Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

He looked up, and saw the end of all things.^[1]

Explosions, soft and peaceful in the darkness of space, rippled and bloomed like tender flowers in a predawn mist.  The violence of war played out in silence, as if someone had bothered to turn the volume of the morbid scene off completely.  From where he stood, he could see thousands of individual detonations, caused from oxidizing gases as flames came into contact with them.  The whirls of the separate infernos raged in their beautiful blooms before being snuffed out at the end of their half-lives upon expending the accelerants almost instantaneously.

He could see veins of smoke and particulates making a cross-stitch across space from small attack ships spiraling out of control before they exploded, their pilots desperately doing everything in their power to prevent themselves from meeting annihilation, only for the inevitable to claim them in fiery conflagrations.

He could see capital ships in the distance peeling apart as their cores detonated from within, again reminding him of flowers.  Strips of metal more than a mile long splintered and fragmented, creating spirals of debris that orbited around the hulks only to scatter once the ships erupted, sending out overlapping shockwaves throughout space.

He could see the lattice of magnetohydronamic beams race from the undercarriages of the multi-appendaged and enormous ships that dominated the battlefield, the orbit of the sapphire planet that loomed above the scene.  The ruby lasers seemed to divide the heavens itself, for they only needed to touch a ship, no matter the size, and it would part, cleaved in two. 

But with every kill, the massive machines, Reapers, made no sign of jubilation.  No motion of a celebratory nature.  For it was not their way—they were programmed with a simple purpose and they were carrying out the extinction of everything organic, their grand design, as dispassionate and as remorseless as they had been since the start of this terrible conflict and from the history of the concept of conflict.

All of this meshed together to create a beautiful and terrifying tableau of the galaxy’s last moments.  Thousands upon thousands of ships, all linked together in a valiant last stand, standing firm against impossible odds, as the Reapers cut into them mercilessly.  Lasers, missiles, and autocannon fire warped the skies like comets.  And beyond, the curtain of stars that glimmered, nestled within the clouds of the Milky Way’s arms.  Impervious to the destruction in this tiny corner of the universe, the stars glimmered in their position, projecting their billion-year-old light.  

From where he stood, upon a lonely point on the Citadel, John Shepard tracked the scene, breathing intensely.  He was rooted to the spot where he stood, his whole body hurting. 

His eyes moved from ship to ship, internally crying out whenever he saw a ship he recognized meet its fiery end, while he would feel a soaring sensation in his chest when he saw the same fate befall a Reaper.  One such enemy had been so devastated from a missile strike, about a hundred miles away, that the impacts sent it into a spin like a top, three of its legs sheared off into their own separate spirals.

Blood festered from a wound in his side and he gave a hiss of pain.  A gunshot had nicked him right there just an hour ago, before he had made it onto the station.  Medi-gel had not fixed the injury entirely and he knew he was suffering from internal bleeding.  His armor had also melted into his skin, the N7 logo upon the breast distorted, courtesy of an attack from Harbinger back on the surface.  Though his nerves had been so overloaded from all his injuries that the collective pain had dulled to a numb simmer by now, he was not completely beyond agony.  The majority of his skin had suffered third-degree burns and it was only from his armor being sealed against him had it not all sloughed off his body by now.  His breathing had taken on a dreadful rasp—he suspected that one of his lungs had collapsed.  He had a splitting headache that threatened to bring him to his knees with every fresh throb, and his face was slick with blood and sweat.

Miraculously, he still found the strength to keep himself standing.

Blinking away the blood that threatened to blind him, a dazed Shepard tried to take stock of his surroundings.  It looked like… like he was somewhere on the underside of the Citadel.  If he looked directly above him, he could see the massive spindle-like structure of the Crucible, the galaxy’s last chance to tear off the yoke of its enslavers.  It brimmed with radiant energy.  Electric bolts crackled from the emitter that was positioned towards the center of the Citadel, the cascading and jagged vines moving so slowly they appeared almost in liquid form. 

Strangely, given that he had a clear view towards the endless battle that appeared to wrap its way around the entire planet, Shepard could detect no barrier between him and the vacuum of space that allowed him to survive out here.  It was cold, but there was oxygen.  He could breathe.  Perhaps there was an invisible field somewhere out there, keeping in the atmosphere, giving him the opportunity to do this one, final thing. 

His last act.

The pathways in front of him splintered into three different directions, like a trident.  In the center of the platform, just beyond the tip of the central path, was a pillar of light that brimmed a brilliant sapphire.  The energy being generated by the Catalyst and Crucible in their union.  It was not yet unleashed—he was looking at the massive vault of power, waiting to be dispelled by some fateful act.  Something on the Citadel was holding it back, damming back the tide in advance of the rampaging flood.

Darkness clung at the edges of his vision, threatening to drag him down into the depths.  But he kept standing with a grunt, noting that a dark puddle had begun to spread on the floor between his fleet.  He was bleeding out.  There was not much time left.

Time… I want more time… a voice that was not his was ringing in his head.

Another voice overwhelmed the smaller one.  It was loud and angry and metallic.  It thrummed with the violence of a thousand suns and spoke with the assuredness of one who had ruled for millennia.  It said nothing else—screamed nothing else—except his name. 

A curse. 

A plea.

SHEPARD.

The buzzing in Shepard’s head grew fierce and he gave another groan, the pressure in his eyes momentarily becoming so overwhelming he figured they were going to pop in their sockets.  But he focused on that quieter voice.  That calming voice.  He beat through the murk that had infected his brain like a swarm of locusts, fighting through the horde until he could find that voice there and clutch it with what strength he had left.  It was all he carried now, all he could ever hope for.

But it was not a hope for himself.  No, he figured with a serene smile on his face, he knew that everything was going to end here, for him.  There was no more hope that he could reserve, for he had already dispersed it all.

At least she would be safe.

There was no one else he could think of.  Shepard knew there were so many souls in and around this little planet that loved him and cared for him.  But he only wanted to keep one person in his thoughts, for she had been the reason he had gone on for so long, had kept on living.  She had been the fire that had carried him to this place, this moment.

God, Tali… I’m so sorry… his own voice was finally allowed to intrude into his own mind like a sudden shaft of sunlight through a screen of storm clouds.

Then that meant the angry whispers were being fanned away, like pathetic and dying embers, if he could hear again.  Hear himself again.

That voice—the embodiment of all the Reapers—bellowed his name again, but it was now nothing but an impotent cry that only underscored how dire they saw the situation.  After so many cycles of death and destruction, carrying out programming and patterns in such ways that it had become almost clinical in its mathematical precision, did they now come up against something their equations had not accounted for.  There was no misinterpreting it—this cycle, this outlier—scared the Reapers.  It scared them because they could now see a future in which there were no more cycles, no more need for their influence.  They were on the brink of being surpassed, for a new apex race had come to overthrow them and wrest away the yoke of control.

Come back to me… the fire inside him whispered.

I can’t.

Shepard returned his gaze back to the beam and the Crucible, his heart on the verge of being rent in two.  On the rightmost path, slightly elevated, he could see a bundle of tubes and wiring sealed behind a curved glass housing.  The moderator feeds—open those up and the energy would be allowed to disperse.  He had already decided long ago what he was going to do when he was going to come here.  It did not matter if he could control the Reapers or merge with them.  There was only one way this was ever going to truly end.

Annihilation.  One side, or the other.

He staggered forward, towards the conduits in their glass temple.  His left foot lagged behind, the result of a broken ankle.  In his right hand, he clenched his pistol, the grip of which was matted and smeared with blood left behind from his sticky palm.  He looked down at the weapon, turning it over almost thoughtfully.  It only had one thermal clip left—it would have to be enough.

The Reapers kept on wailing his name, but he was able to ignore them all.  Explosions warped around the perimeter of his vision from the capital ships unfurling from enemy fire.  He could see a few of the Reapers wheel about, setting a new course for the Crucible, their limbs spread wide as they fired every single thruster upon their hull as they sped towards the station at a frightening speed, desperate to stop this final defiant act from the true inheritors of the galaxy.

They would be too late.  Shepard would guarantee that much.

The pistol in his hand felt like it weighed a ton, but Shepard was able to lift it with the last of his faltering strength, the muscles in his arms quaking, on the verge of failure.  Muscle memory slotted the gun in the direction that he willed it to—the iron sights levelled off upon the glass face of the tubing right in front of him.

Come back to me…

A last jolt of remembrance stayed his fateful pull of the trigger, if only for a moment.  Pushing past the myopia in the fog that was his ruined brain, a figure clothed in a jet-black enviro-suit, kingly purple fabric delicately swathed about their form, accented ornamentation colored a dulled gold—as if they had been excavated from deep beneath the surface of some ancient world—had been bound upon their limbs and waist.  Devotion to his duty was no reason to live—but she was.  All he had to do was think of her and life itself would make sense, have a purpose.  There was no need to question what he knew to be true.

Maybe she thought that things would be different, that there would have been another way for this to end.  One where they would have been together until the end of their days.  Shepard would have liked to have thought that, but he always kept a part of himself tampered down, knowing that there would be a time—in a future so unfairly near—when he would not be there for her.

At least she’ll be safe, he thought.  She’ll be alive.  I’m giving her a future.  Everything I have.

Tali…

The name of his beloved nearly caused him to lower the pistol and run away.  Run back to her so that they could watch the ending together.  As dearly as he wanted to just retreat, turn away from his responsibilities and hopes the entire galaxy pinned on him, he could not, even though he knew he was going to be causing her more pain than was imaginable.  For he had left her life once before—Tali had put herself back together in the aftermath.  But this time, he did not know if she would have the strength to rebuild herself once more after this day was over.

However, he reassured himself that he was giving her that chance.

So many promises he had made to her over the last several months.  All the times they had spent, those nights on the Normandy, curled up against one another in bed together, imagining the future.  Now, nothing but ashes.

The life they were going to spend together.  He would be forever absent.

The house Tali wanted to build.  He would never help her with it.

And… the prospect of a family.  The denial of that moment caused the freshest stab of pain that cut more deeply than all the wounds he had sustained.

I want more time… his own voice now echoed, a prayer within himself.  I want more time for you, Tali.  No one could be loved more.  Forgive me for this.  For all of this.  You are worth everything to me.

You could have asked me for my heart and I would have given it to you.  Asked me for Earth, and it would have been yours.  Asked me for the galaxy, and I would have pledged it to you without hesitation.

I’m giving you everything.  Right now.

He breathed, and he returned to himself.  Focus slid together with clarity like a lens slotting into the correct position.

The pistol was still raised, the barrel aimed towards the massive pipe and the arterial conduits within.  He unleashed a breath, imagining that he was expelling all of his remorse and guilt, all of his failures, the things that made him a hypocrite. 

And when he opened his eyes again, his dreams had finally burned away, left to scatter amidst the sudden clarity in his mind.

Right… now.

He pulled the trigger.

An angry fracture grasped the glass.

Shepard walked forward, the pain in his body forgotten.  He straightened, his ankle no longer affecting him, a hard look in his eyes as sharp as steel.

The Reapers made one final plea to him.  It struck Shepard as amusing, faintly, that their last words were to beg for their lives.  As if they had anything to offer him.

He fired again.

The crack in the tubing grew larger.

He let the gun settle back in his hand, but the instant he knew the sights were set back on the pipe, he fired once more. 

And again. 

And again. 

And again. 

He grasped the weapon with both hands as shards of glass and knots of flame begin to spit back at him.  He walked closer to the malfunctioning conduit, as if in a dream.  Fractions of memories spat through his mind for the last time.  Faces of those that he had met across his incredible journey.  Captain Anderson saluting him after his Spectre ceremony.  Liara embracing him after they had defeated the Shadow Broker.  Garrus, bloodstained and weary, pulling off his Archangel helmet on Omega.  And Tali, gently prying aside her visor, letting Shepard see the exquisite face that had been locked away from him for so long.

But still, he fired.

He was so close to the ductwork of combustible gases now and he emptied the clip of his pistol.  The glass whited out and finally gave way with the last bullet, which punched through the shattered layer and sliced on through the main hoses, depressurizing the valve safeties and causing the entire system to fail.  Catastrophic feedback chained up from within, a series of detonations that began to rip paneling out from the Citadel, traveling up to Shepard’s position, a kilometer away.  He could hear the sounds of the explosions growing closer.  He made to turn away, but knew that he had no time to retreat.

The commander, the savior of all life, managed one last glance upward, past the curvature of the Crucible.  Silhouetted against Earth, he could see the frantic shadows of the ships of his fleet, having recognized the danger, making a break towards the Charon relay at the edge of the system.  There was the brief cerulean glimmer from each vessel as they jumped to FTL, but the Reapers, strangely, stayed in place.  Perhaps the Reapers had realized that they could no longer outrun the inevitable and if this was the future this galaxy had chosen for themselves, then so be it.  These disparate races would be left to dictate their own fate, wherever it may lead.

As the greatest fleet in the history of all memory scattered to the edge of safety, Commander Shepard watched them all go.  He hoped one of them was the Normandy.  He knew that Tali was there on it.  They could certainly get away.  They had their whole lives to look forward to, now.

There was no need to shout at the darkness anymore.  For there was no darkness.

There was only light.  And life.

His grimace slowly transformed into a serene smile.  Warm relief flooded his body and ached his tired bones.

And, impossibly, in the far corner of his nerve bundles, deep within the core of his gray matter, a voice cried out to him that stretched across the stars and time.

“John!”

His eyes widened, as if he meant to call out to the voice, there was the final jolt of chained explosions beneath his feet.  An electric burst flowed from the emitter of the Crucible and the stars all became whited out.

He could feel her against him.  The taste of her lips.  The warmth of her body.  The ache in her heart.

He opened himself up to the last memory of being with another person when the fire finally burst forth from the shattered pipe.  Shepard did not even feel the heat as it washed over him in totality.  There was just a burst of yellow and a razed orange that flashed across his vision.

It was bright… bright… so bright.

Commander Shepard smiled.

And then he never saw anything after that.

Chapter Text

Sol was a searing speck amidst the deep black void of space, drowning out the cosmic giants and far-away galaxies with its brilliance.^[1]  It shone like someone was blazing a flashlight through a punchout in a tapestry that had been hung upon the emptiness, tireless and brimming with its expansive gaze.

Earth was basking in Sol’s radiance, so bright the continents seemed to be gleaming in unnatural colors, like the hue correction had been incorrectly set on a monitor.

Between the planet and its sun, a trillion stars twinkled.

Only they were not really stars.  They were smaller, much smaller.  Ranging from the tiniest grains of silica to the looming and shattered hulks of warships.  The larger chunks tumbled end over end in the weightlessness of space, some of them miles long, as big as cities, and collided against one another in frightful and silent cacophonies, crumpling their already-twisted hulls and shattering them into millions more pieces to join the field of debris that ringed around the planet. 

The ringed field was several hundred miles thick, and it wrapped around Earth like an elaborate noose.  The field was more tunnel-like in shape, with gravitational offshoots manipulating its appearance like an elaborate cave system.  It was completely artificial, made up of junk and debris instead of the cosmic dust that comprised the ones of Earth’s planetary neighbors Jupiter or Saturn, and the detritus came mainly from the ruined ships that had been destroyed during the war, hollowed out by missiles or carved through by lasers.  Gravity had nestled the multitudinous pieces of metal, frozen gases, and rare minerals into the banded shape around the planet.  The great battle that had taken place here had seen the destruction of the greatest number of ships that many galactic beings had witnessed in their lifetime, turning the space immediately around Earth into a graveyard of cold steel.

Glinting just past the nebulous circlet was a massive station that was also trapped in Earth’s orbit, a shade over twenty-five miles long, that had the shape of a segmented bullet. 

At one point, the Citadel was once capable of housing over thirteen million souls with space to spare, but the damage it had accumulated in the years past had severely hampered its desirability within the region and now only could sustain half that number.  The proclaimed capital of the galaxy had been plucked from its perch in the Serpent Nebula by the Reapers right before the last battle of the war, having been brought to Earth’s orbit, where it had remained ever since, mostly because no one had figured out how to move the massive station, exactly.  It was not like they had the horsepower to give the thing a push out of the system, considering the losses that had been sustained.

Ten years since the fighting had quieted.  Ten years since the creation of the debris field, which had been given the local name of the “Folly.”  It had been given that name due to the treacherous nature of the field itself—the debris was so dense and congested that flying through it took skill and precision lest one would become pulverized by the constantly shifting pieces of what might have been the hull of a battleship, or the leg of a Reaper. 

Navigating the field was so dangerous that pilots today took precautions to avoid it outright by taking longer routes that steered them clear out of the way of the zones where the debris was thickest.  Traffic to and from Earth had become congested as a result of these limited routes that connected the planet with the rest of the galaxy, as every navigation lane was tightly governed, with each ship arriving or departing being assigned a specific timeframe to navigate the Folly.  Failure to comply with traffic control typically resulted steep fines for the captain and crew to start.

The Folly was the system’s largest superfund site due to its location next to the symbol of the seat of all galactic government, the Citadel, and because of its immediate proximity to Earth, the home of one of the key races that made up that government.  An environmental remediation program had been setup a year after the Reaper War had ended.  The Folly was not only a scar upon Earth, but a direct threat to the planet’s economy—it only behooved the inhabitants of the planet that their government make a concerted effort to eliminate the effects of the debris field, or at least mitigate it. 

Ten years had given way to little progress being made.  Various governments had contributed to the fund, which was always in danger of being depleted, but the Folly still remained a nuisance for local travel.  Multiple companies, some incorporating themselves specifically for the job at hand, along with various unions or organizations, bid or underbid for the rights to strip-mine the Folly alongside the efforts of the government, who raised money by offering mining permits to third-parties in an effort to speed up remediation efforts.  The government offered a key incentive to the third-parties: anything they mined, they got to keep, with an exception of dead bodies that had been floating in space for years on end.  There was a law in place that the dead had to be returned to the governments so that they could begin the process of bringing them home, finally putting them to rest.  Complying with that law would net crews a small bounty for their services.

The loose rules were a boon for groups looking to strike it rich—a lot of money could be generated from stumbling upon usable resources that were floating around in the Folly.  Unlicensed groups—factions that did not even bother registering for permits—were a common issue in the field.  Piracy was common and enforcement lax.  The Folly was a treasure trove, ripe for the plundering.  That brought the opportunistic, as well as the unscrupulous, into the fray.

The sector of the belt that the corvette remained coved in was one of the less populated areas of the Folly.  The sun cut the Earth into a crescent from this angle, the light of the lobed star looming over the surface of the world like a nuclear detonation. 

The ship, the Tien Extremis, was a tri-wing design, with angular fins jutting out from the cylindrical design of the hull at every 120-degree interval.  Three shrouded plasma thrusters at the back could provide pinpoint FTL jumps to damn near anywhere in the sector.

It was a ship that was built to go fast.

At the controls of the corvette, Ceraphan Kalinn, slithered a breath as she adjusted the overlay goggles atop her head.  Her lanky turian frame fit perfectly within the custom molding of the pilot’s chair as her fingers fiddled with the holographic controls upon the armrests, while her left hand manipulated a worn joystick.  She wore a bright orange mechanic’s jumpsuit, the top half of which was knotted at her waist, and a simple tank top that left her carapaced arms, gray as a cold predawn, exposed.  She scratched at her neck, the tattooed insignia of one of her favorite racing teams adorning a bicep.

The goggles over Ceraphan’s eyes glowed a cool electric blue, the surface of the glass emblazoned with holographics.  “All right,” she growled with a tight impatience.  “Give me all you got.”

There was no one else within the corvette that she spoke to, save herself.  Her hands gently nudged her chair’s controls and outside, past the trapezoidal viewport, a pair of grasping arms could be seen manipulating a piece of wreckage.  The arms were connected to the body of the Tien Extremis, which terminated in complex clusters of pincers, suctions, and claws.  The object they were now ferrying towards the airlock of the corvette was a massive bulk of metal, half-encrusted in ice.  It had been plucked from the dead ship that lazily rotated in front of the viewport before the Tien Extremis, the gouged name of the Asphaltites still legible on the side of the impacted hull.  A perfect rectangle had been laser-carved into the side of the cold warship from the lasers mounted upon the corvette’s appendages, the edges to the breach having stopped glowing half an hour ago, offering Ceraphan a clear-cut route into the ship to retrieve her prize.

The turian set the arms of the corvette to run an automated route now that they were clear of any debris and she stood from her seat, stretching, and yanked off the goggles that had been over her soft yellow eyes.  Her careful features flexed, the ruddy orange facepaint looking almost burnt in the low light, but the ring at her septum glimmered like a vein of gold within a lightless cavern.

Just past the viewport, in the middle of her stretches, Ceraphan arced a look over towards the part of the field that was closest to Earth.  A swarm of drones, one or two hundred in number, scuttled past her view like glowing gnats.  They appeared miniscule from this distance, but the turian knew that they were about the size of a magnetic cannon round.  She could see fans of white lasers blink and twirl as the drones whirled through the sector, not intent on missing out on scanning every single scrap of debris in sight.

Ceraphan gave a sigh as she watched the drones flit and configure back into their swarm mode after they had finished cataloguing a good amount the floating detritus.  If they were searching for something in particular, she did not have a clue as to what it was.  But it also meant that this sector was not as empty as she had been hoping. 

There was a good chance that the drones belonged to one of the larger mining outfits that operated in the Folly.  The largest of them, the LB Group Holdings (referred to as “Elby” by the other salvagers), was known for employing particularly ruthless security contractors to enforce its claims to the various Folly sectors.  Skirmishes were particularly common between the Elby contractors and the non-affiliates, which always ended in more debris being added to the field to be plundered after the violent confrontations had been thoroughly settled.  Now Ceraphan had taken precautions to never encroach into Elby territory if she could help it, but she knew Elby had the unfortunate tendency of reaching beyond its designed zones if they thought they could get away with it.  And since she was located within twenty klicks of the nearest border with the Elby zone, there was a good chance that they could take offense to her presence if they detected her.  She needed to be quick and careful.

A thin ladder led down to the main level—Ceraphan nimbly headed down it.  She was now within the galley of the Tien Extremis, which was outfitted with all of the industrial foodstuff appliances that one could ever ask for, though the turian only used a fraction of it. 

The galley immediately opened up, directly to Ceraphan’s left, her back to the cockpit ladder, to the cargo bay of the corvette.  The bay was twenty meters wide and six meters tall, and it stretched from nearly one end of the ship to the other.  Stacks of mini-ISOs had been piled in a corner, along where a miniature loader bot, slathered in orange paint, awaited its next duties.  A makeshift gym had been erected in the other far corner from items that Ceraphan had scavenged all over the galaxy, which gave it the appearance of a collection of scaffolding.  Artificial gravity was a wonder and all, but it had atrophic effects on a living body to the point where Ceraphan had to work on a regular exercise regimen lest her muscles withered upon her frame.  And seeing as she was still young, she was keen to keep her figure intact as much as possible.

The airlock door was at the front of the cargo bay, a massive threshold that always blared klaxons and flared yellow warning lights whenever it was opened.  Cerephan punched in the code to open it once she confirmed that the door beyond that led outside had been fully sealed.  With a groan and a clanking of gears, along with the usual cavalcade of noises from crackling loudspeakers, the enormous airlock door parted down the middle and Ceraphan stepped inside to retrieve her prize after grabbing a portable welding torch that had been hanging nearby on the wall.

The hulk of metal that had been pulled in from outside—a neat and rectangular block of detritus—was lying upon a small railed trolley.  The appendages that had pulled it inside the ship were now folded upon either side of the wall, like complex tenting.  Ceraphan made a circuit around the trolley, studying her salvage.  About the size of three lockers side by side, the find was slightly battered and dented, which could have been from the initial detonation that had killed the ship it belonged to, or garnered from the weathering force that was time.

Central radiator systems like this were old tech, as most ships dispersed generated heat through arrays placed along the ship’s hull, but a ship with a centralized radiation capacitor had a greater consolidated quantity of lithium carbonate that it used to dispel the heat generated from the engines.  Lithium carbonate went nearly a hundred credits per gram, and capacitors like these tended to have around twenty pounds of lithium carbonate in them.

If Ceraphan was lucky, she was looking at a million-credit lump sum right in front of her eyes.  Tax free reward.  She could see money in her mind and she had to try very hard not to squeal in anticipation.

Kneeling down, torch in hand, she found a panel that was encrusted with space dust.  She applied a stiff and curved mask over her face, one that would protect her from the intense light the torch was going to generate.  She primed the control on the torch, allowing the ignitable gas to flood the chamber, before she initiated the miniature ignition control.

A pulse of blue fire narrowed to a microscopically thin line.  The torch felt like it was humming in Ceraphan’s hand.  Quickly, she aimed the welding flame at the edge of the panel, and was rewarded with such a thick burst of sparks that they seemed to combine into a wave of liquid gold.

Then, she started to cut.

Even half-full, you’re still looking at a clean payout.

Enough for a fresh start.  You don’t have to worry about disappearing, anymore.

You’ll be able to be… yourself.

It took about fifteen minutes before she had made a careful rectangular incision just above the panel of the capacitor.  She waited until she heard the satisfying thunk of the panel shearing loose.  She thumbed the control of the torch and the flame huffed out with a sigh, and she flipped up her mask, breathless and giddy.  The area where she had been slicing was smoking, the outline of the cut still glowing a deep bloodred.  Fumbling for a suction tool, she placed it upon the edge of the detached panel and depressed until there was a good seal.

Now, if her hunch was correct, the lithium carbonate canister would be attached to the other end of the panel, just inside.  All she had to do was pull and the millions were hers.

So she pulled.

The panel made a grinding noise, offering resistance, before it finally relented and Ceraphan nearly fell onto her backside as she was quickly left with the canister in her hand, a dull gold thing that was a little bigger than the average thermos, bolted onto the underside of the panel.

Ceraphan was about to crow in victory and raise her arms to the ceiling in jubilation, when the dim lighting of the cargo bay caught the sizeable gash on the side of the canister.  Heart in her throat, the turian got to her feet and turned her prize over in her hands.  No… A large tear in the canister, the edges warped and melted from an intense heat, had been encrusted with what had looked like a dried white foam.  The turian scraped the whitish substance with a clawed talon and rubbed her fingers together, the sinking feeling in her stomach growing almost bottomless.

“Shit!” she yelled as she threw the canister at the side of the wall, brutally rebounding it upon the surface.  She sank into a crouch, holding her head in her hands, breathing heavily.

The foam had been the carbonate, she had recognized.  And the carbonate could only have gotten into a foam-like state had it been exposed to an oxidizing agent—chlorates, nitrates, among others—of which there were plenty to go around on a spaceship.  The damage had not been her fault.  A piece of space junk must have punctured the canister years ago, allowing it to react to an oxidizer, creating a reaction and ruining its efficiency.

She had salvaged not even twenty credits of carbonate, in all.  The day’s events had led to nothing.

Somewhere, in the direction of the galley, a soft chime sounded to signal the latest full rotation of Palaven, millions of lightyears away.

She was now twenty.

Later that day—or night, it was hard to tell, as Ceraphan’s circadian rhythm had been ruined long ago—she was fixing herself a meal in the galley while she had the newscasts blaring on a large holographic monitor just over the counter.  The microwave dinged and the turian retrieved her tray of what had been freeze-dried meats and vegetables, now steaming and giving off a not-unpleasant smell.

Ceraphan glanced at the package the food came in, out of curiosity.  There was no expiration date.  There was no packaging date, either.

“Been sitting in a fridge for about six years, I bet,” she grumbled.  “Living the gourmet life.”

She took her tray over and began to eat.  The food was tasteless and had a soggy mouthfeel to it.  For all the technology in the galaxy, no one had been able to master the science behind long shelf-lived food that actually tasted like it came right out of the cooking pan.  But it was loaded with nutrients that were supplementing her diet, so Ceraphan could only complain for so long.

The Tien Extremis was close enough that she could pirate the news feeds from the remaining satellites that orbited Earth.  The one channel that she was on displayed the familiar talking heads, the corporate stooges that parroted the bottom line of their sponsors instead of providing anything actually news-worthy.

“…and we’ll continue to update everyone with the latest as this midterm election cycle continues to be called across Citadel space,” one of the reporters, a human in a smart black suit, was saying effortlessly to the camera with an artificial smile upon her face that gave Ceraphan a bad feeling.  “But the majority of votes have been tallied, and now the polls are calling for a victory for Firmament Omina, which is the first time in Union Eterna’s history that the popular vote has gone for the conservative political bloc.”

The woman’s co-anchor, a human male, was nodding sagely as if he were agreeing with everything she was saying, as though her words were prophesizing the future instead of affirming that they were borne from a teleprompter.  “No doubt this is a historic moment for Union Eterna, and for the rest of the galaxy.  With a massive 64% of the vote going to Firmament Omina, this has been a clear message to the current ruling party, whom after two years of controversy, broken promises, and high inflation, have begun to reap the effects of governing a galaxy in absentia.”

“Abandonment of populist ideals, dissatisfaction of bailouts for large institutions, and disgust at naked acts of corruption were just a few of the reasons why working-class voters ended up casting for Firmament Omina.  The inauguration for the new government is expected to take place in two weeks’ time, once the results of the votes have been reviewed and ratified—”

“Spare me,” Ceraphan grunted as she thumbed a control on her omni-tool, thankfully whisking away the image of the lady with her ersatz smile and her simpering colleague.  She rested her head upon a hand, her eyes glazed over in boredom.  “It’s all the same game.”

Ceraphan did not put all that much stock into politics these days.  As a “displaced individual,” per the government’s determination, she had no voting rights, therefore she had little care as to which new regime was stepping into the picture.  First it had been the Citadel Council, which had been dissolved almost immediately after the war and replaced with a supposedly more democratic body, the Union Eterna, which was the Council in all but name.  No longer did the various races only have a single councilor to represent them, because they were now granted an allocated number of senators to devote to the legislative body based on an equation that took the absolute population and the number of civilized worlds under that race’s control under account. 

But no matter who was standing upon the podium, Ceraphan noted that there was the same amount of discontent from the people.  The same amount of corruption from the elected officials.  Bribery, lying, dangerous rhetoric, it seemed that the latest playbook from everyone trying to get elected was to try every underhanded trick in the book to attain their goals.  There was no governmental oversight for that sort of thing aside from third-party watchdogs—after only ten years of ushering in a new government, those types of safeguards had not been created yet, and the various political parties were steadfast and united in their desire to not see them created at all.

She took a drink from her cup and gave another grumble.  In the end, she already knew it was going to be people like her, people on the outside, who would be hurt the most.  Firmament Omina ran on a platform of fiscal responsibility, but anyone remotely paying attention to their campaign goals would find out that they intended to achieve this “responsibility” by cutting funds to social programs that they considered parasitic wastes to the overall economy.  Those programs included relief funds that provided post-war services—valuable aid for the people suffering from PTSD, for the ones that had been displaced and lost everything they had ever owned, and for the young ones who had lost their families and needed immediate financial support in order to maintain a normal life or at least survive.

Ceraphan knew she would be among those that would be impacted.  The checks that had been coming to her account had been getting slimmer and slimmer with each passing month.  I wouldn’t need them if I was legitimately employed, she thought miserably.  But they will run out at some point.  I should have prepared a whole lot better.

Thinking of politics was just making her mad, so she quickly changed the channel to something that was a little more brain-inert.  Fortunately, she quickly found a candidate, for she was soon looking at a feed showing a massive dreadnought three miles in length, low-slung and sleek like a longsword, in orbit over Thessia, according to the chyrons at the bottom of the screen.  Fighters in victory formations seared by in close proximity, the lights of their engines mingling with the scatterglow of heat and radiation as their hulls scraped against the upper atmosphere of the planet.

“…and it will be noon in a few minutes at Thessia’s capitol city, where the SSV John Shepard is slated to begin its highly-anticipated Victory Day display, which will be accompanied by demonstrations of its formidable weaponry, alongside spectacles by the finest fighter squadrons in the Alliance.  The schedule is part of a galaxy-wide tour in which the dreadnought will visit every Union system…”

Ceraphan sipped her drink as she watched the cameras display multiple angles of the enormous ship—she took special interest in the four fusion engines at the back, the thrusters of which were wide enough to fit an entire light cruiser through them.  A ship like that would have given the Reapers a run for their money—with those turret emplacements and batteries of nuclear missiles, it was hard to believe that anything else in this galaxy could stand up to it in such a fight and win.

It had only been a matter of time that a ship would be named after the famed Commander.  It was only fitting that they gave the name to the most powerful vessel that had been created in this galaxy.  Ceraphan wished she could have known the man, as did about nearly everyone in the galaxy, she supposed.

Commander John Shepard, the most famous person in the history of all history.  The soldier who had figured out a way to beat the Reapers and had done so, saving the lives of the galaxy’s inhabitants after months and months of grueling war.  He had defied the odds across countless battles, always finding a way to win, even in the face of certain defeat.  He was a true paragon of his race, and a physical ideal that not just humans could aspire to.

Ceraphan had remembered listening to the feeds as a child on her broken and scarred world, always tuning in at night, desperate to hear a report of the commander’s accomplishments.  With every victory, he had brought hope across lightyears, inspiring billions of people to stand strong against certain defeat.

The triumphs followed the commander across the many stars and worlds.  There were many who had thought the commander to be invincible.

But immediately after his most crowning moment on the Citadel, the initiation of the Reapers’ destruction, he had vanished.

Long and exhaustive searches had taken place in the aftermath of the war.  Every fleet had sent out as many ships and bodies as they could muster to look for the man—they had known that his last position had been near the Citadel’s base and that he had would have been there right as the Crucible had fired its fateful wave of energy, securing the galaxy’s freedom.  But all their efforts would be in vain.  For years, the civilized galaxy scoured every inch of the station and every cubic centimeter of space within a thousand-mile radius of where the commander had made his last stand.

There was nothing.  No trace of him, as though he had never existed.

On the screen, the videos had shifted over to an image of the commander himself: tall and proud in his dress blues, his hair closely cropped to his skull, a strong jawline, and piercing blue eyes.  A few scars marked his appearance, but they were merely modest marks that hinted at the cosmic wonders he had seen, the conflicts and battles he had endured.  It was the face of a soldier, one who was primed for war. 

The screen was now reading out a list of the memorial services for the commander that were due to take place over the next month, across a number of Union planets.  No body had been recovered, but after ten years, the number of people that were holding out to their hopes had dwindled precipitously.  One could not deny the cruel logic that could only indicate the truth after so long.

John Shepard was not going to be found because there was nothing to find.  He had died on that station, perhaps vaporized by one of the explosions.  Ten years of nothing only deepened the wound that the galaxy felt, but it had only recently begun to scar over. 

And for the rest of Ceraphan’s natural life, she would raise a glass to the fallen warrior, along with every living being in the galaxy, hang her head in silence, and proclaim her undying gratitude to the man who had saved them all at the cost of his own life.  It would give her a small comfort, at least, knowing how the man would be remembered.  Parades on every civilized world would be held in the man’s honor.  Parties and celebrations, too.  The streets of the rebuilt cities would overflow with people reveling in their joy of being alive, drunk and happy with an unknown future stretching before them.

A solemn smile crept across her face, or at least as good as one a turian could approximate.  She finished her meal and drink, cleaned the silverware off in the sink, and headed towards her bunk.  She undressed and clambered into the tight space, curling up into a ball, a thin blanket around her.  The Tien Extremis was always cold—she needed to fix the central heating system one of these days.

After a while, she closed her eyes.  A new day could only bring new opportunities.

With a crackle of smoke and a silver flash, the cover to the black box fell open, a few gray curls extending into the air from the sheared end.^[2]  Ceraphan immediately raised her torch, set it aside, and removed her welder’s mask as her breath misted from her mouth in the cold cargo bay.

She reached inside the box, which she had just brought inside from a wrecked salarian gunboat using her ship’s onboard grappling arms.  Her sensors had picked up that the hull of the ship had been relatively intact when she had approached.  As good a find as any.  And salarians were known for stuffing their ships full of advanced tech.  If there was anything of value, it would be in the black box files.

Ceraphan grabbed the box and placed it across a pair of suspended supports so that it was propped up at the height of her lower ribcage.  The ends dripped with melted icewater, for it had been encrusted when she had pulled it aboard the Tien Extremis, like so many of her acquisitions in the Folly.

She plunged her arm into the box and gripped a heavy handle and gave it a twist, popping off the panel that led to the electronics inside.

The first indication that something was wrong was when a spit of black dust immediately burst from the black box upon being opened.  That was not supposed to happen.  These things were supposed to be airtight.

Frantic, Ceraphan knelt down and shone a light onto the circuit board.  Nothing but disconnected wires and piles of granules so black in color they could have come from a volcanic beach.

Abruptly, Ceraphan gave a shout of anger and despair and smashed the side of the black box with a hammer, knocking it off the supports and sending it banging to the ground with a frightful clatter.

The dust had been the silicon chips.  After ten years of languishing in temperatures past negative 400 degrees, the chips had degraded to the point of disintegration.  There was never going to be anything of worth in that ship that she could find.

Letting the hammer drop from her hand with a clang, Ceraphan bonelessly trudged over to a nearby bench and lowered herself onto it.  She stared hollowly out unto the bay before her, looking at the destruction she had wreaked before she bent forward, as in prayer, and put her head in her hands as she listened to the agonizing beat of her heart.

She was going over the finances later that night in her bunk.  She was wearing nothing but a simple tank top and some snug military-grade underwear, the thin blanket draped over her lower torso while her flat pillow was doing a sorry job at propping up her head.  Tapping away at a tablet with a few practiced finger strokes, Ceraphan’s mood was only getting worse the more time went on.

The fuel costs alone were eating a massive hole in her budget and that did not take into account the registration costs, maintenance and upkeep, docking fees, not to mention what she was paying for food and water and everything else required to keep herself alive.

But the fuel charge by itself was going to be the death of her, judging by the forecast outlook.  The price of fuel had almost doubled in the last year and it was expected to spike further due to negative market reactions to the new regime in Union Eterna.  She knew she was not the only salvage operator in the Folly that was hurting from the current economic situation, but she could not help but feel angry at herself over these past several months.

How many times had she salvaged a ship, thinking that she had finally been gifted by a stroke of luck and that she was on the verge of a major find, only for it all amount to nothing?  Every failure meant a denial of income and a big red mark on her balance sheet from all the resources that she had expended for each fool’s errand.

All she needed was one good score.  Just something that could at least allow her to keep her ship running.  If the next month turned up as empty as the last several had, she knew she would need to make some hard decisions.  Sell the Tien Extremis?  She’d just as soon as cut her own throat.  Perhaps join an actual guild instead of relying on her own independence?  While she did value her freedom, from what limited amount of it she actually had, there was certain inevitability that weighed upon her, knowing that she would have to go corporate at some point or another.  Everyone sold out in the end, for all matters inexorably lead to problems of a financial nature.

She set the tablet aside and maneuvered herself upon the acceptably-comfortable bed.  It took an hour for her to finally get to sleep, as she had been staring up at the ceiling of the bunk above her, wide-eyed and tormented with ominous thoughts. ^[3]

The new dawn on Earth was announced by the slow but pronounced rise of Sol just over the horizon, its glimmering light bringing life to the blue oceans, the ragged mountains, and the endless plains that marked the scarred completeness of the world before it.

Taking this miracle for granted, Ceraphan did not notice it.  She had been hard at work for two hours already, arms bare as she maneuvered the Tien Extremis through a gap between two titanic warship wrecks, a pair of headphones on her head blaring a kind of music the humans called “rock,” which had similar melodic structures to the popular music that was being played on Palaven, Ceraphan had noted.  Though the instrumentation was different, the meaning behind the lyrics was not.  Her goggle overlays translated the words into real-time for her and she would invariably sing along to the aggressive tunes.

“…I’m the runaway son of a nuclear A-bomb…”

Head bopping along to the tempo, Ceraphan pulled up a map of the local area with her right hand while she maneuvered the ship with her left.  A screen popped up in front of her eyes.  A golden blip was registering in a sea of fragmented spaceships some twenty klicks ahead after she had put a wayfinder pin on it.  She had been tracking this little bastard for the better part of an hour now, trying to find a way through the labyrinth of the Folly to find it. 

It was only from sheer luck had Ceraphan been able to detect this blip at all.  Per the irregular intervals of the ping she was getting, she was reading an object somewhere in the Folly that was still registering power.  She knew that she would have ordinarily not been able to detect such a thing, for her ship would have needed to be in the briefest line of sight of the item in question, and with the density of wreckage that so defined this field around the planet, it would be hard to detect for someone deliberately trying to find such a thing.

A powered device in the Folly—it sounded ludicrous. 

But Ceraphan knew that she was not tracking another salvager, as all spacecraft had their hulls specifically designed to mute any electrical signals they were originating.  This had to be something else.  A ship whose crew had gotten spaced and the reactor was still online, perhaps.

There were so many possibilities and so many questions that Ceraphan needed to comprehend.  But there was only one way she was going to find the truth out for sure.

She engaged the exterior lights to the Tien Extremis and the automated lamps swept across the enormous curve of a turian battleship, just two hundred feet away, cold and dead in the peacefulness of the void.  It easily dwarfed the corvette and Ceraphan felt like she was nothing but an insect in the wake of the battleship’s majesty.  As a child, such ships could only fill her with hope and awe if she was lucky enough to set her eyes on one.  She had thought they were invincible.

Shows what she knew—she now stared at the twin holes where pillars of plasma had boiled through the hull of the battleship and had hit the power plant.  The Reapers had certainly done their work in shattering everyone’s deluded illusions.

Moving away from the hulk, Ceraphan adjusted the trajectory of the Tien Extremis with a careful tap of fingers upon the controls.  She glanced at the map again—she was closing the distance to the marker she had laid.  Just a few more seas of debris the size of icebergs were in the way between her and her prize.

The map was also showing another potential glitch in her plan, though.  According to the latest cartographic updates, the boundary to the Elby zone was only fifty klicks away in the direction of aphelion from her position.  Ceraphan was already aware of how opportunistic the Elby mercs could be, considering their penchant for skirting their own borders.  She needed to find what this blip was, retrieve it, and get the hell out of here as quickly as possible before she was detected.

“You’re listening to Radio Second Termer,” the promo to the pirate station proclaimed over the turian’s headphones, “because the best things in life are free…”

At the same time, the map gave a sharp bleep.  Proximity warning to her target.

Heart thudding in her chest, Ceraphan took the headphones away after turning them off, applying her full attention to piloting her ship.  Clouds of dust and frozen gases swept by the angular viewport, the lights illuminating such a tangle of shattered metal it was as if she was observing a fractal hellscape inhabited by searing and sharp blades.

Tapping at the retro-rockets, the Tien Extremis smoothly glided above the obstacles, the main engines dark and quiet but ready to let loose at a moment’s notice.  There were a few pings from the hull as wayward bits of metal, the largest piece the size of a fist, bounced off it, but they only delivered scratches and nothing nearly hard enough to do actual damage to the ship.  The tri-wing design of the Tien Extremis meant that Ceraphan had to get inventive when trying to skirt small gaps, but she had been flying the ship for so long that maneuvering was now second nature to her.

“Come on, come on.  Just a little closer.” 

She passed around a crumpled bulkhead, an abandoned Trident fighter that its pilot had ejected from, a nearly halved carrier that had suffered a detonation right down the middle of its hull and caused it to look like it had ballooned before exploding, and…

…there.

Her map was going haywire with the frantic bleeping and Ceraphan silenced it.  The object floating in front of her was now fully visible—her scanners were also making schizophrenic leaps and twitches on her screen.  No doubt in her mind that this was what she had been searching for this morning.

The turian brought up a control and a portion of the viewscreen zoomed in.  Ceraphan blinked as she studied the object on her screen.  Nestled in a cove between a cadre of destroyed troop carriers, it was partially cylindrical in shape, with a rectangular base, about three meters tall.  Near the base, a small red light pathetically winked in and out of existence—low power.  But Ceraphan instinctively recognized the shape of her find.  She had seen them many times before, but never used one herself. ^[4]

Cryo pods were stalwart technology, if not outdated.  The first colonists in space had used them, before her people had discovered the mass relays, which had been the only way that her race had spread among the stars for a time.  Cryo could stall a person’s lifespan across a multi-lightyear voyage, rendering them in a state of suspended animation, awakening on the other side of the galaxy with no debilitating symptoms other than those that approximated a hangover. 

Today, cryo pods were used nearly exclusively by medical personnel these days to transport critically wounded patients to facilities that could treat them if they were in a state that only gave them a small timeframe in which to live.  Apart from that, there were not that many practical reasons to use one at all.

“You are kidding…” Ceraphan was about to pound her armrest in frustration, but thought twice about it.  Cryo technology was valuable, considering that there were not very many firms developing it these days.  And hospital groups around the galaxy were still suffering from a dearth of usable technology.  A pod like this could be sold to them at a discount, but Ceraphan would still make a tidy profit out of it.

It was not much, but it was something.

Switching her controls to the grappling arms of the Tien Extremis, she saw the limber appendages swiftly move into view just past the glass of the canopy.  Her entire body tense, a headache began to burgeon as she focused all of her concentration into maneuvering the arms just right.  Mess up a movement, and she could end up damaging her prize beyond repair.  She had done that too many times when she was just starting out as a salvager—she knew she had to take things slowly and deliberately, despite the time crunch she was facing.

She made sure that her fingers did not move than a millimeter necessary on the controls as she deftly guided the grasping arms towards the cryo pod.  She monitored the digital readouts, which were indicating just how much distance left was between the end of the appendages and the pod itself.

Ten meters…

Five…

Two…

“Gotcha!”

Green lights across the board as the clawed extensions found purchase on two anchor points on other side of the pod.  Ceraphan let out an exhalation of victory, allowing herself to relax in her seat.  The moment of jubilation did not last very long, as she ran cross-checks to ensure that her payload was indeed secure.  Upon finding nothing that would indicate to the contrary that the retrieval had been botched, she initiated the recall function to the grasping arms and watched as they began to reel in with the pod in tow.  There was a rumble throughout the Tien Extremis as the airlock door, just below the cockpit, opened to accept the catch—the arms would gently place it upon the railed cart like all the others, allowing Ceraphan to easily maneuver it within the ship once it was inside.

Once her displays were confirming that the airlock door was sealed and the appendages fully retracted did Ceraphan start to get out from her seat, eager to give her newest acquisition a once-over.

But before she could fully extricate herself, her proximity alert began to loudly blare, startling her and causing her to look out the canopy at the same time multiple beams of light shot into the cockpit from outside.  The turian gave a grunt and sagged into her seat, a hand thrown up to protect herself from the glare.

The glass of the canopy polarized, revealing three brutal-looking trawlers that had maneuvered directly in front of the Tien Extremis.  They were all a flat matte gray and had been outfitted with defensive turrets upon the exterior of their hulls.  All of them bore the same insignia on their wings, one which no salvager in the Folly was liable to forget.

“Elby,” Ceraphan grimaced.

Her comms began to crackle in the next second.  “Unidentified ship, power down all systems and prepare to be boarded.  You are trespassing in territory claimed by LB Group Holdings.  You will surrender all acquired cargo and submit to any further search and seizure as dictated by our investigative squads.”

Ceraphan was frantically consulting the map, confirming her thoughts that she was most certainly not in the territory that these guys were claiming.  As she had thought, she was still in a neutral zone, yet to be negotiated by the various companies that bid for salvage rights here.

But as everyone already knew, Elby did not give a shit about borders.

She hit the transmit key with a shaking hand.  “Touch my ship, and I’ll make you regret it.  You have no jurisdiction here!  Under the Alliance Charter 4903, I am within my rights to proceed with my operations as—”

But the Elby stooge managed to override her transmission.  “The Alliance doesn’t exist out here.  They can’t police all of space, let alone their own gravitational boundaries.  Last chance, unidentified ship.  Shut down all shipboard systems, with the exception of life support, or we will open fire and lay claim to your salvage by force.”

Ceraphan’s eyes narrowed and her breathing began to crescendo in intensity.  It had been worth a shot, even though she knew she had next to no chance of talking her way out of this.

From the brief puffs of accelerant that were pluming from the two ships that flanked the middle one, increasing their separation, Ceraphan saw that the Elby frigates were moving into prime firing positions.  Already, her infrared sensors were showing that their weapon emplacements were warming up.

She already knew they were not keen on taking her alive.

Her hands began to steady themselves on the controls after she had buckled herself into her seat.  She told herself not to be afraid.  Fear was just a choice.  There was another she could make.  She pressed her back against the molded spine of the chair and sucked in a long breath.

“Don’t make us waste the ammo.  You’re outnumbered three to one.  The smart thing would be to—”

Whatever the smart thing was going to be, Ceraphan most decidedly did not take that course of action, at least in the eyes of the Elby frigates, when she slapped at the controls to engage both her main thrusters and the maneuvering jets of the Tien Extremis at the same time.  G-forces grabbed her and hurtled her against the side of the chair painfully, her eyeballs momentarily touching her skull as they sunk into her sockets for a brief moment, but it was a fresh pain that tampered down the thrill of the adrenaline that surged through her veins, and in the next moment, as the Tien Extremis shot through a jagged opening in the middle of a bisected battleship, she crowed over the comm, “Then come and get me!”

The drive core of her corvette thrummed and sent her hurtling through the maze of twisted metal and debris.  She screamed past sheared decks and detached mass driver turrets, passing by the segmented hulks almost as if a great god had carved out cross sections of the ships in the belt.

Her computer rang a shrill warning as it detected the Elby ships immediately moving into hot pursuit behind her.

The Tien Extremis rocked as an explosive round detonated just aft of its thrusters.  Ceraphan was thrown into her restraints hard enough to bruise the cartilage under her natural plating.  “Damn it,” she gritted out.  Violent blasts were now sparking and expanding in front of her and making new holes in the cauldron of debris that encompassed the Folly.  Ceraphan had to twist and dive to evade the fire, making quick decisions as she spotted offshoots in the congested space.  One wrong move here and she would be cosmic dust, her ship doomed to drift with the rest of the relics around Earth.

She urged her ship faster and the Tien Extremis responded to her call.  The tri-wing corvette entered a spin, which confused the tracking systems of the missiles that one of the gunboats had launched at her.  The spiraling trails of heat from her thrusters mingled into a swerving blur, causing the missile’s targeting to veer off course and into the side of a derelict Reaper destroyer.

Ceraphan used the explosion as cover and maneuvered her ship just underneath the expanding blast.  The temperature sensors skyrocketed, but she ignored the warnings for now.  On the other side of the detonation, one of the Reaper’s legs was still attached to the main spaceframe, which she deftly dodged using her retro-rockets.

The explosion was still in the process of conflagrating and, in their blind rage to catch Ceraphan, the first gunboat powered through the fire and chaff at full speed.

They never saw the leg of the Reaper on the other side of the explosion until it was too late.  It was too close for them to maneuver away.

Another explosion warped throughout the field, this one jarring the corpse of the Reaper so hard that it began to enter a slow spin.  The crumpled gunboat expelled all of its atmosphere in a microsecond before it burst into a million pieces.

“Serves you right,” Ceraphan spat as she watched the ship disappear off her scopes, forcing her quivering gut feeling down knowing that things were getting serious and people were being killed.

The radio was now clamoring in several different languages on how Ceraphan was going to be tortured in many creative ways, but the turian quickly switched to a different frequency.  She was going to focus on piloting herself the hell out of this mess.

She adjusted power to the engines and the Tien Extremis drifted around the curved edge of a derelict asari dreadnought, the same model as the famed Destiny Ascension.  The other two ships followed dutifully, momentarily losing sight of her around the sleek and graceful warship.  But as Ceraphan flew just mere meters from the surface of the dreadnought’s hull, her drift had her directly facing the curvature of the ship and she had a brief thought that quickly formulated into an idea.

Ceraphan pummeled the control to her ship’s point-defense cannons, which popped out of hidden panels along the corvette’s hull.  Auto-controlled, she quickly sent a command to fire her weapons in a raking motion directly in front of her, shooting directly into the behemoth in front of her.

Ordinarily, it would be impossible for such small-caliber fire from PDCs to even put as much of a scratch into an asari dreadnought.  But for one that had been hollowed out from the inside, its shields long dead, the frame left to languish in the deep cold and darkness, her ship’s weaponry was perfect for the job.  Hundreds of scattered rounds immediately punched their way through the dreadnought’s outer layer, expelling massive pieces of the ship’s length as if she were peeling a fruit.  The dreadnought’s exfoliations had nowhere else to go except up and away, adding an additional layer of obstacles between her and her pursuers.

The closest Elby frigate had finally closed the gap just enough that it started to fire at the Tien Extremis.  Cannonfire columned up and down the hull of the asari dreadnought, just missing one of the corvette’s wings.

However, the frigate had been so hell-bent on getting close to Ceraphan’s ship that, when the Tien Extremis had sheared off the pieces of dreadnought hull, there was nowhere left for it to go, no time for it to make an emergency abort.

The gunboat hit the reverse thrusters and tried to turn away, but it slammed into one of the ejecta that Ceraphan had shot away, shearing off a wing-mounted thruster and slicing open a hole in its side, bleeding element zero in a glowing cloud of radiation.  The now single-engine gunboat began to helplessly enter a deadman’s spiral, missiles and burst fire uselessly chugging away from the ship as its enraged pilot fruitlessly tried to recover, but a fault in the electrical system soon cascaded into the fuel lines and the ship vanished in a brilliant display of pyrotechnics, the concussion from its detonation sending out a sphere of pressure that scattered the rest of the Folly’s debris in its immediate vicinity, like an invisible bubble had suddenly sprung to life around the brief flower of flame.

Ceraphan did not declare victory just yet, because the final Elby frigate, apoplectic at the destruction of its comrades, fell back into firing range and let loose with its cannons, the Tien Extremis squarely in its sights.

White flares scattered across Ceraphan’s vision as her pursuer’s autocannons tore up space all around her ship.  Pieces of shattered bulkhead melted and evaporated, and her ship shuddered with each near detonation as if she was passing through a wave of heavy atmospheric turbulence.  She was thrown this way and that, making grunting noises every time her restraints dug into her body.  Her stomach gave a churn as the horizon of the Folly spiraled just outside of her vision, but she narrowed her eyes and tried to power through the vertigo.

Her body already felt tired.  She was strained to her fullest extent.  No doubt the Elby ships had called for reinforcements.  She needed to end this immediately or she would be overwhelmed and would have no chance to escape at all.

To prove that point, one of the rounds from the gunboat just skipped over the Tien Extremis’ leftmost wing.  Razor chaff sheared by, tearing at the mounted solar panels and ripping at the atmo maneuvering fins.  Too close.  An inch to one side and she would have been piloting a two-winged craft after that.

She looked at her targeting computer.  The last gunboat was still on her tail and was closing, but keeping enough of a distance to not fall for the same tricks that its cohorts had.

Somehow, she knew what the Elby ship was going to do right before it did it.

Her eyes twitched her display, which displayed a readout of the enemy ship.  There was a surge of heat from one of its missile tubes.  Her display was able to identify it as a Python Howitzer, equipped to seek and destroy the closest source of heat in the area.

Her fingers were already on the controls when she saw the gunboat fire the Python.

Half a second later, Ceraphan cut the power to all systems and the last thing before she initiated the cutoff switch was to send the ship swerving in a drifting arc, just underneath the swerve of a riddled Alliance cruiser, out of the Elby ship’s line of sight.

The missile shot forward, leaving behind a miniature blueshift streak from its propellant. 

But instead of arcing towards Ceraphan’s ship, it instead veered off in a strange trajectory, maneuvering itself upward, through a cluster of shrapnel, almost exiting the Folly itself.  But it curved back down, down, down, in reverse direction, as the Tien Extremis had vanished from its sensors when it had hidden behind the wreckage and now it was going back to the one heat source that it could filter out within the field of debris.

Return to sender.

Whether or not the pilot of the Elby ship had realized what was going to happen, perhaps mesmerized by the smooth arcing of the missile, it made no effort to evade and the projectile smashed directly into the cockpit, detonating, and blew apart with a multicolored burst of rainbow flame before the inferno was whisked out after expending all the available accelerants, leaving nothing but cooling dust behind.

Ceraphan had flipped the systems to her ship back on by then, having seen the pulse of light fuzz just behind the ship that she had used as cover for the Tien Extremis.  Reengaging the radio, it was ablaze with chatter from incoming ships—the Folly was blocking her sensors in such a limited area, but she knew that she was probably going to have additional company in the next two minutes.

It was time to go.

Deftly maneuvering the corvette towards the thinnest portion of the Folly, Ceraphan hit the pulse thrusters and was yanked back in her seat with the cool pressure of g-forces.  She hardly had to make evasive maneuvers to dodge pieces of the larger debris and soon she was clear, out into open territory with only the planetary glow now to soothe her.

The coordinates for her FTL jump were already punched in.  She hit the auto-direct function, watched as the stars rotated into place like a great mechanism, and soon she saw nothing but a realm of purple streaks as the Sol system vanished around her.

She sagged in her seat and felt her heart unclench like a giant fist had ceased gripping her insides.

The turian just stared at her latest find in the cargo bay, after the cart it now sat atop had wheeled it in from the airlock upon its stout rails.  The Tien Extremis was still in FTL and would be for at least half a day until they reached the far side of Jupiter, further out in the system.  She walked around her latest acquisition, a hand to her chin, studying the pod intently, watching as it faintly wisped frozen gas into the air, which was starting to melt after having been stuck in space for so long.

Scanning lasers from the ceiling were bursting out fans of cold electric blue, scouring over the pod and soaking up any information at the atomic level.  A nearby readout was showing that the degradation of the pod itself was consistent with it being languid in vacuum for at least ten years.  So, it certainly had not been dumped here by anyone before the end of the war and now.

“What were you doing out there?” she murmured to the cryo pod as she went to a knee next to it and brushed away a layer of space dust.  “Where did you come from?”

The batteries on cryo pods were meant to last hundreds of years, but there would be retrogression if, for instance, a pod would be subject to the vacuum and extreme temperatures of space.  An environment like that would reduce the battery’s efficacy to about a tenth of their natural life.  And judging from the slowly blinking red light near what Ceraphan determined to be a control panel, there had to be only a few days’ worth of power remaining.

But then, that meant…

Ceraphan depressed a button and the panel popped out on a hinge.  A tiny screen coughed to life behind the panel and displayed an unfamiliar insignia, along with the software version, as it slowly began to boot up.

It took another minute for the diagnostic screen to settle in, but once it did, it just displayed a series of flat graphs, upon which Ceraphan could decipher as at least three different readouts.  The axes to the graphs were abbreviated, but her eyes were focused on the topmost graph, which seemed to subtly blip up from its otherwise horizontal trajectory every fifteen or twenty seconds.

And Ceraphan knew what a heartbeat looked like on a monitor quite innately.

She stood up in shock, the lamp behind her searing a starburst pattern just off of her crested head.

These bio-readouts… they meant life. 

Life inside of the cryo pod.  It was unbelievable and crazy to think of that someone had survived for so long out there.

Regardless of the number of questions that now occupied her brain, Ceraphan forced herself to focus.  She was not a salvager.  Not today, at least.

Today, she would be a savior.

“I have to get you out of there,” she whispered to the pod as she quickly backed away to grab all the tools she required. ^[5]

starring
JOHN SHEPARD
TALI’ZORAH VAS RANNOCH

The generator whirred, filling the cargo bay with white noise, as Ceraphan hefted the atmospheric tubes from where they had been coiled around the reel near one of the stacks of crates.  She had zipped her orange jumpsuit back up and had lowered the interior temperature of the craft so that she would not overheat.

From a panel on the side of the cryo pod, the turian had popped open another cover that revealed a juncture terminal, which had plugs and ports for a variety of different cables and tubes.

Ceraphan got to a knee and fitted one of the hoses into the ports, which maneuvered into place with a satisfying series of clicks.  Supplemental oxygen engaged, judging from the green halo LED that ringed around the port, expelling a quick burst of gas, accompanied by a swift hissing noise like air escaping from a dirigible.  She inserted a thinner tube into another plug, next to the oxygen hose, which also registered a secure connection.  Now that the exhaust was secured, she could begin the process of equalizing the atmosphere within the pod with that of her ship.

She ran back to the main terminal of the Tien Extremis and, grabbing a power cable, inserted one end into the ship using the universal plug, and moved over to the pod so that she could connect via that plug as well.  With the pod’s battery at critical, it would need an external power source to begin the warm-up cycle.  It would also need the additional power to rouse the subject from sleep by stimulating their heart with a controlled current.

The turian set a timer for twenty minutes, trying to pace herself.  There was no use in going fast if the occupant’s life was at stake.  She had time.  This could be done deliberately.

The pod itself was strangely shaped.  Ceraphan had seen a few relics in the museums back on Palaven back when she had been smaller, but they had been sleeker and far more compact than what was now occupying her ship.  This one was boxier and looked as if someone had fused a rectangular block with a cylinder.  Upon closer inspection, she could see that the excess area was actually a storage unit for IV nutrients, fluids, and even oxygen.  Strange.  Cryo did not typically require such nourishment.  A body’s metabolism was brought to near zero while in cold sleep, so there would be no need for supplemental food or air.  She would have to consider that later.

But, now that she was taking a closer look at the cryo pod, she could now observe multiple imperfections in the structure of the pod.  Dents, scratches, and remnants of ice scarring.  Some of the panels looked to have been fused together, either from the extreme heat or cold.  Out there in the Folly, this thing had taken a beating.  It was a miracle that this thing had survived from floating out there in that maelstrom.  This occupant had some damn luck, whoever they were.

It meant, however, that Ceraphan was going to have to find out a way to repair some of the damage so that the pod would open smoothly once the thawing process was complete.

She did not worry yet.  There was still time.

and introducing
CERAPHAN “CERAPH” KALINN

Sparks splattered across the ground from the turian’s arc welder, the precious flame scoring the composite metal of the pod.  Her motions were slow and technical, offering the barest graze over the damaged seals that had been altered by cold space.  The welder made a spitting noise, like a cobra, and left a dull red line across her target like fiery scars, cooled from fiery yellow.

It took an effort for Ceraphan to keep herself composed and still.  Cut too deep into the pod and she would compromise the interior atmosphere or slice into the life support.  The fact that the interior of the ship was heating up from her efforts was not helping her constitution all that much, either.  But, with a determined effort, she slowly applied a two-handed grip on her welder, and carefully moved it, like an artist would with a paintbrush, across the scarred metal like it was her canvas.

Globules of molten metal, encrusted from ice and time, finally softened and bled like pustules, dripping open across the seal gaps and removing the obstructions from the pod doors.

Ceraphan let out a breath.  Her efforts were working.

She continued, alone with her thoughts.

based on “Mass Effect” by
BIOWARE

A display had been plugged into one of the pod’s diagnostic ports and Ceraphan was crouched to the side of the pod, tablet in her hands as she downloaded the data from the memory bank

In five minutes, she had managed to clone the contents of the cryo pod’s limited hard drive onto her tablet.  Still continuing to crouch, she activated the troubleshooter with a few careful finger taps, which was the automated process that examined the pod for any damage she could not see or issues that the occupant was relaying upon her device.  Fortunately, the pod was reporting that nothing had imperiled the cargo within and that the opening mechanisms were registering green signals across the board.  All very good signs.  The awakening process had started just fifteen minutes ago—a fine mist of neurochemicals had been seeping into the pod, which were completely safe to breathe, but would induce brain activity upon registering in the body.  The temperature was also being brought up slowly, to not damage any tissue cells from rapid rethawing.

But there was one system that had raised a fault upon her tablet.  Ceraphan blinked and gave a concerned grunt as she booted up several submenus to try and track down the source of the error.

Her heart began to sink as she found the screen that explained everything.  The electrical current generator that was responsible for inducing metabolism stasis—the device responsible for slowing the heart rate of the occupant while—was reporting a total failure.  When going into cryo, the sleep cycle was reliant on the generator to produce a current counter to that of the occupant’s heart rate, thereby stopping it and nullifying the body’s metabolic cycle.

Whoever was inside had never entered full cryogenic stasis.  Or the system had failed sometime in the last ten years.  With their metabolism still active, they would have continued to age while they floated out there.

Ten whole years.

Ceraphan felt dizzy and she ran a hand along her forehead.  She looked over at the pod.  “Oh, Spirits,” she whispered, her heart going out to the person inside and what she was about to do to them.  “Everything’s going to be so different when you wake.  Are you even ready for what you’re going to see?”

But now the pieces were starting to fall into place.  The pod had been outfitted for an additional supply of oxygen and nutrients, after all.  The occupant had been provided all of the necessary items for long-term cryo.  So had this pod’s spacing been an accident, or had there been deliberation behind it?

Idly flipping through the contents of the pod’s hard drive, Ceraphan suddenly stumbled across a folder marked “Vid.”  She opened it and found that there was a singular video file inside.  From the file size, it was low quality and only lasted ten seconds.  What was a video file doing in the hard drive of a cryo pod, anyway?  These pods had wireless shipboard network receiver installed, ostensibly to receive OTA firmware updates to its software—could it be that it had simply plucked the file from the cloud by mistake?  Her confusion helplessly spiraling, Ceraphan did all the necessary virus checks before her tablet pronounced it clean, and she swiftly engaged the video to play on the screen.

As expected, the quality of the video was terrible.  Filled with film grain so dense it was akin to peering through a hailstorm.  It was a fixed perspective, mounted upon a wall, looking down at what appeared to be the bay of a carrier.  So, this was a clip from a security camera on board a ship.  The metadata did not indicate which ship it was—either it had not been added or had been wiped, but there was no information to make a determination on that.

In the view of the camera, maneuvering across the floor of the bay, were three lanky figures pushing what looked like the exact cryo pod model that was now sitting in her ship.  The bad resolution coupled with the fact that the poor lighting aboard the ship in the video clip meant that Ceraphan could not make out any faces, or species for that matter.  The figures were bipedal, but there was no good way for her to tell if they were turian, human, salarian, or any other species that had a similar build.  The dark and blurry figures were wheeling the pod near a shielded opening in the floor, the kind of opening that attack fighters would be launched out of from an overhead rail system, but she couldn’t be sure of that as well.  They appeared to be conversing with the other, judging from their hand movements, but there was no audio in the file for Ceraphan to make out what they were talking about.

At about the halfway point in the video, the scene suddenly changed.  The lighting within the interior of the ship shifted and blaring red fixtures began to flash in rapid strobes, causing the crew in the bay of the carrier to pause, caught off guard.

Two seconds later, the image heavily jittered and Ceraphan saw the rightmost bulkhead suddenly bulge inward, and a great knifehead of wreckage speared straight through the anodized steel.  The brief moment of terror before the impact must have been a proximity warning.  Walls and beams suddenly crumpled inward as the breached ship could not contain the damage.  The structure was collapsing; the atmosphere escaping.

The figures that had been ferrying the cryo pod had been sucked out of the ship in an instant when the barrier to the launch window in the floor had failed.  The cryo pod offered a scant moment more of resistance, before it too was plucked out and whipped out into the void to join the lifeless bodies that were in the process of freezing into popsicles.

There was a searing burst of flame as something detonated within the ship.  A ball of fire rushed towards the camera.  Darkness.

The video had ended at that point.

Ceraphan tossed the tablet atop the cryo pod as she stood back up in a daze. 

Questions upon questions to consider.  From what she could glean from the footage, it had looked like the ship that had originally borne the pod had not meant to suffer such a cataclysmic accident.  No doubt they had piloted too deep into the Folly and had paid the price when the claustrophobic field had closed all around them, offering no escape. 

“But… why?” Ceraphan whispered as she returned her gaze to the pod, unable to keep her most pertinent question to her own head.  “Why were you even here at all?”

written and edited by
ROB SEARS

WAKE_CYCLE:                              COMPLETE
NEUROLOGICAL_ACTIVITY:          NORMAL
RESPIRATORY_ACTIVITY:              NORMAL
CIRCULATORY_ACTIVITY:            ERROR 44 – PROCESS INTERRUPTED
EXTERIOR_TEMPERATURE:           70° FAHRENHEIT
OBSERVATIONS:                          NUTRIENT DEFICIENT; MUSCULAR ATROPHY; FREEZER BURN

[OPEN POD? Y/N]

The readouts from the pod had only compounded the worrying sensation that Ceraphan had felt up to this point.  The occupant was certainly not healthy, but they were not in such dire straits that their life was immediately in jeopardy.

But their life was going to change regardless, as Ceraphan’s finger hovered over the control on her tablet, the one that would unlock the vaulted cylinder.  She felt like her mind had splintered in different directions, hesitation overcoming her.  Her pulse was soaring—she had never done anything like this before.  There had been no manual for her to consult, what if she had messed up somewhere in the awakening process?  A part of her was telling her to not unlock that cryo pod, for some primitive belief, buried deep in her subconsciousness, feared that everything was going to change if she did so, and perhaps not for the better.

She felt as if she was perched upon a tall ledge, with nowhere for her to take a step forward, and only a shrouded mist and an endless drop awaiting her.  Her throat felt like it was closing, brought on by a nameless panic.

But her mind cleared when she allowed logic to power herself through into lucidity.  To hesitate was to betray her own instincts.  There was someone inside this pod and they would die without her intervention.

She could not allow that to happen.

Ceraphan made sure to position herself in front of the pod, which was now situated at an incline against the wall of the cargo bay.

Looking down at her lit tablet to make sure her finger was aimed in the right spot, she now glanced at the pod when she firmly stabbed down upon the button to unseal it. ^[6]

Heavy locks thudded.  A tight burst of white gas suddenly hissed from the seals of the cryo pod—carbon dioxide deposits.

Lights within the interior of the pod brimmed to life, soft and white.

Then, on disused hinges that creaked so awfully the sound could shatter glass, the doors slowly extended and then folded open like a chrysalis revealing the efforts of its labor.

Heart in her throat, Ceraphan crept over to the pod, which was still expelling a thick white gas that flooded to the floor and swirled around the turian’s feet.

On her tiptoes, Ceraphan edged her head just over the open pod doors and peered inside.

In her wildest imaginations, she had been visualizing something like an ancient turian warrior, clad head to toe in resplendent green armor, weapon at their side like they could spring into battle at a moment’s notice.  Or like that Prothean that had been unearthed on Eden Prime and had joined the final attacks against the Reapers, awoken from their eternal slumber with the sole duty to bring about the revenge of an extinct race.

Whoever was occupying the pod did not match Ceraphan’s dreams.

They were human, with pale skin from being cut off from natural light for so long.  They wore a thin medical gown, their hands and feet bare.  IV tubing ran into both arms and, trickling conduits of clear fluid and blood, alternatively.  Ceraphan was not very good at determining the age of humans, but this one looked to be significantly aged.  Their hair was shock-white, and had grown out in cryo down to their neck, parted and wavy.  They had an unkempt beard about their face, the same color of snow, the length of which made them look wizened.

Hesitantly, Ceraphan ground her teeth as she moved over to call out to the man.  Quietly, so as to not rouse them from sleep quite so dramatically.  She was about to whisper something out when she noticed something curious about the man that gave her pause.

A big pause.

The facial structure.  The slight scar at the forehead.  There was something so familiar about this man that it was driving Ceraphan absolutely crazy.  She wracked her brain all the way down to the core, certain that she knew this man from somewhere.

And when it finally hit her, her head raised upward, her eyes without focus and dilated, her hands numbly dropping to her sides, she murmured, “By the Spirits…”

At the same time, she saw the man’s eyes flare open.

In the pod, the occupant made a shuddering gasp, and his body writhed several times as he coughed to clear his airways.  He made a bone-chilling cry of panic and agony, startling Ceraphan terribly.  The man’s hands clutched at his chest, which were ridged as though he was attempting to burrow through his own chestplate, then tried to grasp the sides of the pod to haul himself out, but he had already expended what little strength he had.

He fell back into the pod, shuddering and spluttering.  Exhaustion fell upon John Shepard like a hammer and very soon he was back in the realm of unconsciousness, leaving behind the speechless turian who had saved him.

AFTERSHOCKS

Chapter Text

He felt the caress of water upon his feet before he could even see or hear it.

Liquid gurgled hollowly, as if the sound was being emitted from a long and dark pipe.  The warm water submerged his feet to just above his ankles.  It ebbed and flowed.  Tidal, but from a calm sea rather than the surf of a battered and windswept beach.

Sunlight baked his skin, the rays from above bright and savage.  When he breathed, he could smell the mineral scent of the sea and the sharp tang of dry vegetation.  Unfiltered air, unlike the kind processed by a ship’s atmo scrubbers thrice over.  He had breathed in the vaguely metallic bouquet for seemingly half his life.  The raw air in comparison felt thick in his throat, akin to a nectar.

When he opened his eyes, detail only seemed to seep back in at separate intervals, as if he had emerged from a dark cave after an eternity, only now getting his power of sight back, little by little.

A searing sapphire blob formed the boundless horizon which slowly coalesced into the flat and still surface of a pristine ocean, bordered only by the deep and vibrant sky of a blue so pure it blended with the color of the sea, peering into cobalt infinitude.  Brown needles of islands in the distance broke up the horizon intermittently, rough and jagged like they were ancient keys.  White specks of sailboats and pleasure yachts seemed to float within that void of blue.  The man had only sparingly seen boats in his life before and stood there in the surf of the beach, watching them pass on by.  They were such foreign objects to him.  He spent his entire life among the stars, but not once did he ever consider giving his life to the sea.  It was an old man’s vice, sailing, and while the civilizations of old relied on the oceans to ferry goods provisioned from far-off lands, the advent of interstellar travel had made such a mode of transportation obsolete within a matter of years.  The pastime was just that, albeit one spurned by a melancholy disposition to return to a far simpler age.

His sight had mostly returned by now.  He glanced over his shoulder to take stock of his surroundings.

A crescent-shaped beach, possibly a half-mile in length.  Surrounded on all sides by roughly sloping hills, dotted sparsely with dark green shrubs that had sprouted from the yellow and unfertile soil.  The slopes were coated with rocks and pebbles—hiking out would be treacherous.

The beach itself was just a thin stratum of sand that gave way to a rocky mantle just underneath the surf a couple of yards into the water.  He was standing on the slippery rocks now, his feet carefully wedged against a particular arrangement so as to keep him from tipping over.  A thin breeze plucked at him only to fizzle out within moments.

Shepard raised a hand to ward off the glare of the sun as it bounced off the water in front of him, sucking in yet another deep breath, imagining that the air was thick enough to take bites out of it.

This could have been anywhere in the galaxy—Palaven, Rannoch—but Shepard just had a gut feeling that it was Earth.  Perhaps it had been the sailboats that had given it away.  There was just an inherent familiarity about the place, one that was latent to humans in recognizing their endemic lands, despite the fact he could not say for certain that he had ever been to this specific part of the planet before.

The most recent memories he had of his homeworld were of it in pain.  Scarred.  Landscapes razed.  Mountains ground to dust and glass.  The atmosphere choked with smoke, the skies crackling with electricity and plasma.  Buildings hollowed out by fire, surrounded by the selfsame cityscapes that created a broken and gray horizon.  A world that seemed ill-suited to life, charred by nuclear flame.

But here… this place was pristine.  The water was clear, the skies were devoid of pollution, as if the war had never come to this little corner of nowhere, and had waited out the devastation that had so consumed the rest of the planet. 

And it was absolutely quiet.  Not another soul to be seen around him.

The loneliness did not faze Shepard one bit.  He just stood there for a time, the water lapping at his legs while he breathed in the fragrant air with his eyes closed in bliss. 

It had been a while since he had just done absolutely nothing.  All of his years of fighting prevented him from taking more than a moment to rest.  His mind had simply moved from battle to battle, always looking towards the next fight as soon as his most recent victory had been assured, his body bearing the brunt of each successive campaign.  He could not stop his determined charge towards destiny.  The fate of trillions had all been in his hands and he had this crushing need to address such responsibility with the respect it dutifully deserved.  He had faced his terrible foes in the most brutal environments across countless worlds, defeating them all to secure the survival of every single sapient species in this galaxy, all while sleep-deprived, sick, or both.

But now, he could just exist in this tiny speck of the universe while the rest of all life and civilization could carry on as though he had intended to be here, despite having no memory of coming to this place to start with.  Nothing else threatened to impart itself upon him.  His duties had either been fulfilled or forgotten.

It was just him right here.

The sun seemed to hang in its position directly above him, stalwart and eternal.  Shepard just watched the series of ships sweep on by in this little zone, his eyes tracking the occasional cargo tanker that pushed across the horizon like a battering ram.  He kept on locking on each ship in turn, getting a little more anxious as each vessel shifted into view, as if he was expecting one of those little dots to suddenly make a beeline for his little beach, someone on board having been summoned to located him, driven by an unknown invitation.

Companionship.  The idea of him being with someone brought a familiar ache to his heart.  Right… it would not do for him to be alone for the rest of his days.  Such moments of quietus could only be appreciated all the more if he had someone to share them with.

He looked down at his warbling reflection.  The colors in the cerulean ocean muted everything, his skin and clothes appearing washed out as the hues blurred together.  He squinted hard at his face—it looked familiar, yet it was as if he was staring at a stranger.

Shepard gave a gruff noise from the hollow of his throat, momentarily breaking eye contact with his reflection.  This was a waste of time.  He should not have even come to this place, however it had been possible.  He had the vaguest notion that he should be doing… something, but try as he might, there was nothing that his mind could grasp that could point him in the right direction.

He returned his gaze back to the water in front of him, finding himself imperceptibly fascinated with how his reflection seemed to twist and distort before him. ^[1]

There was a brief burst of wind and the echo on the water buzzed as if it was a static image upon a holoscreen.

The ripples coalesced and shimmered until they seemed to solidify, as if the very surface of the sea had become a tender pane of clear ice. 

A new reflection now stood next to Shepard and his heart seemed to wrench into two pieces as the neurons in his brain fired before the image itself had finished warbling.

A noise fluttered from his throat, a low keening sound, as he finally looked up, but only the deepest recesses of his hearing were allowed to impact as all sound became muted for him.  His mouth opened and closed, eyes widening and trembling in their sockets, hardly daring to believe who was standing next to him.

Tali’Zorah was staring off towards the sharpened horizon, hands folded plaintively behind her back as her visor slowly swept from side to side like she was an indominable lighthouse, appearing to scan the clouds and ships that dared to transgress across her vision.  The water faintly rippled around her boots and the lightest of breezes tugged at the taut trappings of fabric that had been swathed around the nanofiber enviro-suit that hugged her slim form.  Her eyes were like crystals behind a sheet of curved glass the color of a bruised sunset that covered her face.

Shepard wanted to reach out to her.  To touch her.  But his arms were leaden.  Something was locking his sockets in place.

He opened his mouth to call out to her, even though she was just feet away.  Nothing but a muted gurgle.  A drowning noise.  He tried again, louder this time.  But he still could not hear his own voice.  It was as if his tongue had been cut out, or if he had been surreptitiously deafened.

Tali continued to stare out towards sea, perhaps not realizing the man next to her was desperately trying to speak to her.

Something was coming.  Shepard could feel it.  It curled in his muscles and strained at his bones.  His nerve endings were starting to sizzle redhot and a fire began to kindle in his lungs.  He could not even step towards the woman he loved, not even as the skies began to darken and the waters began to swiftly rush away from them, retreating away from the shore, leaving the two standing on a skein of gray and chalky soil.  There was no evidence of dampness that remained—the ground was as dry as a desert basin, and thin swirls of dust were beginning to cyclone from the brief spits of wind that continued to spin up.

Shepard glanced upwards at the sky, which was now choked with dark and ominous clouds, obscuring the once pristine blue sky in an instant.  Lightning crackled somewhere in the morass up there, with brief flashes of electricity barely allowed to sear through the thick ceiling.

No… not here… anywhere but here…

And now a cataclysmic brightness was being emitted at their backs.  Shepard turned around, the only sort of movement he was allowed to perform, and squinted heavily.

The beam of light speared upwards towards a destination neither visible nor imaginable from their current position.  Pillars of rock as tall as skyscrapers cradled the spear of light, as if they were the bones of a tall and thin volcano that had been hollowed out from the energy they were pressed against.

In the sky, faint twinkles of high-altitude fighters roared just below the clouds, spitting fire, leaving trails of death and destruction in their wakes.  Occasionally, the ceiling would part to reveal the stricken hulk of a massive capital ship, the hull in flames, the engines stone-dead, in the throes of hurtling towards the surface in their final moments.  A shattered skyline of buildings miles long would shield the moment of impact from Shepard, but half a minute later, he would feel the shockwave across the ground and would see the gigantic mushroom cloud another half minute later as the smoke steadily rose upwards, becoming a new support in the cathedral of clouds that hung over the grisly scene.

More concussions smashed at his body.  He rotated on the spot, Tali somehow serene and unconcerned next to him.  He watched as the plain in front of them flattened and became cratered with explosions, erupting into a battlefield in moments.  Hammerhead tanks flipped end over end as magnetohydrodynamic beams sheared away at their thruster supports.  Mako tanks bottomed out and smashed to a halt, Reaper weaponry having cut them in half.  Soldiers, on full sprint towards the beam, fired their weapons indiscriminately.  One of them crouched for a moment to fire a rocket launcher.  Shepard tracked the stitching of tracer rounds as they split the night, only briefly illuminating the massive machine hulks that lorded over the ruined city of London, their immense and unblinking optics utterly impassive, their undercarriages a miasma of delicate appendages and pristine targeting lenses.

The smell of ash reached Shepard’s nose.  Acrid.  Hint of burning flesh and rubber.  There was screaming, too.  But not from him.  It came from everywhere.  Screams of denial, of the dying.  Men and women—the species did not matter—either refusing to believe that this was the end, or trying desperately to cling to their last moments of life as their blood and entrails were greedily soaked up by the parched ground.

Need to go… he wanted to scream and shake Tali, but he had still been unable to regain control of his body.  Can’t stay here… need to leave… we can’t stay!

He tried bellowing at her again, for it was all he could do.  Yelling until he lacked the strength to do so, with the veins in his temples throbbing with definition.

Listen to me!

LISTEN TO ME!

As if in a trance, Tali turned her head towards him, blinking slowly.  An explosion gently wafted in the corner of her visor, the vivid color dulled but rampaging throughout the gentle metal accents that had been placed upon her enviro-suit.

Shepard saw Tali’s vocabulator strobe once.  To his despair, Shepard realized that he could not hear her, either.

But he did hear the sound of the Reaper beam striking just nearby.

It all happened in the blink of an eye.  Just past Tali’s shoulder, Shepard saw the column of red light suddenly spear out of nowhere and vanish before he could take stock of it.  But the impact of the energy had plowed dead-on upon the front of a Mako tank.  Immediately, the cabin of the Mako melted into a hulk of dripping metal, its center of gravity immediately skewed.  The force of the remaining weight lurching onto the rearmost wheels caused the tank to flip end over end, seemingly defying gravity, until it landed upon its roof, its exposed hydrogen-oxygen cell cracking and finally, detonating.

The ground pulsed as the tank became engulfed in a ball of smoke and flame.  Shards of razor-sharp shrapnel sliced just by Shepard like spinning rotor blades, nicking at his clothes and skin, but only dealing superficial damage.  He felt the heat of the explosion at his face, the skin feeling like it was blistering, almost as if he were walking into an oven.

But then his eyes tracked a darkened object, flung from the force of the explosion, briefly silhouetted by the light.

It was not heading for him, however.

“No!” he was finally able to scream.

The quarian’s head lifted and he saw her eyes slowly widen. 

She had heard him.

But Tali never saw the piece of the wheel axle that smashed into the side of her head, which impacted her helmet and indented it nearly a full centimeter.  The shock of the blow traversed around to her visor, cracking it and turning it into a thickened spiderweb, obscuring the glow from her eyes behind the shattered panes.  The fabric of her sehni, the covering that was always draped around her head, sheared off in a singular tatter, trailing fibers.

Shepard only saw the blood spray from the wound in a perverse ring around the impact for the barest moment before Tali was sent flying away, just past him.

He groped for her hand, missed, and started to scream—

Shepard opened his eyes.

There had been no initial awareness.  Not so much as what he could perceive, at least.  There had been no slow rise to consciousness.  No slow activation of his sensorium that could detect stimuli like pressure, sounds, smells.

There was just a stark fatigue, then the long ache akin to one garnered from lying down for too long.  Everything had been so black for him, a deepness so infinite and thick he had barely been able to keep his head above it all.  He had clung to his own self in that time, praying for when he could see a dawn.

And what a dawn it was.

It was electrical.  Bonewhite.  Impure.  It felt like the light was stabbing him with its harshness.  The air was dry all around him.  And cold—he was shivering.

Oh god, he thought, the last image of Tali’s crumpled body unable to leave his mind.  Tali.  Tali.  Where is Tali?

Then he took the next breath.

The taste of cryo-fluid slammed his tongue, which seemed to trickle down his throat and settle in his gut, nearly setting off his gag reflex.  His lungs also seemed to be diminished in their capacity, almost as if they had not been used for some time.  The next several breaths were an effort, he noted, and he was feeling lightheaded, as though he would pass out at any given moment.

He blinked several times, but the world was refusing to focus.  He could only discern faint colors and the strangest of shapes.  There was a pale gas that seemed to be seeping around him, but did not have the wherewithal to place what it was.  His brain felt like it was waking up from a long slumber.  As if it had been in hibernation, even.

Slow pulses in neuron activity.  Pathways forging, faltering, reconnecting.

The dormant parts of his cortex felt like they were awakening.  The clues began to piece themselves together. 

Cryo-fluid.  Frozen gas.

Had he been placed in cryo? 

How long had he been under?

Had they won the war after all?

What the hell had happened to him?

Vertigo swam over him.  He was now coughing and gagging at this point, spittle spraying into the air as he thrashed back and forth on what he now determined was a very uncomfortable surface.  He was heaving, spasming, his arms shaking in midair and wrenched into claw-like shapes, the rest of his body limp but jittering as if he was touching a live wire.  He kept on coughing until he was expelling a thick drool from his mouth, his ribs and stomach aching from his exertions.

It was so cold.  He felt like ice had infected his veins, cradling his bones.

Panicking, he tried to focus his eyes, but definition still refused to come.  Everything was a deep blur for him.  He was lost in a fog, directionless and alone.

Then… he heard someone call his name.

Perhaps he was not alone after all.

Who is it? he thought he had spoken aloud, but in reality the noise only existed inside his own head.  His throat was so dry, his mouth barren and devoid of lubrication, that he had no chance of even formulating a single intelligible syllable. 

He felt hands gently grasp at him, holding him still, assuring himself of another presence.

“Try not to speak,” the voice said to him, unfamiliar.  There was a slight flanging effect to the voice that, for the moment, he could not place.

His lips fumbled again, but he could not formulate the next question from his mouth, nor could he even think of what to ask for he was so addled.  The feeling of suffocation was starting to lessen, but now a hammerblow of fatigue was walloping him behind the eyes.  Consciousness was slipping away from him, no matter how tightly he tried to grasp at it.

Wincing, the last of his strength ebbing away, he squinted his eyes, moving past the pain that felt like needles were stabbing his eyeballs, that his blood was boiling in his heart, that sharpened fibers were ripping his lungs to shreds with every inhalation.

A shrouded figure soon appeared above him, cradled by the light like a halo overhead.  At first, Shepard thought he could see that familiar and vibrant purple color of a visor and the delicate whorls outlined upon an immaculate sehni.

As something in his chest began to rise, the shape then shifted into an unfamiliar figure.  A carapaced face with dabs of orange markings.  A turian.  One he did not recognize.

The questions compounded in his head until their weight finally became too much for him to take.  With an agonized groan, Shepard tried to reach for the face, but that fateful movement used up the last of his energy and his eyes slammed shut with the finality of a bunker door, everything else growing blissfully quiet moments after that.

When he woke again, he was at least lying on a more comfortable area, albeit it was a far cry from a five-star hotel bed.  While he had much to complain about, his selected resting platform was not among them.  Stark fluorescents were beating down on him again, the light peeling past his eyelids and returning that fresh pain to his sockets.

It took him a moment to get his bearings.  Whereas before, when he had been lying at an angle, he was at least prone this time, which no doubt added to his overall comfort level.

His body faintly detected flickers of contact, further down, on his torso.  Daring to lift his head, Shepard gave a slight gasp of surprise as he saw a series of metallic arms, shrouded in a white metal, with delicate arrays of sharpened apparatuses gleaming at their ends swiftly move across his body, poking and prodding him with impassioned abandon.  He was strapped to a surgical bed, he realized, and was bare-chested, only wearing a pair of dark underwear.  An IV tube, connected to his left arm, trailed away just over his head, trickling a clear fluid within.  He wondered what was inside the tube.  Fluids?  Nutrients?  Was all this really necessary for getting out of cryo?

He returned his attention back to the surgical arms, which he noted were already bloodstained.  One strobed a gridded laser across his abdomen, which was laden with fresh scars.  Surgery.  Someone had operated on him?  Shepard’s brow furrowed as he tried to recall his injuries.  The memories came back in fragments, like lost pieces of a broken vase.  He remembered the wash of heat from the Reaper’s laser as it bore down on him, melting his armor into his skin.  The pain in his side from the fresh gunshot wounds sustained on London.  The thudding of his heart, thinking it was about to explode, as he expended every last fiber of his strength to just stand upright upon the Citadel, the familiar buck of the pistol in his hand as the onrushing wave of flames finally cocooned him.

A breath slithered out and a singular tear escaped an eye.  This… this was real.  So, he was alive.  There had been no sacrifice.  Somehow, he had survived.

Despite the joy of his new comprehension, Shepard still felt odd and incomplete, like he had awoken unto a universe without meaning.  Deep within, he understood the reason for this hole in himself.  He had known throughout all of his years of fighting that he would most likely die out there on the field.  For most of that time, he had devoted himself to a cause.  An ideal of free will for all life.  It had been an easy concept to rally his will behind—a rock that he could count on to steady himself should he have faltered.

But, as time went on, the rock had shaped itself to another ideal.  A singular person.  For as the months had quickly passed, Shepard had found that he was no longer fighting for all life in the galaxy.

He had been fighting for one person.  One person only.

Fantasy soon gave way to reality as his throat felt like it was closing on itself again. 

Tali. 

Is she alive? he wanted to cry out.  I need to know that she’s safe!

There was no one in the immediate vicinity that could soothe him, so it took five minutes until the gently shuddering human tied upon the bed could quietly calm himself down, more tears leaking from his eyes.  He knew he must not imagine the worst.  He had survived, after all, and he had been where the fighting was thickest back on Earth and the Citadel, so she had more than a fair chance, too.  For all he knew, Tali was out there, somewhere, waiting for him after all this time.

And there were promises he had made to her that he was hell-bent on keeping.

First things first.  He slowly blinked as if he were wiping himself free of dark thoughts.  I need to figure out where I am.

He tried to turn his head to look for the turian that he had seen before he had passed out last.  Tali may have been a hallucination back then, but Shepard had been sure that this woman had not been one.  She had spoken to him, after all.  He had heard her words so clearly that it had ripped him away from his own morose thoughts for a split-second.  It had been a young voice, one tinged with awe and panic.  Who was she?

He craned his head to the left.  That was a mistake.  His vertebrae were not used to being rotated so much due to atrophy and a strong spear of pain seemed to skewer him down along his spine.  Shepard clenched his eyes and made an agonized noise, falling still until the sensation had started to subside.  When he opened his eyes again, he could just see the empty wing of whatever building or ship he was in.

Turning to the right, much more slowly this time so as not to antagonize the degeneration his body had accumulated, he was faced with a bare wall, and the large hulk of the surgical suite that had just finished operating on him.

Shepard’s eyes automatically honed in towards the yellow and black insignia that had been stamped at the corner of the sleek suite.  Inwardly, he gave a groan.  He knew that insignia better than most people in the galaxy.  He had served on a ship that had that logo plastered on every bulkhead, upon every device, even the silverware.

Cerberus.

More panic bubbled in Shepard’s brain.  His fight or flight instinct was starting to burgeon.  He made to lift his head up more to see if he could spot a way to free himself, but his elevated vitals must have tripped some monitoring sensor because, on a screen upon the suite next to him, he could see that the machine was preparing a dose of propofol.  His trained mind recalled the effects of the drug: fast-acting, short duration.  Guaranteed sleep.

The suite began to hiss and Shepard gulped.  He was not willing to go back to sleep again after all the time spent in the cryo pod and he was about to thrash against his restraints when he suddenly felt something cold at the IV in his arm.  Immediately, he knew that the drugs were in his bloodstream and he sighed.

Something pulled at the back of his eyes and, like a puppet at the whim of a cruel marionette, he was yanked backwards into the darkness.

There were three of them.

Shadows upon shadows.  Their features masked by a grim and undulating fog.  Standing over him.  Agitated.  Even in his twilight state, he could recognize their turmoil.

Three.  The number somehow seemed very important to him.

They were speaking amongst themselves.  He could not place their voices.  But it was obvious they were talking about him.

“You’ll never have a better moment,” one of them was saying.  “He’s at our whim and off the grid.  We should do it now.”

“Patience,” another said, a deeper voice.  “The commander is not completely useless to us, and until he has outlived that usefulness, he will live.  Your erratic consternation would have us give up on a potential asset.”

“I don’t care what you think!” the first speaker hotly shot.  “He has outlived his usefulness to all of us and will only become a liability from here on out.  He could hold a gun against all of our heads and the galaxy will merely cheer him on.  He needs to die!”

The third cohort, the one who had not spoken yet, merely placed a hand on the first shadow’s shoulder, pulling them away despite their protesting.

The last of the figures watched the duo leave before they slowly slid their attention over to him.  He now recognized that he was lying in a pod of some kind, the door to which was already in the process of sliding over his body.

He only had the thinnest chance of catching a glimpse of these people, whoever they were, but a starburst in the corner of his vision flared out the faces of the mysterious figures.  There was a sweep of cold that started at his feet, then quickly clambered up his body like a rampaging growth.  There was a great weight in his throat and he opened his mouth for one last breath.

The cold surged inside his mouth and rushed down his gullet and the last thing that he remembered was his feeble attempt to scream…

He awoke coughing.

His hand came to his throat, rubbing the skin there, the area still tender.  His splutterings quickly ceased and, after a few painful gulps, he sucked down several breaths, trying to remain calm.

Waking in distress like this was starting to get old, Shepard considered.  His hand traveled down from his throat and cradled his ribs, as though he expected to go into convulsions at any second.  Too many bad side-effects from cryo, he reasoned.  The level of respiratory complications he had developed was troubling, to say the least.  N7 training required a session of cryogenics to familiarize recruits with the process and sensations afterward.  He had not developed any adverse effects back then, but perhaps with all of the stressors he had encountered in his life, some autoimmune reactions had been unlocked that he had not been aware of previously, making any duration in cryo a debilitating experience.

He was wearing a thin shirt and a pair of soft pants, the two pieces of clothing unequal shades of gray, which annoyed him for some reason.  He was barefoot and had been resting upon a thin cot, the previous medical devices nowhere to be found.

Running a hand over his face, he felt a scratchy mass of hair.  A beard.  Rather long, too.  He knew what he was going to be taking care of as soon as he got his hands on a mirror.  Though he was confused for a moment—hair grew at a very slow rate in cryo, if at all.  When did he have time to grow a beard?

Glancing at his arms, Shepard saw the healed markings of where the IV had gone into him.  He lifted his shirt and smoothed a hand over the grid of scars that ridges across his abdomen.  He took a moment to appraise the situation.  Waking up after seemingly dying in orbit around a planet?  This certainly feels familiar.

Now to figure out exactly where the hell he was.

Slowly, so as not to induce vertigo or any underlying agonies that were just chomping at the bit to spring up, Shepard sat upright.  His eyes were still tinged with a film that hurt his ability to see in the darkened room that he was in.  A lone lamp upon a nearby desk shimmered a pathetic splash upon the surface of which it was perched.  Strips of orange light on the sides of the walls—which Shepard now recognized as a small cabin of a ship—glowed a muted orange.

And where is…?

When he spotted the turian from before, the one who had been observing him when he had awoken from cryo, he gave a small jump that jolted his insides and caused him to wince.  However, he quickly calmed himself, for the turian was fast asleep in a chair, her legs spread out straight, head lolled at an angle while she softly snored.

His eyes squinted.  Trust was a commodity that he was running low on these days and with his momentary glimpse of the Cerberus logo, he was allowing his suspicions to take over.  The dichotomy of a turian being involved with Cerberus somehow did not fail to register upon him, but he decided that he could not afford to take any chances.

Using his arms to prop himself up, Shepard grimaced as he tried to move his legs, which felt like logs of concrete.  They were barely responding to his commands and just scraped across the surface of the bed.  But in due time, he was able to swing them over the side of the bed—he shivered as his bare soles touched the metal floor.

Okay.  Now what?

Bending forward, as if offering himself in supplication, Shepard sucked in several quick breaths, trying to prepare himself for what was to come.  He tensed his muscles, continuing to sharply inhale, nostrils flaring.  Nothing new here.  Just stand up.

His first and only attempt at lifting himself from the bed could only be described as an utter failure.

He had tried a sort of lurching motion by using his arms to push himself off from the bed, with the expectation that this would propel his torso forward.  At the same time, he tried to clench the muscles in his thighs, but he only found out too late that there was absolutely no tension in his legs and he was nowhere close to supporting his own weight.  Meanwhile, his upper torso began to fall back down towards the bed, and he was helpless to stop it.  He twisted at the last moment to prevent the back of his head from colliding with the nearby wall and fell unceremoniously into a heap upon the bed instead, making a loud ruckus from his attempt in the process.

Something inside him throbbed and he clutched at his side, wincing.  “Ah!  Shit…”

Slender hands were now holding him.  One at the back of his head, the other at his shoulder.  He instinctively reached up to grab one of them.  He felt dry carapace and a strange warmth.

He looked up and the turian, having been jolted awake, was standing next to his cot, trying to keep him steady.  As he was more conscious than he had been the other day, this was his first good look at the turian.  She was wearing a tank top and an orange mechanic’s coverall, the top half of which was knotted around her waist.  Thin tattoos adorned the gray skin of her arms, between her carapaced plating.  The soft yellow of her eyes did not match the raw orange of her facepaint, but the effect was akin to a dawnburst just over a calm sea.

From how wide her eyes were, she was just as on edge as he was, it seemed.

“Okay…” the turian breathed, and Shepard realized that she was speaking to herself.  She shook her head, as if to dislodge any thoughts, and took in another breath.  “Okay.  Wow.  You’re… you’re actually awake.  Moving a bit too fast, but… but this is a good sign.  Still have some atrophy, which is expected.  I mean… this is… if you only…”

Strange bedside manner, Shepard thought.  The turian was not a medical professional, then.  They tended to be less… emotionally charged when they spoke.

“Wh…” he tried to gasp, but his throat felt like it was still in tatters.  “Who—”

“You shouldn’t try to speak,” the turian regained her composure, suddenly looking concerned.  Watchful of my well-being, I see, Shepard noted.  “Your body is nowhere near fully recovered and you’ll only prolong your healing if you move around too much.  If you must speak, please whisper.  But please… please… take things easy.  I don’t beg often, but for you, I have to make an exception.  I mean… if you are who I think you are.”

Only now did Shepard realize that this turian was young.  Very young.  He had trouble reading the ages of certain aliens, but if he had to hazard a guess, the woman in front of him was no older than twenty-two or thereabouts.

He licked his lips.  “I…” he whispered, his voice a terrible rasp, “I’m—”

But the turian stopped him with a gentle touch to his shoulder.  “You don’t have to tell me,” her mandibles parted in the equivalent of a grin, “Commander Shepard.”

A shudder ran through Shepard, but he noted that it came from the turian and not him.  It was hard to spot at first, but the turian was rapidly letting down her defenses to the point where she was almost hyperventilating with glee.

Shepard did not know how he should be reacting.  Perhaps it was obvious in hindsight that he was going to be recognized right off the bat in this situation, which was probably going to be an occurrence that will happen for the rest of his life.  From the mere existence of the turian in front of him, all life had not yet been purged from the galaxy.  Perhaps he had done it, indeed.  He had beaten the Reapers.

Could it truly be that he had won?

There was so much he wanted to know.  How many had survived?  Were all the fleets accounted for?  Were all the populated worlds reporting the Reapers’ destruction?

Was Tali safe?

Shepard grabbed at the turian’s wrist and his lips fumbled with jumbled questions.  The turian held his hand while she gently waved at the air with her other to soothe him.

“I guess… I guess you should know who I am.  My name’s Ceraphan.  Ceraphan Kalinn.  But you can just call me Ceraph.  I don’t mind, either way.”

Ceraph.  Shepard grabbed at the name and sunk it into the gray matter of his brain.  Something new to latch onto.  “Where…?” he was able to choke out.

“This?” Ceraph gestured in a wide, sweeping motion.  “You’re on my ship, the Tien Extremis.  It’s a multipurpose Ladigo make, from Sur’Kesh.”

More names to commit to memory.  Shepard closed his eyes in a slow blink and nodded faintly.

“You—,” Ceraph continued, “you’re probably wondering how you found yourself here.  To be honest, I’m—” she let go of Shepard’s hand and seemed to be overcome with emotion, taking what appeared to be a firm bite on her finger to bring her back into focus.  “I’m so sorry, but seeing you here… Commander Shepard, of all people… I’m trying not to lose it.”

Shepard made a shushing noise, which he could not help but find ironic.  “With all this attention you’re giving me, it’s like I’ve become a celebrity or something,” he joked, trying to bring Ceraph back on track.  The last thing he needed was to get an interrogation from a member of his fandom.

“No, you don’t understand!  You’re… a hero.  A hero to everyone.  And I… I have you on board my ship.  What people will say when they hear of this…”

The prospect of being swarmed by admirers and the press was not something that Shepard was particularly keen on enduring, now that he put some thought to it.  Though what did he expect, considering what he did was tantamount to the greatest act ever accomplished by one being in the history of… history. 

Temporarily separated from Ceraph, Shepard managed to lie back down, his hands folded atop his chest.  Already he could envision the tickertape parades in his mind, the swarms of confetti burying him in an avalanche of paper.  He was never going to get a moment’s rest from here on out.  His private life was going to be a thing of the past, with well-wishers and paparazzi hounding him at every turn, once the dust had finally settled from the impact of the war.

His brow furrowed.  There was a question that flared in his mind like a fire in the middle of a cold desert night.  “Ceraph…” he uttered.

The turian was right back at his side again, alert and attentive.  “Yes?”

He licked his lips.  “How… long?”

The shifting of those warbling yellow eyes, eye contact momentarily breaking, spoke volumes.  There was no need for clarification.  She understood what he was asking. ^[2]

“Maybe it’s better if we—”

Burning through a reserve of strength he did not know he possessed, he reached out and gripped the turian’s wrist.  Ceraph gave a start—the human’s grip was stronger than she anticipated.

“How… long?” the commander whispered again.

Ceraph winced and swallowed.

“Ten years.”

The bottom of his stomach dropped out.

“No…” his voice tumbled out at the quietest volume possible.  A denial even though he had no substance to back it up.

The images in his head.  The plans he had envisioned.  All were going up in flames.  A house on the beach.  Watching the sunsets with his deepest love by his side.  All becoming ashes amidst the smoldering embers.

His body was losing all feeling again as if he had imbibed a powerful narcotic.  Everything lost focus and Ceraph’s panicked exclamations were running on a distorted delay, blurry and throbbing.  His heart was fluttering, on the verge of failure.  He could not remember feeling more lost as he sank down on the bed, hoping that the mattress would yield and let him fall further and further into the abyss of blankets, never to rise out of them again.

Ten years gone.  Ten years.

She’s been alone all that time.

He did not know that he was crying or making the most piteous noises that one could imagine, but he shuddered upon that small and pathetic cot, wallowing in an existence that seemed more and more insignificant by the second, surrounded by his failure, his broken promises.

There was a sharp prick at his arm and he immediately knew that Ceraph had injected him.  His initial thought was to scold her, but then he quickly accepted the fact that she did him a big favor and he relished the upcoming unconsciousness with open arms this time, hurtling towards the unknown with a surge of eagerness.

“He needs to die!”

When Shepard came to, he was lying on his side, still in the cot.  Unconsciousness had spat him out without a care in the world—it felt like he had only closed his eyes for ten minutes.  Perhaps in a cruel twist of fate, he had lost another ten years in the process.

His body stiff, his eyes rimmed raw, Shepard sat up again, rubbing at his neck.  His chest ached with a lifetime’s worth of regrets and despair.  Ten years.  How could he have lost ten years like that?  He plumbed the depths of his memory for answers, but came up short.  A flash of a dream splintered behind his eyes—recollections of pale skin, the peeling of nanofibers away to reveal a bare shoulder, soft lips against his, the rustling of sheets fluttering overhead—and Shepard groaned painfully.  He felt as if he was about to roll off the bed and fall to his knees.  His throat clenched and his lungs strained with an unvoiced howl, where all of his grief and anguish readied to pour from his mouth in a singular cry.

But he stifled the feeling down after being wracked with silent sobs for several moments.  He curled into a fetal position upon the bed, his eyes wide and trembling, waiting until his sorrow subsided.

He lay there until the concept of time was a fleeting thing.  Shepard did not want sleep to come again.  He had seen too much of it, wasted too much time.

Tali…

He should have been there for her.  If he could have done something, anything, to have prevented all of this, he would have taken such an opportunity without a second thought.  Somehow, the idea of not dying in a blaze of glory compared to spending all this time in limbo was a far worse thought that hung upon his mind like a heavy weight.  The plans they had talked about.  Their hopes and dreams.  All for naught.

She must have moved on with her life by now, he thought miserably.  After so long, it was only natural that she would not have waited.  Anyone with a lick of sense would have declared him dead years ago if his body had not been located in that time.

Somehow, out of all the injuries and pain he had suffered on every galactic battlefield he had participated in, nothing had hurt more than this.

The door slid open with a ragged hiss, causing Shepard to slightly jump.  Ceraph poked her head inside, looking somewhat sheepish as she saw Shepard.  “I… I can come back—”

“No,” Shepard gritted out, his voice stronger but still sounding like he had smoked a pack of cigarettes every day since he was seven.  “You can come in.  I just need to talk… to talk to someone.”

Ceraph walked in, a tray in her hands.  She set it on the desk next to Shepard’s cot.  The commander’s nostrils detected the scent of food. 

“It’s levo,” Ceraph said, glancing at the tray she had brought.  “I kept a few trays on hand for… emergencies.”

The grumbling of his stomach was ample reason enough to reach for the food.  Ten years of cryo without a morsel to eat had made him close to the edge of starvation, as it turned out.  He sat up, the vertigo thankfully not claiming him, and grabbed at the tray.

Ceraph had provided a small metal cup with water and a set of plastic utensils.  There was an unappetizing-looking paste with the consistency of grits on the tray—it was hot around the edges and lukewarm in the center.  It did not have too much of an unpleasant taste, thankfully.  Probably loaded with protein and vitamins, he thought.  In less than a minute, he had scarfed it all down and gave a grateful sigh, placing the empty tray back on the desk after guzzling the last of the water.

Silently, Ceraph took the empty cup and filled it in the nearby sink.  She came over and placed the cup in Shepard’s hands.  “You should hydrate.  Spending that long in cryo just saps the water from your body.”

In between sips, Shepard gave wrathful hisses as fresh waves of nausea washed over him.  He had eaten too fast and now his nutrient-starved body was paying him back for his impatience.

He clasped a hand to his forehead to ward off an incoming headache and felt long hair underneath his fingers.  Examining his scalp, Shepard found that the length of his hair had grown considerably—almost to his neck, completely untamed.  For the second time, Shepard did not think that this was right—in cryo, hair follicle growth should have been stalled completely, yet he could not discount the proof that he had grasped between his fingers.

He brought his hand around to his face and slowly felt his beard.  His exploring fingers groomed through a mass of stiff bristles, like a scouring pad.  He nearly asked for a mirror, but decided that he had suffered enough needless surprises for now.

Ceraph noted Shepard’s self-examination and her mouth opened in a forlorn manner.  “I think… I have a theory as to why that happened,” she offered, trying to be helpful about Shepard’s new look.

But Shepard soon tore his hand away from his face, as if disgusted with his own appearance.  He took another sip from his cup, the water helping his nausea.  “Later,” he grunted.  “I have as much time as I need to fix it.” 

Ceraph tried to look amenable as she gave a bob of her head.  “Okay,” she said quietly.  “And, just so you know, I’m so, so sorry that I had to put you under again—”

“Don’t apologize,” Shepard murmured.  “It was the best option you could take.”  Truncating the amount of time he had to sob his eyes out seemed like a good use of tranquilizers, considering that he had been and still was on the verge of heartbreak.

“It was the only thing I could think to do, at the time.”

“It worked, so there we are.”  He then affixed her with an unblinking eye, the motion swift and judging.  “You brought me out of cryo alone, didn’t you?”

The turian nodded frantically, but seemed slightly embarrassed.  “Yes.”

Shepard’s face blanked and he became serene.  “I don’t even remember going into cryo,” he mused, the dream of the shadowy three still lurking around in his subconscious, but it was nothing but that to him, a dream.  He considered musing about his dream aloud, but bit the urge back.  The last time he had discussed a vision as definitive proof, he had nearly been ostracized for his perceived impertinence.  “Where even are we?”

“One of the planets in the Sol system.  I had to make a quick FTL jump.”

“I guess I meant: where did you find me?”

“In a debris field.  In orbit around Earth.”

Agitated, Shepard ran a hand through his long hair.  “Ten years floating in space…” he hissed.  He then raised his head, looking back at Ceraph.  “How did you even find me?”

“The power source on your pod,” Ceraph explained, rubbing at an arm frantically.  “The pod had been spaced, but the battery still had some juice in it.  My ship’s scanner locked onto the source, which had been masked by the thickness of the wreckage that had surrounded the pod, and… here you are.”

Shepard drained the last of his water, his hands clenching the glass so hard that it was in danger of crumpling within his grip.  “It doesn’t add up.  Nothing fits.”

Ceraph tilted her head.  “What’s the last thing you remember?  Can you think of anything at all that might give a clue as to why you were found all the way out there?”

The man screwed his eyes shut and held his breath for several seconds.  Plumbing the very depths of his mind, he pitched through a veil of smoke and flame, of gunshots and broken glass, of lightning and ozone.  Faces of the dead seared by like burns on the very air.  Anderson.  The Illusive Man.  Blood seeping from a wound in his gut, the cold feeling of his life dripping away.

The warm acceptance of dying.

Opening his eyes, Shepard just shook his head.  “Like I said,” he croaked, his mood somehow falling further than it already had been, “I can’t think of anything.”

Crestfallen, Ceraph struggled to think of something to say to the stricken Commander.  She had not been prepared to have experienced the very anguish that was clearly tormenting the man.  She was in over her head with this, for there had been events beyond both of their understandings that were maddingly out of reach, beyond the scope of their imagination that the turian could see frustrated Shepard to no end.  And she pitied him—were she in his position, she would be feeling the same way.

Adopting a more thoughtful look, Shepard took a deep sigh and straightened as best as he could, miraculously pushing down his melancholy to make himself look statelier.  “Something to figure out eventually.  Anyway, there’s probably more that you can tell me than I can tell you, Ceraph.  I need to be caught up.  I may be still healing, but I just have to know.”

“Know about…?”

“On the rebuilding efforts, the political situation,” Shepard waved a hand in a circular motion as he set his empty cup back down on the desk next to him.  “Just something to take my mind away from… me.  But certainly, many things have changed.  I guess I want to know, what has happened these past ten years?”

Now Ceraph scanned the floor for a quick second.  She then nosily pulled up a chair and sat next to Shepard.

She spread her hands.  “I wouldn’t know where to start.  There’s been so much.”

Shepard drummed his fingers against his arm and blinked sonorously.  There was still the one question that was burning at him like acid, but as much as he wanted to know the answer, it was the possibility of the answer not being the one he wanted that gave him pause.

Instead, he skipped to the next item on his mental list.  “The war, then.  That’s where the gaps in my memory start.  The beam fired, as I understand, considering you’re right here before me.  And the Reapers…?”

Now Ceraph straightened, hands shaking eagerly, reenergized.  “Totally destroyed.”

“The Crucible worked?” Shepard whispered.

“It wiped them all out.  Turned them into lifeless hulks.”  She made a swift motion with an arm, mimicking a punch.  “Damn straight, it worked.”

Shepard absorbed this information with a stoic nod, but bit by bit his defense began to wither away and he slouched in place as he let out a long breath.  He bowed his head and gripped the edges of the bed with knuckles that swiftly blanched from his firm hold.  Fragments of glassy plains battled in his head, cratered by motorfire and stained dark red from spilled entrails.  Fiery and ragged explosions from ships bursting in space in silent death.  “So it wasn’t all for nothing…” he murmured.

“No…” Ceraph shook her head, bending forward, the edge of her head catching the light from the lamp that fell across Shepard’s eyes.  “Oh, you don’t even know what you’ve truly done, do you?  Everything you did was worth the effort in the end.  You saved everyone, Commander.  We’re alive—everyone is alive—because of you.”

Not everyone, Shepard thought, remembering Mordin, Thane, Legion, Ashley, and all of the other men and women that he had known and bled with that had never seen the light of the new dawn. 

A chance that he never got to experience, either.

He folded his hands together and the makings of a smile graced his face again, though the moment was short-lived just like the last time.  “Maybe this time they actually did make a headstone for me,” he surmised.  “A second funeral for a dead man.”

The guilty look on Ceraph’s face made him do a double-take.  “What, is there more to it?”

“More than a headstone, at least.”

Shepard blinked.  “All right.  How bad has it gotten?”

“Ehh…” the turian made a see-sawing motion with a hand, “let’s just say your image has been… well… commoditized.”

“Commoditized.”

“Yes.”

“What, like action figures, movies, that kind of thing?

“And video games, operas, art,” Ceraph added rather sheepishly.  “I mean, you’re a really popular video game character in several different franchises.”

Shepard bumped his eyebrows.  “Oh,” was all he could say, for no other reaction seemed prevalent upon hearing that he had been the subject of idolatry over the past ten years.  He rubbed at his chin thoughtfully and glanced at his rescuer.  “Any of that media good at all?”

“I liked the vid trilogy they made of you,” Ceraph said honestly.  “All of the films won a ton of awards.”

Now Shepard nearly chuckled, in spite of himself.  “I’ll have to see it one of these days.”

“They probably don’t hold a candle to what you really went through.”

“Adaptations rarely do.”  He then mock-dusted his hands as if he were about to head out for the evening, but he was just washing his hands of the current subject.  “Well, we can probably stop there with my public image, as lofty as it has been hoisted.  I can name twenty more important topics at the top of my head.  So how about what things are like around the galaxy?  What of the civilized worlds?  The Citadel and the Council?”

Ceraph thought for a minute as she tried to comb her mind for the best data possible on the selected topic.  At the same time, she groped for a nearby datapad, flicking a finger to an extranet browser to supplement her facts.

“You probably could have guessed this, but all of the heavily populated worlds suffered extreme damage from the war.  The asari, turians, salarians—none of them had it better or worse than their peers.  It was just… devastation.  Everything was nearly ruined, wherever you went.  Cities were wiped out.  Even some moons were cracked open from some brutal assaults.”

“And…” a heavy lump rose in Shepard’s throat, “the death toll?  How much of a price did we have to pay?”

He did not fail to notice that Ceraph clenched a hand so tightly that he could hear the carapace of her fingers grind against her palm.

“Around two hundred billion,” she said, her voice cracking.

Everything was still for the longest time.  Then Shepard slowly rubbed his face with his hands as the number sank into him like a heavy blow to the gut.  His brain buzzed with the weight of all those lives, every one of them a drop in the sea of his conscience, threatening to drown them with his failures.

His own hands furled into fists and he set his forehead upon those fists, breathing swiftly from his nose.  Angry at himself.  For being too slow.  For not doing enough.  He could have done more to save all of them.  He could have—should have—gone over the heads of his superiors and the Council, screaming what he knew from the rooftops.  He had all the information about the geth and Saren.  About the Collectors and the Reapers.  He should have told more people.  Gone to more authorities.  The press, had he swallowed his pride.  Maybe then everyone would have been better prepared, they would have listened—

A hand set itself against his wrist.  Momentarily startled, he looked up.  Ceraph’s limpid eyes were warbling in the low light, her arm straight as she gently brought the human back to reality.

“No one blames you,” she told him, as if he could read his mind.

“Someone has to,” he wiped the corners of his eyes before any tears could materialize.

Ceraph’s mandibles gave a flex.  This was not exactly the sort of man that she had expected Commander Shepard to be.  Shepard in the war footage had been bold, uncompromising, brave, and decisive.  The man in front of her was morose, plagued with self-doubt, and tortured by demons of his past.  A sensitive man.  A warrior with a solemn heart.

But Shepard soon managed to breathe a little more energy into himself, his reflective posture disappearing away like morning dew under a rising sun.

“What can you tell me about the government?” he asked, switching subjects like they were clothes.  Blasé.  “Is the Council still on the Citadel these days?”

Momentarily annoyed, Ceraph’s eyes narrowed for a second.  There were so many things that she wanted to ask the commander, but soon accepted that there would be a time and place for such things later.  The man was still recovering.  She needed to support him.  “The Citadel is still in the middle of repairs from the war,” she cleared her throat.  “A lot of the superstructure was damaged—one of the blades was shattered in half from the Crucible detonating near the base.  As for the Council… well… there is no Council.  Not anymore.”

“Wait, really?” Shepard straightened on the cot.  This was unexpected.  The Council had been in power since before humans had arrived on the galactic scene.  They were the ultimate authority in civilized space and had their own special ops forces—the Spectres—that had carte blanche to cut through any red tape across any world that respected its laws.  Shepard had been the first human Spectre, inducted about a lifetime ago, it felt like.

Ceraph nodded.  “It was dissolved about a year after the war ended.  The Revolution of the Ashes.  Too much social tension between the politicians and the populace.  There were riots on all the capital worlds, protests in which the people were demanding that the councilors step down and cede their responsibility to a temporary legislature so that a new government could be formed.  They… didn’t like the knowledge that the Council had of the Reapers’ existence years before the war and did practically nothing.”

That, and their efforts to withhold Prothean technologies for themselves, Shepard recalled, the memory of the beacon in the temple of Athame still ringing true for him.

“Violent revolution?” Shepard asked, heart twisting.  Had the cycle of violence repeated itself yet again while he had been in cold storage?

Proudly, Ceraph shook her head.  “It didn’t even last two days.  No one was killed.  In the end, the councilors willingly abdicated and a provincial government was formed by members of the largest political parties of each race.  They expanded on it and so-and-so—I’m not terribly familiar with the political process—but in the end, the government solidified into a new representative body: Union Eterna.”

“A new government,” Shepard mused, slowly rubbing his hands together.  “Union Eterna, eh?  So how does it work?  By the people, for the people?  That sort of thing?”

“In part,” Ceraph said.  “Union Eterna has a hierarch in the executive branch, but the main power is in the legislature.  A hundred senators instead of four councilors.  All elected by their respective races instead of being promoted from within.”

Shepard knew what she was talking about.  Previously, there was no set path that politicians could take to become a councilor of their species.  Some had become anointed after heavily lobbying investors and fellow politicians.  Others had taken informal elections amongst the elite in order to attain a slot.  And, in the case of humanity, Shepard’s recommendation to the Council had led to them directly appointing his old captain and mentor, David Anderson, to the position.  As far as he knew, the latter’s appointment had been conducted without a formal election and had been promoted in-house, without any input from Earth, a decision which he had heard had soured the lawmakers back home.

But out of all the choices he had made, tapping Anderson for the post was not one he felt an ounce of regret for.

Clapping his hands together once, Shepard leaned back and glanced at his water cup, as though he sought to take a sip, but remembered that he had drained it already.  “So I’d imagine that Union Eterna these days has been responding well to the needs of the people, then?  I’d reckon they’d need it, with all the healing that needs to be done now that the war’s over.  Social programs, housing assistance, and the like?”

The look on Ceraph’s face told him that what he had just described was not how reality had gone down.  The turian seemed even embarrassed to look him in the eye.

“No?” Shepard placed his hands on his knees and leaned forward, incredulous.  “It’s… they haven’t been helping you that much?”

Mouth dry, Ceraph just shook her head.  “Any aid in the past few years has been… scarce.”

“But… that doesn’t make any sense.”  Shepard was now rocking back and forth with agitation, as if he were about to explode to his feet, but he still lacked the strength for that, not that Ceraph would have let him make such an attempt.  “How the hell could that have happened?  After all that everyone has gone through, surviving the Reapers and standing together as one against them, experiencing their defeat, why wouldn’t the government have coalesced around a platform of helping as many people as possible?”

“Things are different now,” Ceraph said hollowly to the wall.

Shepard let out an exasperated grunt and slowly closed his eyes.  “Different.  As if I haven’t heard that one before.  Damn it.  So… what, then, explains this new stance?  A political coup?  Corruption?”

“No,” Ceraph shrugged.  “A technically legal exchange of power, if you believe the media.”

“Well, that’s the first giveaway right there,” Shepard drolly noted.  His experiences with the media in the past had been combative, to say the least.  There were times that he had to bite his tongue when getting interviewed by reactionary individuals masquerading under the guise of journalists, trying to use him to stir up false emotions in the viewer base of their publications.  “Then give it to me straight.  This… Union Eterna… is it still a democracy?”

“Depends on who you ask.  A year from now, that might not be the case.”

“How so?”

“Elections,” Ceraph explained.  “In two weeks, the Firmament Omina political party will take power for the first time and their policies… probably aren’t in line with what you’ve envisioned.”

Shepard steepled his fingers.  “Firmament Omina?  I’m afraid I haven’t heard of them.”

“They’re new to the political scene.  They appeared about eight years ago as part of a merger between separate political parties from the established Council races.  They’re big proponents of isolationism, techno-monarchism, anarcho-capitalism, you get the idea.”

Now Shepard rubbed at an eyebrow with a thumb.  “Christ, we’ve gone backwards,” he sighed.  The trend towards isolationism that Ceraph had mentioned was particularly troubling.  He thought that he had proved, if not single-handedly, that unification across all races, all worlds, had resulted in the impossible being achieved.  The defeat of the Reapers should have been the most undeniable proof that a united galaxy could conquer any obstacle in its path.  They had stopped a grand design that had been going on for millions of years, for crying out loud.  How could anyone bask in the light of that achievement and hold any other opinion about a unified greatness?

Ceraph was also momentarily overcome, but for a different reason.  She had hardly spent two hours with Commander Shepard while he was conscious and already, she was talking politics and policies with him.  The man’s body may have been altered from his prolonged period in cryo but he was fairly adept at keeping up the more he spoke, his brain never having lost its sharpness.

“It’s what the public voted for,” she said as she spread her hands.  “As the media says.”

“And I suppose the media helped steer the public in the direction of this Firmament Omina, yes?” Shepard raised an eyebrow.

“Again, I’m not an expert on this.  Hold on one second.” Ceraph held up a hand as she quickly made a few keystrokes into the tablet that she grabbed from a nearby nightdesk.  She scanned the screen for a few seconds to bolster her knowledge once the extranet sites had loaded—she did not want to communicate inaccurate information to Commander Shepard.  “So, the gist of what I’m reading here is that the current party—the one that is losing power in the next couple weeks—had tried to codify several pieces of legislation that would have helped provide assistance to struggling individuals or would combat inflation, but they were held up in legal gridlock for so long that they never got passed, because Firmament Omina had pursued an obstructionist governing style to weaken the opposition.  The media jumped on this fact and spun it into the belief that they were the ones responsible for everyone’s prolonged financial misfortunes.  That, and the commercials that everyone saw didn’t help matters much.”

“Commercials?  What commercials?”

“A bunch of billionaires got together and financed an advertising blitz.  It… was frankly disgusting.  I can show you some images—they basically have the logo of the other political party plastered upon the sides of Reapers while they wreak havoc on worlds.  It’s… a metaphor for—"

“—for equating the opposition to be no better than the Reapers,” Shepard finished sourly.

Ceraph’s eyes had a watery and sympathetic look to them as she tapped her thumbs in agony upon the tablet that she held.  “Apparently, it was very effective for voter participation in their favor.”

The urge to put his head in his hands registered upon Shepard so severely that he developed a cramp in his back from having to resist it.  “So, the sane people actually did their best to try and help everyone, but the sluggishness of the political process created the perception that they were doing nothing, thus they voted against their own interests, resulting in this setup for what will be a severe economic crisis?  Because I can imagine that the economy had not been in a good state after the war, what with the massive amounts of infrastructure damage and jobs lost.”

“A lot of real estate was snagged up by corporations with offplanet holdings,” Ceraph said.  “A large number of housing areas around the galaxy were re-zoned for business, as a result.”

Shepard’s fists clenched so hard that his knuckles popped.  “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.”

“Maybe it won’t be as easy for Firmament Omina as they hope,” Ceraph suggested, perhaps realizing that the entire conversation had been focusing on the doom and gloom of the worst-case scenario.  Not exactly a good way to introduce the Commander to a brand-new galaxy, especially for a hero of his stature.

“How so?” Shepard asked.

“Union Eterna’s expanding.  Getting more seats, I mean.  Two weeks from now, before the new senate is sworn in, there’s a signing ceremony for the newest members: the Omega Collective and the Rannochian Federation.”

Shepard perked up at the news.  Omega had been a lawless station in the nebula of the selfsame name, a hideout for criminals and gangsters.  While the largest authority on the station was the self-proclaimed “Queen of Omega”, Aria T’Loak, she never held any official power over its inhabitants.  In all of its years of its existence, there had never been a time where anyone could recall Omega ever having remotely the concept of a centralized government, but then again, there had been those who had thought defeating the Reapers was impossible.

As for the reference to the Rannochian Federation, that was the one callout that Shepard inherently understood, but he forced himself to remain measured.  First things first.

“Omega Collective, huh?  Sounds like Aria got to whipping things into shape after the dust had settled.”

Ceraph brightened.  “She did.  The Collective has been legitimized for around five years now—the talks with joining Union Eterna have been three years in the making.  Apparently, most of the Omega gangs had been devastated during the war and she came in and picked up the pieces.  Went through the motions of establishing something of a constitutional monarchy, if I’m not mistaken.”

“Let me guess,” Shepard smirked.  “Aria’s the monarch.”

“Not that anyone wants to dispute such a thing.  She’ll be signing the ratification documents during the official ceremony at the Citadel, legitimizing their acceptance into Union Eterna,” Ceraph tapped her datapad.  “Along with… the delegates from the Rannochian Federation.”

The way that Ceraph had put emphasis on the latter group gave Shepard the impression that something was amiss.

He sensed that she was waiting for him to ask the question, so he did so, knowing that it would lead to the answer that he had truly wanted to know all this time.  “And who are these delegates?”

The expression on Ceraph’s face was blank, apart from her mandibles subtly flexing.  With a sigh, she dropped her attention down to her tablet console and made a few additional taps upon its glass surface.

Then, once the proper page had loaded, she turned the tablet over and handed it for Shepard to take. ^[3]

A video was playing on silent on one of the news sites.  The camera was directed to a podium upon which a cadre of aliens—quarians—were standing.  Different angles showed that the podium was facing a small crowd upon a wide mall that was rimmed by gardens of the most ancient-looking flora, the makings of a stout city around them with construction vehicles and cranes easily visible in the various shots.  Wait, is this Rannoch?  A chyron at the bottom of the screen displayed the following text, confirming his astonished hunch: “Rannochian Federation Finalizes Talks with Union Eterna.”

Shepard recognized many of the people on the podium.  There was the proud and upright Admiral Zaal’Koris, who had been a good voice of reason for the quarian Civilian Fleet during the war.  The dark and slim form of Admiral Daro’Xen was next to him, her arms crossed, the camera managing to capture a somewhat bored look in her eyes.  On the opposite side of the platform, Shepard could also see Admiral Shala’Raan, the setting sun bathing half her body in shadow, whom he had trepidatiously treated as a friendly face when he had interacted with the fleet, as she had always seemed predisposed to offer him support though only when it was politically convenient for her to do so.

But his attention upon the members of the Admiralty was stymied once he focused upon the lone member positioned at the center of the dais, the one giving addressing the crowd at the podium.

The quarian was standing tall and proud, her enviro-suit sleek and angular with sharp accents of titanium wrapped around her like they had been pulled from the fiercest armor.  Her helmet was a magnificent piece of engineering, one that Shepard had not seen before, the metal of which seemed to flow almost in an organic shape around the chin, cupping a reflective bulb of purple glass.  The covering she wore atop her helmet—a sehni—had twin tails in the back that gently flapped in the wind, making it look like she was about to take flight.  She was making no reference to the notes that she had assembled in front of her.  Her gaze was always sweeping out to the crowd that had assembled before her.  Her arm gestures were grand but precise.  He could see that her vocabulator was blinking fervently, and with the accents each movement of her body made with her words, even on silent he could tell that what she was saying was monumental, impactful, and just the thing that everyone in attendance needed to hear.  Separate angles that covered the crowd portrayed a sea of colorful enviro-suits, each of them rapt with attention, hanging on every word as if they wanted to absorb the meaning of each syllable intimately and transcribe them to their memories.

The chyron’s message at the bottom switched as the camera returned to the elegant-looking quarian.

“Admiral Tali’Zorah Secures Rannochian Federation Entry to Union Eterna.”

The screen began to shake, but it was not coming from the camera.  It was coming from Shepard.

He bent forward as he gripped the tablet tighter, unable to take his eyes off the woman on this little pane of glass.  Something welled in him, creating a knot that only seemed to gain more and more in mass.

It was her.

“Can…” Shepard fumbled, his voice cracking hideously, “can you…”

“Yes,” Ceraph said as she sprung from her chair as if she had just been stabbed, already halfway out the door.  “Yes… of course, Commander.  I’ll… I’ll just be outside…”

Barely a second had passed between the time that the door had hissed shut, leaving Shepard alone, did the tablet slip from his fingers, clattering upon the ground next to his feet.  Shuddering, Shepard buried his face in his hands as he could no longer hold his sobs back.

There she was.

Tali was alive.

Not only that, she was a figurehead of her species.  A gifted master of speech, too, from the looks of it.  A far cry from the young woman he had met on the Citadel all that time ago who could configure a Tantalus drive core with the most complicated of jump equations but stumble over her words as soon as you got her talking about her deepest and most heartfelt feelings.

But seeing her on the screen, absorbed in her role, only compounded the notion in Shepard’s heart that he had failed the quarian.  He had failed the one person he loved the most by leaving her alone.  He hated himself and he almost retched in grief.  He felt like a spirit looking at the universe through a ghostly plain.  He was never meant to see any of this.  Everyone thought he was dead and they had all moved on from him.  He may have cheated death that one time, causing everyone thought it was a miracle, but there was little belief in his newfound survival from his second brush with death, he knew.  No one believed in coincidences anymore.

For the proof was before him, as Tali had found a way to live without Shepard.

After I had hurt her so badly in the process.

Ten years away from her.  Ten years lost.  Shepard kept crying in his solitude, furious at what had been stolen from him.  A life had been taken, one that he had deserved.  What she must have felt in all that time, he could scarcely bring himself to imagine such a horrible outcome. 

And the wills of three people had all conspired to rob him of all that.  Three people that Shepard, in this very moment, swore he would pay back many times over, not in the name of justice but because he knew his anger would not be quelled until he had destroyed them all in totality.

Not a single year more would go wasted.  He would make sure of that.

Chapter Text

The makeshift gym that Ceraph had assembled over the years over in the corner of the Tien Extremis’ cargo bay had come from a variety of hauls.  Many of the derelict ships in the Folly possessed a good amount of exercise equipment in the first place—training in artificial gravity was practically mandatory in order to offset muscular atrophy.  Ceraph had seen fit to retrieve any workout items that she figured would be most useful, or valuable, to herself.  The result of her salvaging efforts had yielded free weights assembled from various mismatched sets over the months: a punching bag, a treadmill, and even an automated muscle training machine had been among her finds, which mean that could address nearly every muscle group with her collection of equipment.

Shepard, dripping sweat, was finishing off his workout as he hustled upon the treadmill. ^[1]  He had just passed mile nine of his ten-mile run, and the automated sensor on the treadmill was reporting a steady heartrate of just under 170 BPM.  Higher than when he had been in his prime, he noted, but then again, he had been napping for ten years.  If he expected to bounce back to his original fitness level without considering the reality of muscular degeneration, then he was hopelessly deluded.

He had spent the beginnings of every morning just putting himself to work in the gym, getting into a comfortable routine, which he had been dutifully following for the past three days.  He would work out for as long as it took until his body was screaming for mercy, upon which he would end his exercise.  But the next day, he would start the cycle all over again. 

He needed to build his body back up, he had figured, and get himself in a state that most Alliance marines would consider to be healthy, all in all.  He was no use to anyone if he was not fit for duty, especially to himself.

To his dismay, yet non-surprise, the amount of weight he was able to lift with had noticeably been diminished.  But at least getting back into shape had seemed like a mission that was at least somewhat under his control, so with Ceraph’s help in procuring several levo-meals high in calories, he had created a regimen for himself of stretching, workouts, and eating.  He had lost too much muscle mass while in cryo, and though Ceraph had done an admirable job in partially rebuilding the body that he had lost in the process of rejuvenating him from his rest, he was far from a hundred percent.

Quite far.

Through his heavy breathing, Shepard ran a hand through his tousled hair, which was now only an inch or so long compared to the near-foot that it had been when he had awoken.  One of the first things that he done once he was mobile enough was to give himself a trim.  Ceraph did not have any grooming equipment on board, or at least none that was intended for human use, so Shepard had made do with some wire trimmers and a piece of scrap metal he had fashioned into a razor.  He had cut his snow-white hair and razed back his beard to a goatee that looked like a salt wreath around his mouth.  Even though he had detested facial hair in the past, Shepard did not dislike the new look.  He thought it made him appear dignified, for once.  A respectable soldier.  Though the increase in age was still jarring every time he looked into a mirror.

He wondered what Tali would think if she saw him now.

The treadmill beeped and began to slow to a walk.  Shepard’s ten miles were up.

Shepard forced himself not to hit the reset button.  Even though he felt that he could go on for ten miles more, he knew that he was still healing.  Still melting off the rot that clung to his bones.  Even now, he could detect a faint strain in his joints—a sign that he would do well to stop soon.

He set a ten-minute timer on the treadmill so that he could commence his post-run walk cooldown.  He grabbed at a towel that had been draped over the closest handrail and dried his face and wiped his neck, momentarily ridding him of sweat.

There was a quick flicker of illumination on the wall.  Shepard turned his head, spotting Ceraph heading his way as she was heading down the ladder from the cockpit.

“How was it today?” she asked, a bottle of water in hand, referring to the workout.

Shepard forward again, applying most of his concentration into his walk.  “Better than the day before.”

“Any numbness?  No residual pain or anything?”

He flexed a hand thoughtfully.  “Not that I can tell,” he said.  “Truth be told, I was expecting to have been immobile for far longer than I was.”

Ceraph pulled up a chair and sat facing the headrest, studying the man.  “You probably have your implants to thank for that.  High-tech stuff like that, it did a number on delaying the atrophy.”

“That right?” he considered Ceraph again.  He knew the stuff that Cerberus had put in him had been cutting-edge to the point where he was a walking prototype.  The very procedures that had knitted his broken bones together, had stitched his muscles back into one fabric, could it be that they had saved his life a second time?

“Honestly, I’m surprised you’re in this kind of shape just days after thawing from cryo.  But between that and the gene therapy, I guess anyone would be up and walking around after that treatment.”

Shepard tilted his head.  “Gene therapy?”

“Yeah.  Onasemnogene abeparvovec.”

“Gesundheit.”

“Onasemnogene abeparvovec,” Ceraph frowned.  “It’s a drug that treats muscular atrophy by providing a copy of your SMN gene that produces the protein of the same name.  Basically, it overwrites the faulty genes in your body with new ones, allowing you to return to full strength quicker than traditional means.”

Shepard could not help but chuckle in surprise.  “Yeah, right.”

“I’m serious.  Gene therapy.”

“Do you even realize how expensive that is?” Shepard raised an eyebrow.  “The medication alone costs hundreds of thousands of credits on the gray market.  You’d have to own your own—” He cocked his head, mouth still open.  He then pursed his lips and nodded, now getting it.  “The medical suite.  The one that repaired me.  You got it from Cerberus.”

Ceraph clenched her jaw, trying not to look guilty as she tapped her clawed fingers together.  “That’s putting it delicately.”

“Okay, so you salvaged it.”  Shepard’s grin turned snarky.  “Heh, all that tech and they couldn’t lock it down when it mattered.  So, where’d you get it?”

The turian’s eyes looked upward in thought.  “A system in the Horsehead Nebula.  Anadius.”

“The Lazarus Research Station?  You were there?”  The secret Cerberus base had been the site where Shepard had been revived just months prior to the start of the Reaper War, back when Cerberus had needed the commander to help stop the Collector threat.  Even Shepard had not managed to figure out where it had been hidden.

Ceraph shrugged, as if the question was a simple one.  “I go where the work takes me.”

Now Shepard laughed, now realizing that over the past ten years all of the secret Cerberus sites had probably been divulged and laid open like a wound, open to pillaging and theft by the opportunistic.  “That a fact?  It all came full circle, then.  I don’t know why I didn’t put it together until now.”

There was a time when Cerberus had been one of the preeminent technological threats to the entire galaxy.  They had acquired, by virtue of recruitment or by force, a vast array of technologies that they quickly implemented into their own practical use.  Many of those technologies had seen their first ever use throughout the duration of the Lazarus Project, the experiment upon which Cerberus spent billions of credits to bring Shepard back from the dead, in effect.  The experiment had been a resounding success, though after the most hazardous of teratogenic substances had been utilized and the most advanced and untested tech had been implanted into what had been nothing but a corpse at the time.  There were times where Shepard thought of himself as the Ship of Thesus, for he never truly had been told just how much of his body had been salvaged and what parts were just flash-grown copies.  He had never truly known if he had come out from the Lazarus Project as the same John Shepard.  Or if he was even technically human anymore, for that matter.

“You know,” Shepard said as he rotated his arms, still plodding on the treadmill, “when I first woke up, I saw the logo on the medical suite you had swiped.  For a second there, I thought you were Cerberus.”

Ceraph did a double-take, her eyes frantically rotating in her sockets for a few quick seconds.  She then palmed her head in exasperation.  “Gah, I’m an idiot.  I knew I should have taped up that logo at some point.  That was stupid of me.”

“If it’s any consolation, I figured you weren’t Cerberus once I saw that you were a turian.”

“That would be an interesting story to explain if it were true, wouldn’t it?” Ceraph gave a look that almost appeared as a crooked smile to Shepard.

“Wouldn’t be the weirdest,” Shepard pointed out.  “Cerberus technically had aliens on the payroll back when I was… assisting them.  Of course, that didn’t end up lasting long.”

The dreams from his deepest regrets had begun to uncontrollably pool back into the hollow of his mind again.  Those same three shadows, one gesticulating wildly, as they discussed what to do with him.  The voices he had not been able to place.  Nor their faces—it was as if someone had taken an eraser to their shapes and features, eradicating the evidence of their species, even.

He knew what it was they desired—for his ultimate submission.  And in one of their cases, his death.  These were the three people in this galaxy that truly knew what had happened to him, and he had promised himself that he would pry the truth from their throats even if he was going to have to rip it out with his bare hands.

He had been so lost in thought that he quickly realized that Ceraph had been asking him a question.  He shook his head to dislodge his dark musings and quickly applied a towel to his forehead so that he could wave off suspicion.  “Sorry,” he muttered, “what was that?”

“I was just wondering aloud if your pod hadn’t been damaged, that I would have been able to reverse the worst of your atrophy sooner.”

Leaning forward, Shepard now gripped the forward handlebar of the treadmill as he walked, but still craned his head so that he could eye Ceraph, indicating his keen interest.  “I think you were mentioning something about that the other day, but I never fully quite caught it.  So, you’re saying that, when you hauled me aboard, the pod was showing signs of damage?”

“The life support systems were malfunctioning because of some damage that the power supply had sustained,” Ceraph explained.  “Perhaps from a piece of space debris striking the pod or—” her mind flashed back to the video she had uncovered on board the pod’s data banks, which had detailed the final moments of the ship that had borne it when the footage had been cut off by a tremendous explosion, “…or a fault in the system.”

“That why my hair looks like this?” Shepard twisted a few strands between two fingers, which were so white they nearly appeared translucent.

The turian could not appear more despondent if she tried.  “Sort of.”

“Sort of?”

“The cryo pod made auto-adjustments with its power allocations while you were out there.  To triage power to keep you alive for as long as possible, it had… brought you into a restricted stasis.”

“Then…” Shepard murmured as the treadmill slowed to a stop, but he still remained atop the worn path, “…you’re saying that I might never have been in complete cryo all that time.”

“Near as far as I could tell, you continued to age.  Your body may have been subject to an additional ten years without your cells being placed in a complete stage of suspended animation.  It’s why your hair grew out and turned white.  It’s why you have those new wrinkles.  What has done cannot be undone, Commander.  I’m sorry… I… I thought I had told you…”

Shepard bore the revelation stoically as he cupped his bearded chin in a pose that emitted thoughtfulness.  It was not as earth-shattering as many of the other things that Ceraph had told him.  Actually, it was like a weight had lifted from his chest now that he knew the reason for why he had looked so old after coming out of cryo.  The whiteness of his hair had not even been something that had immediately alarmed him, though, as premature graying was a common side effect on those that had been exhibited to an unusual amount of stress. Shepard figured that the combined amount of stress that he had been subject to in his life would have been catastrophic enough to put ten people into a permanent bedridden state. 

The actual injuries to his body had done their duty in drawing his attention away from his cosmetic appearance.  From what Ceraph had described, being put into cryo had actually staved off immediate death, for the surgical suite that she had pilfered from Cerberus had immediately gone to work at staunching multiple points of internal bleeding, addressing a crack in his skull, applying micro-doses of medi-gel to his reinforced skeleton where several greenstick fractures were beginning to splinter, and this was all before he had his blood purged of heavy metals and radiation that he had gotten from so much exposure to toxic elements while on the battlefield.  Whoever had pulled him from the Citadel had only given him the most basic of medical care to ensure that he would not bleed out on the spot.

It was a wonder he was still alive to begin with.  Shepard was now starting to come to the conclusion that he was a walking medical marvel, considering each lucky scrape he had with death.

“Barely into my forties and I look twice that age,” he said as he placed his hands upon his hips, shaking his head ruefully.  “It’s what people don’t tell you about war, you know?  That even after the last bullet is fired, there are still many slow ones that’ll get you in the end.”

“But still,” Ceraph waved a hand, “everything changes from this point on.  Last week, everyone thought you were dead.  And now… you’re here on my ship.  The man who did everything he could—call forth thresher maws, direct close range orbital bombardments—to destroy the Reapers once and for all.  Who—”

Shepard felt his face grow hot and he held up a hand, causing Ceraph to fall silent.  “I understand your enthusiasm, but I don’t think I want to go through this right now.”  He did not want to crush the turian’s spirits, but Shepard had always kept his battlefield achievements at arm’s length.  He had never talked about his missions in detail, only divulging his most private of feelings to a few close people in his life.  He felt that there was no point in braggadocio, that he did not need to inflate his record by regaling people of the past.  The memories were there in their crystal clarity, the pain and the fear clawing at his heart.  The bullets and blood and the sharp smell of death in the air.  Despite the passage of time tending to turn things distant and hazy, for Shepard, his prior campaigns were like a nightmare that threatened to never leave him.

Ceraph looked crestfallen anyway.  It was clear she had been dying to broach this topic with him.  “I’m sorry,” she said meekly, staring at the ground.  “I forgot… it must have been like it was yesterday for you.”

“No, I understand,” he conceded as he grabbed for a nearby shirt and pulled it over his tank top.  “I don’t think you’ll be the only one reacting this way.  They were talking about me like this before the war had even ended, actually.  Maybe I’m just not used to the idea of my name being the recipient of so much fervor.”

The turian raised her head.  “Honestly, for the past several days I’ve been trying not to freak out in front of you.  I’ve been trying really, really, really hard.”

Chuckling, Shepard sat on a chair next to the turian, noticing that Ceraph stiffened her posture quite dramatically in response to her proximity to the man.

“Look,” Shepard spread his hands, open in more ways than one, “I’m never going to admit to the fact that I might just be a celebrity, though I am aware of how I can come across to others.  I just don’t see myself that way.  I’m a soldier.  Plain and simple.  I don’t have any PR training.  I don’t even have any political tact, for god’s sake.  I never tried to be anything more than I already am.  Think of me as a man who just did his job the only way that he could think of.”

“’Just did his job?’” Ceraph repeated, incredulous.  “Commander, I’m sorry, but take it from me, no one’s going to believe that.  What you did, I don’t think could ever be repeated.  By anyone.”

Shepard’s smile cooled, his thoughts turning grim.  “All the same, I was not good enough.”

The billions of lives lost would always be an albatross about his mind.  So many worlds lost, sacrificed.  He could have done more.  He could have stopped the slaughter for some of them.  He had needed to have been perfect back then.

He had not been perfect.

If he had been, Tali would not have been alone for ten years.  Maybe she had gotten to build that house, without him, fulfilling the dream of her father.  No, it had been her dream, too.  Shepard would have given anything to just sit outside on the deck of that house with her for just the span of a morning, watching the sunrise together while holding each other close.

He could not, in good conscience, say that he had done the best job he could have done.

It was only from the fact that the Reapers had been eliminated did he stop short of thinking that he was a miserable failure.  But his opinion of himself was quite close to that, all the same.

The mask of his face did not allow that inner turmoil to show and Shepard managed a shallow grin behind his beard.  “Given time, you could probably tell me the events of half my life, but you, Ceraph, I know very little about.”

“Sir?”

“That’s another thing.  You don’t need to call me ‘sir.’  You don’t need to call me anything other than ‘Shepard.’  I’m not your commanding officer.  I’m your guest.  But as your guest, I figure it’s only fair that I learn a little about my host.”

The widening of Ceraph’s eyes made it seem like she had just been shot, or that the prospect of gargling acid was preferable to acquiescing to Shepard’s very simple request.

“Oh.  Oh… I… I’m… well, you see, it’s a bit…”

“Well, from what I’ve gathered, you’re a medic, a pilot, and a salvager to boot.  Just enough diversification to be called a jack of all trades.  So, can you give me any indication as to where we should start?  Or better yet, what do you want me to ask you about first?  Maybe… your occupation now?  Salvaging.  Was that by necessity?”

Ceraph twiddled her fingers.  “Every job was by necessity,” she croaked.  “Ever since the war ended.”

“You were about ten when the war broke out, weren’t you?” Shepard’s eyes hardened, trying to pierce through the woman that sat next to him, imagining when she had been younger and smaller.

Nodding, Ceraph refused to look Shepard in the eye.  “Yeah.”

“You were on Palaven?”

Again, Ceraph nodded.

Shepard understood right away.  He had never set foot on Palaven during the war, but he had gone to one of its moons in the early days of the fighting.  While on the surface of the thinly atmosphered satellite, he had been beholden to an expansive view of the turian homeworld in the sky, the Reapers having turned entire cities into lakes of fire hundreds of miles wide that glowed like the planet was carving itself anew, just like in the eons when the troposphere was taking shape amidst the toxic and primeval landscapes as they shifted and hurled cataclysmic ash and dust into the air.

The paternal instinct in him ordered him to place a hand upon Ceraph’s shoulder.  The pragmatic side of him barked for that order to be belayed.

His eyes scanned her rigid body language.  There was a pressure point that he could immediately sense in the woman, and though he knew that she would give him the direct answer if questioned, he had the sense that he already knew the answer.  Just a soldier’s way of knowing.

Instead, he then asked, “Were you a refugee during the fighting?”

“No,” Ceraph said.  She then raised her head proudly.  “I was a volunteer.”

“At such a young age?”  This surprised Shepard.

The turian made a clicking sound with her tongue.  “They needed bodies.  They couldn’t have afforded to be selective.”

“Fair,” Shepard said and he resisted the urge to rub at his forehead in anguish.  Of course there would’ve been children participating in the fighting.  It had been a distinct matter of life or death back then, as black and white as any issue could have been.  But for whatever reason, he had never thought that having children in the war was possible.  He had only thought of them as civilians.  Noncombatants.  Stupid of him to gloss over that fact, for children had participated in every great war in some form or another in human history, but it agonized him to no end with the truth laid open for him.

“I wasn’t on the front lines,” Ceraph continued, her tone dropping an octave.  Soothing.  “I started out as a runner.  Ferrying messages, weapons, and ammo to various squads and platoons.  Then, I was randomly assigned to a medical tent as an assistant.  Just a kid of ten, standing past the elbows of turian doctors, watching as they operated on their patients.  Studying their techniques.  The names of the chemicals they treated the wounded with.  With all that blood and gore around me… those screaming men and women… I had to grow up very quickly.”

“Too quickly,” Shepard softly pointed out, noting how Ceraph’s eyes had grown glassy and distant. 

How many other people like Ceraph had had their childhoods stolen?  She had seen things that no kid should have seen—to be beholden to the graphicness of warfare, it messily alters the brain chemistry of a developing child.  The fact that Ceraph seemed to be well put-together was either a testament to her inner strength, or she had cracked long ago and was still putting the pieces back together and was putting up an admirable façade in front of Shepard.

“Learned a lot, though.  Enough for me to be given an unofficial promotion to medical apprentice within a matter of months.  Was one of three kids in my unit who had gotten such a ‘promotion.’”

Truthfully, Shepard felt that if he had been wounded and had no recourse but to be treated by a bunch of ten-year olds, he would have probably tried to get the hell out of there even if his legs had been blown off, but he was not insensitive enough to bring this up.

“What kind of work did they have you do?” he asked.  “They didn’t have you do surgery or anything?”

Now it was Ceraph’s turn to laugh.  “Not at first.”

“Not at… ah.”

“Times were desperate.  And so were the patients.  I had to do everything from minor sutures to assisting the actual doctors with the heavy-duty surgeries.  Limb removals, intestinal shearing, that sort of thing.  The first day on the job, I puked.  But after that, I managed to hold my stomach.  I had to.  Because I wanted to do something.  To make a difference however I could.”

Shepard knew the feeling intimately, but he said nothing, content to let the turian speak more.

“After the war, though,” Ceraph’s tone turned bitter, “things… didn’t turn out as I had hoped.”

There it was.  That little creeping feeling at the back of his skull.  The what-ifs and such.  “How do you mean?” Shepard asked.

“Well… try to imagine a few billion people trying to salvage what they had lost simultaneously.  Our governments could not handle the influx of such a refugee crisis, nor did they have the infrastructure to do so.  The Citadel didn’t send help—they couldn’t, not with the station in pieces.  People were left without their homes, without food, without money.  The lines at every single relief station, which were just singular tents in sprawling cities of tents, stretched on for days and there was no guarantee that you would get any measure of support when you were finally called up in front of an agent.  Many people ended up leaving the planet.  I was one of them.”

There was a part of Shepard that would forever be chastising himself for not having the foresight to envision the brutal reality of a galaxy recovering from the war.  Naively, he had held onto the vain hope that the solution to his problem—and thus, everyone else’s—was the sole objective of defeating the Reapers once and for all. 

But while that would have solved his immediate problem, he now realized that there would have been a macrocosm of complications that would beset this civilized galaxy.  Billions of refugees, left without homes.  People slowly starving to death outside the ruined foundations of their cities.  Bodies in the street, poisoned by nuclear fallout.  Every singular piece of infrastructure would have been damaged if not outright destroyed—there would have to been a continued unifying effort on the scale as when the entire galaxy had warred against the Reapers in order to set everything back to the way it was.

And somehow, Shepard figured that the galaxy had forgotten what it had the potential to be in all the time he had been in absentia.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” Shepard asked.

Ceraph’s mandibles tentatively flexed.  Shepard knew the tic meant that the turian was thinking hard—he had learned much about turian expressiveness from a particular member of that species that had served him dutifully nearly everywhere he went, a man who had been one of his best friends.

“Yes and no,” Ceraph finally replied.  “I went all over in search of some semblance of stability.  Traveled to Earth first, but they didn’t have any work for me.  I went to Thessia next, but it was the same deal.  Even wound up on Ilium at some point—almost got forced into indentured servitude, too—but got out of there when I suspected it was the same old story on that world.  But as I traveled, I took on more jobs, more roles, just to give myself credits and experience.  Picked up what I could along the way, in case I needed to make it into a career.”

“How long were you bouncing around before you got to…” Shepard raised a finger in the air and rotated it, “…this?”

Ceraph shrugged.  “Couldn’t tell you.  Honestly don’t know.”  But before Shepard could ask his next question, the turian rose from the bench and stretched, taking a proud look around the cargo bay.  “But, I managed to find that stability I had been looking for.  Somewhat.  Got a ship.  Got a job—though it isn’t a steady one.  Got bills, but who doesn’t?  I found my footing, eventually.  And now…” she spread her arms magnanimously, “…you’ve caught up to where I am.”

There was a hitch in the turian’s voice that gave Shepard just an inkling of doubt, but he pushed that for now.  He also stood from his chair and rotated his neck, giving off a few satisfying cracks in the process.

“Ceraph,” he said, taking a moment to breathe and concentrate.  “There’s… something that I need to say to you.”

“You can tell me,” the turian bobbed her head eagerly.  “Whatever it is, I’ll always listen—”

A short, loud beep suddenly resounded through the hold and Ceraph froze in place, her eyes widening. ^[2]

Shepard looked up to the ceiling, as if trying to place the source of the sound.  “What the hell is that?”

“Proximity alert,” Ceraph hissed, already on the move to the nearest terminal.  She pushed aside the chair in front of the console and stood as her hands raced across the holographic keyboard.  On the screen, several different external camera feeds of the Tien Extremis booted up.  The turian focused on the top right one.  “Shit,” she spat.

Shepard hurried over so that he could take a look himself.  On the screen, he could see another vessel maneuvering into position alongside the Tien Extremis, though the angle and resolution was not good.  Outlined against the pale rings of Saturn, between the series of shadowed space, she could see a dim blue glow of thrusters and the brutalist angles of a worker’s vessel that prioritized function over form.

His hand instinctively reached towards his hip, though he had no holster.  An old soldier’s reaction.  “Pirates?” he asked, his voice quiet like death.

“Worse,” Ceraph groaned.  “My ‘policyholders.’”

Blinking, Shepard did a double-take.  “I thought that you were an independent salvager.”

Sheepish, Ceraph refused to meet Shepard’s eyes.  “Technically… I’m not.”

Shepard could scarcely believe his ears.  “’Technically?’”

The turian whirled to face him.  “You need a contract to salvage the Folly!” she defended, though it was not a hot defense but one drawn out from sheer panic.  “Earth doesn’t allow unincorporated vessels into the orbit of the belt.  I had to sign a contract with a controlling firm for access and… they get a percentage of whatever I earn.  They must have tracked me when I jumped from Earth’s orbit.”

There was a thud of locking lugs that snapped against the exterior airlock.  The ship’s computer reported a good seal and that the equalization of airlock pressure was starting, but at a fairly protracted pace.

Shepard eyed the adjacent hallway through slit eyes as he mapped all points of cover and advantage in his mind.  “Yeah, well, I’m content in not letting anyone take a percentage off of me if I can help it.  Where’s the armory on board this ship?”

“You mean… weapons?”

“No, I mean the massage parlor.  Yes, of course I mean weapons!”

But Ceraph’s hand was frantically clutching at the collar of her shirt, bunching it up in a manner that looked painful.  “I don’t have anything.”

“You’re joking,” Shepard said as he took measured glances between the screen and the hallway from where the hissing of atmo was becoming more apparent.  “Salvaging is one of the riskiest and confrontation-laden jobs that there was even when I was around.  Skirmishes are a practical guarantee in this line of work, and you don’t have anything more deadly than a kitchen knife on board your ship?”

“I don’t, okay!” Ceraph yelled, her eyes bulging and her mandibles flaying as far as they could go.

Gritting his teeth, Shepard momentarily hung his head before he straightened with a firm intake of breath.  “So, what are they going to do?”

“That’s the thing,” the turian ran a hand along the curve of her carapaced skull, tense, “I don’t know.  Whenever they came on board, it was usually to take their share of what they deemed was fair back to their ship.  But the only haul I found since they last visited was… you.”

On the screen, the pressure tube that had extended from the other frigate looked like an invading spike, pressing around the seal of the Tien Extremis.  The atmo counter was ticking down—fifteen seconds until equalization.

“Commander,” Ceraph grasped at the man’s arm, her claws digging in painfully, “you can’t hurt them.  There’ll be consequences if they’re messed with, but I swear I won’t give you to them.”

“Then you can’t call me ‘Commander’ or ‘Shepard’ in front of them.  They can’t know who I am.”

“Just promise me that you won’t hurt them.  If you do, I’ll be hunted for the rest of my life.  They’ll put a price on my head that I’ll never be able to pay off.”

Shepard’s jaw tightened.  It felt like a rope had been cast around his neck, holding him to a stake.  Something inside him was begging to be let loose, to unleash that long-dormant urge that had not been satiated for the better part of a decade.  Every instinct in his brain was screaming at him to do whatever it took to protect—not himself—but Ceraph.  The woman was terrified, her careful guard already starting to peel away.

“If they give me no choice…” he started to say.

“Just don’t!” Ceraph begged.  “Please!”

Shepard’s inner ear felt the tiniest pressure differential before he heard the sound of heavy metal squealing open.  His eyes shot towards the far corridor, which extended straight ahead like a long artery.  He could now see a flurry of shadows begin to squirm against the deep brown corridor, the scuffed lightstrips providing only the paltriest of illumination as Shepard realized, with a hidden sigh, that boarders had crossed the accordion bridge and into the Tien Extremis.

He steeled himself.  His knuckles tensed as he gripped the headrest of the closest chair to the point that he was about to snap it off.

The light fell across the boots of the intruders first, before it slowly revealed more of their torsos, and finally, their faces.

There were four of them, all dressed in a combination of armor and dusters that made Shepard vaguely think of cowboys from the nineteenth century.  Two of them were human, with deep tans upon their faces that Shepard knew to be the result of mispolarized helmet visors.  The other two were a salarian and a turian.

The taller human of the two took the lead.  He had the air of someone who always got what he wanted.  He had small beady eyes that looked almost black in the low light.  His cheeks were frittered by black stubble and his hair was unkempt.  Shepard immediately honed in on him, narrowing his eyes, also noting that every one of the intruders had at least one weapon strapped to them.  Sidearms and rifles.  Seems they were ready for a fight and here he was, practically caught with his pants down.

“Nice place,” the lead man said with a sneer, making a show of looking about the bay.  It was clear he and Ceraph had never met before.  “Cozy.”

Ceraph stood by herself in the center of the room, the artificial light searing down on her like it was roasting her.  “I thought we had an agreement with the group,” she tried to appear as if she was in charge.  “I radio in, you come get your share.  You don’t get to board my ship at your will!”

“We took the liberty ourselves.  We wanted to see what had gotten Elby’s hackles raised.  Seems you took something that they thought, by rights, belonged to them.”

“Elby’s lying.”

“They have lawyers that can be quite convincing.”

“I can show you the logs,” Ceraph pointed a trembling finger, though she not swaying anyone.  “I was well outside of the Elby boundaries and I can prove it!”

The hairs on the back of Shepard’s neck were standing on end.  Ever so slowly, he tensed his muscles, only his eyes shifting as he watched the scene.  His foot edged forward, ready to spring to Ceraph’s defense at a moment’s notice.

His consternation was only exacerbated when he saw the other turian in the group withdraw a pistol from their holster.  Perhaps diplomacy was not on the menu today.  As if provided some unseen cue, the group began to split up, searching around the cargo hold of the Tien Extremis, poking around under tarps and investigating the container stacks that had been piled in the corners.

“Not really important,” the man said to Ceraph, his grin turning fiendish.  “What’s important is the percentage.  Where’s the cargo?”

“Spaced it,” Ceraph lied.  “Turned out to be junk.”

Now the man laughed, a sound which reverberated around the hold.  Shepard gave a quick start, but held himself back, his own breathing taking on a savage tremble.

“As amusing as the thought is of Elby having wasted their time,” the man stretched, making a show of brushing his hands along the grip of the pistol that was strapped to his waist, “you know that excuse isn’t going to fly.  So I’m going to ask again: where is the—”

The man’s eyes had flicked over to the side and he did a double-take as he finally realized that Ceraph was not alone.  He took in the sight of Shepard glaring at him over by the security station, noting the contempt that radiated from the commander and he tried to match it with his own.  However, Shepard had spent a lifetime honing his concentration and hatred and could diffuse it at will, appearing like stone.  Raw and unblinking.  In the face of his ability, the intruder had no chance at intimidating him.

Realizing that he was not going to win in a direct contest of wills with Shepard, the man looked at Ceraph as he jerked his thumb in the man’s direction.  “Who the fuck’s that?”

Ceraph’s eyes wavered and she mustered all the willpower she had to stop her voice from shaking.  “Freelancer.  Picked him up on Earth.  Said he needed a job.”

“A freelancer?  Now I catch you deliberately skirting the rules of your contract.  And I read your contract.  You want to know what it allows?  One ship, one pilot.  No subcontractors without prior approval.  We’re not paying extra for additional crew.”

Shepard had disliked the man already but now he flat-out detested him.

“He’s not on your payroll,” Ceraph nervously stammered, but the leader had apparently had enough of her.

He strode over to where Shepard was standing and looked him up and down.  Shepard kept his entire body still.  The commander studied the man’s reactions.  If the salvager recognized who he was, this whole thing could go south very fast.  This encounter was predicated on Shepard maintaining the element of surprise.  There was no reason for this man, bastard that he was, to believe that Commander Shepard was back.

The corner of the man’s mouth rose in a crooked smile, as if he sensed a kindred spirit.  “Hard up for credits, are you, old-timer?  That why you joined this ship?  What’s your story?”

Breathing measured, Shepard gave no outward recognition of the questions, instead trying to appear blasé.  “Work’s hard to come by these days,” he said carefully.  “Man’s got to make a living.”

“Indeed,” the lead intruder said as he rubbed a hand along his face.  He then glanced over at Ceraph.  “So, how’d you two really meet?”

He obviously wasn’t buying Ceraph’s story, but Shepard’s blood refused to back down from its simmer.  The man had enough charisma that he could get away most times with spinning a tangent to get to the true heart of his subject, but Shepard saw through the maneuver right away.

“I think I’m in the middle of something here,” Shepard said.  “I don’t know what it is you’re searching for, but I think this is something that can be resolved in due course.  Until that’s done, you’re welcome to bring me on board your ship for a bit, at least until this is straightened out between all of us.”  To emphasize that he was serious, he slowly moved away from the desk, his hands partially outstretched to show that he was weaponless as he approached the lead salvager, his gaze never diminishing in hardness.

Ceraph looked like she was about to vomit.  “Shep—” she nearly choked out, but clamped down on the word when the commander’s firm stare bored deep into her, atomically thin and precise.

The lead salvager did not hear the near-outburst, but he did give Shepard another once-over with disdain.  “Lot of loyalty for your ‘captain.’  How well do you even know her?”

Shepard smirked.  “Well enough, let’s just say.”

From behind, Ceraph was shifting her weight from one foot to the other in agony.  Shepard’s brow furrowed, as if he were telepathically giving her the instruction to stay put.  These guys had no idea what they were looking for.  If they gave them no reason to linger, they would head back the way they came and would leave them alone.

If Ceraph and Shepard could convince their intruders that everything was normal, then they had a chance of making it out of this situation clean.

And that possibility was ripped away when Ceraph clutched at the arm of the lead salvager in desperation, her panic getting to her.  “If you just leave him alone, I can show—”

But the human suddenly whipped his arm so rapidly that it mainlined into a flat blur. ^[3] “Goddamn it!” he barked, drawing the attention of the other salvagers.  Ceraph, startled, jerked back and lost her balance, landing upon the floor with a sharp clang, causing her to wince in pain.

The lead salvager reached to his waist and now had one of his pistols in a hand.  It was a model that Shepard did not recognize.  Dark black and red construction.  Oversized barrel.  It was clearly not a weapon that was to be used for plinking bottles—one hit with a bullet from that thing and chunks were guaranteed to be removed.

“You do not touch me!” he raised the pistol, but did not point it directly at Ceraph.  “Not when I have you here in this pathetic—”

His eyes then raised to what was just past Ceraph.  A large object, covered by a bright blue tarpaulin.  Irregularly shaped.

The salvager raised a finger.  “The hell is that?”  When Ceraph did not immediately answer, he directed to his group: “Check it.”

The turian on the salvager team quickly ambled over and inspected the base of the shrouded object first, perhaps scanning for any booby traps.  Once he had silently pronounced that it was safe, the turian grabbed a fistful of the tarp and yanked it away from the object it had been covering.

Shepard was already shaking from adrenaline and now his pulse was skyrocketing as he searched the face of the lead salvager, watching as his expression fluidly shifted from confusion, to apprehension, and finally to recognition as the cryo pod now became apparent to the dwellers inside the hold of the ship.

The cryo pod that had been opened.

The lips of the salvager parted a crack.  His eyes began to shift over to Shepard, sensing familiarity.  He met Shepard’s gaze and somehow, the commander knew the man was trying to peer past the beard.  Past the scars and mane of white hair. 

A cryo pod required a passenger.  And there had been someone on the ship that had not been on the manifest.

“Wait a minute,” the man whispered, his head subtly cocking, his brow furrowing in recognition. 

He knew.

Behind him, Ceraph made a moaning noise, slowly shaking her head back and forth in terror.

But Shepard was already way past caring.  His bones felt like they were made from knots of silica, scratching against the flesh and cartilage that wrapped around him.  The roots of his teeth were pure electricity, the acid in stomach reaching a boil, and his eyeballs sizzled with pent-up energy.  Everything felt cold, then hot, and then numbed.  There was only the steady thud of his heart against his ribcage, threatening to break free.  Painful spikes seemed to poke into every pore in his body and Shepard knew that he had reached the limits of his patience.  He was done giving a solitary fuck about things anymore.

Something spliced together in his head.  Like two fringes of wire suddenly and inexplicably reconnecting.

Shepard focused on the heavybarreled pistol that the leader was slowly swinging around in his direction.  His vision cleared almost as soon as he honed in on it, an old instinct.

There was barely two feet between him and the other man.  The raider’s compatriots were shrouded just behind his body, shielding Shepard from them all.  Shepard’s mind felt like it had become detached, almost analytical, as he lashed out a hand, as quick as a striking cobra, and grabbed at the raider’s wrist at the exact same time he landed an open-handed strike upon his elbow, bending it backwards and briefly extending it far beyond what bone could endure, when the structural integrity finally failed with a hideous crunching sound and Shepard saw the man’s jacket suddenly bulge upon the opposite end of the elbow, the fabric quickly dripping dark.

Pain-fired nerves caused the fingers of the man to spring open before he could utter a noise of shock.  Shepard was already in motion, sweeping his hand and catching the grip of the pistol mere milliseconds after it had started to fall to the ground.  His finger already in the trigger guard, he flipped the pistol so that it was the right way around, pressed the muzzle of the pistol against the man’s sternum, behind his shields, and pulled the trigger twice.

Shepard was looking at the man’s face as he fired.  There were two heavy thumps and the expression of the intruder rapidly slid from pain to confusion and finally acceptance as he began to topple over.

On the ground, Ceraph twisted and curled into a ball behind a crate once the noise had made itself present, her hands clutching over her ears as she screamed, “No!  No!”

Bringing a hand up to the dying man’s neck, Shepard rudely shoved the body aside and flung it to the floor before bringing up his pistol back into a two-handed grip.  The turian near the opened cryo pod had been slow to react, fumbling for a submachinegun at his waist, knocking over a nearby tripod lamp in the process and causing stark shadows to fall across his face.

Shepard’s next shot caught the turian in the shoulder, whose shields flared from the impact, but wobbled and shattered in the next moment.  The turian was spun around and Shepard’s follow-up shots caught him in the gut and the neck, arcing blue blood across the walls.

There were two more in the bay, but one of the salvagers had already turned tail, his coat flapping as he sprinted back down the corridor to the umbilical where his ship was docked.  The remaining individual, a fully armored salarian, stood his ground, firing at Shepard with two pistols, cursing the whole while.  The commander ducked the shots and rolled from cover to cover, using the stacks of crates to shield him from the incoming onslaught as bullets pinged and flew chunks of micro-metal through the air.

In a lull in the shooting, Shepard slowly unleashed his breath that he had been holding.  Mechanically, he ejected the spent thermal clip and it clattered upon the floor. 

He breathed.  And again.

He raised his wrist over the top of a nearby crate and fired several times.  None of his shots hit, but it had the effect of forcing the armored salvager to take cover.  That gave Shepard another spare few seconds to move up the bay, towards another alcove of crates.

Whipping himself into cover just as the salvager got into position, Shepard barely flinched as bullets ripped at the corner of the crates he had hunkered behind, tearing at the metal like it was tissue paper.

He then looked down and to the side and realized that Ceraph was huddled down at his feet, hands still over her head, rocking back and forth, eyes beaming towards the ground and staring at nothing in particular.  She was whimpering.

Shepard momentarily forgot about the man that was shooting at him and he quickly knelt down beside the woman.  “Hey!” he had to shout over the din, reaching out and grasping Ceraph’s shoulder to keep her still.  “Were you hit?  Talk to me!”

It was no use, for Ceraph seemed too stunned to even mouth an intelligible word.  A quick examination showed that her clothes had no blood on them, thankfully.  But her body was shuddering heavily, limbs ceaselessly trembling in their sockets, and she buried her head in her arms while bullets and pieces of crating flew by overhead.

His hand clenched down hard on Ceraph’s shoulder for a moment, bending the cartilage there enough to sharply deliver pain to the flesh underneath.  Ceraph gave a hiss and winced, but stopped shaking.

“Stay here,” Shepard sternly ordered, before he turned to face the last armored man in the room, who was in the middle of reloading both of his pistols.

The light at the salvager’s back made his armor appear like a living shadow to Shepard, which made it all the more easier for him to focus his sights to the center of mass.  Three shots rang out, aching Shepard’s ears—two for the shields, and one at the helmet—causing the man to abruptly lurch backwards as something dark exploded out the back of the man’s head covering.

Almost contemptuously, Shepard discarded his pistol, the porting of which had clacked open and held, out of clips to utilize.  He quickly approached the body of the man that he had just shot and reclaimed one of the sidearms.

The bay was now clear of intruders, but Shepard’s eyes snapped back to the surveillance cams near the console.  The salvage ship was still docked to the Tien Extremis and he could see a grouping of five armored men begin to make their way back to the interior corridor, nearly all of them now hefting heavy weapons of some kind.  They were not here to take prisoners.  They were here to kill.

Whatever it took, Shepard vowed that they would never reach Ceraph.

There were only seconds left before the men reached the bay again and tore it up with their superior firepower.  Already hearing their footsteps, Shepard double-timed it to the corridor entrance and plastered himself flat against the wall next to the doorway.

He could feel the vibrations of boots through the floor, each impact a seismic event thanks to his heightened senses.  But despite the danger, he had never felt such a calm in a long time.

He waited.  Waited.  Hearing the salvagers grow closer… closer…

The glint of silver in the split-second that the barrel of a shotgun poked out from the threshold—

Shepard already in motion, slamming his hand down on the weapon, wrenching it so that the muzzle pointed towards the foot of salvager—

The explosive burst as the shotgun fired, brought on by the instinctive pull of its wielder, filling the ship with noise and light—

The foot of the salvager disappeared in an eruption of blood and bone.  He was screaming in agony already, but Shepard quickly grabbed the front of the man’s armor, hoisting him up with a hand while he held his own sidearm in the other.

There were panicked shouts from the man’s companions and the hallway became awash with the savage popping of automatic fire.  But Shepard was still holding the man he had neutralized upright and angled his body so that he was completely hidden by his profile.  The captive salvager’s body stuttered and shook as the friendly fire slammed into his shields and finally punctured his armor, spraying blood from his back as he groaned and gurgled for the first few shots before falling silent.  The men at the end of the corridor still fired and each bullet that impacted the body of the dead man made a wet, punching sound.

The chattering of gunfire slowly trickled down a second or two later, with the men starting to realize that they had just been shooting one of their own the whole time.

Then ragged bursts of light spat from the corner of the dead salvager’s cloak.  The shields of the man in front down the corridor flared and popped—he tried to run, but a two-round burst caught him in the center of the chest, destroying his heart in an instant.

Shepard let go of the body he had been holding and removed his pistol from the cover he had utilized beneath his dead hostage’s armpit, the barrel still hot and smoking.  A surge of illumination from one of the haloed overhead fixtures fell over him like a soothing wave as his entire body was visible to the group for the first time.  It had the effect of making the remaining three men at the end of the hallway falter.  Enough time for Shepard to spot one of the auxiliary atmo linkages to the umbilical at the far end of the corridor and aim squarely at it.

He fired, and a lightning flash seared his eyeballs before a thunderclap pulverized his bones.  A blast of heat warmed his face as if he had suddenly been thrust inches away from a supernova and he smelled the roasting scent of his own hair.  There was a distinct sucking sound as the air rushed back into the space it had just been rudely vacated from.

One of the salvagers had been thrown into the side of the wall from the force of the explosion, leaving behind a splatter of blood that smeared and dripped to the floor.

The other two were still alive, but stumbling around and deafened.  Their armor dripped with dark liquid and one of the armored salvagers was heavily limping, his right arm in tatters, hanging by strands of sinew.

Shepard had picked up the deposited shotgun by now and had pointed it down the thin corridor.  He fired and buckshot exploded into the gut of the nearly-disarmed salvager, sending him flying several feet back, his arm finally bending and snapping away like a twig. 

The last armored intruder stumbled into the umbilical, which was miraculously still intact, intent on fleeing instead of fighting.

The commander took his time striding down the corridor, like he was the angel of death.  Malfunctioning lights flickered across his face, painting his visage in a kaleidoscope of tortured grimaces.  He stepped over the bodies of the men he had killed, making sure not to plant his boots in the pools of slowly spreading liquid.  Now, his own footsteps resounded dryly, heavy and unnatural.  Shifting metal sounds accompanying him in his slow march towards the enemy ship.

He turned the corner, shotgun already at the ready as he now faced the circular umbilical, three meters long, that connected the two vessels.  He needn’t have bothered with the weapon—the last remaining man had collapsed near the airlock of their ship, leaving a blood trail smeared across the metallic floor as he tried to crawl to safety.

The man’s body had several punctures that had managed to penetrate his body armor.  Shrapnel from the explosion, Shepard reckoned.  The man had been drilled in nearly a dozen places and was leaking like a sieve.

Stepping into the pressure tube, Shepard took a slow breath in the dry air.  Rubber accordion walls and dim lightstrips ribbed the walls in the tube.  He lifted the shotgun again and slowly approached the downed salvager.

The stricken man coughed, a hand clamped over his chest in a vain attempt to stem the bleeding.  Dark and thick liquid bubbled from between his fingers.  Not a good prognosis.  With his free hand, he managed to remove his helmet, albeit with an effort, revealing a shaved and tattooed head, a stout black mustache, and a set of weary eyes that indicated more about his age than any other feature.

Shepard raised the shotgun, stopping about halfway down the umbilical.

Rummaging in a pocket, the salvager’s hand came out with, not a weapon, but a stout aluminum flask.  A series of thin amber drops dribbled from the irregular holes that had sheared through the container, the light sounds of less than a mouthful of liquid sloshing around in its confines.

The salvager stared at his ruined flask for a long moment and finally lowered his arm dejectedly.  He rolled his head, locking eyes with Shepard.  He made a broad gesture to his body, riddled and broken.  “You might as well,” he coughed.

“Yeah,” Shepard grimaced.  “I was going to.”

The umbilical rocked in the next second from the shotgun’s blast.

Ceraph had tried to make a manual effort to breathe.  Inhale once.  Exhale once.  Repeat.  But very shortly, she lost the rhythm, for it had gotten too fast for her to effectively keep count.  She sank deeper and deeper into the morass of her own panic, her hands clawing at her skull, nearly gouging her carapace.

She had no idea what the hell was happening to her life.  Every urge that smashed against her told her to thrash and flail and tear away.  But they were coming so rapidly in conjunction and so intense that her brain felt like it was overloading.  In her fetal position, she shivered and moaned, her head between her knees, waiting for the fighting to stop.

Then she heard a singular blast from somewhere further in the ship.  Everything fell quiet after that.

The turian did not open her eyes, still keeping them clenched shut.  Her panic was around her, coddling her like a blanket.  It felt like a knot had twisted in her throat, cutting off her breathing.  Her hurried medical training was failing her in this moment as neural pathways sparked, misfired, latching at nothing.  Her heart was beating as if it was hooked up to a generator and her inner ear was giving her the indication that everything was swaying, crimson sparks flashing in her closed eyes.

Then, she heard footsteps next to her.  The shuffle of shoes upon the floor.

Hands were at her shoulders.  A gentle pressure.

She rebelled against the touch regardless, jerking away like she had just been stung.  “No!” she meekly cried out again, eyes still shut.  “No… no… don’t touch me!”

“Ceraph,” a calm but stern voice cut through the quiet.  Shepard.  “It’s over.  It’s done.  There’s no danger anymore.”

Not knowing how to respond in that moment, Ceraph remained rigid.  The adrenaline refused to leave her system, locking her limbs in place.

It was only when Shepard forced his hands underneath her arms and boldly yanked her upwards, forcing her to her feet, did Ceraph finally move of her own accord, her eyes flashing open.  With one arm draped around the back of Shepard’s neck, she let the commander lead her across the room, towards the med bay in the next room.

She gazed past Shepard’s head.  Saw the bodies littering the floor, the blood staining the wall.  The chunks missing out of the crates from the sheer number of bullets that had smashed into them.

The turian could only gape, something in her heart thrumming.  The human had beaten them all.  Eight against one.  And Shepard had torn through them like it had just been a day at the office for him.  The man didn’t even look like he had broken out in a sweat.  She stared at the bodies again, at their surprised and anguished death masks.

“You killed them all…” she whispered.

“Don’t look at them,” Shepard directed.  She obeyed, looking steadfastly at the floor as it passed underneath them, trying to ignore the churning of her stomach and the rising lump that threatened to shoot up her gullet.

In the medbay, Shepard helped Ceraph up onto the chair and reclined it backwards so that the turian was lying at a comfortable angle.  The overhead lights flared on, making the turian wince and squint, giving a tiny “Agh!” of discomfort.  There was a rattling sound from the cupboards as Shepard rummaged through the shelves, his dexterous hands quickly sifting aside bottles that made thick clinking sounds as they knocked together.  In short order, he found a small box in the nearby fridge that read “Dexmedetomidine” on it.  In the box was a series of injector pens and packaged sterile wipes.  Shepard took one of the pens and the wipes.  He used his teeth to tear open the package while he unclipped both ends of the pen.  He wiped the base of Ceraph’s neck, where there the carapace had parted to reveal her muscled gray flesh beneath.  She shivered from the touch of the wipe.  “Cold…” she muttered.

Shepard made no sound as he then pressed an end of the pen against the spot that he had just sterilized.  There was a plastic popping noise along with the twinge of a spring, and Ceraph jumped as a slight pinprick inserted itself into the subcutaneous layer at the base of her neck, but she held still until she heard a faint gurgle from the pen as the liquid within was pushed out through the needle and into her body.

Withdrawing the pen, Shepard wiped away the small bloom of blood with the wipe and deposited both into the nearest receptacle, after checking for a biowaste container and finding none.

A soothing warmth was already spreading throughout Ceraph’s body in spreading waves, as if she were an ocean and the boundaries of her body were the beach.  The knot at her throat loosened and she could breathe again.  “Mild sedative,” she croaked out, her eyes slowly lidding shut as went into self-diagnosis mode.  “Fast-acting.  Low dosage.”

“Anything stronger and you would’ve gone into cardiac arrest,” Shepard said somewhat defensively.

Ceraph shook her head, but it felt like she needed enough strength to shake a planet.  “No… it’s what I would’ve done.”  Her eyes blazed open again, for a new wound seemed to carve at her chest, insidious and invisible.  It was shame.  Breaking down like that in front of Commander Shepard was beyond the pale.  She felt raw.  Naked.  Vulnerable.  Shepard must have thought she seemed so pathetic right now and her body ached with guilt.  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, blinking morosely.

“For what?” Not a piercing question.  Open.  Honest, even.

She had to turn away, for if there was even the slightest chance she would see disappointment reflected in that face, she did not want bear witness to it.  “I should have told you.  Ever since the war… I’ve… I haven’t…”

But Shepard gently interrupted with a hand to her arm.  “You don’t need to explain it to me, Ceraph.  I think I know what it is you’re going through.”

“You might know,” Ceraph said bitterly, head still turned to the side.  “But turians aren’t supposed to feel like this.”

Shepard was about to respond with a protest, but he bit it back as he realized what Ceraph had been alluding to at the last second.  Turians were a militaristic society where service in the force was mandatory.  They were a proud race, espousing their disciplined heritage as a rigid code in which all turians lived their life and bound their beliefs by.  They were expected to be model soldiers, devout rule-followers, and most of all, to never let fear cloud their emotions.

Easy to say, hard to do, especially in the aftermath of a war that had threatened the lives of every being in this galaxy.  Who could take a glimpse at that abyss, at the maelstrom of destruction that had been headed their way, and not come back even affected the tiniest bit?

“Ceraph, turn and look at me.”

She clenched her eyes shut, as if she could do it any harder she could swallow up all of existence and live forever in her little cocoon of darkness.  But somehow, she found it impossible to disobey an order from the man and, with a trembling effort, she blinked away a tear that was hidden in the corner of her eye and she finally moved her body, staring up at his concerned face. 

Where there had been that killer instinct, that switch into the soldier she had seen so many times in the vids, there was a hint of softness beneath that chiseled exterior that allowed the sedative in her blood to flow more strongly to all corners of her body.

“There is nothing you have to be ashamed about,” Shepard said in a firm and steady voice.  “Sometimes, all of our training cannot prepare us for what’s truly out there.  We’re never ready for it.  And war… well, war has a way of bringing out our deepest, most untold fears.  No one has managed to walk away without a scar of some sort.  And I’m not talking about what we can physically see.”

“Easy for you to say,” Ceraph scowled, somewhat resenting the fact that she was the one now being treated medically, on her own damn ship no less.  “You’re Commander-fucking-Shepard.”

The man’s brow furrowed.  “Yes,” he said.  “I am that very man you’ve heard so much about and it is easy for me to say.  You know why?”

“Why?”

“Because all my life I’ve done nothing but accumulate scars.  I’ve concealed them, kept them locked away so that only I would have to deal with them.  It was only when I had met someone special did I realize that I never had to keep any part of myself put away.  It was only then that I discovered how to heal.  Let me guess, the newsfeeds told you I was somehow invulnerable to fear?  That I could march into hell itself and come out unscathed?”

Shepard’s acid surprised even himself.  There would have been a time where Shepard would have kept this attitude on a short leash—he had only told a select few people about his true feelings during the war, but it just seemed right to let this knowledge slip out in this moment.

Ceraph gulped, feeling a root of panic grasp her insides.  It had been a vigilant routine for her to watch the tightbeam-casts of the news networks after every day.  She would tune in to the channels that were reporting on the Normandy and the progress of the crew, tracking as to how they liberated Tuchanka, Rannoch, and had various victories on a menagerie of campaigns across countless worlds.  The propaganda wrote itself.

“I’ve felt what you’re feeling,” Shepard continued.  “I’m feeling it right now.  Every single hour of my life.  I’ve woken up to a galaxy that has forgotten me, thinking that the people that I loved have presumably moved on.  You think I can possibly stay calm, knowing all that?”

“You look calm,” Ceraph gritted.

“On the outside.  Inside, a psychologist would have a field day with me.  I just have a different way of showing it.  The panic, the fear… I just translate it into something that I can control.”

And Ceraph was certain that she had just witnessed this “something” minutes ago.  That calm and collected exterior, the mechanical motions of his hands manipulating the weapons in his grip, the swift and practiced movements as he maneuvered out of reach of the marauders, gunning each one of them down in turn without so much as a second’s consideration for taking a life.

She was still minutely shivering and Shepard wet a towel and made a compress over her head.  Ceraph did not have the heart to tell the man that such a treatment was not as effective on turians as it was on humans, instead just letting him carry on with his work.  The sedative was still squirming away inside her and a sensation of floating off of her chair was starting to take hold, almost as if her body had invisible strings connected to a limber and giant hand overhead.  The turian yawned.

Shepard grabbed a blanket and placed it over the turian.  “I’m sorry that I don’t measure up to your dreams,” he told Ceraph.  “I have a habit of disappointing people, I guess.”

Ceraph inhaled, managing a searing look of defiance.  “You haven’t.  Not yet.”

“Maybe I will,” Shepard murmured too quietly for the turian to hear.

He sat there on the chair until Ceraph’s eyes finally drooped and she passed out into a dreamless slumber.  While she dozed, Shepard remained watchful over her like a sentinel as he rested his head upon his folded and steepled hands, returning back to the memory of those three shadows and the panic and deliberation in their voices, discussing how his fate fit into their future machinations.

While Ceraph slept, Shepard busied himself with cleaning up the inside of the Tien Extremis, seeing that it was partially his fault that he had left it in such a state.

The ship had a few cleaning drones on board—he set them to work at clearing up the bloodstains and the carbon scoring that had accumulated upon the floors and walls of the ship.  The crates and equipment that were damaged by bullets he left alone—nothing he could do about that, at least not without a hacksaw and some welding gear.

The weapons of the salvagers he collected and placed into a storage locker.  Ceraph had said that she never shipped out with any weapons, but now she had several to choose from.  Rifles, a shotgun, several pistols, a couple of SMGs, grenades, and even a few spare omni-tools.  Not a bad arsenal, all in all.

The bodies were the tricky part.  Shepard had to drag each one out from the cargo hold of the Tien Extremis—unintentionally creating more bloodstains for the drones to clean up after him—through the docking umbilical and into the main airlock of the other salvager ship.  Shepard did not devote much time to making sure that the final state of the bodies were presented somewhat respectfully, as he simply just made a pile out of them within the airlock itself.  While he did not know any of them personally and knew that it was probably bad form to be so disrespectful of their moments after life, they had been shooting at him and Shepard had only so much patience for those who wished him dead.

Once that was done, he made his way into the cockpit of the other ship after confirming that there was no one else left on board.  Using a stored hack on his omni-tool, one that Tali had given him a long time ago, he bypassed the weak security to the flight controls in a matter of seconds.  He programmed a new flight path with a few rapid keystrokes, one that would take the ship straight into the heart of Sol at the center of the system.  The ship blared several potential object collision warnings when he input the flight path, but he disregarded each and every single one.  With this new directive, he set a five-minute timer and calmly walked back through the umbilical onto the Tien Extremis, sealing the airlock behind him and decoupling the ships a few seconds later.

Five minutes later, Shepard watched as the sapphire blue glow of the engines of the opposing craft warmed, sending it hurtling away towards the forest of stars far in the distance.  He gazed out the airlock window until the eternal shadows of space swallowed up the hull of the ship and the glare of the thrusters blended in with the pinpricks of the stars.  With any luck, the ship would not be intercepted on its route to the sun, where it would hurtle into the void of plasma for its atomic structure to be disintegrated in totality.  He had programmed the route to avoid the areas that the Alliance frequently patrolled, so hopefully no one would be able to fully piece together what had happened to the ship and its crew.

By the time he had finished with everything, Ceraph had woken up in the med bay.  She was sitting up in the seat she had been resting in, the blanket now down at her waist, leaving her bare arms visible.

“Are we still in-system?” she asked when Shepard came in to check on how she was doing.

“Haven’t touched the controls,” Shepard affirmed.  “Was waiting for you to wake.  Feeling better?”

“Shivering’s stopped, but I’ve got a splitting headache.”

“Comedown from the sedative,” Shepard said as he went to the sink and filled a cup with water.  He held out the cup to the turian.  “Best to stave off the dehydration.”

Ceraph took the cup and guzzled its contents.  “Been sedated enough times to remember the proper treatment?”

“Yes, many times.”

Crumpling the now-empty cup in a hand, Ceraph slowly sighed, the light from a nearby hi-power lamp starbursting between her mandible and her skull.

“We’re going to need to leave soon,” she said as she tentatively swung her legs off the chair, testing her weight for a few seconds before she stood up, the blanket dropping away from her.  “The other salvagers—the faction will get suspicion if the ones who stopped us don’t report in.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Shepard said, standing close by in case the turian was about to topple.  “I’ll need to lay low as well, so this is a good opportunity for the both of us.  A very… convenient opportunity.”

Ceraph turned her head and made a face that approximated the raising of an eyebrow.  “Wait, why do you need to be the one to steer clear of all this?  It’s not your ship that’s going to be tracked.  And besides, the galaxy needs to know that you’re alive again.”

But Shepard emphatically shook his head.

“Not just yet.”

He could see that Ceraph did not understand, so he continued.  “There’s a reason why I don’t remember getting into that cryo pod, the same reason why there’s that gap in my memory about that one, specific moment.  I keep having this memory—it comes in fragments and all the details are a blur—but I can see three figures standing over me, talking amongst themselves.  I think I’m lying down, within the pod, maybe.  But their words… they’re talking about what to do with me, specifically.  Kill me or keep me captive, one or the other.  It wasn’t very clear.”

“And you’re sure it’s not a dream?” Ceraph asked, keeping her voice low and careful.

Shepard’s jaw moved to the side for a few seconds before he shook his head again.  “Too lucid to be a dream, plus the moment comes to me and it plays out in the exact same fashion.  Same dialogue.  The same… dread feeling.  Dreams don’t repeat themselves, not to that degree.  But I know now for a certainty: I was deliberately put inside that pod, against my will, and left for ten years in space.  What has been stolen from me, I intend to make right, get myself even.”

A mandible on Ceraph’s face carefully flexed.  She reached for the counter.  “Pass me that datapad?”

Obliging, Shepard gave it to her.

“I didn’t know when I should show you this,” Ceraph said as she quickly booted up a video file, “but I found it when scouring the memory banks of your pod.”

She tilted the pad so that Shepard could see.  And he watched as a blurred crew aboard a starship wheeled the suspicious-looking pod across a hangar bay.  Ceraph did not look at the video, for she had seen it already, but instead studied the man’s face, watching as his jaw clenched as the seconds ticked on by.  How his eyes seemed to take on a sharper glint, the soft blue growing harder and more agonized.

Ceraph glanced back at the pad just in time to catch the fireball that unceremoniously ended the clip.  He was nodding almost absentmindedly, having committed each frame of the video to memory, already beginning to pore over it in his mind.

“Could have been an accident,” he murmured out loud.

“Maybe,” Ceraph said.  “The file came with galactic coordinates.  They were in the Folly when the ship blew.  I’m guessing the ship collided with debris.”

Shepard was starting to ache for a stiff drink.  He rubbed at his chin agonizingly.  “So, whoever did this never recovered the pod.  All that time in space, they couldn’t find me.”  He began to nod slowly again.  “I can use this to my advantage.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, think about it,” Shepard made a slow perimeter of the med bay, a finger waggling at nothing in particular, “the entire galaxy—even the people that tried to get me out of the way—thinks I’m dead.  Otherwise, why go to the trouble of sealing me inside a cryo pod just to toss me out of the proverbial window?  I’d make much better use as a hostage or just dead, not abandoned without reason.”

“It would be pretty stupid of them to discount you like that.”

Shepard stopped in place, breathing slowly, head tilting.  “The ship that had been ferrying me was destroyed, I think we’ve determined that.  But the people behind the whole plot… I can’t make the assumption that they perished in the explosion, too.  I need to consider the strong possibility that they are still out there, oblivious to my return.”

“It makes sense,” Ceraph agreed.  “Because, why would they be the ones to hide?  If their plan involved you being out of the way, they would have enacted it, or are in the process of enacting it right now.”

“Yeah, they’re not off lounging at a resort on a tropical island to spend the rest of their days.  This was all guided by some kind of grand purpose.  These weren’t stupid people—they knew about me.  People who were—are—powerful, I’m guessing.  Powerful and rich.  And the one thing you can count on those who are rich and powerful is that they’re never satisfied with their current lot in life.  To them, there’s always more to take.”

“But why?” Ceraph scratched her head.  “It doesn’t make any sense.  You’re an icon!  What threat would you have made to anyone besides the Reapers?”

Let’s see, who would consider me a threat?  The press.  Politicians.  Mysterious information brokers.  Rogue paramilitary groups.  The list goes on.  “Icons can still make trouble even after their heyday,” he said.  “But somewhere along the line I must have pissed someone off.  Someone with the resources to try and make a move against me.”

He honestly tried to make a go of narrowing down his list of suspects further, the list which was a mile wide and an inch deep.  Nothing seemed to fit.  Nothing that he could justify, at least.  He couldn’t figure out a motive that anyone whom he might have even mildly offended would have sought to carry out an elaborate vendetta against him.  Sure, his Spectre duties had him routinely running afoul of private militaries, local government officials, and at times other Spectres, but the links between any of the suspects were tenuous at best, making any of their perceived vengeances against him just abysmally pathetic.

“So, how are you going to find these people?” Ceraph asked as she sat back down, the datapad in her lap. ^[4]

Shepard tapped a finger against his chin, steepling him in thought as the cold air of the med bay poked at him like a pitchfork. 

“As a matter of fact, I’m thinking that they will reveal themselves to me without me having to look very far for them.”

“I guess I was hoping for something a little more specific than that.”

“And I’ll expand.  Commander Shepard is dead to the galaxy.  No getting around that.  And that’s the way I want it to be.”  For now.

“But wait… wouldn’t you want to reveal yourself as soon as possible?  The news of your return… it could shake everything up!”

“And it would make the people I’m hunting for potentially go to ground,” Shepard said thoughtfully.  “Remember, they thought me enough of a threat to take me out, possibly permanently.”

“Right,” Ceraph said, starting to follow.

“I can’t let the moment slip away.  If putting me in the cryo pod was for some hidden plot, then it stands to reason that their design has already taken shape, or is nearing completion.  But we’re talking about people that would need to be adjacent to the political dealings in this new galaxy.  They would need to have a route to shape the government that has taken form.  And that’s my ticket in.”

“Union Eterna,” Ceraph breathed.

Shepard pointed a finger at the turian and smiled.  “Precisely.  If I can get close to the action, where all of the political development is taking place, the conspirators will be close by, or at least someone who knows who they are.  I can make them all pay for stealing so much of my life away.”  He swallowed, a heavy action that seemed that he was growing heavier with doubts like they were lead weights around his neck.  “And then… once they’re all dealt with… once they’re either behind bars or dead… things can go back to the way they were.”

And I can finally see Tali again, he thought with a pang.  If she’ll still have me.

But he had to put that aside for now.  Even though every fiber in his being was screaming for him to make a beeline for Rannoch so that he could see that house that Tali had presumably built, the last scrap of logic stayed him from doing just that.  Revealing himself would just put her in danger as well—the people that targeted him may set their sights on her as retribution.  And even though he had already been apart from her for too long—ten years too long—if he pulled this off, if he managed to reveal the corrupt root at the center of this whole plot, he would have the rest of his life to spend with that woman.

Just a little longer, Tali.  Please.  Please forgive me.

Ceraph tossed the datapad back onto the counter and stood with a shrug.  “So, where to?”

Shepard blinked.  Something in the turian’s voice threw him off.  It resonated a second later.  “Oh no.  If you even think for a second that you’re coming with—”

“I’m going to stop you right there,” the turian held up a finger, her voice taking on a more grating timbre than usual.  “Because I’m not about to let you—Commander Shepard—get out my sight without any allies.  There are people in this galaxy that would do anything for you because you gave everything for them.  Well, this is my chance.  And this is my ship, so you’re stuck with me either way.”

“I don’t need a—”

But Ceraph was unimpeded.  “You know my resume, my life story.  I can’t say that I’m much good in a firefight—you’ve already seen that—but I can do so much more.  You need a pilot?  I’m right here.  Some help with engineering?  Toss me a wrench.  Need to be patched up?  I’ll fuck up the stitching, but at least you’ll stop bleeding.”

A small smile crept along Shepard’s face and he considered the woman in front of him, finding it amusing that he had to crane his head back so that he could take in Ceraph’s height.

“And… if I needed a soldier?”

Ceraph breathed.  “That, I can’t give you.  But I can give you my loyalty.  And,” she added, sensing that little spark inside the commander that the void of space had not been able to extinguish, “forgive me for saying so, but who else can you trust right here, right now?”

Shepard wanted to open his mouth, to protest, but stayed frustratingly silent.

He had already scoured the extranet for any snippets that he could find on his old crew.  Liara had apparently made a small fortune by creating a security operations firm based on Ilium.  Wrex had his hands full as overlord of Tuchanka.  Jack apparently stayed with the Alliance, continuing to teach at Grissom Academy.  And strangely, he could find no history on Garrus except for a couple of short and terse interviews from after the war.  It appeared that the turian had taken his own advice to heart by retiring somewhere out of the public eye and living off the royalties from all the subsequent media that portrayed his likeness.

But none of them knew of their commander’s survival.  And was it worth the risk if he leaked to any of them that he was still alive?  Had the people that had held him captive created backdoor channels within the various governments?  The very act of reaching out to any of them was too much of a liability.  If his survival was exposed, the danger would lie dormant, but not be excised.

And Shepard knew that there was only one way to fully stamp out this danger to him and Tali: total and complete annihilation.

“I’m going to ask again,” Ceraph said, sticking her chin out, sloughing off the rust that had rendered her paralytic just hours ago.  “Where are we going?”

Shepard chewed his cheek.  Studied her for a second.

“Remember,” he finally said, as if the act of speaking was an effort, “a couple of days ago, you said there was going to be a signing ceremony on the Citadel?  Union Eterna gaining two new members, if I recall.”

The turian nodded energetically.  “The Omega Collective and the Rannochian Federation.  Do… do you want me to put in the coordinates for Rannoch?”

“No,” Shepard said, able to keep his voice from rasping.  “For Omega.”

“Omega?” Ceraph repeated, confused.  “Wouldn’t that be the last place you’d want to visit?”

The turian was talking sense, especially since Tali was probably somewhere on Rannoch right now, but Shepard remained steadfast.  “It’s a place where people who don’t want to be found go to disappear.  But, I have another reason for going there.  You ever been to Omega?”

“Once.  Layover.”

“Doubt it’s changed much.”

Ceraph eyed the ceiling.  “You might be surprised.”

“Then set a course.  Omega’s going to be our ticket to all this.  And besides, there’s someone there who owes me a favor.  A really big one.”

Chapter Text

“Good god,” Shepard exclaimed.

They were standing upon a broad footpath, about as wide as a boulevard for vehicles, at the bottom of a metallic canyon.  The ends of the gorge were limitless, either stretching on for what seemed like miles at one end, or obscured by the angles of the buildings and shops that lined its boundaries.  The light that seeped through the canyon was dull and ruddy, like a sun had been filtered through several clouds of dust and smog, though most of the illumination was employed by the strips of neon and holographics that adorned each storefront.

The sky, if he could call it that, was just an endless stretch of reinforced steel, with each sublevel of Omega simply stacked atop one another.  At some vista points, one could look out and see a forest of columnar protrusions—processing facilities—as wide as a freighter that seemed to either support the entire station or extend into the limitless gloom.  The protrusions were key parts of the station that provided either housing, commerce, or acted as valuable infrastructure for Omega’s mining operations.  And just past the jungle of these platform, the soft yellow glow of the station’s shields could be glimpsed at the far edges of all vision.  One step past that, and it was open space.

The next thing that shocked Shepard was the amount of passerby that threatened to crush him where he walked.  He had seen footage of foot traffic in the most heavily congested places in the world—New York, Tokyo, Thessia, certain parts of the Citadel—and this looked like it could very well rank among them.  The boulevard was packed with throngs of people, all dressed in attire that was a significant step up from the rough-and-tumble vestments he had seen ten years earlier, when Omega had been nothing but a waystation for gangsters and miners.  To drive that point home further, upon inspection of several of the storefronts, Shepard realized that he recognized many of the brands.  These were authorized resellers of luxury goods—not knockoffs—where one could purchase the latest in tech, fashion, and services.  He could discern fragments of music from a number of sound systems.  Even the chaotic lilt of carefree laughter.

The dichotomy of Omega’s appearance now versus the picture Shepard had maintained in his mind was nearly sending him reeling.  During his visits prior to the war’s end, Omega had a centuries-long reputation for being a center of lawlessness that was well-known not just to the region, but across the entire galaxy.  Omega did not have a central ruler, considering that the station existed outside of civilized space, with most of its enforcement having been carried out by the gangs that controlled each district.  Any sort of illegal activity imaginable, Omega had a market for it.  It was as close to a literal black market as one could imagine, which was probably why most races gave the station disdainful names as if its very existence was a blight against culture and progress.

Shepard could not help but stare at the throng of people.  Ten years ago, all of this would have been just a trickle of activity.  Most people had only traveled to Omega out of necessity, with each day spent on the station a new battle for survival. 

But here, he saw people in a state of relaxation.  Couples eating at noodle shops, embedded in their intimate conversations.  Teenagers hanging out around public gardens—actual greenery!—as they joked around and took pictures of themselves.  And just casual shoppers moving out and about with their hauls for the day, their clothes containing a noticeable dearth of places to conceal hidden weapons.

Omega, dare he say it, looked normal.

“We may have arrived at the wrong station,” he murmured as he walked shoulder-to-shoulder with Ceraph, the turian easily standing head-and-shoulders above most of the crowd.  Shepard, for his part, had donned a cap and facemask that Ceraph had kept on hand back on the Tien Extremis, which was docked at the civilian spaceport just a few blocks behind them.  Fortunately, Omega lacked ident scanners, so he was able to go through the security checkpoints without his identity being broadcast.  For the moment, anonymity was his.

“Lot different than when you saw it last, huh?” Ceraph managed to ask as she had to angle her body to avoid being jostled by passerby.

“That’s putting it lightly,” Shepard said, unable to keep his head from swiveling in all directions.  “I barely recognize the place.  I’ve seen less luxurious facades on Illium, and that was before I had shot them up.”

Ceraph laughed at Shepard’s quip.  They headed to a transit station and entered one of the lifts, which hurtled down hundreds and hundreds of stories at a dizzying rate.  The floor counter began to blur just above the door seals, the blinking light strobing against the two occupants.  The interior of the lift was stifling, but not to the point where it was claustrophobic.

“After Aria T’Loak had kicked Cerberus off of Omega, she was in a prime position to consolidate power from all across the station,” Ceraph explained.  “All of the gang leaders had been killed from the fighting, so there was a void for her to step right back in, one that was larger than when she last been in control.  In no time, she soon had influence over all the districts and she set to work at turning Omega legitimate after the war.”

“Had to have been a tall order,” Shepard momentarily removed his facemask so that he could scratch at the corner of his mouth.  “For a station that has operated so long the way it has, I’m surprised it was even possible in my lifetime.  Omega, a safe haven.  Doesn’t even sound right when you say it out loud.  And now, you’ve told me that Aria apparently has aspirations—political ones—outside of her self-made title.  Huh, always figured that Omega was enough for her.”

“Maybe she saw which way the wind was blowing.  Thought there was an advantage to be had.  Anyway, she set up an agreement with the provincial asari government—got them to lend her a few gunboats to guard the station, along with some of their engineers to start the rebuilding efforts.  She sent out communiques across the galaxy, offering Omega as a haven for refugees.  Apparently, there were a lot of people that were skeptical about the offer, but many took it out of desperation, as they didn’t have anywhere else to go.  But when they got here, they immediately conformed to Aria’s idea of a reformed Omega.  They put down roots.  Set up businesses.  Flourished, pretty much.”

“And now there’s a galaxy where people are proud to be Omegan,” Shepard mused.  “Aria T’Loak, clean and respectable.”

The very idea seemed contradictory.  The entire time Shepard had known Aria, she had made no presumptions about her status as a crime lord to him.  But she was a pragmatic one and Shepard found her to be very blunt during their interactions together.  She could have a slightly-unreasonable amount of bloodlust for those who wronged her, which Shepard had seen firsthand when he had helped take Omega back from Cerberus with her, but Shepard had never found himself in a situation in which he had gotten on the asari’s bad side.  She openly considered Shepard to be a righteous pain in the ass, but they treated each other civilly.

Shepard had thought that Aria would have still maintained that attitude of inflexibility, but the new veneer of Omega belied his mental image of the woman.  He had anticipated this upcoming meeting to have gone a certain way and now he was rewriting all of the potential outcomes in his head, on the fly.

By happenstance, Shepard flicked his gaze up to the floor counter.  “Afterlife is on sublevel 347,” he said as the counter whipped by that number.  Afterlife was the nightclub where Aria had managed her share of Omega from her private lounge, replete with strippers, drugs, and bad house music.

Next to him, Ceraph nodded as she consulted the map on her omni-tool.  “That’s right.”

“We’re not going to Aria?”

The turian pointed the floor control, to the button for sublevel 450 which read, “Omega Authority.”

“Like I said, gone legitimate,” Ceraph explained.  “I think Aria knows something about optics.  Can’t really run a functioning government from a club, right?”

“I suppose not,” Shepard agreed, feeling slow.  So much had changed and he was just struggling to catch up, almost like his brain had not yet adjusted to the notion that he was ten years removed from everything.

He had thought that Aria’s throne would have always been on Afterlife.  The woman had made it a point to use the club as the palace for her retinue, something that General Petrovsky had taken advantage of during his occupation of the station.  Perhaps it was that very predictable nature that Aria had been known for at the time that had caused her to move to new digs.  A change of scenery might have been just what she needed.

In truth, a part of him had been curious to see Afterlife again, if only for the nostalgia of its perceived safety.  With the club in full swing, one could easily forget that there was an entire galaxy past its walls.  Even with universal translators, one could hardly go two seconds without overhearing a conversation in another language, the software being unable to catch up.  The pulsation of the bass notes had a tendency to crunch within the ribcage.  The bartender made the drinks too strong, which made the entire dance floor tilt at impossible angles. 

There was only the here and now in Afterlife.  Enough to drown out the reality of a war.

The last time that Shepard had visited Afterlife was right after the end of the Omega campaign.  He had finished getting Aria re-installed as its de facto ruler and the Normandy had come to pick him back up at the docks.  Shepard had allowed the crew to make a supply run, considering that it would take several hours to prep the ship, and had allowed himself to be dragged back to Afterlife by Tali and Garrus, which had immediately resumed its neon infernos and searing azure projections.

The clientele in Afterlife had been sparse, which was mostly made up of gangsters trying to wind down after securing a major victory against Cerberus, but one by one, as they had gotten drunker, the crew had started to dot the dance floor, with many of them proving to be surprisingly talented, or at least more talented than what Shepard could ever manage.  He would always joke that he had two left feet, which seemed to beggar belief considering that the commander was such a coordinated and talented soldier and yet when confronted with such a tight choreography of steps and elegant body movements he would never fail to lumber around and stutter-step quite hopelessly, giving him the appearance of a rusting robot.

Shepard never forgot the last conversation that he had while there.  He had been sitting at the bar, Garrus next to him.  He was watching Tali on the dance floor, studying the movements of her feet, envious of her talents as she seemed to effortlessly glide into a pattern that she had apparently just created on the spot.  She seemed to become liquid, blending into the growing crowd, lost to the music, though every so often he could catch a glimmer from past her visor.  An invitation to join her.

It would take a great amount more of liquor to get Shepard to a state where he was going to accept that kind of embarrassment, so he had started to pound a few old-fashioneds just to get him to that point, the alcohol curling in his gut like a razor.

“Bet you could get a penthouse here for a decent rate now,” Garrus had been saying in between sips of his beer.

Shepard had coughed after he had swallowed his drink wrong, the alcohol gleefully raking at the back of his throat.  “Penthouse on Omega.  You’d only retire here if you were desperate.”

“Think Aria has a chance of cleaning up?”

“Does a bear crap in the woods?”

“I don’t understand the reference.”

“No?  Would’ve thought that you’d heard that one from Joker by now.” 

He had set his empty glass down on the counter and was about to order another when he felt a strong force tug at the back of his eyeballs.  He had settled in his seat, waiting for the drunkenness to simmer for a bit while he watched the crowd.  And Tali, who was by leagues the best dancer in the club, her introversion shed like the skin of a snake.

Elbowing Garrus, Shepard got the turian’s attention.  “What?” the turian had asked.

He had not answered at first, merely assigning the turian’s face in this moment to his memory, as if he wanted to keep a flash copy to reference for his future amusement.  “You’ve thrown so much aside just to be by my side for this whole crazy journey, Garrus.  I’ve barely had to ask, and you’ve always answered my call.  I could always count on you to drop everything if I wanted you to join me.”

Shaking his head, Garrus tried to cut the awkwardness by taking a draught of his beer.  “Come on, Shepard.  You’re just lucky that you came across the one turian who hadn’t figured out his life yet.  The only time where anything made sense was—is—when I’m working with you.  Doesn’t take a genius to figure out that I could reach my potential via you.”

“All the same, I can’t help but feel a little guilty.  All I’ve done was pull you away from your assignments.  C-Sec.  Your role as a military adviser.  Even the Spectres—”

“And I would happily let you pull me away from those assignments all over again,” Garrus disregarded.  “And the whole Spectres thing… you had nothing to do with that.  It was just family getting in my way.  For the right reasons… that they believe.”

“Do you still want the chance?”

When Garrus had glanced over, his expression had immediately arced into one of surprise.  “I’m… I don’t…” he stumbled.

“Garrus,” Shepard had reached out a hand and grabbed the man whom he could consider his best friend by the shoulder, “I haven’t told anyone this, but I think you should be the first one to hear it.”

“What?”

“Once the war is over, and if I survive—a significant distinction—I’m retiring.  Hanging up everything.  My rank.  My access.  I’m wiping the slate clean.”

Now the turian had rotated in his chair so that he could provide Shepard with his full concentration.  Off in the distance, the dancers continued to throb and writhe to the roaring music while a blue haze of cigarette smoke swirled overhead, but it was just a soft backdrop for the two soldiers.

“I’ve known you long enough that when you set your heart on something, you’re serious,” Garrus said.  “I guess you must’ve found some motivation for this decision.”

Glancing back over to the dance floor, Shepard had caught the sleek outline of the quarian dancing her heart out within the throng.  A little smile nearly shattered the commander’s stoic persona.  “Yeah, I guess I did.”

“Think it’s about time you indulged yourself?”

“I’m in agreement with you on that,” Shepard had said, groaning as he extricated himself off of the barstool.  “Oh, and one more thing.  The Council said that I have the option of either terminating my Spectre position outright, or considering my service record, I have the option of fast-tracking someone else for the position.  The endorsement of the man who saved their asses twice over counts for something, I guess.”

Garrus stared, the drink in his hand forgotten.

“Well?” Shepard mechanically shrugged.  “Still want to be a Spectre, Garrus?”

The turian nearly lost his grip on his beer.  “You’re not joking.”

“I take it that means you want the job?”

Attempting to stand from his own chair, Garrus nearly tripped over the ringed footrests, but Shepard placed a hand on the man’s shoulder, having the effect of stilling him.

“Take a night to think about it.  Take a week, if you have to.  A month.  I don’t care what answer you give other than it has to be what you truly want.”  He then tilted his head mirthfully.  “But for what it’s worth, I think you’d make an excellent Spectre.”

Patting his friend affectionately on the shoulder, Shepard finally turned to join the quarian on the dance floor, disappearing into the crowd as the rhythm blared on, sounding eerily like the drone of a Reaper’s horn.

The doors to the lift parted once they had reached sublevel 450.  Beyond was a lobby of sorts that just screamed governmental drabness.  It was threadbare, the walls a deep maroon that seemed like it was a paltry attempt to imitate mahogany.  Just a datapad upon a stand was propped up in front of a huge symbol embossed on the far wall, which Shepard supposed was the insignia of the Omega Collective.

Ceraph did the honors with the datapad—no telling if there were alternate scanners embedded into it that could read Shepard’s DNA just by touching its surface.  After flitting with the menus, Ceraph paused.  “This thing is just an appointment manager for the various bureaus,” she explained to Shepard.  “And none of them lead to Aria’s branch.”

“Great, so now even Aria has adopted the shortcomings of bureaucracy,” Shepard grumbled.  “Well, put our name down for something.  There’s got to be some functionary here that has no waitlist.  Maybe we can sneak into her office.  What’s the earliest wait time you can find?”

Selecting the button for the Hydroponics Bureau, which seemed like a benign option, Ceraph nearly cursed as she spied the waitlist.  “Two weeks is the earliest I can get.”

Shepard shook his head.  Waiting that long was not an option.  He had lost too much time already and he was not about to spend two weeks sitting around and doing nothing on Omega, no matter how much of a new shine it was projecting.

“All right, new plan,” he said as he walked past the datapad and around the insignia wall where there was set of double doors hidden just behind it.  The lock over the nearly invisible parting glowed an angry red like a baleful eye.

“Uh, Shepard?” Ceraph whispered as she stumbled in place, as if unsure if she should follow him or not, before she quickly shuffled behind the man.  “What exactly are you thinking?”

“A card I didn’t want to play this soon.  Root access.”

Holding his omni-tool over the lock, there appeared to be a spark that connected the door’s console to his own tech when his hack punched through the software, the icegates shattering around his intrusion like they were fragile panes of glass.

“Nice trick,” Ceraph drawled.

“A friend lent it to me,” Shepard said.  Then hastily tried to justify himself by saying, “For emergencies only, of course.”

“Of course.”

Beyond the set of double doors was a suspended bridge encased in reinforced glass that connected two of the station’s massive pylons.  Over the side was the vast matrix of wild space—Ceraph was getting vertigo by looking over the edge.  Above, through the transparent ceiling, they could see the spires of Omega reach out towards them, creating an image that a metallic growth had suddenly exploded out from the side of the halved asteroid.

At the far end of the spacebridge was another set of doors flanked by armored guards with that same Omega insignia adorning their pauldrons.  They strode up to meet Shepard and Ceraph, one of them raising a hand to halt them.

“State your business,” one of the guards gruffly commanded, his voice sounding scratchy from his helmet’s aging vocabulator.

Shepard folded his hands behind his back, trying to put on more of an official posture while Ceraph nervously glanced at him all the while.  “Yes, I was hoping to speak with Aria T’Loak about a personal matter.”

“Are you on Director T’Loak’s schedule?” the guard’s head cocked, emphasizing the title to correct Shepard’s unintentional slight.  “Identify yourself.”

“I have a feeling that she would want to hear what I have to say,” Shepard tried to play it cool, ignoring the directive that had been posed to him.  He then realized that he probably did look suspicious waltzing around in the Omegan offices while his entire face was obscured by a mask.  It didn’t exactly project trustworthiness.

But the guard was unyielding.  “The Director is not in the business of receiving trivial matters anymore.  Her concerns lay in the governance of the station—the individual bureaus around Omega should be able to assist with any questions related to housing, infrastructure, or business.  If you don’t have any official reason for your visit today—”

Shepard took a small step forward, causing the guard’s hand to minutely drop towards the pistol strapped to his waist.  The other guard had been hefting a rifle and Shepard noticed that he was readjusting his grip, obviously readying it in case things blew out of proportion in this glass tube.

Before things went sideways, Shepard took a breath and held out his palms to show that he was not here to act as a threat.  “Okay, I understand completely.  The Director is a busy woman and I don’t want to disturb her matters regarding the station.  I’m not here to cause her any trouble and I have no intention of dragging this out longer than necessary.”

“Good.  Then you can—”

“However,” Shepard made a face, adopting a more submissive posture, “if you could please just relay a message to her, I would greatly appreciate it.  It’s all I ask.”

The guard was silent for a few moments, processing this compromise.  “What kind of message?” he finally asked.

Shepard clamped down on his urge to breathe faster.  “A short one.  Just tell her: the chessboard was appreciated.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

The guard absorbed Shepard’s message and slowly gave a nod.  “Wait one moment,” he said before he walked back down the spacetube, the door sliding shut behind him.

The other guard did not make an effort to continue the conversation further, so Shepard and Ceraph were left to awkwardly stand in the middle of the bridge, shifting their weight from foot to foot upon the nonslip metal surface.

“Chessboard?” Ceraph whispered to Shepard, not understanding.

“Belonged to the general who kicked Aria off Omega,” Shepard explained.  “Aria didn’t want it.  So, she handed it off to me.”

The guard—the conversationalist—was back in just a couple of minutes and he pointed to Shepard as he marched back over to the spot he had left the two in.  “The Director insists that she speak with you face to face,” he said, not sounding all too happy about it.

Shepard resisted the urge to say something smug, so he made a conciliatory gesture towards the armored escorts.  “Lead the way.”

They were led through the double doors into a corridor of blank white plastic.  The floor was a series of slightly elevated discs, as if this had been part of a hospital at one point in time.  The guards maneuvered through a series of selfsame hallways and lifts, with each change in direction further disorienting the guests, which Shepard assumed was by design.

The labyrinth finally ended when the corridor finally became a tunnel of ebony black granite, capped by another set of doors with a glowing red hologram of Omega’s insignia blazing just over its surface like angry firecode.  The guards now flanked the door.  They would not follow the two inside. ^[1]

Beyond was an unusual room in the shape of a cylinder.  A steep staircase led downward, allowing access to a series of segmented levels that narrowed to a point at the bottom of the room, almost like a sinister amphitheater.  The far side was an entire window, allowing the occupants to gaze upon the massive bristles that exuded from the main station, along with the crimson glow of the shield generators that wrapped around the asteroid like a wreath that had been lit aflame.

At the bottom of the room, staring upwards at the staircase, was an asari in an angular black suit with the vaguest of white-gold accents that streaked across its breast.  She wore black boots with soles so thick that they could crush bone with the slightest of efforts.  The asari’s skin was royal purple, and the tribal accented facepaint that daintily marked her had not changed in the years that Shepard had seen her last.

Aria had on a scowl as Shepard, followed by Ceraph, made it to the ground level, so that the three of them were now staring eye to eye with one another.  “All right,” the asari said by way of greeting, beginning to stalk around the circumference of their level, “you got my attention with the chessboard comment, so why don’t you tell me who the fuck you are?  Only one person knows about that damn chessboard and he can’t exactly be reached these days.  So, an explanation or two would be highly fucking appreciated.”

Shepard matched the asari’s gait, getting into orbit within the confines of the dais. “After all this time,” he said as he reached up and removed the cap and facemask, revealing his shock of white hair and bearded face, “you still haven’t lost your acerbic edge, Aria.”  He smiled, trying to recall that expression that had never failed to irritate the asari to no end.  “Though I’m sorry to see that you no longer recognize me, but I’ll share some of the fault.  It has been a while.”

Eyes narrowed, confusion only registering for mere milliseconds.  A subtle chemical change took place, as though nerve pathways jittered and scrambled only to hastily reassemble themselves into a foggy morass.  Her back straightened and her head turned to the side, her gaze unable to be torn away from the man who had come back from the dead for the second time. 

“No.  No fucking way.”

“It’s nice to see you too—” Shepard smirked, but did not have enough time to fully voice his thoughts, for Aria suddenly whipped her arm forward, a canvas of glowing energy wrapped around her hand.  The biotic blast gripped Shepard around the waist, hurtling him towards the window and smashing his body against the surface with a resounding crack.  The pillar of force kept him pinned to the wall like a butterfly and the commander gasped in pain.

“Shepard!” Ceraph shouted and rushed toward Aria, but the former crime lord merely flicked a finger and a burst of biotic energy bounced around the turian’s legs, which threw her off balance and she tumbled to the ground with a grunt.

With Ceraph momentarily indisposed, Aria whipped her head back to face Shepard and strode forward a couple of steps, still holding Shepard feet above the ground in a crushing grip.  “You’re not making a fool out of me today.  I know all about the crazy shit that Cerberus was up to, but no one gets resurrected twice, not even Commander Shepard.  And as for the rumors that he had a clone running amok around the galaxy for a bit, yeah, I heard that too.  So, is that what this is?  You’re just the latest failed experiment that escaped containment and you’re trying to retrace the steps of your progenitor?  Too bad for you—I’m not particularly sympathetic to test tube cases.”

The weight of the immense biotic force on Shepard’s ribcage felt like a Mako tank was standing atop of him.  Even in his prime, he would have faced quite a match in Aria, who was one of the foremost biotic combatants that he had ever seen.  Her tactics were always aggressive, meant to overwhelm her enemies with superior force before they could apply their defenses against her.  She had honed her abilities over the course of centuries—she could even take on a krogan or two in hand-to-hand combat.

Yet, Shepard managed a tight grimace that slowly escalated into a crooked smile, despite it feeling that his chest was about to cave in.  “You know… as well as I do… that specific memories… can’t be transferred, Aria.”

“That a fact?” Aria spat, arching an eyebrow.

“I have… so many to… to choose from.  The chessboard… belonged to Oleg Petrovsky.  I first came to you… on Omega… to ask about… Archangel and Mordin Solus.

“Not like any of those were private.  Lot of people could know about those dealings.”

“Not… finished.  Your ex-lover was… Nyreen Kandros, who led the Talons… here… against Cerberus—”

“Okay, yeah, I’m going to stop your right there before—”

“She died… feet away… from Afterlife… because she wanted… to protect the civilians… which you never had any interest in—"

“I said enough!” Aria yelled as she yanked her hand away, breaking the connection that held Shepard against the window.  The man toppled to the ground, clutching his chest and coughing.  Aria backed up until her legs found a chair, but she did not settle herself into it, managing to keep herself upright, for the moment.

His ragged breathing subsiding, Shepard slowly got back to his feet, a hand planted upon his chest.  The mirth had disappeared from his face, replaced by a hard-edged steel.

“I probably could have handled that better, right?” he said before another spasm of coughs momentarily distracted him.  He then walked over to where Ceraph was and helped the turian back up.

The asari was just shaking her head in disbelief as she looked upon the man who had completely transformed within her sanctum.  “This isn’t possible.”  But the familiar features were starting to stand out, the more she focused on his face.  The posture, that far-away glint in his eyes.  No doubt he was who he said he was.

“I know.  Using the same trope twice, not exactly original,” Shepard replied offhandedly.  “Not that I had much of a choice either time.”

“But you died.  For real this time.  Earth… the Citadel.  And… you’re here.  Shepard, I only have one question, but what the fuck?”

“It might surprise you that I probably have that exact same question.  I’m still trying to find the answer, sadly.”

“Trying to—” Aria snorted before her face hardened into platinum.  “Wait, don’t tell me that you’ve been spending this last decade ‘dead’ for tax purposes?”

“I’d continue to joke about my return,” Shepard said, “but there isn’t much humor that I can glean from this.  Not this time.”  He idly glided a hand upon Aria’s desk.  “And speaking of time, I’ve already wasted enough of it.  Ten years’ worth.”

“And so, you make me your first stop?” Aria threw up her hands.  “I can’t tell if I’m supposed to be flattered or not, but do me a favor and fill me in?  Because I’m going to be honest, I have no fucking clue what is going on anymore.”

Shepard did not regard the question right away.  Instead, he turned in place so that he could see the gentle sweep of stars sparkle against the ragged peaks of the processing facilities.  “I’m liking the office, Aria.  It’s a more sophisticated view than what Afterlife had to offer.  Quieter, too.”

The former crime lord jutted her chin in pride.  If there was one weakness she had, it was a fatal desire flex her power to anyone within earshot.  “A new station required me to put on an atmosphere of respectability.  Couldn’t really do that in a venue of Afterlife’s reputation.”

Aria was not wrong, especially since an average night in Afterlife would usually play host to at least two murders, considering the reputation of its clientele.  Shepard himself had shot a couple of mercenaries in the club when he was briefly visiting and had also been subject to a poisoning attempt which had nearly claimed his life, though it had ended worse for the bartender after everything had been settled. 

“Did you ever reopen the rest of the club, considering the damage we did there when we were fighting Petrovsky’s Adjutants?” he asked, easily able to recall the time in which he had been firing a machinegun on full bore throughout the expanse of the deserted club, emptying a clip into a bipedal Reaper monstrosity with slick purple skin and eyes that glowed like neutron stars, his feet slipping on gore and ichor that blazed from the wounds he put in the creatures. 

The Reaper ground troops were tough by themselves, but Adjutants had been something completely different.  Resistant to standard arms fire, it took either a concentrated or precise effort to bring just one Adjutant down, and even then, it would take another clip to fully destroy its brain functions.  They had been a plague on Omega that had nearly claimed Aria’s life several times when they had encountered the monstrosities.

“It took a year for the remodeling to finish on the lower levels, but by then, I had already moved out into this,” Aria spread her hands, indicating the office.  She turned the plush leather chair around and sat on it—she gestured to the other chairs opposite the desk.  “I’m sitting.  You can stand, if you want.”

Shepard took one of the chairs, Ceraph next to him.  Aria then centered her sights upon the turian.  “And… who the hell are you?”

“Uh… Ceraph Kalinn,” she said, speaking slow so that she would not stumble over her words.  It was obvious that the brief violence had left her shaken, hammering home the fact that she was talking to a brutal warmonger.  “I’m… a salvager.”

“I see.  And you know the commander, how?”

“Ceraph was the one who found me,” Shepard said, coming to the turian’s rescue.  He placed a hand on the turian’s shoulder for emphasis.  “If you want a reason for my return, look no further.”

“Wait, wait,” Aria leaned forward and placed an elbow on the desk in front of her.  “’Found’ you?  Now I’m even more confused.  You’ve successfully caught me off guard with this dramatic return from the dead shit you’ve pulled, Shepard, so why don’t we just skip to the part where you connect all the pieces for me, okay?”

There had been a part of Shepard that reasoned for caution, especially when dealing with Aria.  Keeping the former crime lord in the dark was the best strategic option at his disposal, for it was like Ceraph had said: he didn’t know who his allies really were now.  He and Aria had always kept one another at arm’s length for all the time that they had known each other, a bond that had been thoroughly tested during their campaign on Omega when they had fought their way through the station’s streets, mines, and buildings together, frantically hurrying through one of the deadliest warzones as Cerberus sent wave after wave of troopers and Reaperized forces after them.  None of them had been in a position to fully trust one another and had kept up their partnership purely as a survival strategy.

Perhaps it was time that he started to let down his guard with Aria, considering the circumstances. 

Like a neuroelectric scrawl dictating a tome, Shepard laid himself open before the asari, telling the story of how he had been placed into cryo just after the Crucible had fired, how Ceraph had found his wayward pod, and that he had been spending the past several days healing and reintegrating himself, struggling to come to terms with the fact that he was a stranger in a strange land once again.

To her credit, Aria absorbed the story with an attentive and stone-faced expression.  She asked little questions, content to let Shepard set the stage and provide his theories of how he had come to be so displaced and to whom had been the cause of that displacement.

After Shepard had finished, Aria sat very still, turning over the fragmented pieces of the tale in her head.  “If anyone else but you had come to me with such an unbelievable tale, Shepard, I would have them thrown out before they reached the second act.”

“I don’t really think there’s any more bravado that can be added to it, honestly.  I just told you what I know.  The reality might be a whole lot more complex.”

“Then, I assume that, one of the reasons you’ve come here to Omega, to me, is because you think that I didn’t have a hand in your… absence, intentional or not.”

Shepard leaned back in his chair.  “I thought long and hard about it.  What could possibly be in it for you if you were involved?  I was a soldier, not a politician—I had no interest in interfering in your future with Omega.  I helped take it back for you, for crying out loud.  If anything, and yes, I’m being presumptuous for this moment, for what I did do to help you, what else would the remainder of your opinion of me be but gratitude?  Helping to throw me aside, in your position, makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.  You had everything you wanted by the end of the war.  What threat would I be to you?”

Aria had propped her head up with a hand under her chin as she listened to Shepard speak.  Her sharp features were just as pronged as the suit she wore, something diamondforged that rose above the boutique amalgams that plagued the streets in the levels above.

Without taking her eyes off of Shepard, she reached down to one of her desk’s drawers, opened it, and took out a bottle and three glasses.  She poured a clear liquid into the glasses and passed two of the filled ones to Shepard and Ceraph.  She took a sip of her own drink first to prove that it wasn’t poisoned.

“Vodka,” she said.  “From the west coast of some continent on Earth.  I forget which.  The usual stuff’s bland as shit, but this one has some local flavoring.”

Taking one of the glasses, Shepard sipped the vodka.  Aria was right, there was a subtle heat as well a savory underflavor.  Reminded him of peppers.  Next to him, Ceraph also drank, affirming her approval—hard alcohol was chiral-neutral and could be consumed by nearly every species without incident.

Aria drained her drink by half and set the glass down.  She hadn’t even grimaced when swallowing the alcohol.  “You are right, in that I can’t really think of any reason to fuck you over like that.  Though I will say, the only times I did openly fantasize about your demise when you were being such a righteous boy scout when we were here last.  Always trying to push me away from the path of revenge.”

Now Shepard cracked a smile.  If only she knew the war that was raging inside Shepard, but he decided to keep mum on his true feelings for now.  “You looking for an apology from me, Aria?”

“Why?  We both know it would be insincere.”

The asari topped off her drink while Shepard and Ceraph continued to sip theirs.  “Though,” she continued, “I should probably ask the most important question of the day.  The one that you were perhaps hoping that I would be too distracted to even ask about in the first place.  But, now that the shock has worn off, I don’t really have any other burning desire for any answers other than that to this particular question.”

The asari raised her glass, as though she intended to take a drink, but instead she adopted a glare of suspicion, the rim of the crystal catching the filtered light from the hazy sun.

“Why did you come to me first?  You had the Alliance, some old Spectre pals…”  Her eyes turned mirthful as the corner of her mouth gave a tweak.  “A certain quarian admiral, if I’m not mistaken?”

The mere intimation about Tali sent a knot twisting in Shepard gut, the vodka churning within.  With his last memory of her standing atop the ramp of the Normandy, torn sehni flapping in the stale breeze, blood dripping from half a dozen punctures, visor riddled with micro-cracks, her mournful words in his ear came to the forefront all too easily.

Gripping the armrest so hard that his tendons were noticeably standing out, Shepard forced himself to breathe.

Aria took Shepard’s silence as an answer and she raised a finger in the air.  “I’ll tell you why you’re here.  You’re here because you can’t rightfully trust anyone else.  You wake up ten years out of date and, surprise, everything’s changed.  And it’s not exactly what you expected, right?  But all that is window dressing.  What you crave to know, fighting against your nature to peer into that dark place that inhabits us all, are the names of who wronged you, but you want to do it carefully.  So, you decide not to rush things.  You’re careful, methodical.  You go to the one person that’s disconnected from your past and you’re absolutely sure has no reason to do you harm—me—and even though you’re completely right about that, it means that you want something from me and that this isn’t just a social call.”

When Shepard did not openly contradict her, Aria made a point to glance over at Ceraph, who seemed to be trying extremely hard to be invisible at this point in time.  Chuckling, Aria stood, taking her glass, and strode over to the window, watching the ore freighters lumber about between the processing hubs as they headed for the edge of the system, where the relay was, their precious cargo stowed in their brutal hulls.

“No doubt your new friend,” her voice dripped with sarcasm, “has told you of the fact that, in a matter of days, I will be heading over to the Citadel to ratify the Omega Collective’s new alliance with Union Eterna.”

“Yes,” Shepard spoke up, making a point to nod at Ceraph, though Aria could not see the gesture with her back to them.  “She did.”

The asari’s reflection made a smug look in the window.  “Then you probably imagined that renewing our acquaintance came with additional emoluments.  You’re not a political creature, Shepard, but you do know the benefit of having a politician in your pocket.”

“I would hope you don’t think of me that crude, Aria,” Shepard said, something twisting in his gut.

“No, it just means we always had more in common than I thought.  Or that you were always capable of sinking to my level.”

Shepard struggled not to pale.  Aria was someone who knew revenge well and had detected Shepard’s true intention when he had told her his story.  He should have known that she would see through him, especially when it came down to satisfying his own vengeance.  Aria had lived such moments on an exponential scale than he ever could experience.

Turning, Aria’s expression seemed to appear as a mask.  “Well, you’re here now, aren’t you?  Even if you haven’t made any requests verbally, it’s the fact that we’re having our vis-à-vis that gives away your intention.  Cashing in on a favor, after all this time, thinking I would honor it?”

When Shepard remained silent, Aria downed the rest of her vodka and walked back over to the desk so that she could set her empty glass down upon it.

“You think they’re that powerful, huh?”

Shepard tilted his head and blinked.  “What?”

“The people you’re after.  Come on, Shepard.  You came to me because Omega is suddenly going to have its fifteen minutes of fame once I sign that document.  I’m your route to the front line of the political action in this galaxy, and since you think that associating me is your best route to a normal life, you probably have given it some thought that the people you might be chasing are, in fact, also politically linked.  Or at least, you think they’re governmentally connected, not to mention they’ve got a good number of resources at their disposal.  They must, considering how they took you out of the picture for a while.”

Staring up at the former crime lord, Shepard could do nothing but continue to blink, not knowing what to say.  Aria, perceptive as ever, had the uncanny knack of reading between the lines when she was not looking to rip apart her enemies limb from limb.  It was what had made her so dangerous when she was acting as Omega’s so-called “queen.”  Clever and careful—a combination for longevity.

Slowly, he set his half-finished glass of vodka down on the table in front of him.  He then made a conciliatory gesture with his hands.  “I can’t be in a position to underestimate anyone anymore, Aria.  I need to assume the worst regarding the people I’m after.”

“This coming from the man who talked me out of ripping Petrovsky’s head from his shoulders with my bare hands.  But these people made one critical mistake: they left you alive.  And I’ve seen what you can do when you’re assigned a mission, Shepard.  The Reapers thought they had you beat and now look.  Where are they now?”

Undeterred, Shepard stood, a steely gaze upon him.  He narrowed his eyes and acquiesced with a soft nod after a moment’s hesitation.

“All I have are theories, Aria.  Theories that, by and large, you’ve pretty much guessed.  I don’t know the identities of who might have put me in cold storage for a decade.  But seeing as I was set out of the way for a reason, it stands that they thought I was going to be a hindrance to them in the future.  Which means that my disappearance couldn’t be attributed to a local crime lord or someone so small-minded.  My existence was directly threatening some belief, some intention.  And the only way to bring about change in a post-war galaxy is to be part of the government that’s reshaping it.  And Union Eterna is the key.”  He grabbed for his vodka glass again and downed its contents, the liquid so smooth there was little of the alcohol burn that ravaged his throat afterward.  “So, to be close to the center of political development, is to be close to the group that stole all that time from me.  They’ll show themselves.  They have to.  And I need to be there.”

Aria considered the man at the opposite end of the desk.  She had spent several human lifetimes looking down on others from on high, but there had always been something special in Shepard that forced her to see him at his level.  It maddened her to no end.  Perhaps it was his indomitability, his naturally unyielding nature.  Aria had seen enough of it reflected in herself.

“When you find them,” she asked, “will you kill them?”

For a long moment, Shepard didn’t answer.

“I don’t know,” he finally said.

The smile that Aria made was not a mocking expression, but one of sympathy.  Wavelengths condensing, blurring, merging.  “You really have changed,” she marveled.

She crossed the room, making a point to not maintain eye contact, content to simply pace in her little quadrant, her arms crossed. 

Then, she asked, “So, what did you bring with you?”

The question was simple, but it caught Shepard off guard enough that she shared a look with Ceraph before he whipped back over to Aria.  “I’m sorry?”

“Weapons.  Equipment.  When going up against a conspiracy, it’s generally considered good preparation to come with as much firepower, if not more, than their supposed antagonists.”

When neither Shepard nor Ceraph immediately replied, Aria got the message.

She gave a noise of frustration, rolled her eyes, and started to head back up the stairs, making a rapid gesture for the two to follow.  “Come on.  You’re not going to get your revenge by orating someone to death this time.”

Aria’s personal armory used to be a conference room.  Shepard could tell because she had not yet deigned to remove the wide walnut table that spanned nearly the entire length and width of the room, which was dotted by swiveling chairs upholstered in black calf.

The armory itself was not that far removed from Aria’s main office, which made sense considering the crime lord-turned politician had had centuries to develop her paranoia.  Easy to understand, considering that death threats in her own club had been somewhat of a regular occurrence, and the sting of losing Omega to Cerberus was something that was going to weigh on her heavily for years on end, perhaps a hundred, for there was nothing more embarrassing or humiliating than getting one’s turf stolen out right from under them.

Nine wide rectangular lights in the ceiling snapped on as the group entered.  Upon the table, a variety of assault weapons in various states of assembly had been dispersed, their gunframes scratching at the veneered surface.  Bottles of liquor and half-filled glasses were scattered amongst the weapons, along with the occasional ashtray.

But Shepard’s attention was focused on the walls, which were lined from head to toe with every single type of weapon that he could imagine.  He recognized many of the models, some of which were illegal in Citadel space, and there were a couple of futuristic guns that Shepard guessed had only just been released in the last ten years.  There were rifles, shotguns, pistols, grenades, submachineguns, and there was even a geth Spitfire over in the corner, a sort of plasma minigun and very hard to come by outside of what used to be geth space.

Shepard took one of the shotguns, a pump-action model, and inspected it.  He tested its weight, racked the slide twice, and slid his fingers over the controls.  “Could’ve used a few more rooms like these ten years ago,” he said Aria, who was walking along the other side of the table.

“My sentiments exactly.  I will say that there are many more rooms like this one dispersed throughout Omega, but this one contains the weaponry that I saved for myself.  The old adage rings true, for if you want something done properly, a rocket launcher tends to erase most problems.”

Shepard snorted as he placed the shotgun back upon its rack, exchanging it for a particularly large submachinegun with a medium-range scope attached to its topmost rail.  “Were it that simple,” he pulled back the charging level of the weapon and slapped the handle so that it slammed back into place.  “So, are you just going to let me have my pick right off the shelf, Aria?”

The asari made a beckoning motion with a hand as she walked over to the corner of the room.  “You have the pick of the litter, but there is one item here that I think you’ll be most interested in.”

That same violent glow exuded from Aria’s hand again, and the asari gently splayed her hand out.  From behind the table, a heavy crate rose into view, the edges glowing that selfsame shade of purple.  Aria moved her arm and the crate followed, until she gently eased off the biotics and the enormous object settled upon the table with a thud.

Shepard examined the crate, the serial number stenciled on the side capturing his interest.  “Well, it’s Alliance equipment,” he said as his mind worked to interpret the numbers.  “From… Luna?  Interesting.  That’s where one of the skunkworks divisions is located.”  Then he focused on the top of the crate and he did not miss the symbol that adorned the top right next to the electronic lock.  “N7.”  He looked over at Aria, his eyebrows raised in a position of mock judgment.  “Not really something you can pick up at any sporting goods store.”

Aria shrugged, but her smile told volumes.  “Just a little something I came across.”

“Let me guess.  Stolen?”

“Why Shepard, your accusations hurt,” Aria said in exaggerated scathing tone.  “You’ve read Omega’s travel advisories in that it is highly recommended to keep all valuables stowed and secure while visiting this station.  At least, back then it was far less safe.  But the advisories applied to everyone, including a platoon of N7 troops who may have been stationed on Omega during the last days of the war.  Cerberus was still being flushed out, pockets of resistance were flaring up now and then.  There was still a lot of chaos to sift through—a missing crate or two could easily go unnoticed in the melee.”

He could only make a noise of derision, his scowl lacking substance, as he flipped the latches to the crate.  But there was no point in chiding Aria for the theft, for he was not in a position to act as adjudicator. 

The electronic lock to the crate had been disabled, allowing him immediate access. ^[2]

Inside was an abstract shape of a foam packing unit and underneath, sheathed in plastic film, looked like obsidian plating that had been forged from the heart of a volcano.

“Some kind of prototype,” Shepard observed aloud.  “But… lighter and thinner than most combat armor.”

“Had some eggheads take a close look at the thing a while back,” Aria pulled up one of the soft chairs and sat down, crossing a leg.  “It has all the latest tech.  Hard shields.  Ablative plating.  There’s a voice modulator built into the helmet so that you’ll be able to disguise yourself in case anyone recognizes that gruff timbre of yours.  The armor even has wavelength suppressors embedded in the material so that no one can get any ident readings off of your implants, and on top of that, its built-in modifier allows you to alter your local-field implant broadcasts.”

“So that I can not only prevent someone from scanning me and finding out my identity, but I can use it to project a completely different identity as well?”

“I’d imagine it’s a feature that you could immediately find a use for.”

Sifting around inside the crate, Shepard began removing some of the plastic-wrapped pieces, but the surprises had not yet ended.  Underneath, sandwiched in the middle between the pauldrons and the chestplate, was a piece of apparel made out of some kind of composite fabric.  Shepard rolled it out onto the table.  It was a large trench coat that had been decorated in the traditional N7 coloration—the insignia upon the right breast and the red and white stripes running all the way down the right sleeve.  The interior was quilted red leather, but the material was tensile.  Stab-proof.  Additionally, given the weight of the coat itself, and when Shepard felt the thickness of it, there had to have been some additional armor sewn in the lining.  This thing could take several shots and he would be able to walk away with only bruises, even without a working shield generator.

“Didn’t think that something like this would be standard-issue,” he noted aloud, finding the overall getup to be way more stylish rather than functional, especially for something with N7 branding on it.  It reminded him of the sort of armor that Alliance Intruders would wear for spec-ops wetwork, opting for flowing lines instead of brutal angles.

“Try it on, see how it fits,” Aria said.  “I’m interested to see how my bodyguard is going to look in it.”

Shepard paused in the middle of unpacking, raising an eyebrow.  “Bodyguard, huh?”

“Well, if your whole plan was to use me as a way into the center of politics, it’s only fair that I use you as my protection.  Besides, with you at my side, you’ll be able to go anywhere you want.  Unlimited access for the politicians plus their retinue.”

“And me, too?” Ceraph asked.

Aria looked to the ceiling and then to Shepard.  When she saw his head tilt downward, his eyes lidded upward in an expectant look, she shrugged.  “Shepard has an eye for talent—have seen that firsthand.  So, what do you bring to the table?”

“She’s a pilot,” Shepard called over from where he stood at the table.  “And a damn good one, from what I’ve seen.”

Ceraph swelled in pride and Aria seemed to take the turian a bit more seriously, considering the weight of the soldier’s endorsement.  She then gently guided Ceraph to the door by placing a hand upon the small of her back.  “We’ll give you a few minutes.  And be sure to check the bottom of the crate.  You might like what’s there.”

Shepard waited until the two ladies had left the room before he started to undress.  The armor itself was composed of a bodysuit that melded to his frame like nylon, only there was an extreme tensile strength in the fibers that could resist even a krogan’s grip.  The bodysuit had latch points that Shepard could fit the armor to, and in no time Shepard’s exterior looked like a chitinous beetle, framed by the plating that was as light as carbon fiber but as tough as diamond.

After fastening the boots, Shepard finally threw the coat around himself.  The collar was high and nearly came up to his cheekbones, and the trapping flowed around his calves.  He tested the flexibility of the coat and found that it did not restrict his movements as much as he feared.  Hell, his old N7 armor was far less amenable to his range of movement than this.  And, he noted, the shield generator was built into the coat itself, which paired with the generator in his bodysuit, effectively compacting the design.  The entire getup was several kilos lighter than his old armor and, from what Shepard could tell, he had inherited no drawbacks whatsoever.

He started to have the feeling that he was going to appreciate this new armor very much.

The helmet was a lobed teardrop of obsidian glass, with hollowed cheekbones and faint strips of red neon at the base of the neck.  He turned it over in his hands, studying its atomically perfect surface, noting the simmering sheen that seemed to well from beneath the smoked material.

Upon putting it on, the HUD glimmered to life automatically, sensors in the helmet scanning his retinas and forming the biolocks that would only allow him usage of the software.  Shepard took a minute to familiarize himself with the display, which had gone through a few updates since he had been last active in the service, but the function of each area of the HUD still possessed the same functionality that he was used to, so it did not take much of an effort to learn the basics.

At the bottom of the crate was a small case.  It looked like a pistol case.  He opened it up.

Inside was a sleek pistol model that reminded him a lot of the experimental M-11 models that had been developed by the Alliance.  Only this one was smaller, colored volcanic beach black, and was equipped with an integral sound moderator that had been screwed over the barrel.  Something like this could be fired and people five feet away from the report would mistake the gunshot for a cough.  When Shepard picked up the weapon, his HUD flashed golden icons just above his grip: “M-20 [Suppressed].”

Shepard hefted the weapon, testing its weight.  It had a good balance to it—the suppressor’s impact on its center of gravity would be offset when it was fully loaded with thermal clips.  He looked down the iron sights and found them to be more than acceptable.  He would have to take this apart at some point, spread out its components like an elaborate puzzle, and learn it, inside and out.  It would be a perfect instrument for the intentions that he had in mind.

He was still examining the weapon by the time Aria and Ceraph both entered the room again.  Framed by the searing white light of the walls from behind him, his form positioned in front of the racks of weapons, the masked commander regarded the asari and the turian that approached him, for a moment appearing as a sleek guardian, a lobe of searing halogens warping around the curvature of his helmet.

Aria pursed her lips, taking in the sight of the man.  “You’ll make the emblematic bodyguard yet, Shepard.”

But it was Ceraph who was the least reserved of the two.

“You look fucking awesome, Shepard.”

The homeworld.

Look at a map of the galaxy.  Focus the cursor at the top right, near the arm at the thirty-degree mark.  Zoom in.  Program the map to display the solar output in this quadrant.  Your map becomes blinding, every star being visualized as trillions of zettabytes of data upon the scale.  All quadrants flood as solid light.  Filter out the noise.  Up the scale—cool the map down.  You can now see the gentle pinpricks of the cosmos, the trafficking of information along the ancient route of the mass relays.

Focus on the endpoint at the relay’s endpoint here.  Your map labels the star “Tikkun.”  Filter out the data even more.  Planets come into existence, most inhabiting the space outside of a massive ring of rubble.  Parse the data one more time.  You see flickers of light surrounding the first planet from the star.  The pulse of plasma thrusters.  The gleam of satellites and stations.  Evidence of life.

The world is Rannoch.  The small sun casts the even smaller oceans into pits of vast blackness.  The surrounding continents are dimmed in purpled and grayed hues.  Clouds are sparse, appearing only as faint wisps, though near the poles, you can see building cumulus start to grow dark with convection.

A natural harbor at the northern continent, where a nearby array of lakes and isthmuses act as a rugged labyrinth.  Focus your view here.

There, at the edge of the sea, upon the cliff’s face.  A dwelling casts a loping shadow upon the parched ground. 

Zoom in.  Carefully. ^[3]

The twilight sky sparkles with cosmic brilliance through the windows.  Stars appear frozen in the air, as though as a giant has just thrown up a handful of dust.  Galaxies curl in the backdrop like fiery whips, lashed from their gravitational perches to carve the heavens in twain.

The light of Tikkun scrapes through the veiled blinds, casting upon the interior of the house.  The floor is concrete, so smooth that even fabric glides across it.  The trappings of the interior are spare, whatever furnishings are inside are minimalist.  The person who lives here does not care about material items, only that they serve their intended function.

A voice floats through the air.  Quiet.

“…they will never have to know…  they will never have to know the challenges… the challenges… they will never have to know the challenges…”

The house itself is quite large, two stories, though some of the rooms remain unused.  The doors to these rooms have not been opened in months.  Some, in years.

The evening sun glances upon the low couch that is faced away from the window, the glass of which makes up the entire wall.  Embedded holographics in the glass display the time and the weather, limited to only the most basic of information available via the extranet.

Moving through the kitchen, a small table in the shape of a square sits in the center of the room.  There are two chairs at the table, though one always remains pushed in.  The kitchen counters are spotless, devoid of any kitchenware.  It almost appears as if the house had just gone on the market, despite the fact that its inhabitant had been living within it for years.

A set of sliding glass panels opens up onto a wide balcony that faces the ocean, positioned near the edge of the cliff.  The purpled air has begun to turn shades of orange, like massive plumes of flames were razing the very sky while the limpid sea also began to glow the same shade, a lake of lava.

The light was only broken up by the lone figure who stood upon the deck, a datapad in one hand while their other made a flowing rhythm in the air like a conductor while she faced the churning waters below.

“…after a decade of preparation,” they were reading off their datapad, “the Rannochian Federation has joined its esteemed… no, the flow isn’t right.  Dictation: move string sixty-four ahead of seventy-two.  Find the rhythm.  Slow down.  Relax.  Try again.”

The enviro-suit she wore was a puzzle of blacks and grays.  The armor that wrapped around her abdomen and wrists was polished to a mirror sheen.  Inserts of a platinum-like metal sparkled upon her shoulder plates.  And the fabric that she wore, a long flowing garment that stretched behind her back like twin tails, wrapped around her head like a shawl.  A sehni.  Quarian fashion did not adhere too much to a philosophy of ostentation, but the woman wore the more regal stylings as proof to herself that she had earned such a privilege, considering all she had won and lost in her life.  In the comfort of her home, she could don whatever she pleased, while out in public, her attire tended to skew towards a more militaristic motif.

Next to her, upon a small table, a sleek facemask sat looking upon its owner.  The pale metal made a singular sweep that cupped the jawbone, with twin atmo intakes embedded on either side of the mask’s lower half like starfighter pulse engines.  The curved surface was opalescent, glimmering with an almost nebulonic hue.  One could see the universe in its reflection.

The quarian kept reading off of her datapad, her poise firm and dignified, as her voice was clearly articulated to the undulating ocean and to the graceful spires of rock that cupped the harbor, reflected grayly in the light of the dying day.

Then, the omni-tool upon the quarian’s arm flashed.  Incoming call.

Without turning, she set down her datapad, exchanging it for the mask.  There was a gentle series of metallic clicks, a hiss of atmosphere, and Tali’Zorah turned in place as she hit the accept button.

“Shuttle’s en route, Admiral,” a voice on the other line spoke.  “ETA ten minutes.”

“Thank you,” Tali said with sublime confidence, a gleam in her eyes sparking through the vibrant barricade that sealed her face away from everything and everyone.  “I’ll be waiting outside.”

Chapter Text

The Yarren had been a cargo-hauler at the beginning of its life.  Spanning a nearly a kilometer in length, the asteroid-scarred ship had been outfitted with the sole design of hauling ore from all corners of the galaxy.  Whatever the type of ore was, the official records had surreptitiously vanished long before the registration had been traded to its current owners, but scans of the material deposits that were laced within the hull had revealed traces of heavy metals and eezo. ^[1]

The quarians had converted the ship into a military cruiser upon acquiring the ship as part of a trade with the turians a few years ago in exchange for mineral rights in a limited quadrant of the sector.  It had undergone a total conversion while in drydock, in which weapons emplacements had been installed, the shields upgraded, and the hull outfitted with thicker sections around critical areas.

All of the extra development was worth it, as the quarians had been keen on making the Yarren the newest flagship of their fleet.  Battle-cruiser and transport all at once, a bruiser of a ship.  They had learned a few tricks of the trade since their near-total rout at Rannoch and were not keen on making the same mistakes again.

Tali stood at one of the lozenge-shaped windows on the third deck, staring down at the glow of Rannoch below, which was slowly shrinking away as the Yarren’s phased engines thrummed with pulselight, sending the vessel towards the relay at the edge of the system.  She remained there as her own reflection grew more pronounced against the glass, her image now brimming with layers of extra armor at the shoulders, legs, and collar, making her appear like she was partially encased in obsidian.  She tried to keep her eyes on the thirty-first parallel, near where the bays of limestone and granite fractaled in their never-ending chaotic perfection. 

Her house was down there, somewhere, basking in the tender light of Tikkun amidst the softly unfurling oceans nearby.  She laid a hand across the window, as if she could cup the planet in her hand, like a fruit.

It was the most beautiful world she could ever imagine.

There was some cosmic luck in that Rannoch was on the edge of the goldilocks zone of its solar system—a few degrees off its elliptical orbit and it would veer too close to Tikkun and the oceans would boil, the vegetation would burst aflame, and the atmosphere would dissipate away, leaving the world no different than another lump of rock and minerals.  Too far in the other directions and whatever liquid was on the surface would snap-freeze, the atmosphere dissipating away like a memory.

The terminator between night and day was starting to creep around the western edge of the world, where the deepest of canyons dug in like blackened scars.  The tops of the tallest mountains were brushed with a white so blinding it was as if a texture pack had failed to load.  Furrows of green lay nestled in taut valleys and encrusted around the rims of freshwater lakes.  Patches of clouds withered under the unforgiving stare of the sun—Rannoch was mostly desert, but contained thousands of natural underground aquifers that allowed life to survive.  Tali had visited some of the caves herself and had been in awe at the sheer size of the riddled domes, the soft undulation of light as reflections folded across the glistening ceilings.  Enough water for millions.  Billions, even. 

The stories from her elders and the sole surviving pictures from the past had certainly not done the world any justice.

As the night slowly scraped across the land, Tali could see the glowing arteries of transit lines as they split away from the gridded nexuses of the cities that appeared as oceans of orange light.  While the cities themselves were little more than towns, the quarians could set development at a record pace now that they had an entire world to expand upon.  With such a small population, the quarians were confined to just a few hubs of civilization on Rannoch’s surface, which meant that building up the infrastructure would not be as widespread as a city on Earth’s, but that did not mean that they did not have the will to try.  They now had time, and lots of it.

They managed to build up several geothermal and fusion plants in such a short timespan, even going so far as to restart some of the infrastructure that had been left behind by the geth.  They had dammed several rivers, storing up years’ worth of freshwater reserves.  They had even installed miles and miles of quantum-optic fiber already, giving at least seventy percent of the population a working extranet connection, not to mention setting up a robust sewage system with the help of human engineers.  The quarians’ new government, the Rannochian Federation, had even gone so far to set up a bureau for the purposes of land management—it was even in the process of surveying land to mark as parkland for all quarians to enjoy, zoning them away from any development forever so that everyone would be able to appreciate the world’s natural beauty once a viable population was better entrenched.

Tali had traveled all over the galaxy, seen the most amazing galactic phenomena to the naked eye, and had been present for some of the most cataclysmic and terrible warfare imaginable, but the sight of Rannoch never failed to transfix her every time she was in orbit.  It was a ritual of hers whenever she was departing or arriving to be beholden in its majesty—she just needed to catch as much of a glimpse of it as possible and store it to her memory. 

The sight never got old, for it reminded her that after three hundred years of being forced to live in the desolate void, her people doomed to reap the sins of their fathers, the quarians had finally, finally, come home.

The gift you gave me.  One I can never repay.

Her hands clenched at her side and her breathing slowed to a crawl as she beheld the retreating world in her view. 

How many hours had she spent on the Normandy recounting this very dream aloud, she wondered?  Staring at the homeworld with her very eyes and not through a screen, fantasizing of a time when she could stand upon its surface, the children of the past touching immovable earth under their boots. 

By the time she had been born, the quarians spoke of Rannoch as if it were a mythical place.  A perpetual goal that was almost destined to be unachievable, for the geth that had roamed the system, having pushed out their creators through a brutal extermination process, were too powerful to go up against in a straight-up fight.  There were those on the fleet who had seemed hell-bent on ensuring that they would set foot on the homeworld someday no matter the cost, but there were others who did not share the same dream as their counterparts, having given up on it long ago as they imagined that its pursuit was tantamount to courting death, a folly, that to save Rannoch would be intertwined with the death of its true people.

Had there been another few years of no gain and Tali reasoned that she would have become more cynical towards that very dream.  She might have joined that growing part of her brethren in deserting it altogether.  Her people’s slapdash attempt to exile her through no fault of her own had acted as an accelerant towards her overall jadedness, jeopardizing her trust in the admirals that had led the fleet for the past three centuries.  For a small period, even she had willingly abandoned the dream of her father, considering it to be an impossibility.

If only she could have imagined the impact that one man could bring, upending everything she thought she knew and changing her entire life in the blink of an eye.

Whatever she had thought in the past now remained there.  Rannoch belonged to her people again. 

And, through this period of upheaval, Tali had unexpectedly found herself being granted the position of admiral, her previous attempt to exile her apparently forgiven (but not by her), and her role now allowed her to confer with the other admirals that she had spent most of her life looking up to, and in some cases, trying to live up to.

“Everything I ever wanted…” she whispered hoarsely at the window.  Or so I thought.

Absentmindedly, she reached up and plucked at the hem of her sehni, which she had swapped out prior to embarking on the shuttle that had linked up to the Yarren afterward.  Instead of the long and flowing garment that she wore at home and during certain public occasions, this one adhered more tightly to her body, retaining a similar angular shape to when she had first become an admiral, and before that, just after she had completed her Pilgrimage.  The series of ice waves against the purple backdrop was still the same, but Tali had added razes of red that seemed to scar the swelling currents, blasting them apart with shafts of radiance.

The homeworld shrunk down to the size of a gourd.  Then a holodrone.  Then a speck.

And then, as the Yarren’s engines gave an oscillation, it was pushed into the searing azure curtains of FTL, her homeworld now far out of reach.

Since there was nothing for Tali to look at through the window anymore and she didn’t need to be on the bridge for an hour, she turned away, heading down the nearby corridor, hands folded behind her.

Armored marines snapped salutes to her as she sidled down the spinal halls of the Yarren—Tali had to respond to each one with gestures of her own.  Not so easy in the narrow confines of the deck, especially when one had to plaster themselves to the wall so that they could slip by one another.

The constant saluting quickly grew monotonous.  Ten years of performing the same action had completely dulled any thought she gave towards the maneuver, but not towards the respect she embedded in every occurrence.  These men and women looked up to her, trusted her to lead them.  She had to prove to them that their trust was well-placed.

It was still unbelievable to her.  If Tali was able to look at herself from ten years ago and had seen the progress, would have dismissed the probability outright that she would have been uplifted in both stature and position. 

To think, that all she had wanted in the beginning was a house on Rannoch.  A window with a view, as well.

She performed a cursory inspection of the rooms along her route, not doing it as part of an unpleasant surprise to her crew, but as a way for her to gauge the layout of the ship.

The closest room was a literal cyberwarfare suite, in which a half-dozen quarian operators lay upon reclined ergonomic chairs, their suits hooked up to high-powered consoles where they navigated the matrixes of shipboard systems in a 3D, virtual-reality environment. 

A machine bay lay just beyond—poking her head in, Tali saw technicians from the Special Teams branch of the fleet poring over old geth cadavers, which were suspended in various positions.  Holographics wrapped around the dead forms while several quarians poked, prodded, and sliced at them while frantically recording their observations into their portable terminals.  The geth were not liable to wake—the Crucible wave had seen to that—but it still gave Tali a chill knowing that her people had resumed their dispassionate dissection of the synthetics.  After all the efforts that Legion had gone through to prove that the geth—his people—deserved life, it seemed to Tali that the quarians had taken a step backwards towards recognizing that right, but she was not in a position to dissuade the higher-ups.  “A matter of state,” had been the answer when she had previously objected, and the ordeal was soon closed.

The veins of the ship were abuzz with activity as she moved back into the hall.  Tali had to endure an assault of people, military and civilian alike, greeting her with utterances of “Admiral.”  She tried to convey her acknowledgement to each one, but there were far too many for her to recognize without stopping in place.

Such encounters were not new for her.  The days after the war had been the most hectic for her as an admiral.  Upon returning to Rannoch, she had been met by a litany of people who had been on the verge of hopelessness.  There had been crowds thousands of people deep at the refugee areas—she had been swarmed by people wanting to shake her hand, to provide her with their blessing and thanks for saving them.  The little children had scattered around her feet, wanting her to regale them with war stories.  She had never been claustrophobic before, but the panic had proved to be too much.  It had been so bad that these incidents had nearly caused her to go into attacks, but she had managed to salvage the remnants of her courage before her sanity had slipped away. 

Thankfully, the past several years of experience, plus her PR training, had dulled the knife edge of anxiety that slipped between her ribs every time she was in a room of more than three people whose attention was all diverted upon her.  She would have been a quivering mess today had she not tried to seek help.

Entering one of the Yarren’s many cargo bays, Tali stealthily climbed up one of the yellowed and peeling catwalks, watching the scene from above. ^[2]

Stevedores and mechs prowled the floor of the bay, all of them donned in suits with high-visibility accents.  The mechs were off-the-shelf models with no intelligence matrixing, built to be cargo haulers only.  Above, a few cranes built into the ceiling prowled among the rafters, guiding intermodal containers from stack to stack.  One of the containers swung a bit as its momentum from the cabling that held it slowed, suspended in air.  The operator to the crane cab opened a safeguard, flipped a switch, waited a patient second, and punched the release—the cables unwound through their spools and the ISO lurched onto the stack with an ominous groan.

Tali leaned over the guardrail as she soaked in the sight of the chaos of the cargo bay.  Dockers were feverishly working to secure ISOs to crane hooks so that they could be lifted, maneuvered, and sorted.  Workers even installed thruster packs on some of the suspended containers, allowing them to be more precisely maneuvered while in midair.  There was a warbling of superheated air along with vague cones of purpled flame that exuded from the thrusters and a thin whine spread throughout the bay.

She found all of this to be odd, considering that the stacks of containers did not look at all precise—some of them were crooked, others unevenly stacked.  Generally, sorting the cargo would have been done when the ship was in port, docked at a cargo bay.

She spotted the foreman walking just below her.  Hard to miss, especially since he was barking out orders to his men, his demeanor crisp and precise.  For quarians, military service was mandatory—for some, it was hard to fully leave that life.  Tali wondered what rank this man had managed to attain at the peak of his career.

When he was done dispensing his instructions, Tali called out from above, “Gross tonnage or tare weight?”

The foreman’s head snapped to both sides, trying to determine who had just spoken out of turn.  He then raised his head, about to deliver a snide remark, when Tali saw the man’s eyes widen behind his visor, even at a distance.  “Ad—Admiral Zorah?!”

“You sorting by gross tonnage or tare weight first, foreman?” Tali asked again.

Whereas the foreman had previously shown that he was calm and in his element just moments ago, now he was shifting his weight from foot to foot, unsure of himself.  Being in the presence of an admiral undoubtedly was making him uneasy, as it did for many, something that Tali resented.  I was one of you, once.

Heading back down the steps of the catwalk until she was at the floor of the bay, she approached the foreman directly, her demeanor open.  “Spread seems loose,” she gazed at the ISO stacks, gesturing with a hand.  “Compensating for the lack of space?”

“Doing what we can, Admiral,” the foreman’s voice had dropped noticeably in volume.  “Cargo wasn’t exactly loaded to specifications.  The drydock didn’t have the proper loading equipment—they had to bring everything in on shuttlecraft.  Different crews, different priorities.”  He then coughed, seeming to realize that he was making excuses.  “We’re trying to set all of this right before we make our destination.”

Tali nodded, not at all looking to blame someone.  “Can I see the manifest?”

The foreman handed her a datapad.  With a slender finger, she flicked through the list.

“Mostly empties,” she murmured, noting the numerous hollowed out icons of the ISOs.

“The Yarren’s scheduled to make a pickup of carbon ore, silicon, and manganese,” the foreman replied.  “Part of it will be paid with the salvage we’ve collected.  Plan is to come back laden with the materials.”

Salvage, Tali’s eyes narrowed.  “I’m sure that the necessary precautions have been taken?” she asked, recalling the factors that had led up to her very public trial on the Rayya almost eleven years ago.  Geth components, triple-scanned, sent back to the fleet, yet they had been used to reactivate deadly weapons platforms deliberately.  Her father’s body on the Alarei, riddled with gunshot wounds.  Numbness spreading throughout her as she stood over him, gazing at the empty shell.

“Paperwork’s attached.  Click that button there.  It’s all signed off and everything.  No intact components are included that can send or receive a signal.”

Scanning the attached documentation, Tali handed the datapad back to the foreman.  She had already known the answer, but she felt she had to ask anyway.  The risk of the salvage being hot was a near impossibility after so long, what with the geth having been destroyed for a decade already.

The pulse of energy from the Crucible had been thorough in knocking out every single piece of technology with Reaper components within it.  The geth, at the time, had adopted the components, believing that it would assist their creators in throwing aside the reign of the machine gods.  But no one could have predicted that the same wave that had forever darkened the Reapers would have done the same to the geth.  All over the galaxy, geth ships had suddenly stuttered to an aimless halt.  On the homeworld and the other planets of fierce fighting, geth collapsed where they stood, the lights from their optics muting to a crisp blackness, the color of a poisoned night sea.  And despite the best efforts of the scientists, Tali’s people had not been able to recover an intact copy of the geth’s source code.  The Crucible had wiped the memory banks of each geth permanently, forever dispersing their secrets to the unknown void of cold inertness.

Tali scanned the progress of the workers.  Tried to determine the rhythm.

“How much time does the Yarren have at the dock?” she asked the foreman.

“A half-slot,” he answered.  “We’ll have to move fast before we’re boxed in at the slip.”

“And which one is most time-sensitive?  Materials retrieval?”

“We’ll be within limits, but we—”

“Sort by tare weight,” Tali ordered.  “Position them at the top of the stacks and prep for immediate unloading once we’re at the Citadel.  Resources for our people take priority.”

The foreman straightened.  Finally, some real orders.  “Right away, Admiral.”

To the side, a lock on one of the ISOs then slipped.  As if in slow motion, the crate fell to the ground awkwardly with a crash that shook the entire hull.  One of the thruster packs mounted on the side to provide extra lift spiraled away like a missile only to crash against the wall, crumpling itself flat.

Tali immediately jogged over to the downed crate, making sure that no one was hurt.  The man who had been overseeing the crane was standing near his handiwork, hands on his hips, hanging his head in frustration.

Metal began to melt as several dockworkers moved in with their laser torches, working to unjam the ISO.  Tali came over to the man who had caused it, his rust-colored enviro-suit absorbing the brunt of the hazing lamps from overhead.

“Everything all right?” she asked, her voice spare but cutting above the din.

It took a moment for the worker to motion a cutting nod.  “Was going too fast.  I was just—”  He cut himself off when he looked over and saw that it was none other than Tali’Zorah talking to him.  He made a gulping sound with his throat and his entire body stiffened as if he had been frozen in ice.

“Relax,” Tali said.  “Take a deep breath.  This is just a delay.  You can be fast, but you can do it right at the same time.”

It took even longer this time for the young dockworker to muster a physical response.  Tali got this sort of reaction all the time, especially from civilians.  The newsfeeds had done their job in projecting her image all over the galaxy ever since the war had ended.  Every quarian may have known her father, but now it seemed that she had finally stepped out from his shadow now that the fighting had all been settled and her achievements broadcast to the galaxy.  Her name was known across all of civilized space—hard for anyone, especially a fellow quarian, to not know about her.

With a shuddering sigh, the dockworker’s shoulders relaxed.  “I’m trying, Admiral,” he whispered so that the foreman could not hear him.

“We all are,” Tali placed a gentle hand on his shoulder.  The young man’s eyes tracked her hand, no doubt awed that the famed admiral was giving him, of all people, guidance.  “So, forget that it happened.  Get the ISO unstuck and send forward another block of stacks in this sector.  Am I understood?”

The dockworker saluted, even though he was not military.  “Yes, Admiral!” he proudly proclaimed before he quickly grabbed a nearby torch and ran off to join his fellows.

Crossing her arms, Tali watched from afar as the crate slid back onto its base with a thud, molten metal cooling around its edges in thick puddles.  She walked back to where the foreman was, who seemed impressed.

“They’ve been lacking firm direction all day,” he told her.  “Command’s been occupied with other matters.”

“I know what that’s like,” she said.

With a renewed purpose, the bay seemed to glow with activity as the workers finally seemed to find the heartbeat that resided within the room.  Cranes whirred, drones scurred, and there was the ever-present whining of gears and spools that provided a nearly-soothing soundtrack to the place.  The stacks of ISOs began to take shape, with nearly a quarter of the bay organized within a half-hour at the rapid pace that had been set.

Tali made no other intervention, simply standing by and watching, trying to remain invisible.  She wanted these workers to reach their efficiency of their own accord, not because she was in observation of their efforts.

After it seemed like the structure of the organized bay was taking shape did Tali silently excuse herself and headed for the ladder that would lead her to the catwalk above.  As her head crested the topmost level, she was aware of a scratched combat boot that was standing close by the lip of the platform, which extended into an enviro-suit the color of desert sand, with an ashen visor that hazed the soft protrusion of the woman’s nose and the muted glow of her eyes.

Finishing her ascent, Tali looked the other woman in the eye and gave a nod of greetings.  “Raan.”

“Tali,” the other woman nodded, her voice an elegant rasp, sinewy.  “You’ve been keeping busy.”

“Something to take my mind off things,” Tali said as she leaned across the railing, gazing out into the quickly developing sea of ISOs.  “I could never stand still, remember?”

They did not use the distinctive of “admiral” between one another, for they had too much history together to let rank come between them.  Shala’Raan had been a close friend of Tali’s family from before the younger quarian had been born, even going so far as to assist Tali’s mother with the birth of her only daughter.  Tali and Raan had never resorted to formalities because of this existing relationship, though it did not damper their own mutual respect.

The two veterans silently regarded one another, the weight of experience latching onto them.  Tali’s gaze was filled with a longing deference.  Raan’s was distant.  Incalculable.  Tali was used to that—Raan had a habit of keeping things close to her chest.  Even when Tali’s back had been against the wall for events such as her trial and even at times during the war, Raan would never stray far from her place to get her out of trouble, as if worried that if she displayed any strong tendencies of breaking from the Admiralty’s strongest positions that she would be forced out in retribution.  She had always been better at playing the political game than Tali, but that was to be expected.  Politics had already been the source of much misery in Tali’s considerably shorter life, anyway.

She pushed away from the railing and made a cocking motion with her head for Raan to join her in lockstep.  They moved through the halls, the sections here wide enough to travel two abreast one another.  The partitions were separated by wedge-shaped segments that irised open upon approach, allowing passage through.  They looked down upon a hydroponics bay as they headed through a walkway encased in clear glass, able to view the rows upon rows of green plants that were being currently diffused with a thin mist, water dripping from the bright leaves.

“The other admirals didn’t send you out to find me, did they?” Tali asked.

Raan shook her head next to her.  “It was of my own volition.  You’re not late.  The meeting’s not for another ten minutes.”

Tali considered to herself for a few seconds.  “I remember when I used to seek you out in the early days.  You were always the first person I went to for advice when I was selected for the position.”

“And now,” Raan looked the younger woman up and down, “you hardly solicit me at all.”

“It was what you expected, wasn’t it?”

“Yes… and no.”

They came to a concourse where the hallway elongated and widened even more.  The foot traffic here was heavier and several of the quarians frantically saluted the two admirals as they made their way past.  Tali, again, tried to respond to every salute that she could.  Raan only made a few halfhearted gestures next to her.

When they had come upon the next intersection, they hung a right that led up a slightly sloping ramp to the next floor.  There was a moving walkway in the next hall that would take them most of the way to the bridge.  One of the walls was nearly entirely made up of a large window, projecting the violent glow of FTL-space upon the opposite end.  The two admirals stepped onto the walkway and paused for a moment, facing each other.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you…” Raan said, making a point to look to the side, trying to appear nonchalant.

Uh-oh, Tali thought.

“…are you still keeping up with your sessions?”

A sharp snort of disbelief faintly escaped Tali’s vocabulator and her eyes focused and refocused.  “Why do you ask?”

Raan’s fingers tapped at the railing of the moving treadway as she beheld Tali in full again.  “Something I’ve just been wondering.  I haven’t asked you about it in a while.”

Tali had to bite her tongue before she said something that might come back to haunt her.  “The therapy…” she enunciated slowly, “…is fine.”

“You haven’t had… anymore… you know?”

Tali grunted.  “No.”

“Oh,” the other admiral tilted her head.  “Then that’s fantastic to hear.  Then has the specialist told you when you will be able to stop the treatment?  It’s been almost ten years since you started it.”

And almost ten years of having to hide the fact from my people that one of their admirals is in therapy.  They need me to be strong.  Anything that breaks that notion…

“I’ll stop when I know that I’m finally free of my…” Tali waved a hand, trying to articulate her innermost worries, but gave up with a sigh, briefly hanging her head.

“You want to go over the itinerary of the plan again?” Raan asked, changing the topic with such a casualness it was as if they were discussing the weather.

Tali, grateful for the reprieve, took a moment to consider the question. “We’re not bringing that up during the Admiralty meeting?”

“Not in too much detail.  Not enough time.  After that, we’ll try to make some progress on mapping out this resource deal we’re negotiating with the turians after the ceremony has taken place.”

“Okay.  Then let’s hear the rundown before we get to the bridge.”

There was a whirring noise as Raan brought up her omni-tool to consult her notes.  The moving walkway continued to ferry the two down the long corridor while quantum space raged just outside the window.  “Union Eterna has provided us transport from the docks once we arrive at the Citadel.  They know to expect us.  The total delegation of the Rannochian Federation are to be shuttled to the InterContinental first.  A hotel, it seems, that is positioned on the third arm of the station.”

Tali crossed her arms and kicked a foot against the part of the walkway that she was leaning against.  “Did they change the venue of the signing?”

“No,” Raan shook her head.  “That comes later.  The hotel is where we’re having the luncheon.”

A quizzical look befell Tali.  “The luncheon?”  She must have missed that part of the schedule.

“Union Eterna is hosting what is essentially the pre-meeting at the hotel.  Gathering all the signatories together, plus the press and anyone else who was invited.  Should take a couple of hours, at the minimum.”

Tali grimaced under her visor.  A couple of hours of mingling and small talk, no doubt with the wealthiest donors in attendance who could drone on for eons about the most banal topics that could ever grace her ears.  Hours without anything of any action being accomplished, for she was expected to go along with the performative niceties that was expected of someone of her station. 

Tali had always resented the fact that the position of admiral came with the hidden expectation that she act as a politician as well.  While she understood the symbolism of her role and the importance it carried to her people, she had never anticipated just how much potential there had been for her reputation to be part of the public record, for whenever she tuned her holofeed to any news network on Rannoch, there was a good chance that one of her battlefield achievements would be recounted for the captive audience whenever she was part of the headlines.  She had only taken the role because it had been her first real chance to assert real change, anyway.  Individualistic gain in terms of power and station had been the last thing on her mind upon becoming admiral. 

The second reason… was more personal.  One that she had only admitted to one other.

At first, Tali had been content to stay out of the limelight.  She was a soldier first, a figurehead second.  But the galaxy had not seen it that way and, with the gentle persuading from the other admirals, mostly Raan, Tali had begrudgingly accepted being the de facto spokesperson for the newly formed Rannochian Federation, and by extension, the entire quarian race.  She had been pushed to make speeches on a variety of topics she held a lot of passion for, but never once considered that she would have make a formal address to any of them.  But Tali was a quick study, and she had spent weeks attaining additional skills in public speaking, mostly from watching videos on the extranet.  She researched great orators from all corners of the galaxy, studying their patterns, their inflections, the rhythm of their speaking.  Already she had more than eight holo-casted speeches under her belt in which she discussed the repairing of race relations, the new opportunities fostered by recent scientific discoveries through reverse-engineering geth ruins, along with the latest endeavor of adding the Federation to Union Eterna.

When she had been studying, practicing her diction, Tali had considered opening up a few of the recorded speeches from the very man who haunted her thoughts, day and night, but could never bring herself to do so.  Just seeing his face, let alone hearing his voice, felt like someone was taking a knife to her insides.  Her extranet feeds would always recommend clips with that damnable human on it, and it would be an effort for her to block it all out, lest one of her attacks would come again.

The entire idea of joining Union Eterna had been Tali’s from the get-go.  She had seen firsthand the value of an interconnected galaxy, not just technologically, but politically.  She had molded herself after the lone person who was her greatest role model, asking herself constantly what would they do if she was ever in doubt.  She had pushed, first by convincing the other admirals, and then by reaching out to every contact she had on the Citadel in an effort to open up talks.  The conversations between the Federation and Union Eterna were not exactly backdoor—neither party had any interest in keeping their interest on the down-low.  But from Tali’s enthusiasm, knowing what benefits her people could provide in a united universe, had been the catalyst for the overall negotiations proceeding at such a rapid pace.  She had been offered the position as senator to Union Eterna, of course, but she had made it clear that being an admiral was the furthest she was going to climb in the meritocracy.  She could stomach politics up to a point, but she did not have the capacity to make it the entirety of her career.

She only wished she had not been so alone to share in such a future.

Out of sight, Tali clenched a fist.

Raan immediately sensed Tali’s discomfort and moved to put a hand upon the younger woman’s arm.  “This is what we have to endure,” she assured her.  “It comes with the job.”

Tali did not look Raan in the eye as she glowered.  “How much further along would we all be if we disregarded ceremony altogether?  We would have this all wrapped up in fifteen minutes.  J—Shepard would have…”

There she was.  Talking about him again.  Her mouth was working faster than her brain was and she cut off the rest of her sentence with a violent groan.

If Raan could even detect a glimpse of the turmoil that raged within Tali like a hurricane, she would have made an approach to soothe her.  But the other admiral was all business, saying, “Building a foundation is never easy.  The tallest structures take decades to complete.  A few hours of discomfort against a limitless future of possibilities.”  Proudly, she gave Tali’s shoulder a tap.  “That belongs to you.  You’ve made your father proud from what you’ve done for our people.”

Finally, Tali’s stare edged back over to Raan.  She softly smiled, the mask only projecting the soft turn of her eyes.  “Thanks, Raan.”

“If you want, I can handle the idle chit-chat between the various representatives and the senators.  No doubt there will be leaders of commerce there as well, looking to parse out how our arrival is going to affect the economic outlook.  I know you don’t particularly care about that aspect of the job.”

“Please,” Tali nodded, grateful.  “I couldn’t give a damn about some company’s bottom line.  I’m not doing this for someone to make a profit.”

She had seen it many times.  CEOs lining to kiss the ring of the latest regime that came to power.  Offering faint words of support, letting their wallets do the talking instead.  No doubt there would be similar people of such stature at this luncheon, using their honeyed tongues to tiptoe around stating the word “bribe” directly.  The very thought of it made her stomach churn.

“And afterward?” Tali gritted.

“The signing,” Raan consulted her notes again, “will take place on the Soledad Starliner.”  She tilted her omni-tool so that Tali could see.  A schematic of a wide ship that looked like a massive quad-finned aquatic creature filled the screen.  “I believe that Union Eterna is using it for their purposes after the cruise company that was leasing it went bankrupt.  Another casualty of war.”

“Pleasure cruiser for the rich turned state frigate,” Tali noted.  “I don’t think we’ll be lacking for creature comforts while on board.”

Raan disregarded Tali’s comment as she flicked through the itinerary.  By this point, they had reached the end of the moving walkway and were now striding up a thin stairwell under their own power, but the admiral kept reading from her tool.  “The next few days after that will be spent meeting with the various committee chairs.  We’ll be discussing on how to properly ease our new representatives into the legislative body without creating a supermajority for any one side.  Day one will be the turians and the humans.  The next, the asari and salarians.  We’ll even have a chance to deal with Omega’s own—are you even listening to me?”

They had proceeded through a door that had been guarded by a squad of quarian marines, which all had parted to let the admirals through while embedded scanners blitzed lasers across their bodies, reading their implants and confirming their identities simultaneously.

The room beyond was a series of raised platforms, a mini-ziggurat that glowed a cool jewel-blue.  An angled window wrapped around the entire scene, the heavy polarization managing to hold back the impossible gleam of the whisking realities just past its expanse. 

Traversing up the stairs led them past the series of ringed levels that all narrowed towards the top, which gleamed with starcharts, hieroglyphics, and fragmented equations.  Techs, ensigns, and specialists manned the consoles on the various levels, their hands blurring over the controls as they ran their separate analyses, their voices speaking lowly into their dictation devices, transcribing their movements to the ship’s main server.

“Tali?” Raan tried again as she climbed the steps behind her.

“I heard everything you said,” Tali did not turn her head.  They approached the top of the platform as they nearly completed their ascent—the bridge of the Yarren.  “The first day is for the formalities and the following ones will be the direct correspondence with the delegates.  This whole thing—”

“—has been nothing but a political boondoggle from the very start,” a deep voice interjected from the top level of the bridge.  “Were it up to me, I would have been more methodical about this whole assemblage.  Coming to the table first makes us seem weak, like we’re racing ahead of the tide in a desperate attempt to escape it.”

Tali raised her head as she broke past the surface, striding up the steps to become level with Daro’Xen, Admiral of the Special Projects branch of the quarian navy.  The woman had been leaning against the railing the entire time, watching her compatriots ascend.  

Though advanced in age, Xen possessed an almost illimitable quality.  As sleek as a geth prowler, the fabric that embraced her enviro-suit, which extended to her sehni, was a stark black color that seemed to become shadow itself.  The panels of armor that lined her suit were of geth fabrication that Xen had modified herself to be a perfect fit.

Even though they were technically equals, there was always something off-putting about Xen to Tali.  Perhaps it was because the woman contained an unhealthy fascination towards the geth or any other synthetic life, or it was the admission that she had performed surgery on her childhood dolls, which definitely did not do any favors to Tali’s initial impression about her.  The two had always maintained a respectful distance from each other over the last decade, which was difficult to do considering their positions.  Tali did not get the impression that Xen either liked or disliked her—the other admiral just seemed far too aloof, absorbed in her own work, to maintain harsh opinions towards other living, breathing things.

Tali was about to deliver a retort to the admiral’s snide comment before someone beat her to it.  “Now, Xen, we’ve had three hundred years of isolation already.  I have no desires to elongate this sorry period anymore and, for one, am grateful that our fellow admiral has deigned to put in the legwork to bring us back to parity with the rest of the galaxy.  It’s about time that we return to the status quo.”

Stepping from shadow upon the other end of the square platform, Admiral Zaal’Koris was the epitome of quarian pride.  Anyone with even a lousy eye for body language—and Tali’s was very good—could tell that Koris was a man of self-discipline.  His armored enviro-suit, polished to a mirrored sheen, reflected the man’s highly organized and nearly obsessive compulsions.

Koris was a bit of an enigma to Tali, but there was nothing but the utmost respect between the two of them, even if their histories had been a bit shaky to start.  It had been Koris that had spearheaded the heaviest of the charges of treason against Tali during her trial, which had given Tali the impression that he held a grudge against the woman for her and her father’s stance in wanting to take their homeworld back from the geth, however possible, which directly clashed with his own resigned stance on the subject.   

But when the two had been forced to work together during the war, Tali had watched Koris come into his own in a manner that she had not expected.  As the leader of the Civilian Fleet, Koris never took up a strategy, never wavered from his beliefs, if it put the lives of his people, his crew, in danger.  Every decision he made was for the safety of the quarian noncombatants, the ones who had never wanted a fight with the geth to begin with.  In fact, Koris had been the only other admiral to stand with Tali when they had tried to vote against attacking the geth.  He had earned a newfound respect from her in that moment, even though their efforts had been for naught in the end.  The initial surprise attack had failed, thousands of quarians had perhaps needlessly perished, but Koris’s convictions never broke throughout the campaign, even when he had been seconds from death after crash-landing on the homeworld, for his thoughts had only been for the safety of his crew and not himself.

“Thank you, Admiral,” Tali replied with a respectful nod, which Koris returned.

“This was a long time coming.  I’m just grateful that we are here to see our ancestors’ will to completion.”

The roll of Xen’s eyes behind her visor was unmissable.  Tali was struck by the blatant insult—Xen was usually very good about keeping her emotions to herself.  For her to be so gregarious meant that she was feeling quite irked.

“At the cost of our own leverage,” the older woman pointed out.  “We’ll be entered into Union Eterna as the junior of our peers.  We could have had time to further build up our manufacturing capabilities and solidify trade routes.  We’re coming to them with a value based on our potential.  Even information can be quantified, analyzed.  But we have nothing but half-realized commodities.”

“That is simply a consequence that we have to absorb,” Raan said gently as she now reached the bridge’s top platform.  “The other races have populations in the billions.  We’re entering with less than fifteen million.  It is only natural that our allotment of the assembly be commensurate to the whole.”

“Again, at the expense of our own representative segment.  We’ll still be a significantly underpowered bloc against the might of the—”

“That’s not the point, Xen,” Tali finally snapped, having enough of the other admiral’s complaining.  Crossing her arms, she stared daggers at Xen when the black-armored quarian whirled to face her.  “Sooner or later, we needed to get a foothold into Union Eterna.  We had been lacking one on the Council for three hundred years, and where did that get us?  The quarians have been without a voice for too long.  But by the end of this week, we’ll have undone three centuries of abandonment.  There’ll be time to grow, now that we have Rannoch.  Time for our own representative power to build.”

Framed by one of the holographic starcharts, the glow that washed over Xen looked as if she was standing next to a burning hydrogen fire.  “And no doubt you fancy yourself as that voice, is that it?”  Trying to mold yourself in the shape of a certain human? was the unsaid insult.

Her tone oozed contempt and Tali could not mistake the intention of the jab.  Just what is she playing at?  She had to bite her tongue to control her rising temper.  Ordinarily, Tali would not have embarked in confrontation so directly, but this was her project, her design.  She needed to see it through to the end.

Raan took a step forward to helpfully intervene, but stopped when Tali shot her a look.  Bad enough that Xen still considered her a novice, she did not need to give her any more ammo by thinking that she could always run to Raan for support.

“Someone had to step up,” she coolly retorted.  “You had all this time to do just that, Xen.  In fact, I would have gladly appreciated it if you had been the one.  But we find ourselves here.  There are many things that I wish I could take back.  This isn’t one of them.  And if you’re implying that I only did this just so that I could raise my stature, remember that I declined the post of senator.  It’s still up for grabs.  We haven’t voted on it yet.  Want to throw in?  You’re more than welcome.” 

All those years, all that time.  I’d give everything if there was the slimmest hope I could change fate.  Take it all back.  I just needed to stand in a different spot.  An inch to the right.  Maybe.  Fire and debris whipping past.  Closer to him.  I wouldn’t have been hurt.  I would’ve been there for him at the end.  Maybe, that would have been enough.  For the both of us.

She braced herself, waiting for the verbal onslaught that Xen was no doubt itching to unleash.

But it surprised her to see that, although Xen was twitching with an unstable eagerness like a half-life substance, she was restraining her comments, nothing but a sly look that pierced the glass of her visor.

Koris finally felt that it was his duty to intrude with a small clearing of the throat.  “Many times, we find ourselves rising to a station beyond what we anticipated.  Duty.  Necessity.  The why doesn’t matter to everyone else.  It only has to matter for one person: our own self.”  He gestured to Tali while looking at Xen with a knowing gaze.  “Admiral Zorah has routinely shown that she has embraced the responsibility of her station.  I think we should all be grateful that she has decided to stay in her current post.  This is only the first step in a long marathon and it was a step that needed to be taken.”

“I agree,” Raan chimed in.  “And since Tali is right in that we cannot take back the course that has been set, there is no sense in bickering about this any further.  She has the trust of her captains and her ships—the endorsement of the entire Heavy Fleet is not something to be discounted, Xen.”

“It is true,” Xen gave a disinterested shrug, her shoulders then slackening to convey that her attention on this subject had also been wandering.  But the glare in her eyes hardened and they became sharpened spears as they flicked back over to Tali.  “And we have seen firsthand when the Heavy Fleet loses trust in their admiral.  They can be such a fickle bunch when displeased.”

One last slight, but Tali let the abuse bounce off of her.  The prior head of the Heavy Fleet, Han’Gerrel, had been a longtime friend of her father’s, but he was a reckless commander, one who prioritized guerilla attacks to clench short-term victories even if his achievements came at great cost.  He and Koris had been at loggerheads ever since Tali had known them both.

Gerrel’s downfall had come during the last moment of the Battle of Rannoch.  When the Reaper that had been controlling the geth had been destroyed, causing its disruptive signal to cease transmitting, Gerrel had continued to order his ships to open fire on the momentarily overwhelmed geth vessels, even though the geth were in the process of receiving an upload of the code that would grant them the same type of autonomy they had previously been exhibiting, minus the Reaper hold over them.  And if the geth had successfully installed the code right as the quarian fleet was firing at them, their superior technology would have wiped out their creators in a matter of minutes. 

It took Shepard, Tali, and Koris all shouting at Gerrel to countermand his orders, managing to relay the imminent danger to the quarian fleet.  Gerrel had relented at the last possible moment, though it was only revealed later that his XO had put a gun to his head, forcing him to stand down, who had seen his admiral’s blatant disregard for his own people and decided to take matters into his own hands.

A small tribunal had been held within the Heavy Fleet and they quickly delivered their verdict to Gerrel.  The commanders of the fleet had heard the entire exchange their admiral had had with Tali, Koris, and Shepard, and they realized that if they had continued firing on the geth in their exposed position, they would have been prime targets for the synthetics once the upload had completed, understanding that Gerrel’s actions would have led to the extinction of the entire quarian race. 

Gerrel had been handed an ultimatum: he would be allowed to remain as admiral of the Heavy Fleet for the remainder of the war, his responsibilities heavily reduced, and once the fighting is over, he would be forced to resign his position, with honors.  If he did not accept those terms, he would be exiled from the fleet on the spot.  Gerrel might have been the most war-crazed quarian of the Admiralty, but he was not unamenable to logic.  Graciously, he accepted the terms that were proposed and, in the days after the war had ended and the straggling fleets had begun to reconvene and converge in orbit over their smoldering worlds, he resigned his post to his XO, effective immediately.  These days, Gerrel spent his time in retirement, having built a house near the capital city, keeping himself well separated from any military or political action.  He was not missed by his colleagues.

Tali snapped back to the present, remembering her training.  Shut it all out.  Focus on your breathing.  One.  Two.  There you go.

She walked over to the studded pedestal in the center of the platform, which was shaped like an octagon.  A 2D representation of the galaxy lazily beamed an inch from the projector’s surface.  With a few pinches and tugs, Tali zoomed the display onto the massive station that orbited the planet Earth, bringing up a schematic of the immediate area that included highlighted landmarks.

The other admirals, without being told, surrounded the map for their congress.

Tali traced out a route on the Citadel map with a finger, hardly looking up at the others in her vicinity.  “Okay, so security will be scoping out the routes ahead of us prior to the luncheon at the hotel here, and the docks where the Soledad Starliner is stationed, just two klicks away.  Each of us is getting our own stateroom on the ship, which will be interspersed with our security forces for the twelve-hour duration of the flight…”

The journey to the Citadel still had several hours in its duration by the time that Tali had returned to her bunk.  As an admiral, she was allocated a cabin all to herself, which was one of the few luxuries that came with the job.  All the same, despite the sparse interior and the fact that it was less than the third of the size of her own bedroom back on Rannoch, it still felt like there was too much space for her to utilize.

On the flotilla, before the war, citizens and crew would be lucky if their living quarters housed less than four people to a room.  Despite the infinitude of space, the amount of livable volume was always strained to its limits thanks to a fleet whose ships were constantly in disrepair and a population that was struggling to maintain a viable citizenry.  Depending on the ship, desperate measures would sometimes be taken in which cargo containers welded to the outside hulls of the vessels would act as bunks for the population that was bursting at the seams, literally in some cases.

Tali sat on the bed with a sigh, relieved that the day was coming to a close.  Aside from a bag that she had stowed underneath her mattress that contained her essential items, there was nothing else that she had brought.

She looked around the stateroom, if she could even call it that.  The room was angular, hexagonal, and drenched in deep black metal.  There was an offshoot that led to a private washroom about the size of a small closet.  Other than that, there were no individualistic trappings that could identify it to any particular species.

Staring at the wall, she dared for sleep to come, but it refused to show its face.  There was a prickle at the back of her neck, nestled against her spine, that seemed to press against her like a thin needle.

The thin blanket she was sitting upon slowly began bunching in her fists.  Maybe it was just fatigue.  After the conclusion of every meeting with the rest of the Admiralty, it always felt that she had emerged from one of those human boxing matches she had seen on the extranet.  Battered and bruised, her mind reeling.  It was not so much that Raan and Koris went out of their way to make these discussions unpleasant for her—Xen did enough for the two of them—but it was the constant reminder of how a series of choices, whether in her control or not, had placed her here in an uncertain future.

Was this how she had envisioned her days would play out?  A hole carved itself into her heart the instant she thought of the question and she leaned forward with a groan.

“Are you still keeping up with your sessions?” Raan had asked her.

A gasp, and Tali’s visor misted, only to swiftly clear as the atmospheric equalizers compensated.  The uncomfortable tri-beat of her heart felt like a knife was sliding across her ribs. 

Waves of images swept through her, emotions and memories.  They were jumbled in her mind, like a corrupted sequence playing on repeat.  She could not piece the broken montage together, but the procession of these chemical recollections hammered home the same sensation.  A feeling of dread, love, and loss all mixed up into one single brew of agony.

Earth.  Why did it have to be Earth?  Why did she have to be going back there?

Every time she went back to that world, saw it with her own eyes, it felt like her very chest would fracture in half.  The past, her link to that place, was too strong for her to overcome. ^[3]

Mournfully, she looked over at the bed.  Big enough for two.  The one in her house was even bigger, if it could be believed.  As if he could just waltz on in one day, like he had come back from a very long walk.

She could not describe to anyone the scale of what she had lost, because in the grand scheme of things, it was so insignificant.  One man.  Amidst the billions that had died, it seemed so selfish.  And there were countless others, just like her, fighting the same battles every day, losing the war in their minds if they had not already lost outright.

There had been a moment right then in which she had desired, with the full acceptance of her heart and mind, to join him where he had gone.  The med bay of the Normandy, a foil blanket wrapped around her, medical drones swarming around her and knitting her skin with sutures and medi-gel—she had nearly been ripped apart by that explosion from a Mako tank and it was a miracle that she had not bled out then and there.  A partitioned plastic dome had encased the bed she was strapped to.  Her enviro-suit had been removed to get to her wounds.  Only her wild eyes and hair were visible, a breathing mask having been strapped over her mouth, supplying her with oxygen.

The feeds of the battle had trickled in, unfiltered.  She had watched the reports with bated breath, hoping that there was some news that could soothe the wound inside her.  She had to know.  She needed to know!

The word finally came when the images of the Citadel peeling apart, ripped into pieces as the Crucible detonated at the base of the station, were displayed on the screen.  Tali had screamed then.  She knew what had happened.  Her body had thrashed so hard against the straps of the bed that she had nearly snapped the steel-lined fabric.  Her mind prayed for release, yearned for it, and it had taken the efforts of half of Chakwas’ staff to hold her down so that she could be sedated. 

The Reapers may have been defeated, but they had saved the last grievous blow for her, it seemed.

With a stiff intake of breath, Tali returned back to the present, realizing that she had nearly torn out the sheets from where they had been tucked into the bed.  Her fingers seemed to be spring-loaded as she forced herself to release the fabric, a pulsating headache now beginning to pound just behind her forehead.

“Damn it,” she whispered to herself as she momentarily held her head in her hands, letting her body throb for a few beats.  She then surged a fist in the mattress next to her leg.  “Damn it!”

Eyes whispered behind the opaque glass.  Facial muscles contorting.  At least in this small room, no one could see her suffer.

She needed to do something to get her mind off of things, to stop considering the fact that she was going back to where it all began and ended for her.  Back to Earth, to the Citadel.  She kicked out her bag and shoved a fist inside, searching for her datapad.

Her imagination was not helping her constitution—she needed something to distract her.  Tali hunched over her tablet, opening up windows, programs, side projects of her own.  Her eyes scanned the strata of data that clustered across the screen, her fingers sliding matching icons to one another, equations formulating in mere moments.

The flow of blood in her brain seemed to increase as her datapad settled on a graphical representation of a world, surrounded by a belt of rubble.  A hundred tiny little icons occupied the top-right corner, a few of them flashing alert signals, which corresponded to markers within the orbital belt—she opened side windows as she addressed each and every blinking icon, scanning the coded information they were carrying, but found nothing but outliers and false positives, so she addressed the errors and sent commands to resume core programming.  It would take several hours for the command to reach the recipient at this distance, but Tali knew that she had nothing but time. 

The belt itself was a selectable object within the program—touching it brought up a pie chart representation.  There were only two segments of the pie chart, one a tiny sliver of green, the rest a clouded oceangray that read UNMAPPED.  Below, she could see a record of the graph’s change from year to year, the green segment building along that scant timeframe.  Slow progress, as she had feared.

But she could not sit around and do nothing.  She just had to know.

Flash of red.  Bloodbeat in her eyes.

The sound of her screams.

Again, Tali winced, jolting so hard she sent the datapad hurtling to the floor.  Her mouth was filled with a sour taste right before it went dry.  Her gut curdled, a coil of discomfort.

“Don’t argue with me, Tali!”

“No…” Tali moaned softly as she struggled to rise to her feet.  She swayed, as if drunk, and the room began to spin.  “Don’t do this to me, please…”  She scrunched her eyes shut and tried to pull forward the words of the speech she had been practicing for the last several weeks.  “To… to the Committee… the Committee Board, the Senators—"

“Don’t leave me behind…” her own words pathetically whimpered in her head.

Staggering over to the washroom, her shoulder hit the doorframe and she spun, nearly going down to the ground.  The hit area smarted and she gave a sharp gasp, her hands clenching at the opposite threshold, jamming her foot against the corner of the doorjam, wedging her in place.  The taste of metal in her mouth rose up, infecting her tongue.  She spat out the next words like they were poison:  “…I… I thank you for… f-for the warm welcome and hospitality—"

Bleary eyes blinking.  A struggle to hold her own head up.  The floor blurring.  Anti-slip strips upon starship steel.

Pool of blood at her feet.  A trail leading up the ramp of the ship.  Dark.  Her own.  It ran down her legs.  Dripped from her slack fingers.  Puddled below her.

His touch.  A hand at the side of her dented and scratched helmet.  His armored fingertips coming away slick with her blood.

“Get back to Rannoch,” he had said.  “Build yourself a home.”

Grunting, Tali hauled herself up straight and lurched towards the sink, her hands clenching the sides of the basin.

“I… have a home…” her memory and her voice cried simultaneously, her head hanging over the sink, her breath coming in short gasps.  “I… I… I had a home…”

Their words had not conveyed the truth that both inherently understood.  She had known that he had to go.  It was perhaps the one thing that his life had been leading up to.  He had to go because he loved her, because even though he was being eaten alive by grief and anguish in that moment, there would be no other chance to set things right.  She was going to live, he had known.  He would make sure of it, for his life would then have meaning.

But the memory was not done with her yet, because the next motion that Shepard had made on that ramp was something that would only be for the two of them.  For Tali could not forget what he said next when he suddenly closed the gap, kissed the side of her helmet, and then whispered into her audio receptor words so quiet that not even Garrus, next to them and holding Tali up, could hear.  Tali recalled the mournful sound of her sob upon hearing the words, and the pain in the eyes of the man as he parted away from her conveyed the sheer effort it took to slip out of her grasp.

“Stop it!” Tali cried as she suddenly slammed both of her hands upon the sides of the sink.  There was a hollow bang and the quarian suddenly shot her head up, looking upon her trembling image in the mirror. 

There had been a flash of white, and for a scant moment, the glass that obscured Tali’s face disappeared, becoming a jagged barrier that was stained and dripping with red.  There was a gleam of pale flesh.  Sootstreak markings that cradled her skin.  Haggard eyes that exuded a dim moonglow.

A blink, and her “face” was back to normal.  Curved glass upon the delicate construct of her mask, her twin vocabulators strobing in time to her rusty breaths.

The tension in her legs slackened and Tali’s grip slid along the edges of the sink as she gradually sunk to the floor, her lungs allowed to expand with a violent moan.  Bringing her knees to her chest, she curled into a ball as best as she could, trying to shelter herself from the cold and uncaring reality that was unraveling around her.  A burst of nausea welled up inside Tali and her thoughts were now a cloud of gray haze.  Her hands curled around her forearms, as though she was about to tear her enviro-suit clean off her body.

Admiral of the Heavy Fleet, some part of Tali’s subconscious noted from afar.  If only they could see you now.  How pathetic.

They won’t, the wrathful part whispered.  Because that is not who you are.

The disdainfulness she had organized for herself was then ripped to shreds by the burning flame of defiance that she had always kindled within herself, as if it were a living thing ready to rise to her defense at any moment.  Her own monster, tame.  She let it rampage throughout her, burning away the loathing and self-contempt.  The million little fears reared their heads and converged, but the flame was able to keep them all back, locking them back into shadow.

At least for now.

After Tali had spent a few more minutes recovering from the hurt that no physical pain could equivalate, she finally unfurled herself, stretching out her legs as far as they could go in the small confines of the bathroom.  The beat of her heart slowed and the darkness that had clawed at the edges of her vision was starting to retreat.  Her hand instinctively clutched at her gut, feeling her insides squirm, then moved to her chest, feeling that selfsame rhythm.  It let her know that she was alive and that Shepard’s final dream would always be realized as long as she still had breath.

I’m trying, John.  I’m trying so hard for you.

She tried to imagine what he would say, if he were here now.

Her lips curled upwards in a sparse smile as something came to mind.

Okay.

Reaching out, Tali grasped the sink and used her strong arms to haul herself upwards.  She took a moment to focus on her breathing, her hands and arms flowing with a calming pattern, her feet shoulder-width as she tried to accept the reality of her situation.  Of her life. ^[4]

She took one last glance at the mirror before she left the room, directing herself towards the bed to end the day.  As the light automatically shut itself off behind her, the only illumination left was the stuttering dioxin diode blinking in the top-right corner, weakly sputtering, straining, until it too went dark.

Chapter Text

The helmet acted as an information sponge, constantly scanning any objects of note wherever Shepard applied his gaze.  He had adjusted the cluttered HUD beforehand, distilling it to only the basics: shields, ammo counter, and motion trackers, but the amount of data that the helmet was parsing was still massive, running complex calculations in the backend.  Constantly filtering.  Always watching.

Shepard was not sure if he liked the interconnectivity of his new armor all that much.

He was sitting in the passenger seat of a skycar as it stayed plaintively in its aerial lane, about a thousand feet above the “ground” of the Citadel, amongst the other transport vehicles that seared through the localized space.  Aria had taken the driver’s side while Ceraph took the middle seat in back.

Trying to relax, Shepard folded his hands across his lap, settling into his seat.  Draped in his full armor, plus the coat he had donned, he knew that he must cut the picture of a brutal enforcer, silently efficient and one who exuded an infinite patience.  For someone like Aria, he looked like the perfect bodyguard, and no doubt the crime-lord-turned-politician was quite smug at the fact that Commander Shepard was now acting as her effective henchmen.  Despite the fact that his guise was a ruse, Aria seemed quite happy to play her part in its verisimilitude.

Past the window, he could see the glowing latticework of the multi-leveled lanes of skycars that seemed to constrict the station like a floating cage.  Just above him, through the transparent canopy, there was the damaged arm of the Citadel, where construction vessels, cranes, and brief pinpricks of welding lights encrusted the boundary where it had been sheared, the two pieces still in the process of being put back together.

“They’re saying it’s going to take them another five years to complete,” Aria said, tracking Shepard’s gaze.  She was wearing a bodysuit that was multi-layered in cream and black, though it was all one stab-proof article.  Sharp ridges curved from the forearms and shoulders, as well as her shoes and kneepads.  “Not counting the five years that it took them to actually start the work.  Funding issues, apparently.  Lack of investors.  Post-war recession.  All of the above.”

“Hmm,” Shepard murmured, not knowing what to make of that.  He set a hand upon the nearby armrest as he gazed past the window.

He had wondered how it was going to feel heading back to the Citadel after a decade had passed.  Whatever had transpired, the one thing that he had noticed immediately was that, apart from the damaged zones, not much had changed.  Outwardly, at least.  Until he managed to spy, near the inner ring, a halo of new skyscrapers, most in various stages of construction, that ringed around the central tower like a border of gleaming teeth.  The buildings did not seem to confirm to one style, save that they were mostly glass and curved in such complex manners that must have made them all a nightmare for their architects to design.

Shepard did not miss the fact that all of the development was located in the sector of the Citadel that had previously been the financial hub.  Evidentially, some things never changed.

“I think I know where all of the money went to,” he scowled as he looked at the slopes of glass cliffs all arranged in their perfect rows, then back to the gridded areas above and around him, places where the infrastructure had been destroyed or deactivated for all this time.  Places where people had lived their lives, no longer able to return to their homes.

Perhaps he had been naïve this whole time, thinking that once the dust had settled, there would have been this big push from everyone to course-correct from the flawed but still functional code of conduct that had been imposed on the lives of everyone who accepted such social contracts.  Sure, democracy was never perfect, but this was a time to get in on the ground floor, build the system as close to perfection as possible now that the defects of the last system were out there for all to see.  That everyone would have rushed to repair the obvious damage and reshape the galaxy into something better.  Something pure.

Neon danced and surged across the obsidian lobe of his helmet as he peered through the window, hiding his agonized features.

The skycar passed over several areas of the station that were completely dark.  Silent.  As if they had become gangrenous to the Citadel.  On the arms, he could see patches of lit areas and gridzones that were deprived of power, which were mostly concentrated near the tips of the penta-pronged station.

His hand curled into a fist, the armor slightly creaking in response, which was impressive considering how hard he was clenching it.  A good omen for its durability.

Further below, snaking between the synthetic caverns of glass and concrete, Shepard spotted what looked like a slithering line, like an eel.  He used his helmet’s zoom function and up came the image of what appeared to be an elongated train packed to the brim with passengers.  Come to think of it, now that he knew what to look for, he could spot similar carriages move about the station, all gliding from station to station in their constellation-like paths.

“They introduced a new transit system,” Shepard noted aloud.  The filter in his helmet’s vocabulator had already been activated, giving his voice a lighter, raspier edge to it.  Shepard found it eerie, listening to both his own voice reverberate within the helmet and the noise that exuded from the speakers.  But he figured he was going to have to get used to it, for no one save the people in this car could find out the truth.  His total identity needed to be a mystery until his business was finally finished.

“TranCit,” Ceraph clarified from the backseat.  “The name of the grav-lev trains, I mean.”

“Huh,” Shepard said, amused at the portmanteau.

“The system went online around two years ago because so many skycars had been destroyed during the war, which created a deficit of available transport.  TranCit was installed to alleviate that demand.”

“At least there’s one new thing that makes sense,” Shepard sighed.  A hand unconsciously came up to touch his forehead but bounced off the polarized visor.  The reinforced glass of his helmet wrapped nearly all the way around, giving off the phenomenon that he was not even wearing anything behind the glass, hence his error.  Shepard considered his appendage for a bit, gave a huff, and shook his fingers as if to hide his embarrassment.  Rookie mistake—he would just have to get used to his armored dimensions.

Ceraph sensed frustration in the man and leaned forward, one hand on Shepard’s headrest.  “A lot to take in, I’d imagine?”

Shepard bitterly chuckled, a dangerous sound.  He kept staring out of the window.  “You don’t know the half of it.”

The turian’s eyes shifted just above the dashboard, staring at the blaring lights of the opposite lanes of traffic, LED light swiping across her face.  “I thought it would be different, too.”

“Just means I didn’t complete my job.”

“All of this wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you.”

“But what would it look like if I had been around?  Awake, I mean?”  Shepard raggedly sighed, gesturing to the monumental structures that were being assembled from the cavalcade of cranes that busied around the foundations like ants.  “It doesn’t matter.  That right there is my legacy.  A half-formed idea.  An imbalanced approach to the clean slate I envisioned.”

The turian’s hand then closed around his forearm.  Ceraph squeezed so hard that even Shepard could feel the pressure through his suit.  Sensing the desperation in the action, he turned around to apply the other woman with his full attention.

“And what do you think it would all look like if you had failed?” the turian whispered.  The whipping light caught her bright eyes, which seemed to be trembling in their sockets.  Her reflection was distorted across the black teardrop lobe of his visor, in caricature.

Shepard made a point to slowly slide his gaze down, his helmet tipping in that direction, to look upon where the turian’s carapaced hand was holding onto him.

Almost as if she had been unconscious of her own actions, Ceraph released her grip on Shepard, now looking sheepish.

Aria cleared her throat, breaking up the tension.  She shifted irritably in her seat, crossing a leg.  “As objectionable as the future might have turned out to be, Shepard, your cohort has a point.  You’re no use to me if you’re going to keep wallowing in the past.  It’s just a distraction—the sooner you realize that, the more level-headed you’ll be.”

“I’m still struggling to catch up,” Shepard admitted as he faced forward again, his entire body electric as if he had touched a live wire.  With every second, he was growing closer to the next linkage in the chain.  There was someone on this station that knew what had happened to him.  He could feel it in every fiber of his being.  The urge to do something primal was starting to slither into his veins, turning him antsy.  “Man out of time, Aria, remember?”

“You’ll just have to get in sync sooner rather than later.  Bear in mind, your own mission is secondary to mine.  I’m about to bring about a new era of economic prosperity to Omega in the next few hours.  Your lust for revenge barely registers against my own plans.”

“There would’ve been a time in which you would have dropped everything for revenge,” Shepard pointed out.

Aria smirked.  “Back then, I had more enemies than I could count.  Funny how a war tends to filter out all of the detritus from the galaxy.  It’s been a boring ten years, let’s just say, Shepard.  The new challenges are the ones that aren’t routine.”

Isn’t that the truth? Shepard noted bitterly.  Aria was not someone who was capable of settling for the easy route.  She had secured her position through killing.  As had he.  Slashed to the bone, they would find nothing but similarities in the other, yet it was a miracle that they were able to stand the other’s presence.  In other circumstances, they could have been good friends, once, instead of whatever they were right now.

Lifting his head, Shepard again shifted in his seat, a hand gesticulating slowly.  “There’s one thing we need to get straight, right now.”

Aria didn’t answer.  She instead perked up, as did Ceraph, curious as to what the man had to say. 

“While we’re on the station or in the presence of anyone else, you shouldn’t refer to me as ‘Shepard.’  That should be obvious.  My survival must not leak.”

“‘Commander’ wouldn’t be suitable, either?” Ceraph asked.

“That, too.  In fact, from this point forward, you shouldn’t call me by that name at all anymore.  I don’t want there to be any chance that my identity is given away from a slip of the tongue.”

“Right,” Aria nodded, “which then leads to the obvious question—”

“What to call me,” Shepard finished.

“Exactly.  I don’t suppose you had another name in mind?”

As a matter of fact, Shepard did. ^[1]  He had traveled down an extranet rabbit hole during the flight from Omega, trying to find a good name that would suffice as a codeword for this, his last mission.  He had considered this decision thoughtfully, trying to avoid obvious references in lieu of something simple.  Something more personal.

In the end, his extranet trawling had taken him close to home.  Literally, from a certain point of view.  All humans were derived from Earth and Shepard had done his research on the lands he knew his ancestors had settled.  Africa.  The Americas.  The European continent.  He focused on the British Islands, to the north, in the independent nation of Scotland.  He knew of family, generations and generations ago, that had hailed from the small hamlet of Pitlochry, in the highlands.  And there was a mountain close to Pitlochry that was an icon of the surrounding landscape, which was flanked by lakes in the shape of needles and treeless steppes shrouded in mist.  A place that at first glance, seemed desolate and alien to an outsider, but to his family, there was no other home.

“Alder,” Shepard finally said, looking at both Ceraph and Aria in turn.  “From this point forward, call me Alder.”

The InterContinental Hotel had not been on the Citadel when he had been here last.  The lobby extended out from where the IntraTex Exchange had used to be located, Shepard recalled.  Some corporation must have bought up the damaged property and had paid to refurbish it into a hotel for the wealthy.

Stepping out from the sidecar, Shepard made sure to position himself behind Aria and to the right.  As her “bodyguard,” it would look suspicious if he were to lead the little group that they had.  He pulled his coat over the weapons that were strapped to his thighs.  Personal weapons were allowed, but only for approved security, which Aria had ensured that Shepard would qualify under.  The paperwork was legitimate and Shepard had all of his signoffs to conceal-carry, even in a place full of VIPs.

Ceraph oriented herself next to Shepard, also behind Aria.  She had rehearsed her cover in the last five minutes of the flight over.  She was Aria’s official “policy wonk,” the adviser who had helped to facilitate the minutiae of Union Eterna’s negotiation process in its early stages all the way up to the official ratification of the Omega Collective’s joining, despite the fact that Ceraph new nothing about policy, so Aria’s only advice to her was to keep her mouth shut if someone asked her a question.

“Lock it in,” Aria hissed to Shepard as they walked across the porte-cochère towards the set of automatic doors, dodging the valets that were looking to help guests with their luggage.  Security was tight, with several white-armored troopers manning a perimeter around the grounds of the hotel, having double-checked everyone’s credentials before letting them inside.  “Gawking’s going to draw attention in a place like this.”

“I’m fine,” Shepard quietly shot back.  “I’ve been in fancier places, you know.”

“I was talking to your friend,” Aria cocked her head over to Ceraph, who had been gazing at the set of waterfalls over near the hotel’s entrance.

The turian swung her head back, facing center, and hunched over a little.  “Sorry,” she said meekly.  “I’ve… just never been anywhere like this before.”

Shepard could understand the feeling.  Just days earlier, Ceraph had been fighting to survive by salvaging junk out in the Folley, and today she was in the presence of the galaxy’s rich and famous.  She was even wearing a sleek outfit that Aria had loaned her, which had a titanium weave embedded between the layers and was as much functional as it was beautiful.  No wonder the turian was having trouble keeping her composure.

Since the entrance to the hotel had been cordoned off by the hired security already, all the regular guests had to use alternate means of getting inside to contain the possible security risks.  The three were quickly whisked past the insignia-ed glass doors and into an elaborate lobby made of cut stone.  Delicate swoops of glass like colliding galaxies made up a grand chandelier over the area, which lit up from the flashes of the news drones that hovered over the shoulders of the nearby press correspondents—the pool of these individuals made up a crowd of a couple dozen, all of them either jotting down their observations, noted clever lines to use in their newscasts, or spoke into a hidden recorder as they narrated the scene.

Shepard scanned the press corps as he walked by, trying to see if he saw anyone in the crowd that he recognized.  However, none of the faces registered anything, either in memory or in the databanks his helmet offered.  A few of them called out for quotes, but Aria strode past them all, her focus like a laser beam directed straight in front of her.

They couldn’t miss the multitude of signages that led them over to the ballrooms—they would not get a chance to glimpse the atrium of the hotel, it seemed, considering the layout of the building.  They headed over to a security station where they were scanned yet again, which only concerned Shepard for a moment until he managed to get a glimpse at a monitor that one of the guards was looking at and saw that his digital profile was registering a name he did not recognize.  At least that meant that his armor’s identity scrambler was working.  After that, registering his weapons with the staff was considerably less stressful now that the hard part was over, and they were allowed into the carpeted hallway that led to the ballrooms.

None of them blended in with the people who were mingling in the next hallway.  While Aria’s outfit was elegant in its simplicity, it might as well have been considered utilitarian against what the businessmen and politicians here chose to don themselves with, the bourgeoisie.  White leather dress coats and pants.  Exquisitely tailored suits from pre-war London.  The subtlest of cybernetics at the temples and eyes, etched with designer logos.

Shepard and Ceraph looked even more out of place than Aria, considering their more functional attire.  Not that Shepard could care a whit—he had always been uncomfortable in formal wear.  He had barely broken out his dress blues back in the day, except for the occasions in which its usage was absolutely warranted, like major summits or meetings with the top brass.  Give him armor and a weapon any day—that was his preferred suit of choice.

There were multiple holoscreens on the side of the hallway that were blaring various advertisements.  They had bleeding-edge graphics, strange fonts, and soaring orchestral music as they projected a variety of uncanny-looking images, with blocky animated text whirling about like a tornado until they arranged themselves into a readable string.

HAHNE-KEDAR—JOIN YOUR NEWEST COLONY TODAY!  SPACE IS LIMITED!

“HK is sponsoring company towns now?” Shepard asked Aria.  Hahne-Kedar was a private security firm that provided contractors and weapons for all kinds of wetwork.  Shepard had used a few of Hahne-Kedar’s assault rifles on more than one occasion, as they had been a supplier to the Spectre corps.

“Company towns are all the rage these days, and not just in the Terminus,” Aria said.  “It’s this fad of neo-cameralist philosophies that have been growing in popularity, which all started on some extranet blog sites.  But yeah, some of these companies have pivoted in new directions.  They’ve been swooping in to disaffected populations, offering people who have lost their jobs due to the war a chance at a better life on an off-world colony.  Shit pay, of course, but it’s not like anyone’s at liberty to complain.  Sign a contract, work for ten years, and receive your payout.  Or sign a consecutive contract and keep the misery going.  And that’s for the corps that are honorable enough to deliver contracts without loopholes.”

“You sound like you detest them,” Shepard noted.

“Some mega-corps tried to pull that kind of shit on Omega a few years back.  They fucked up the timing, because Omega was getting back on its feet, rising higher than it had been before.  They didn’t get many takers from the populace and they abandoned their efforts to recruit in the system because, shocker, it turned out Omega could offer a better life than a corporation.”  Aria shrugged.  “In a way, they were one of the reasons why I opened up talks with Union Eterna in the first place.  Company worlds—that specific subset of indentured servitude—is illegal in UE space.  And although I loathe the prospect of eventually being beholden to a higher power, it’s better than being under the thumb of a group that thinks freedom and democracy are no longer compatible.”

“So says the monarch,” Shepard pointed out mirthfully.

“Hey, if anyone gets the idea in their head to try and overthrow me,” Aria shot back, “I’ll wholeheartedly welcome the attempt.  It’ll save me from being a dignitary at more functions like this one, at least, and you know I hate it when I’m photographed in the tabloids.”

“A fate worse than death.”

“Oh, shut up.”

The main ballroom was impressively scaled, the floor of which was filled nearly wall to wall with all walks of life, all wrapped up in their little bubbles of conversation.  There were massive screens projecting the various ex-Council worlds, showcasing the rapid development of all of the reconstruction programs taking place across the galaxy, though it did not escape Shepard’s notice that many of the pictures were CGI. ^[2]

His helmet did an admirable job in filtering out the white noise, though it displayed the occasional buzzword that floated along the expanse of his visor before fading out into nothingness.

The range of fashion in the room stretched to the limits of extravagance.  Dresses and suits from the most famous of design houses.  Waiters seemed to glide around, perfectly perching glasses of spirits or tiny tart-like delicacies on gleaming silver trays.

Shepard swept his gaze across the lot, trying to pinpoint any recognizable faces.  One of you in this room knows.  One of you will tell me why you tried to bury me.

“So?” Aria sidled up to him, somehow having procured a glass of champagne while he wasn’t looking.  “Silent’s the only way to plot a murder, but I can tell you’re not impressed with the crowd.”

“It’s a verifiable who’s-not of high society,” Shepard rasped.

Aria gulped down half of her drink without blinking.  “Get ready.  The real circle-jerk is starting soon.”

An artificial garden had been setup around the perimeter of the room, replete with shrubberies, rose bushes, and even streams, though the water feature itself was a carefully disguised hologram.  Shepard peered over and saw that the graphics were detailed enough to depict colored fish from a variety of distant worlds swimming underneath the surface, beholden to their programmed paths.  More holograms of vibrantly flowered trees surrounded the walls, and digital petals falling from the faux branches created a snowblind effect.

As if on cue, a small group from the larger crowd broke off and headed straight for Aria.  Shepard instinctively tensed, although Aria was comparatively relaxed.

The man at the center of the group, dressed in an all-black suit and whose face seemed to have been the result of a surgeon out of Chiba, almost as if his skin was ill-fitting for his skull, spread his arms and gave an obviously ersatz smile.  “Aria T’Loak,” he said.  “Fashionably late, as I was led to expect.”

“We were late?” Ceraph whispered as she bent down to Shepard’s level, who shrugged in response.

Aria made no attempt to mask the coldness of her own smirk.  “Amorth Vanden,” she said.  “Humanity’s monument to vaginal dryness.  You can probably understand why my tardiness was anticipated.  Mainly given the fact that these functions have such shit music as an accompaniment.”

Vanden now broke out into a very unconvincing and loud series of laughs that made Shepard raise an eyebrow in response.  Strange, Aria insulted the man and he was trying to save face to his retinue by pretending that this little tete-a-tete was normal between him and Aria, though Shepard could detect no shared history between the two whatsoever.  As Vanden continued to laugh, Shepard scanned him with his visor.  An extranet biography popped up.  Apparently, this man had created, or took over, several aerospace companies, was married several times—mostly to actresses and singers, all ending in messy divorces—and his latest venture was in the creation of new digital currencies, whatever that meant.

“You’re a bit morose for someone who’s on the cusp of making history,” Vanden gesticulated with his hand, which held a glass of something that looked like bourbon.  He was drunk already.  “You’ve finally gone corporate, Aria.  And in my lifetime, too.”

“Mm,” Aria murmured through a tight smile.  “You know, I don’t believe I even asked you for your opinion, Vanden.  Though it’s not like I’m dismissive of anyone who offers their stance freely, but I’m not about to take this from the man who’s pitching the Credit 2.0.  Doesn’t exactly establish any faith, really.”

“Five companies have already promised to incorporate it.  I’m in the middle of getting some of the bureaus on the Citadel to forcibly adopt—”

“Wow,” Aria laughed.  “You could not be more boring of a fuck if you tried.”

“I’m just saying, Omega could stand to profit from this.”

“The trades that you haven’t paid off seem to think otherwise.”

“There will always be those that rally against progress.”

Aria now scowled.  “Then I don’t know why the fuck you are here in the first place.  Now, if you’ll excuse me—"

But Vanden apparently had more to say, which was evident when he grabbed at Aria’s arm when the asari brusquely pushed past him.  Aria’s head whipped over, biotic sparks blazing from her fingers in a show of uncontrollable anger, but Vanden was too drunk to realize just how much danger he was in as he breathed booze into the ex-crime lord’s face.

“You think you know what you’re getting into,” he muttered, “but you don’t.  You have no idea just how many people I own in this room right now.  We might be seeing each other quite often in the near future.  Think about it.”

“Oh, I have,” Aria snarled.  “And the good thing about Union Eterna is that I can carry out an extrajudicial killing and it won’t be treated as an act of war.  And if you touch me again without my permission, you’d better be willing to lose that limb.”  The asari then forcibly wrenched her arm from Vanden’s grip, leaving him to stagger in place.  She then gave a twitch of her head that was meant for Shepard and Ceraph, who followed her as she cut a path through the crowd.

After they had gotten some distance from the technocrat, Shepard could not help himself.  “And I almost thought that you had pivoted away from your style of Omegan diplomacy.”

“Oh, shove it up your ass,” Aria said.  “Vanden’s an idiot.  Thinks that he can create some sort of decentralized currency that’ll completely replace the credit within ten years.  All he’s got is some support from fringe lunatics on some darknet sites and he thinks that’s enough validity for his concepts.  He’s always been a lucky bastard, though.  Just from being in the right place at the right time to scoop up VC investments.  But I don’t invest in luck.”

“Sure things are more your style,” Shepard noted.

“Very true.”

They continued through the crowd, maneuvering around a water fountain that had been installed in the center of the room.  A waiter offered more champagne to Aria, which she took, and then to Shepard and Ceraph.  The turian obliged.  Shepard didn’t.  Alcohol at this critical time was not a good choice, he felt.  Plus, he hadn’t gone over the complete specifications of his helmet yet, but he was fairly sure that it didn’t come with a slot for him to inject a straw, and he was not about to tip his helmet up to allow for a drink anyway.

“Emergency induction port,” he remembered Tali drunkenly emphasizing to him back on the Normandy.  Thanks to her, he could not look at straws anymore without thinking of her.  Damn it all.

Aria did not appear to have a destination in mind as they ambled through the crowd.  At least Shepard was able to gently push his frame forward—as he was armored, he had an easy time doing so.  But the fast and rapid laughter from all sides was starting to set him on edge.  The claustrophobia was creeping in, his breath turning short.  It was taking an effort for him to lash his disturbing urges down, fighting to remain in control.

He wondered just whose dream he was inhabiting.  All these suits.  These politicians.  All gabbing away like they had not been a millimeter away from certain death ten years ago.  How quickly they had forgotten the flimsiness of their own mortality.  This was what he had been fighting for?  It seemed too perverse for him to even believe.

Slamming his eyes shut, Shepard tried pushing aside his own doubts.  No… this was always what he had been fighting for.  If not for anyone in this room, but for the lives of the people that he loved.  He had been a soldier and had done his job to the best of his ability.  To rationalize all of this with failure was to miss the point of his own decisions in entire.

Another group of humans broke off from their packs to intercept Aria.  Shepard found them vaguely familiar but couldn’t put names to the faces.  They both had perfectly coiffed hair that was suspiciously bereft of gray.  One was skinny like a piano wire, and the other had some considerable muscle bulk, despite the fact that he was well past middle-age, that made Shepard believe that there should be a mandatory 30-day waiting period for HGH.

“There you are. You didn’t, by chance, take a look at the message we sent out to your people?” the skinny one was saying to Aria.  “TerraNet’s already snagged the quarian delegation—there’s still a thirty-minute slot that we have to fill.  The network’s willing to throw in a good percentage for that interview.”

“It’s a good offer,” the bulkier man added.  “A marriage between Union Eterna and Omega.  The numbers indicate—”

Aria snorted into her drink.  Shepard knew the woman enough that she was not really laughing, but putting on a show to unnerve the men across from her.

Turning around so that she could address Shepard aloud, she pointed to the two men in the suits, whom Shepard was now getting the sense that they were in the entertainment business, considering their demeanors.  “Take a look at them, Alder.  Hayden Price and Austin McMurphy.  Top anchors for TerraNet.  You ever watch TerraNet, Alder?”

This was his part to play, so Shepard was keen on sticking to the role.  “Can’t say that I have.”

“You’d have even less braincells if you did,” Aria said right before she polished off her drink and set her empty glass on the tray of a passing waiter.  Price and McMurphy did their best not to appear insulted, much like how Vanden had reacted earlier.  “Neo-con news network.  Actually, I think TerraNet’s legally not supposed to call themselves ‘news’ these days.  Too many court cases.  But TerraNet today is a proponent of galactic species integration.  A huge proponent.  Which is curious, considering that, before the war, their entire platform was based on human isolationism and the usual bombast of resigning from the Citadel Council.  Very popular with the Terra Firma party, to my recollection.”  Her smile was now broad and knowing, clearly having fun with pushing the buttons of these men.

Price tried to appear conciliatory, though he was not doing that good of a job.  “I can… understand the suspicion that you may have with our network.  We have never tried to hide our past as to whom we may or may not have endorsed.  Ten years, these ten years, were a seismic event, Aria.  The political winds shift, as they tend to do.  We don’t get everything right, Aria, and the network’s support of Union Eterna has been proven to be popular with our base.”

Aria smiled slyly.  “I think the word you’re looking for there is ‘lucrative.’  The money just doesn’t come in these days from the constant bashing of anything other than human.  The idea just doesn’t sell.”

“I think—” McMurphy tried to cut in, but Aria was in top form today.

“Think?  Huh.  All evidence to the contrary.”

The anchor glowered and tried again.  “What we’re proposing is for you to get some valuable air time with the network.  It would be good for the galaxy to get a direct perspective as to the process of Omega breaking its self-imposed isolation after all this time.”

Aria shoved her hands in her pockets and pretended to look bored.  “What, it isn’t obvious to you?”

“Our viewership would benefit—"

But the asari had had enough.  “Never about you, is it?  To be perfectly blunt, I can’t say that I see what benefit I’m going to get with an interview out of the two of you if you can’t even assume an atom of responsibility.  It’ll be just like talking to a wall.  Worse than that, in fact.  You’re just… empty shells that allow your opinions to change as the winds shift, as you had put it.  Just failures of imagination that so conveniently happen to be shaped like rapists.  In fact, since I’m not getting any stimulation out of a conversation with you now, even when the cameras are off, I… don’t really see a need in this continuing, do I?  So, I’m just going to leave, and that will be it.”

They kept moving, just like Aria had declared, leaving the entertainers behind.  The ballroom in this particular corner was a holographic forest of evergreens.  Synthetic birdsong floated through the glowing branches.  Shepard was constantly attentive at the sea of faces and he was doing his best to not deliver an outburst at such excesses.

“I don’t suppose it’s going to be your goal to insult everyone at the gala?” Shepard asked.

Aria grunted.  “Only if they irritate me.”

“Aria, it’s very easy to irritate you.”

“Then that’s their issue.  Of course, I’m going to be fighting every instinct to not blow my own brains out as the night goes on.  Better keep those pistols of yours under a watchful eye.”

“That’s the plan,” Shepard said, keeping everyone in close proximity under suspicion.

Another pair of well-suited capitalists found Aria a few minutes later, leaving Shepard to wonder if he was really was going to have to restrain the asari from trying to steal his sidearms throughout the course of this luncheon.  One was young, with a high forehead and dull eyes, and his skin was strangely tanned from too many melatonin boosters, with slicked-back hair and radiated smugness.  The other was elderly, grasping a cane made out of an expensive wood.  His gray hair was neatly trimmed, as was his mustache.  He wore gold-framed bifocals from Oxtec—Shepard could see sparse holographics reflected within the glasses.  The two of them were obviously dripping with money.  They just had this aura about them that Shepard instantly disliked.

He scanned the younger one first.

ERICH KOENIG, it read.  CEO of Chimera Holdings.  A quick search told Shepard that the company was in the private security business and had strong ties to the Earth government, particularly with arming the local government forces down on the planet.

The second one came up on the screen as HAMILTON HAAS-MASE in his display.  The chief executive of the SolBanc Corporation, which apparently dealt in banking, though one of its most profitable subsidiaries, Shepard noted to his dismay, was its for-profit health insurance arm.  The man’s net worth also popped up in the corner of his screen but Shepard looked away from it once he saw the seventh zero in the number.

“Ah,” Aria growled, her venom out in full force, dark eyes rimmed with suspicion.  “This is just what I needed to see.  A match made in hell.  Chimera comes to stick the knife into me, and then SolBanc can finish me off with the bill.  How you humans have managed to survive with your privatized options, it’s a wonder the disenfranchised haven’t openly revolted yet.”

To their credit, both Koenig and Haas-Mase treated the insults far better than the others, without blinking.  Almost as if their usual day-to-day routines were frequented with people hurling abuse at their faces.  Haas-Mase grabbed two glasses of wine from a passing waiter and offered one to Aria, who declined.  The elder businessman passed the wine to Koenig instead.  None of them even so much as glanced at Shepard or Ceraph, which made sense, for these men were cut from a different cloth, having attuned themselves to never pay those that they considered inferior to them any mind.

“I see some of our affiliates have already accosted you over the rapid galactic developments,” Haas-Mase made a subtle salute with his glass, a controlled smile at the ready.  “I take it the company was not entirely agreeable?”

“As agreeable as a hernia,” Aria grimaced.  “This isn’t really my scene.”

“A shame,” Koenig said.  “But we’ll have time to sort through the re-org after the documents are signed.  You know that Chimera just signed a new contract with Union Eterna?”  His voice was light and nasal, almost whiny.  Shepard couldn’t place the man—he seemed naturally inclined towards braggadocio and carried this strange sense of pride that his attire was sharper than most of the other people around here, for he was constantly fidgeting with the cuffs and lapels as if he wanted to drag the attention of everyone around him to his movements.

Aria shook her head.  “I take it that’s good news for you, then?” she asked idly.

“Oh, you haven’t heard?  C-Sec’s getting pushed out.”

Aria’s eyes narrowed.  Behind her, Shepard slowly turned his head towards the war profiteer.  News, indeed.

“Really?” the asari asked.

“Handover’s slated to take place in a few weeks.  C-Sec will still be around, but they’ll be detailed to public safety.  Union Eterna made sure that Chimera won the bid to act as the sole contractor for all security forces in the Citadel Tower, including the politicians who are set to receive their own security detail.”

“Which means me, I guess?”

“You’ll be getting your new entourage in just a few days,” Koenig said as he sipped his wine.  “More and more representatives and senators are using my people as bodyguards.  Pretty soon, we’ll have a monopoly on the whole station once our success becomes more proven.  And no offense to your current escort,” he made a quick and flippant gesture to Shepard without looking at him, “but you’ll be getting considerably more coverage at no cost to you.  Union Eterna’s footing everything.”

Smiling cooly, Aria made a point to eye Shepard’s armored form from head to toe.  “I think you might need to negotiate a little harder.  You know what they say about loyalty and hired guns.  And I prefer to be the one doling out the paycheck, anyway.  Acts as a bit of an extra incentive, plus it makes any open rebellion a challenge.”

Koenig raised his glass in a mock salute as he simultaneously smoothed out his suit jacket, ironing out nonexistent wrinkles.  “Of course, of course.  In these times, a steady source of income is precious to our contractors.”

After you’re done stealing their percentages for yourself, Shepard bitterly thought, toying with the idea of pistol-whipping Koenig right there and then just out of sheer disgust.

Aria then turned her sights onto Haas-Mase again.  “And you.  I’m assuming you’re here because you’ve also signed a new contract with Union Eterna as well?”

“Astute of you,” Haas-Mase spread his hands slightly, as though he had been caught reaching into the cookie jar.  “And yes, the invitation was predicated on SolBanc becoming the preferred provider for the station.  We’re mostly signed to the human populace, but we are expanding our coverage to the other races.”

“Nice,” Aria grimaced as she gripped Shepard’s arm, a sign that they were leaving.  “I wish you all the luck with that.  Enjoy competing against the public option.”

They wandered away until the two executives were out of earshot.  Aria bitterly blew air out from her mouth and cracked her neck.  “What the fuck have I gotten myself into?”  Without waiting for an answer, she peered over to Shepard.  “The stoic bodyguard.  I’m sure you must be quite happy to not be in my position.”

“If you hate mingling, then why did you take the job?”

The roll of Aria’s eyes spoke volumes, as if for a single moment, Shepard had blended in with the horde of stupidity that surrounded them.

She then said, almost accusingly: “You, out of anyone else, should understand the necessity of sacrifice.”

Union Eterna had spared no expense when it came to plying its guests with alcohol.  There were actually three full bars setup around the ballroom, each staffed with at least four separate bartenders that could make anything from a Last Word to a hanar quiver-shot.

Aria had settled against the end of the one that was furthest from the main doors and ordered two vodka gimlets for herself, desperate for a moment of relief within the storm.  As she sat there, downing her liquor, the former crime lord soon became beset with a variety of journalists and press, wanting to get a quote or a picture before the final ratification.  Behind them, a host of more heads of state, traders, and senators were beginning to form a line, wanting to bid Aria a good evening.

Shepard had watched the crowd grow at an alarming rate before a burst of clarity hit him.  His cover was being Aria’s bodyguard, after all.  It was high time he actually did his job.

Before any of the intruders could take a now-despondent Aria aside to speak of rumors and shifting tides, Shepard stepped in between her and the crowd, arms outstretched.  “Aria T’Loak will not be speaking to anyone until the signing has completed,” he announced, his helmet’s vocabulator projecting his altered voice far and wide.  To ensure he was serious, he held out a hand and gently strong-armed the closest member of the press corps so that he would be forced back but not topple end-over-end.

There were mixed grumblings, but the crowd soon dispersed after it soon became clear that none of them was going to get so much of a peep out of Aria.  A few questionable glances were shot Shepard’s way, but he had withstood bullets and Reaper beams before and had managed to pass through those alive.  Rude stares were not the sort of dagger these people thought they were.

The grateful Aria was failing not to look self-righteous as Shepard got closer to her.  “And without any prompting, too.”

“You’re not the only one getting a headache from this,” Shepard said as he took the stool next to Aria.  It was unprofessional, yes, for a bodyguard to be seated next to the person he was assigned to protect as they were supposed to be standing, on alert at all times.  But there was no one in this room who knew what drove Shepard, what sorts of madness he had in store for the phantoms that stalked the shadows.

“You’re probably wondering why,” Aria said idly as the first drink disappeared, immediately replaced by the second.  Shepard considered the amount of alcohol that the asari had drunk already, but said nothing about it, as Aria’s tolerance had been built up over a period of centuries.  It would take an entire keg of liquor to remotely come close to bringing her down.

“’Why’, what?”

Aria smiled.  “Why I’m going through with this.  Why I’m bucking centuries of tradition by throwing Omega’s lot in with Union Eterna.”

“I’d at least consider the possibility is because you seriously took my advice into consideration.”

“It’s not as much about you as you think.  I know I’ve told you the one rule of Omega?”

“Yeah.  ‘Don’t fuck with Aria.’”

“And people didn’t.  For a time.  Then came Cerberus, throwing aside caution and achieving what I had thought impossible.  In the weeks after my ousting, I asked myself how this could have happened, over and over again.  The answer all came down to it being my fault.  I had become complacent.  Sloppy.  To the point where I couldn’t correct the mess in my own house.  My pride had been wounded, even more so when I had asked you to help me take the station back, because even being the queen of Omega wasn’t enough to turn the tide.”

Shepard gave a little shake of his head.  “It’s always a matter of pride for you, then?”

The asari eyed him over the rim of her glass.  “Everyone is driven by pride in some fashion.  Even you.  Because while we can have some effect on how the universe will view us after we die, all the control is with us in deciding how we live.  And people who deliberately mess with that control are fucking up our own actions, our own wills, so it is only natural that we lash out against those who threaten us.”  Her eyes left Shepard’s and glanced across the hall.  “Take the Alliance, for example.  The Relay 314 Incident was a slap to your people’s pride, but what did you do?  You made sure to take all the steps into joining the body that acted against you in the first place.  Because an alliance makes a very good deterrent and enacts a certain level of control.”

Following Aria’s eyes, Shepard soon saw what she was referring to.

They were hard to spot, past the tangle of holographics and neon, but Shepard’s visor automatically filtered out the web of artificial light, bringing the individuals into clear view.

A group of Alliance officers.  Around three or four of them.  Their dress blues like lakes amidst the sea of gold and blacks.  They dominated their section of the room, a natural gravity warping around them.

One of them, Shepard recognized in a heartbeat.

The formal wear she had on was the most clothes he had seen adorning this person in his entire life.  She delicately held a martini glass in a hand as her mouth twisted and her eyes flashed while talking to another human, a politician most likely.  A faint trace of tattoos traveled up the little flash of neck that her collar allowed and her brown glossy hair was tied up in a regulation ponytail.  Her uniform was unbuttoned once at the collar, perhaps to show her disdain for ceremony, but the insignia of Lieutenant upon her shoulders indicated that she was perhaps very well suited for the role that she played.

“Jack,” Shepard murmured in awe as he looked at his former crewmate.  A former hard-edged convict, Jack had been one of the most powerful biotics he had ever seen before, though she came with quite the cantankerous attitude and a mouth that would make a sailor blush.  A scan from the helmet showed that she had just received, for the second time in a row, an award for her teaching, a career which she had taken up after Shepard’s suicide mission with the Collectors.  She had been assigned to Grissom Academy before the war, training biotic students.  Apparently, she was quite beloved as a teacher, considering the vast array of accolades she had received over the years.

“Yes, it seems like she’s done well for herself.  And look who’s come with her.”

Shepard had been staring for so hard at Jack that he nearly missed her accompaniment.  There was a medical officer next to Jack, broad-shouldered and bearded, that Shepard didn’t recognize.  But the next person over was someone that Shepard, in fact, did.

His own jacket was awash with medals and ribbons of various campaigns, a violent splash of color that looked like a ragged tableau of blood for a split second.  Unlike Jack, his attire was prim and proper, not a wrinkle to be seen.

It had been a long time, but he was not liable to forget the face of Admiral Hackett anytime soon.

The leader of the Alliance forces during the war, it seemed that the man had hardly aged, though he had already been getting up there in years by the time the fighting had broken out in full.  His gray hair still had a few faint lines of black interspersed within the snowy forest, as opposed to Shepard’s own stark white hair, and the scar across his face had faded into a shrouded knot, thanks to the trimmed goatee around his mouth.  He was tall and built with corded muscle, with eyes that saw everything.  He was the prototypical posterchild for Alliance Navy recruitment—if anything, time had done the man plenty of favors.

Shepard glanced down at his armor.  Even though the trench coat around him obscured a good portion of his body, the N7 logo on his breast seemed to radiate where it had been etched like a spotlamp.  Hackett was sure to have a good memory of all the N7 operatives that were emplaced around the galaxy—would the admiral blow his cover if he realized that he hadn’t assigned one to Aria?  He would need to give Hackett a wide berth here, despite the fact that the man had been one of his staunchest allies during the war.

“I never figured that Hackett was capable of retiring,” Shepard said, finding a well of relief burst inside of him.  As much as he knew he could not just stride up and reveal himself, it did him some good to see old comrades still alive.  “Seems that still rings true.”

“For the moment,” Aria said, sipping her drink.

“Why’s that?”

“Change of regime, remember?  Firmament Omina’s the ruling party in the Alliance now.  And they’re not too keen on keeping around people they see as disloyal.”

The well in Shepard’s heart started to freeze.  “Really?  But what he’s done… he’s a war hero loyal to the Alliance.”

“To the Alliance.  Not Firmament Omina.”

“So… you’re saying that he’s refusing to play along with this naked cronyism?  Means he still has his principles.  There’s no way that Hackett would ever consider playing along with just a political party.  That’s not the man I know.”

“They’re only speculations up until it’s confirmed, but the rumors are growing louder by the day.”  Aria took a long draught of her drink and smacked her lips.  “I’d give it a week from now before Firmament Omina shows him the door.  Maybe you’re right in that Hackett is incapable of retirement, but that’s the thing with these old warhorses, they never know when to quit.  And every incoming regime wants things done… a different way.  Something new.  Same as it ever was.  Everything gets upturned, nothing congeals.”

There was an undulation of movement and Shepard sensed a presence carving a path through the crowd.  Two individuals, actually.

Shepard immediately made to get in front of Aria, sinking back into his duties once again, but the asari put a hand on Shepard’s arm.  “You can let this one go,” she told him.

At first, Shepard did not recognize the asari that approached, for the markings that had traditionally been applied to her face had changed—sparse white streaks across perfect indigo skin.  She wore a tight, black dress with a singular strap that showed off half of her collar.  One leg was revealed from under the diagonal hem of her dress, her manicured foot slipped into a matte cream slope of a shoe.

Behind the asari dutifully followed a bodyguard of her own.  Based on the wide collar and the peculiar curve of their legs, the bodyguard was a turian, though he was covered from all angles in angular black and red Terminus armor.  The extra protection was a batarian make, but the design had been repurposed by other manufacturers, giving it extra computing horsepower thanks to an embedded microframe chip, along with a redirected thermal system that rendered the wearer as a blank on any heat-sensing scanner.  The turian slowly scanned the area, his expression inscrutable behind the tinted Y-shaped visor.  He was brimming with weapons to the point where Shepard even thought that such a loadout was excessive.  He would have to keep an eye on this one.

Glancing over to Aria, he saw the other asari’s lips tip upwards in a small smile.  “Hello, Tevos.”

Tevos.  Citadel Councilor.  Shepard had to control himself from swinging his head back over to the other asari to prevent suspicion.  And… yes, if he peered through the new makeup, it was as clear as day that it was the same politician that had been there for his Spectre induction and all throughout the war.

Dark thoughts of Tevos’s actions, or rather inactions, towards humanity at the beginning of the war came to mind.  For Shepard was not liable to forget how Tevos had spearheaded the effort to refuse additional forces to retake Earth back during the outset of the conflict, not to mention the outright indignation he had felt when the councilor had privately come to him at the embassy, and revealed the shocking truth to him of how her people had been hoarding valuable Prothean artifacts for centuries on their homeworld, Thessia, ensuring that they would always be more technologically advanced than their rivals on the Council while they played the other side, always first to issue a chiding whenever another race stepped out of line with regards to their artifact cataloguing.

Tevos had acted as a consummate politician the entire time Shepard had known her.  While there had always been a deferential respect he had given her, considering her status and the fact that he used to work for her for a time, it was clear that her loyalty was unfavorably weighted for her own people, though she managed to disguise such dissent with honeyed words and noncommittal declarations.  Of all the councilors that Shepard had dealt with, he had trusted her the least.  At least the turians, as expected, had openly declared their opposition to humanity’s rise, in the beginning.  They made it clear which stance they supported, until it was no longer in their advantage to take such a hostile position.

Tevos, for her part, was measured and poised.  There was something else about her that Shepard couldn’t figure, but he overlooked that for now.  “I remember one time that I told you that you were always destined to stay in your little corner of the Terminus,” she said to Aria with carefully constructed face, a politician’s mask.  “I guess I was wrong.  Apparently, there was a greater limit to your ambitions than I had first thought.”

Aria got up from her seat.  Set her drink down.  “About as much of an ‘I told you so,’ that I’ll get from you.  Only now, our positions are reversed.  Funny, that.”

Shepard was unsure if Aria was making a reference or not, so he stayed silent, hoping that Tevos wouldn’t notice him.

“The irony was not lost on me,” Tevos shrugged.  “You do enjoy playing things close to the chest.”

“That about sums up the entirety of the time we’ve known each other,” Aria countered.  “You’ve been invited to the signing ceremony?”

“Naturally.  I’m what you call a ‘legacy invite.’  Do you have a good speech prepared?”

“It won’t win any awards, but it’ll get the job done.”

Tevos chuckled in delight, her body half-turned, her business here already concluded.  “I look forward to hearing it.  In the meantime, there are some old colleagues that I’ve promised to visit.  Continue this later?”

Shepard watched her go, and the turian bodyguard made a point of providing a long look upon Shepard’s equally armored appearance, before his head turned back forward and he maneuvered close to his boss.

The former commander kept quiet as the pair departed his orbit and were quickly swallowed up by the crowd.  The only other interaction between Aria and Tevos that he had witnessed was back during the war, when Aria had obliquely leaned on the councilor to provide her with a temporary residence visa for the Citadel, skipping all the proper channels and paperwork.  He had assumed that Aria’s reputation had either extended beyond Omega, or there was more to this than just a polite exchange, but Shepard was astute enough to not ask about it further.

But Aria knew that Shepard was brimming with unasked questions as she came up beside him, also watching Tevos leave.  “A former fling,” she said.  “Something that the both of us have been unable to leave behind.  We gave each other space, promised that everything would be civil after it ended.”

“I see,” Shepard softly nodded.

“She resigned in disgrace, you know?  From the Council.”

Shepard’s head tilted, starting to get it.  “Why’s that?”  But then he figured he knew the answer right after he asked the question.

“The Prothean beacon,” Aria smirked.  “Its existence on Thessia came out a year or so after the war ended.  Turns out, a lot of the galaxy didn’t like the fact that the asari were hoarding all that knowledge for themselves, less so that one of the councilors was in on the take.  The uproar got… a little out of hand, and the other councilors gave Tevos a choice.  She couldn’t escape ignominy, but she could determine just how much the stain of her political failure could follow her.  Thus, she tendered her resignation very, very quickly.  Probably didn’t matter in the end, seeing as how the Council itself was disbanded shortly thereafter.”

Judging from the extravagance of the dress that Tevos had been sporting just now, Shepard figured that an inglorious end to her career had not been enough to fully extinguish her pride.

“It seems like she managed to land on her feet,” Shepard observed.

“That, she did,” Aria agreed.  “The thing about politicians is that, it almost seems that it doesn’t matter if you do a bad job.  There will always be something else waiting in the wings.  And, as it turns out, Tevos managed to do quite well for herself.  She’s high up at some manufacturing firm on the Citadel these days.  Sits on the board of directors, I think.”

“Doing what?”

“Who the fuck knows?  Consulting?  Playing bioti-ball with the C-suite?  Banging her secretary in the closet of her office?  I don’t keep tabs on her, so I have no idea.  What I do know is that, since joining the firm, she’s apparently made significantly more money than she did as a bribable councilor.  Now, she’s a capitalist.  Hard to tell which is the occupation with less morality, these days.”

After a while, Aria had drunk enough liquor to approach the gala with a newfound confidence.  She stalked back into the crowd, Shepard and Ceraph in tow, and began to trade japes and barbs with anyone who dared cross her path or slipped under the cordon that Shepard’s natural presence exuded.

About half the room had already taken seats at some of the tables, which were unlabeled and virtually unorganized.  Aria adopted a meaningless weave through the tables to keep her overall path unpredictable and therefore less easy to intercept.  Although hundreds of eyes were upon Aria, she disregarded them all as if they were nothing but stray pixels upon a screen.  The asari radiated power, which was enough for the more cautious to keep their seats, daring not to rise and impede Aria’s trek in any way.

Something had apparently captured Aria’s interest. ^[3]  Shepard was able to see that they were headed towards the corner of the room, where a small crowd had gathered.  Aria seemed intrigued at what all the fuss was about and, seeing as she was bored out of her mind, a little extra stimulation would do her some good.

Whispers from the table around them joined the muted chatterings ahead, a curtain of sound.  They realized Aria’s target before Shepard could, even as the asari asserted her way through, allowing a parting in the crowd to be made to see what all the focus was congregated upon.

And then Shepard’s heart stopped as he pushed past the first ring of bodies.

Something ripped through him.  An ache that would never be satiated that started in his roots and spread to every fiber of his being in a tidal wave of pebbled glass.  A hot column of light, spearing through his mouth and exiting out his spine.  It felt like he was being held together by threads—one wrong breeze and he would shatter right then and there.

There were four of them.  Quarian admirals.  He recognized them all right off the bat, even with the suits.

He had met them only a few times in person, but his mind refused to let go of their personas, for some reason.  There was Xen, and Koris, and Raan, and…

…and Tali.

Nestled between Koris and Raan, he watched as the woman was currently engaged in light conversation with a turian ambassador.  His aural receptors seemed to malfunction as he only heard her voice float through the morass.  Delicate, faint electric tinge from her vocabulator, pitch tipped up.  She sounded happy.

There was a tightness that spread through Shepard’s chest like a fungus.  Everything began to hurt for him, a phantom pain.  It suddenly became very hard to breathe in his helmet, but although some part of him was screaming for him to rip off the covering and show himself to everyone, he stayed his hand at the last moment.  Though it did not help the fact that he was on the verge of hyperventilation, about to pass out.  He grasped a hand near his collar as though the pressure on his neck could be lessened somewhat, of which it could not.

He thought that he would have been able to endure the sight of her again.  He was wrong.  Seeing her like this, surrounded by her colleagues and freely talking to the press and well-wishers, her hands gently flowing and expressive, that new visor softly strobing a wan light from its vocabulator, it was the sheer proof of her being alive that made him want to retch in both relief and sorrow.  He had shared everything with this woman and she had given him everything in return.  They shared their words, their pasts, their bodies with each other.  She had been the only place he had ever felt truly safe in the last few years he had been truly living.

“I have a home…”

A rising tide of violence began to surface in his brain.  Slowly seeing red.  Reminding him of the promises that had been broken because of those that had sought to see his ascent halt in place.  But there was nothing to set his anger upon.  No purpose to pursue.  All he had was his rage and that wasn’t enough to bring him back to her.  It would not be enough to salvage what he had thrown away.

There were two wars occurring in Shepard right now.  The war to preserve his identity and bide his time as a viper would do, wait until the last possible second before making a lethal strike.

The other war was to dispense with all of his tradecraft right here and now.  He would stand before the quarian and remove his helmet, for he was bursting at the seams to pick up where he had left off with her, but it was a war that was rapidly diminishing into a pathetic smolder.  So much had changed in the ten years he had been gone.  What if Tali had changed?  What if she had found someone else?

What if she could no longer love him as he had hoped?

The admirals had detected the rising whispers by now and they all turned to see Aria in all her glory.  The powerful crime boss herself, now influential politician, stood before them.  The quarians all stiffened in slight alarm.

All but Tali.

She was the one to step forward first and Shepard felt his heart swell with pride.  “Aria,” she said, her words coming across clearly to Shepard for the first time, “it has been a while.  I’m glad to see you here today.”

Oh my god, she sounds almost the same.  Older, yes.  But… the same.

“Yes,” Aria said, her voice taking on a noticeable drop in timbre.  “I must imagine that ours isn’t the only ten-year reunion for you today, Admiral.  And to think this whole gathering is supposedly all on our behalf.  If they’d asked for my opinion, I would’ve just told them to save on the budget.  Slash the guest list.”

Tali nodded in sympathy, a familiar look inhabiting the glow of her eyes.  “I seem to recall that Afterlife had a different type of indulgence for you.”

“A healthy mix of stabbings and pole dancing.”

“You haven’t done the former here yet, have you?” Tali tilted her head in mock concern.

There was amusement in the asari’s eyes, but her expression was more genuine, at least until Koris cleared his throat and tried to have his say.  “I share in the relief of my colleague, Madame T’Loak, thought I have to admit that the timing of our entrances to Union Eterna is most symbolic.  Why, I’d reason—”

“I’m afraid any metaphor that could be applied to this situation is utterly lost on me,” Aria interrupted stiffly, her brow furrowing a little as her eyes swept over Xen and Raan for mere moments, as if she was already bored with their presence.  “I’m just here to wrap up these formalities before my patience blows up like a shuttleload of Bahak refugees.”

Koris fell silent, now meek.  Xen managed to appear disinterested and carried on her conversation with the Union Eterna representatives she had been previously engaged in, Raan next to her reluctantly rejoining the dialogue.

Only Tali remained and she soon maneuvered into close proximity to Aria, which made Shepard feel that his chest was about to explode with how hard his heart was pumping now.  He could reach out and touch her shoulder, he was that close, but her attention was agonizingly not directed unto him.

“You’re not the only one who thinks this is a waste of time,” Tali said to Aria, her volume conspiratorial.  “You haven’t been in this room as long as I have, and I’ve calculated we could have been done with the ceremony thirteen times over if we had just skipped straight to proceedings.”

“The one person who sees sense in this echo chamber,” Aria tightly grinned.  For a horrible second, Shepard thought that Aria was going to make a reference to him, but the asari was not stupid enough to wound Tali like that, so she was careful to keep any mention of his name at bay.  “Figures it would come from someone who has boots-on-the-ground experience.”

“I had a lot of time to build up a view of the galaxy.  Had more opportunities than anyone else at my age.”

“Capitalizing on the time you have left, I take it?”

“Building on a future.  I learned from the best.”

While Tali was talking, Shepard was studying her, doing his best to appear as an immobile golem.  Her suit had undergone a redesign—the metal at her helmet was less angular and was comprised of elegant swaths of a shimmering metal like platinum.  Her visor was darkly tinted that, if the light was caught at the right angle, it would appear that it had captured a sun underneath its amber-like surface.  The armor that she wore broadened her frame, making her appear more powerful, thick enough for it to stop the concussion of a grenade.

Still beautiful.  I don’t need to see under that visor to truly tell.

Tali’s hands came together, her thumbs twiddling.  “I know that we never had many chances to talk, you and I.  You… mostly corresponded with Shepard back then—”

It seemed there was a hitch in her voice when she said his name, and Shepard had to fight not to twist in place from the throb that materialized at the base of his own throat.

“—but I just want to thank you for all the support you gave him, right up to the end.  You helped Shepard get back on his feet when it counted and I’ll never forget that.”

It took a lot for Aria to be caught off guard, but there was a distinct hesitation in her reply, probably because she was trying to not give away the fact that Shepard was standing right in their presence and that Tali had no idea what was going on.  Not to mention the fact that Shepard was on the verge of total failure, dying internally at seeing his beloved so close, but he was unable to reach out and touch her, to assure her that everything would be all right.  He was starting to noticeably twitch, to the point where Ceraph had to surreptitiously kick him in order to get his head back in the game.  He glanced over at the turian in grateful thanks.

“I owed him a debt,” Aria finally said.  “One that I’ll probably never repay.”

Next to Shepard, Ceraph was also fidgeting, her eyes watering with tears as she fought to keep them staring straight ahead and not make eye contact with anyone.  Shepard wondered if he should kick her, in return.

But Tali was already solemnly nodding.  “I think he would understand your position.  You’ve given a lot for him, in any case.  Supplies, advice.  You even got wounded for him, which I hope isn’t troubling you that much?”

Both Aria and Shepard blinked.  Acting the dutiful bodyguard, Shepard took a half-step forward, glancing over his employer, searching for anything out of the ordinary.  Until he realized—

Aria had dropped her gaze down to her leg and lifted her foot, rolling her ankle slightly in response to Tali’s comment. 

Shepard’s shoulders swept backwards a bit as he recalled the nasty blow an Adjutant had given Aria back on Omega during the last battle on the station.  One of Cerberus’s Reaperized abominations had made a break for him on the Afterlife ground floor, mounting a frantic charge, while malfunctioning pyrotechnics blazed magnesium trails all around them, looking to rip him limb from limb.  He had been within killing distance of the Adjutant, caught in the middle of reloading his rifle, when Aria had suddenly swerved into the way, taking the full force of the attack, as she countered with a biotic blow right as the Adjutant had started to deliver a brutal swipe, attempting to part Shepard’s head from his shoulders.  The force of the colliding attacks had swept Aria off her feet and caused her to land badly on her foot, shattering her ankle.  The Adjutant had gotten the worse end—it had been propelled into the dancing pit, where an array of spiked instrumentation at the bottom had skewered the creature like a kebab.  Shepard had ended up helping Aria up the stairs to wrest out Petrovksy’s surrender personally, he recalled.

“Impressive,” Aria said as she set her foot back down.  “I didn’t think it was that obvious.”

“You hide it well,” Tali shrugged.  “Maybe years ago, I had heard about it, but when I saw you favoring your weight more on your left side, I was reminded of it.”

“And here I was, thinking that I had managed to get rid of the limp.”

“You did,” Tali then gestured to her own visor.  “But body language is accentuated to a quarian.  Comes with having to live inside a suit our whole lives.  We can’t rely on facial cues after all, so we pick up on other tells.”

Shepard was reminded of the long talks he had had with her in the cabin of the Normandy.  It had been a semi-regular ritual for the two of them, even before they had entered what eventually became a relationship.  She had been so fascinated by him then, and he of her, that they had spent hours talking about their own species, their childhoods.  What made them different.  What made them so similar.

There was an awkward tension in Shepard’s hands.  Surreptitiously, he rubbed at his aching joints, trying to soothe the arthritic pain.  To hide his guilt.

But Tali seemed to sense the movement and, for the first time, the glow within her visor swept over in his direction.  Her bright eyes seemed to cut right through him as she momentarily dipped her gaze over the N7 insignia upon his breast.  Her own body language was reserved to the point where Shepard could not tell what she was thinking, as if she was searching for something.

As soon as it arrived, the moment vanished and Tali returned her attention back to Aria.  She swelled as she took in a breath, about to ask another question when a light chiming noise resounded through the room.  A polite interruption.

“Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please.”

An aide at the entrance, human, flanked by ceremonial guards, the crest of Union Eterna upon her shoulder.  She took a deep bow, all smiles.

“Thank you for your patience.  If you’ll follow me, we have arranged transport to the Soledad Starliner.  The ceremony will proceed aboard within the hour.”  With another bow, she made a smart hundred and eighty degree turn and walked out of the room without seeing if she was being followed.

Chapter Text

Once a pleasure cruiser for the rich and famous, the Soledad Starliner was a modest-sized ship that was only tailored to house up to two hundred guests, unlike the massive super-vessels that were built to transport over a thousand on yearlong voyages.  A human designer firm based out of Italy had been responsible for the design while a salarian shipbuilder had performed the construction.  Looking at a schematic of the cruiser, Shepard was reminded of a sea turtle, with the thrusters embedded in the four “flippers” of the ship, which jutted out from the almond-shaped body.

At the front of the ship, analogous to the “head”, was a massive glass bubble five stories tall, behind which the inhabitants of the grand ballroom could peer outwards towards the vast of space beyond; the room consisted of a circular ground floor and four hemispherical rings that provided an unobstructed view thanks to the plethora of empty space within the massive room, though a chandelier of sweeping crystal strips like a cirque de soleil act occupied a good percentage of that emptiness.  Shepard was standing at one of the numbered tables right at the ballroom’s main floor—meant for the Omega retinue—and stared upwards at the sloping cliff face of borderless glass, momentarily taken by the view.

The Soledad Starliner had departed from the Citadel about a half an hour ago and had oriented itself so that both the Citadel and Earth filled the frame from the ballroom, a prime vista point.  Shepard could see the terminator line as it was slowly wiping across the planet, allowing the broken and recovering cities to project their urban sprawl in their ponds of billions of lights.  The Citadel’s position just past the Folly gave it the impression that it lorded above the belt of salvage.  The circlet that constricted the planet was sparkling from the shimmering Sol in the distance just as much as the damaged and scarred station.  Shepard’s two masters.

It was strange to be looking at the place he had almost died at, he considered as the segmented bullet shape of the Citadel became a speck amidst the obsidian curve of his visor.  Or as far as the galaxy was concerned, he had died on that station.  Broken and burned beyond all belief, was everyone’s thought.  The years had softened the blow, their denial and disbelief gradually sanded away. 

If they only knew who was standing in their midst right now.

More waiters, just like at the hotel, swept around the room with their trays of champagne.  Shepard, again, did not partake.  There was a buffet at the side of the room that was currently serving hors d’oeuvres that attracted a good percentage of the people in the room, who had all been ferried over from the initial gathering back at the InterContinental.  Shepard had scoped out the buffet beforehand.  The amuse bouchées mainly consisted of tartlets that served food prepared in a way he hadn’t seen before.  There were tiny tacos filled with smoked salmon and crème fraiche.  Little balls of fatty tuna topped with caviar.  Foie gras cups with egg shavings.  And even miniature oysters, hidden by cushions of thick foam that were dusted with a blue spice.

Even though the foot looked succulent enough, Shepard was not hungry.  Anger had a way of muting his appetite.

Slowly, he swept his head from side to side, canvassing the array of faces before him.  In a hand, he held a simple glass of water—he wasn’t going to drink it, but it was a way for him to at least make an attempt at appearing normal. 

His helmet’s scanner was rapidly honing in on the multitude of faces before him, trying to identify all of the people in close proximity.  He ran all of the facial identification data that he could find through every database he could imagine: C-Sec, Alliance, Terminus bounties, Salarian STG.  The processor in his armor was already running the cryptanalysis, breaking down any common clues in probable criminal records, political affiliations, ideological stances.  But that was going to take a while.  The data was tenuous at best, and finding a common thread that he did not already know about was going to take more time than he was going to be on this ship, at least.  Unless he had a way of filtering out these people with some variable that he was failing to surmise, he figured that today would not yield the results he had been hoping for.

He clenched his fist hard, his brow furrowing underneath his helmet.  All he could see was a limitless gulf of the guilty in their expensive clothes and glittering jewelry.  Bastards.  Someone here had deigned to impose their will on him, take everything that he had ever wanted, and they were disguised among a crowd of the elite, mingling and chattering and eating their succulent food.  Maybe someone had taken his defeat as a conquest, represented by a mark on an heirloom sword somewhere.  Perhaps private references were being exchanged amongst themselves as to how they managed to bring Commander Shepard low, intending to relay the story across the lineage of their family.  Was he supposed to be nothing but a showpiece, a pawn in a game that he could not see the point of?

Empty, dull, arrogant eyes glinted back at them.  If only they could even know of the hatred behind his blackened visor, everyone on this ship would be quaking in fear.

There was a crunch of glass close at hand, but Shepard didn’t notice.  He was too busy steaming in deep breaths, struggling to prevent his armored body from shuddering like a rattlesnake.

A hand gently came to his forearm. “Um… Sh—I mean, Alder?”

“What is it, Ceraph?” he whispered, his vocabulator mutilating his voice into a light rasp.

“Your glass—”

He looked down. ^[1]  Where he was gripping the glass, a series of spiderwebs had cascaded throughout the structure from the sheer force of his grip.  The fact that it was still intact was a testament to the type of crystal used to make the cup.

“Sorry,” he said as he set the cup down, though he did not exactly know what he was apologizing for.  “I guess I was a little distracted.”

The wide eyes of the turian never wavered from him.  Her lanky demeanor was stiff, arthritic.  She’s nervous.

“Anything?” she whispered.  “I mean, do you have an idea of…?”

“Of who did it?” he said.  He shook his head, which was frustrating in of itself to admit.  “Too early to tell.  Any of the people here could have a plausible reason.  Money… power… something I haven’t figured out yet.  I just don’t have the information to narrow down my search.”

Ceraph absorbed this stoically as she mimicked Shepard’s slow movements in observing the crowd, the ring at her septum glimmering like a deep vein of gold.  “I couldn’t help but overhear a lot of their conversations.  They’re all so… conceited.”

“They’re politicians, Ceraph.  Politicians and CEOs.  Moneylenders and corporate pirates.  I think someone once said that you need to be a bit of a psychopath to succeed in those types of careers.”

“Well…” Ceraph added as she lifted her gaze and nodded to one side of the room.  “Not everyone here is like that.”

Shepard knew where Ceraph was staring, but he followed the direction of her eyes anyway.  He knew because he had been taking several glances in that direction himself for nearly the entire time he had been on board the ship.

Tali was standing next to her table, having a casual conversation with Jack, and by the looks of the hand gestures they were exhibiting, the two women were relaxed as they traded stories together.  In Jack’s case, she was in a particularly good mood, as she would routinely trade a few playful shoves and elbows towards the more reserved Tali, who accepted the blows from the biotic with grace.  The other quarian admirals were within the span of a few steps, having finally broken out from their own insular pools and were also carrying out conversations with individuals like Admiral Hackett and some of the asari senators.  But the filtered light from Sol seemed to land upon Tali, singling her out amidst the horde.  It was a glow that only Shepard was able to witness, as though everyone around him was blind to the truth that he held within.

It hurt every time he laid eyes on her.  He had routinely promised himself to not stare so much at the other woman, but he could not help himself.  He just had to see her, for every second he could witness with his own eyes that she was alive and well was both a dagger and a syringe to his heart.  As if he could trade days from his life for just minutes of being together again.

He was aware of the tautness of every tendon in his body and how he yearned to reach out and touch her, just to reassure her that all of the pain she must have gone through for all these years could be forgotten now.  He envisioned himself healing her with just a simple gesture.  A look in his eyes that he reserved only for her.  Only a second of eye contact and she would know everything.

Shepard forced himself to turn away.  “No,” he finally breathed.  “She’s risen above it all.”  And he believed it, with all his heart.

Ceraph, on the other hand, was not under such suspicion and she took up the glances in Tali’s direction in Shepard’s stead.  “You must have loved her so much,” she observed.

“I never stopped,” he said, probably with a bit more indignation than he had intended as his words caused the turian to recoil slightly.  Adopting a less antagonistic tone, he calmed himself down.  “I had thought that… after the end of the war, there would have been something that the two of us could have built together.  I had wanted to spend the rest of my time with her.”  He hung his head, the phantom of better days lingering within him, and shook his head to exorcise his demons.  “God, I had wanted that.  If she had asked me to forget everything back then, to abandon the war and spend the last of our days with just each other on some quiet world in a forgotten corner of the galaxy, I just might very well have taken her up on that offer.”

The turian seemed dubious.  Commander Shepard, hero of the Citadel, savior of the galaxy, openly admitting to betraying his duty, deserting his values?  “Would you, really?” she asked, unconvinced.

Shepard opened his mouth to respond, but another voice beat him to the punch.  “Of course not.  But, take it from someone who may have been in the man’s position before: love makes you do stupid things.”

Turning around, Shepard saw Aria sidling up to him, a cocktail in hand, which must have been her eighth drink for the day.  Ice cubes delicately clinked in the thick glass.

The moment had been long enough for Shepard to have spouted off a rebuttal by now, but it had come and gone, which Aria took as a confirmation to proceed.  “So, when are you going to go to her?”

The question was enough to make Shepard give a start.  “What?”

Aria cocked her head in Tali’s direction and took a healthy sip of her drink.  “Your woman.  You going to make things right with her tonight?”

Another pause of several seconds and Shepard could only hang his head, defeated chuckles ripping from his throat like parasitic expulsions.  “Aria… you know that I can’t put her in that kind of danger.”

“And just what danger is that, exactly?  She’s still alive, you’re here right now, so what’s the catch?  There’s no war and you’re not being shot at.  Could you ask for a better opportunity?”

“Even you know better to not relax until your enemies are dead or dispatched.  And mine are still out there, somewhere.  A score needs to be settled and I have to keep Tali safe from all that.  I’ll come to her once I’m finished.”

“And how long do you think that will take?  Huh?  A week?  A month?  Years?  How long are you willing to elongate this?”

“As long as it takes,” he growled as he closed the gap to Aria by a firm step.  No doubt the asari could see her own distorted reflection in the expanse of his helmet.  Knowing her, she could also see the doubts that infected him right down to his bones.

Her lips curled into a sneer.  “You know that the longer this farce goes on, the longer the both of you slip away from each other.”

“Then that’s the price I will pay if I can ensure that no one will ever come between us again.”

“Grow the fuck up,” Aria sighed, obviously aching to use his name, but knowing that she could not do so within earshot of so many people.  “If this goes on, there may be a time where you finally realize that, you had a perfect opportunity to achieve that normality, and you ignored it.  There may be several of these moments that come your way, but pride and stubbornness impede all rational thought.  Reality doesn’t work like a shitty romance novel.  And by the time you either finish your business, or come to the realization that the business will never be concluded, you’ll be left with nothing but emptiness.  You’ll be left with the uncomfortable fucking truth that there was nothing left for you to fight for.  And all that remains is a half-remembered memory of a future, a what-could-have-been, that you’ll spend the rest of your life punishing yourself over.”

The asari opened her mouth as if to say some more, but frustration impeded her train of thought and she gave a roll of her eyes as if she was disgusted with herself.  She took a draught from her drink, as if to disguise the pause with the sudden need to imbibe her liquor.

Shepard considered Aria thoughtfully, the chatter of the crowd around them diminishing into an ignorable throb.

“I recall that there used to be a time when you rebuffed any sort of helpful advice purely out of habit.”

Aria searched the ceiling, as if her next statement was written somewhere up there.  She then gave a limp shrug that was more of a begrudging acceptance, but the thin smile that graced her lips spoke the loudest.  “I guess I picked up some bad habits from someone I once knew.  Funny how that works.”

He detected that Aria had probably said everything she wanted to say for the time being, which was a matter of convenient timing, for there was a slight tap of feedback from the embedded speakers around the ship.  Everyone’s attention gravitated towards the dais right against the middle of the massive bubble window, where a man in a tuxedo—a senator or representative—was standing at a podium.

“Good evening, everyone.  Hello, and welcome.  If I could please have your attention.  If you could all group closer together, the signing ceremony will proceed in just a few minutes.”

“And there,” Aria grimaced.  “Duty calls.”  She downed the remainder of her drink, only a slight clench of her jaw tensing to signify the discomfort as the alcohol slammed into the back of her throat.  She set the empty glass on a nearby table.

Around a hundred people clustered in tightly, moving closer to the podium.  The other hundred stood at the ringed levels above, leaning upon the glass barriers as they beheld the spectacle from up high.

Shepard slowly maneuvered his way through the crowd, standing a good half a head above most of the people in his vicinity.  He swung his head to catch the eye of Aria or Ceraph, but to his dismay, he found that they were already separated by a few shoulder widths, a gap which had been filled by a cluster of salarians, as well as a krogan.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the host was now saying as Shepard continued to jostle in his spot, “I now call to the stage, Senator Yanaris from Thessia, who will proceed with the opening remarks.”

An asari in a white cream dress took the stage, shook the hand of the host, and pulled out a foldable tablet which she set upon the podium.  A table with a flattened portable console was positioned right next to the rostrum.  With distinguished poise, the kind practiced by a career politician, she surveyed the crowd before her for a few seconds, using the break to draw out the anticipation before she began her speech.

“Esteemed members of Union Eterna, it is my privilege to be the one to welcome you all to what will be a momentous day in our short history together…”

Shepard immediately lost interest in what the senator was saying around thirty seconds in, in which the series of grateful thanks and congratulatory pats on the back for Union Eterna’s own efforts seemed to drone on and on, a lot of words being uttered to ultimately say nothing at all.  It was hard to concentrate on what was being said anyway, for his portion of the crowd was still settling amongst themselves, with everyone jockeying for a position that best suited them in order to get an unobstructed view towards the dais.

He gave a grunt as someone trod on his foot.  It didn’t hurt, for he was wearing armored boots, but the unexpected pressure caused him to look down in annoyance.

Next to his foot, a slender three-toed boot, replete in a shimmering carbon-fiber gray, was sheepishly sliding away.

He blinked, catching the segmented pattern of the enviro-suit that crawled up the leg of the boot’s owner and the flick of purple fabric that his eyes instinctively registered before his brain could make the connection.

“I’m so sorry, I beg your pardon,” Tali said as Shepard looked up, his neck now feeling glass-like and brittle, his eyes throbbing open as he was being pressed shoulder to shoulder against the quarian.  A pulse of pain manifested between his ribs, aching and stabbing.  It felt like ice had encrusted in that location, a jagged shield that surrounded his magma core.

He just prayed that his voice modulator was not going to malfunction anytime soon.  “Don’t… don’t worry about it,” he said, trying not to stutter.  “I’ve been through worse.”  Immediately, he cursed himself for trying to make light of the situation.  As much as he wanted to carry on a conversation—just to hear her talk more!—he knew that he had to play his part of being a silent enforcer, and that meant being stiff and humorless.  He role was to be her guardian angel, even if she did not know it.

“I saw you before, at the hotel,” she said, seemingly more interested in him than she was with the senator who was speaking up on the stage.  She’s bored of this as well.  “You’re part of Aria’s entourage?”

There was nowhere for him to go, so he had to just stand and endure her questions.  He supplied a nod, trying to be economic with his words.  “Her security detail.  She likes things low-key.”

“I didn’t know the Alliance loaned out N7 operatives out to Omega, of all places.”

Shepard managed a shaky smile underneath his helmet, the dictating senator becoming a blur in the background.  “They don’t,” he gave a sideways look at Tali.  “I work for her.”

That certainly piqued her attention, and in that brief span of time, their eyes connected, even through two separate panes of reinforced glass separated them.  Sealing them away.  Shepard still found that he could get lost in those absorbing eyes, a part of his soul screaming at him to stop being such an idiot and to drop the masquerade at once.  One advantage in this moment, though, was that he had known Tali long enough that he knew what expression she was adorning beneath her suit as long as he looked at her studiously.  There was no need for the quarian to have a mask for her emotions to become apparent.  He could only hope that his cover would hold for as long as it needed to before she was able to figure out the truth.

“Oh,” she merely said.  Her eyes dipped to the logo upon his chestplate.  “I thought… for a moment, that you were with the Alliance.  What with the N7 armor and all.”

His knuckles instinctively rubbed at the insignia, as if to smear it away.  “I can see how one could make that mistake.  The armor was… well… they let me keep it when I turned in my papers after the war.”

It was not one of his better lies, as evidenced by the slight uptick of Tali’s eye as she studied his armor more carefully.  No doubt she had noticed that there was not a single mark adorning the shining surface of the covering that cocooned him.  Clearly, it had never seen combat before, so in her mind, he had either spent the entire war behind a desk at a waystation in a forgotten corner of the galaxy, or he had stolen the armor outright.

Thankfully, she did not pursue the subject so directly.  She instead bobbed on her toes once, an old tic that he warmly realized she had not rid herself of, and gazed up at him.  “I haven’t been in the loop as much as I should have.  Especially with how the military on Earth has been rebuilding, much less the N7 corps.  Speaking of which, are they still running the courses down there, in Denver?”

Shepard smiled.  Tali was testing him.  “You mean Rio?” he corrected.  “Denver is where they train the cadet pilots.  Vila Militar is the advanced combat school.”

A satisfied air came over Tali.  “Of course,” she said with a smooth self-assuredness that seemed that she was pleased to be corrected, even though Shepard knew that Tali had already known the answer because he had told her all about the exact training he had undergone years ago.  “My mistake.”

Another pregnant pause passed and Tali spared another glance towards the still-droning senator, who was now citing development statistics, but doing so in the most boring tone imaginable that it was a chore to stay focused for very long.

She cocked her head at Shepard, her eyes falling to the N7 insignia on his chest again.  It was almost as if Shepard could feel the ache of remembrance that was now running Tali through right now like a spear.

“Did…” she whispered, eyes still locked onto the red and white logo, voice now sluggish like she had awakened from a dream-infested slumber, “…did you…?”  Her eyes developed a limpid glow, but the watery reflection soon solidified into ice and Tali gave a simple shake of her head, as if ashamed that she had spoken out of turn.  That she lacked the courage to get a burning question off her chest.

Instead, she composed herself and renewed her approach.  “How did you come to work for Aria?  If you don’t mind me asking, that is.”

Shepard chewed his lip and gave a one-shoulder shrug.  “Aria… has been known to pick up discarded objects.  From time to time.”

There was no hiding from her gaze as she searched him from head to toe.  It seemed like an eternity passed, or that time had slowed to a crawl.  He avoided looking at her, trying to remain steadfast.  Do not give yourself away.  This is not the time!

The moment passed with a whisper, almost as if a gossamer film had suddenly been whipped away from the two of them, snapping them back into the present.

“Is it all right if I know your name?” she asked.  An innocent question.

Shepard beheld Tali once more, the lump in his throat threatening to leap out.

“It’s fine,” he finally remembered to speak.  “Only fair, seeing as I already know yours.  Everyone here does.”

“Maybe not everyone…”

I once told your admirals to their faces that you showed the galaxy the worth of your race, Tali.  There is no one in this room that could not know who you are.

“More than you think, I imagine.  In any case, my name is Alder.”

“Alder,” Tali slowly repeated, her accented voice producing just the lightest trill on the last syllable.  “Just Alder?”

“Just Alder.”

“Well, it was nice to meet you, Alder.  I know you said you know who I am, but it’s only polite if I return the courtesy.  It’s my prerogative, you see.  So, if you’ll permit me…”  She held out a hand and Shepard could see that her palm and the back were lightly armored with more of that carbon fiber plating.  “Admiral Tali’Zorah vas Rannoch.”

Vas Rannoch.  So she had made the world her home, after all.

Shepard stared at the offered hand for a moment and in that time, he was back on the ramp of the Normandy, the wind whipping dust and ash all around him, Tali being held back by Garrus as she screamed his name, her hand outstretched as if she could grab a hold of him and stop him from heading to the Citadel and causing all they built to become undone—

Another breath and Shepard was thrown back in the present with a rush.  A cold sweat had broken out upon him and he was almost shivering.  He then looked to Tali’s offered hand, looking all alone in the space between them.  It was only fair that it be reunited. 

With a fragile grunt, he gently clasped her hand with his own, matching the surprisingly strong grip.  Something seemed to pass between them in that moment, an intangible feeling, a delicate spark that shot into Shepard’s guts and melted the ice that had formed in the gaps.

“—and it is my honor to present,” the senator’s voice rose in volume, rousing the both of them from their private conversation, “the first of two illustrious individuals who helped make all of this possible for us.  Ladies and gentlemen, Admiral Tali’Zorah.”

Tali gave a start and their private shake immediately broke.  Shepard felt something flow from him, his anguish spiking as the touch of the woman fled his grasp.  But Tali, oblivious to the man’s hurt, instinctively patted herself over as if searching for something.  For a moment, Shepard was reminded of the young woman who had joined him on the Normandy without a second’s hesitation, eager to explore the galaxy and all of the dangers that resided in it.

“Oh!  That’s my cue.”  She turned apologetically to Shepard.  “I would’ve thought they’d ask me to be on stage beforehand.  Anyway…”  She awkwardly gestured to where she was being called up.

Shepard could only manage a limp motion in his hand.  “Go,” he murmured.  Stay.

The gala went dead silent as the crowd parted to let Tali through. ^[2]  She approached the edge of the dais and rose upon the small staircase, now adopting a more poised gait, as if she had remembered she was someone of importance.  The senator gave a grand gesture to the podium, all theatrics, and stepped back to let Tali take the helm.  For the quarian’s part, she supplied a nod of gratitude towards the asari and gripped the edges of the podium with her hands.

Watching from below, Shepard could not help but feel oceans afar.

He was both nervous and exhilarated.  To hear Tali give a speech… she had always professed her distaste for public speaking.  He clenched a fist out of sight.  The woman was liable to forget her own confidence sometimes.  Under fire, she could be an absolute devil.  Calm and collected, ready at a moment’s notice to protect the people she loved.  Though, get her alone in a room and attempt to pry out her deepest feelings, her personal wants, and she would be a nervous wreck in moments.

You’ve got this, he imagined himself projecting to her.  Knock ‘em dead.

Tali spent a few moments erect upon the stage, the slowly churning belt of the Folly behind her sparkling like a scarf made out of diamonds.  She pulled out no speech, no aids.  She simply took a breath and turned towards a cadre of individuals all similarly donned in fine suits and silks, a hand outstretched, cupping nothingness, and rotated her arm so that it swept a hemisphere upon the room she now addressed.

“To the Committee Board, the Senators, and the ladies and gentlemen who are here among us,” she spoke, her voice being grandly projected by the podium’s built-in mic, “I thank you for the warm welcome and the hospitality you have bestowed upon me and my people.”  She made a half-turn so that she could look at the magnificence of the universe behind her for just a moment, as if they also were deserving of acknowledgement.  “It is always humbling to be back in sight of the Citadel,” her voice dropped a quarter in volume, “and of Earth,” before it picked back up again, “and I am honored to be able to speak with all of you on this day, which has been a long time coming for everyone.”

If Shepard had been holding any object in his hand, he would have dropped it by now.  Where had this come from?

Tali was appearing to grow calmer as she spoke, becoming used to her situation.  “It is a long way from Rannoch to get to this spot in the galaxy and, during the voyage, I was reminded by a passage from an opera that has always had a place in my mind, ever since I was a child.  If you’ll permit me, I’ll share my favorite passage with you: ‘After time adrift among open stars, along tides of light and through shoals of dust—‘”

“’—I will return to where I began,’” Shepard whispered at the same time, too quiet for his modulator to pick up.  He had memorized the elegant passphrase that Tali had used when she had returned home to the Migrant Fleet, all that time ago.  He never knew it had been from an opera.

“The quote was by Leben’Vashti vas Idenna,” Tali continued, “a quarian playwright who wrote the opera a hundred years after the Morning War had ended, when we were in the middle of our long exile.  In his opera, the quote was delivered scathingly, with a bitterness that could only convey generations of frustration and longing for a future as bright as the past had been.  As a child, I naively saw the beauty of the words, but never the meaning.  Today, I say them with a melancholy that Leben’Vashti could never have comprehended, because of how much has changed since his time.  But, more simply, it is to acknowledge the place where all of our lives had unquestionably begun anew.  For this is truly where we all began.”

Shepard found himself nodding along.  Keep going.  Don’t stop.

Tali was in no way finished.  “It was important for us—all of us—to be here in this place, this moment, because we are now solidifying that bright future for the generations to come, and they will never have to know the challenges we had to overcome to get to where we are now.  Because, with a stroke of the pen, the Rannochian Federation, after a decade of preparation, has joined its esteemed colleagues of democratic alliances to become a member of Union Eterna.”

To hammer that point home, Tali deliberately stepped away from the pulpit so that she could now stand in front of the table just a few paces away, where a large tablet and an elegant stylus sat upon a cloak of the softest black felt.

Picking up the stylus, Tali bent over the tablet for a moment as she gracefully made a few quick strokes with the utensil upon the glowing screen, her flowing signature being projected on one of the screens behind her.  And then, with glacial precision, she set the stylus back down from where she had plucked it from, to the noise of applause.  Shepard was clapping the hardest out of them all, momentarily forgetting himself, for he was filled with such pride that it felt like his heart was about to burst.

“Your expectations for us are high,” Tali said as she stepped back up to the podium.  “As are our expectations for ourselves.  But if there is anything that I’ve learned from my travels, and from my position as admiral over the last ten years, quarians take great pleasure in not just meeting expectations, but surpassing them.  Ten years ago, we showed the galaxy the value of our race.  We are prepared…”  She paused for a second and bent her head.  “I… am prepared…” she seemed to barely whisper, before she regained her posture once more, “…to do our part in our role of collective defense for the galaxy.”

Hushed murmurs of admiration swept through the crowd and Shepard maintained a tight grin.  How they looked at her!  They were envious—of Tali!

And as Tali went on through her speech, her gestures became grander and more fluid.  She was in the rhythm now, her blood pumping.  An intoxicating stupor.  There was nothing that could stop her.

“We are prepared to be both teacher and student.  Our fleets boast technologies that have not yet been disseminated to the rest of the galaxy.  We will share those technologies with you.  We will integrate and adapt, for we are committed to maintaining our role as guardian, in stalwart cooperation.”

“In the ten years since reclaiming our homeworld, the value of Rannoch’s domestic products has only risen at an exponential rate.  With our vast natural resource exports and our position as a technological hub, the Rannochian Federation has met the minimum standard percentage to contribute to Union Eterna’s defense.  As the decades go by, our own defense budget will increase, and so will our share of the burden.”

Tali took a moment, but not for herself, but to let the words ring true.

She then lowered her arms, becoming quiet for several seconds.

“Today…” her timbre took on a huskier rasp, “…we are finishing the hopes and dreams of… of a dear friend of mine.”

Lightning could have struck Shepard right then and there.  Christ, she’s talking about me!  He tried to remain very still, so that no one else could take notice of his growing anxiousness.

“We are a united galaxy,” Tali said, growing louder, “dedicated to safeguarding the people with our combined strength.  A lifetime ago, I thought that such a bright future was only ever going to be a figment of my imagination.  It turned out that I will live in that future for the majority of my natural life, one that Leben’Vashti, and billions of others across the course of time, never got a chance to see.”

And I’m seeing you now, my love.  Maybe one day, you’ll be able to see me, too.

“And the one man who made all this possible,” Tali was calling out, almost pounding the podium as if it was responsible for her lifetime of agony, “that dear friend whom I could never repay—whom none of you could ever repay—never saw the effect he had made on all of us.  We live in his future now, and I will be forever grateful for what he did.”

There was more applause, but this time, Shepard did not join in.  He was rooted to the spot in disbelief, overwhelmed by emotion, the knowledge that she still thought of him like these ten years had never passed.  He began to wonder if he had made the wrong choice back then.  If he was still making the wrong choices.

Tali raised a hand to cease the applause, for she was almost done.  “The last words that he said to me was for me to build a home for myself.  To my friend, Commander John Shepard, I think you’ll be proud of what has been built.”

I am.  You don’t know how proud, Tali.

A beam of sun bounced off one of the Citadel’s arms in the background, falling across the side of Tali’s visor, outlining her slender, but armored frame.  Shepard could see the tenseness of her forearms, even through the suit.  The curve of her legs.  And it was like he was simultaneously back on the Normandy with her, nestled in a prison of bedsheets and their skin.  His fingers finding her face.  That uncontrollable smile that beamed at him.  How they clutched at each other, sharing their warmth, whispering plans of the future.

“I look forward to this era of brightness,” Tali said and bowed her head.  “Thank you, and keelah se’leh.”

By the homeworld I look upon today.

Shepard was slow to respond to the most raucous ovation of the evening.  Snapping back to it, roused from his daydream, he joined in with the people around him, his brain feeling like it was lost in a fog, his own body slipping away, the sensation akin to a narcotic.

The praise continued long after Tali had departed the stage, now swallowed back up by the crowd to be closer with her fellow admirals.  Shepard had tracked her the whole way and completely missed the senator from before announcing Aria up on the stage to give her remarks.

The asari was quite conservative with her time as she mounted the platform and now stood in the center of the dais.  She waited until the rest of the respectful applause died down before she made a move, previously statuesque.

Her eyes noticeably glanced towards Shepard.  It was hard to tell, but the corner of her lips twitched upwards.  A secret smile.

The instant was too quick for anyone to truly take stock of what had transpired, for Aria had smoothly switched gears, now gazing at Tali and chuckling lowly.

“I think it would be hard for anyone to top that,” she said, to polite laughter. 

Shepard noticed that Tali had her hands clasped in front of her, an air of nervousness about her.  He was amused by how she could be self-conscious after delivering a knockout speech that had put some of his to shame.  That vibrant dichotomy—as if he needed a reminder of why he had fallen in love with her in the first place.

Aria was wearing her best diplomatic smile as she held her hands up halfway as a signal for the crowd to be quiet.  She looked down at her feet, thinking for a bit.  Then, chewing her lip, she surveyed the audience, as if searching for something.  “Perhaps there’s nothing more that needs to be said.  Perhaps… all that matters is looking to that new future that my colleague had mentioned.  Goddess knows that we won’t get there any damn quicker if I keep on talking up here, so…”

It was classic Aria to always buck tradition when compared against much of the civilized galaxy, Shepard noted, and tonight was no different when the asari simply stepped away from the microphone and walked over to the same tablet that Tali had just signed minutes ago.  But there was no ceremony in the asari’s actions.  She scrawled her name hastily, eager to get all of this over with.  And once she was done, she simply flipped the stylus back onto the felt pad instead of gently setting it back down.

The senator was back in the center of the dais as Aria took the liberty of rejoining the crowd.  She smiled, showing perfect teeth, and regained attention by spreading her arms wide and proclaiming, “And that, is how you welcome a new era!”

The Soledad Starliner would not dock back at the Citadel for several more hours, which meant that the rest of the time aboard was going to be spent either snacking, drinking, commiserating, or any combination of the three.

Shepard made a vague circuit of the room as he tried to parse out his thoughts, Ceraph having caught back up to him.  The turian did not have much to say, for she was still intimidated at being in such a place with such naked displays of wealth projected around her.  It must have been difficult not to feel as if she was an imposter in this room of wolves.

The stream of faces provided some abject fascination for Shepard.  He watched as individuals talked amongst themselves in their little groups, joked and laughed, and took note of the ones that took an early leave from the party to find a stateroom to finish whatever business they had that involved a modicum of privacy.  The leaders of private enterprise, Haas-Mase and Koenig, along with the holocasters Price and McMurphy, and the technocrat Vanden were among those that departed from the ballroom to head out into the adjourning halls.  Shepard debated following them, but his sixth sense was screaming at him to stay put.  Blind vengeance was not the desired track to take, not while Tali was around.  She was his mission and it had to override everything else for right now.

His course took him near one of the buffets, where Shepard came into earshot of the burly Alliance medic he had seen earlier at the hotel, who was tentatively picking up one of the oysters and eying it sourly.

The medic tipped the shell to his lips and, screwing his eyes shut, slurped down the foamy contents.

“Oof, McLeod,” one of the medic’s cohorts snickered.  “You’re a braver man than most.  Thought you didn’t like shellfish?”

“You’re right—I don’t,” the medic made a face after swallowing before he covered his mouth with a napkin, fighting hard not to gag.  “And after that, I still don’t.  Fucking hell, I don’t know why I even did that.”

“Wait, aren’t you allergic to oysters?”

Shepard paced back around just in time to see Koris and Xen take their respective exits from the room, albeit down separate halls.  He took stock of their positions and memorized their direction of departure, headed to their staterooms no doubt.  Tali and Raan were still in the ballroom, so that was where Shepard resolved to stay.

When he got close to the far exit, Shepard managed to obtain visual contact with Aria once again.  Only now the former crime lord was embroiled in a conversation of her own, not at all interested in being located by her bodyguard.  It took a second, but Shepard recognized the other asari that Aria was talking to was Tevos.  The former councilor’s turian guard was also surreptitiously absent, but Shepard was able to spot him standing guard near the edge of the ballroom, against the window.  Tevos must have told him to stay put where he was.

He halted momentarily.  Neither Aria nor Tevos had noticed him among the rest of the crowd.  Shepard saw Tevos’s hand glide up, touching Aria’s arm.  Aria did not seem to mind.  In fact, she appeared to be relishing the contact.  Leaning in, Aria appeared to be whispering something into Tevos’s ear, who smirked from whatever sonnets that Omega’s pirate queen was weaving.  With a renewed vigor, Tevos trailed her hand down Aria’s arm, briefly brushing her stomach, and strode away through the double doors, like a liquid, leaving Aria momentarily by herself.

Aria’s eyes glittered with lust, something that Shepard could recognize quite well right about now.  Swallowing to compose herself, Aria craned her neck and managed to spot Shepard from afar.

“It seems I found a good distraction for the rest of the flight,” Aria was unable to hide her smirk as she sidled up to Shepard.

It was almost unbelievable.  This was supposed to have been a momentous joining of Omega into galactic democracy and she was only concerned with getting some tail.

“’Former’ fling?” Shepard just asked mirthfully.

“Temporarily renewed,” Aria shrugged.  “But it will certainly be ‘former’ in an hour.  Or two.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Don’t be a smart-ass.  Go and have some fun for the rest of the night.  I don’t need you hanging guard near the door and you’re certainly not going to be watching me while inside.”

“I can’t say either prospect entices me,” was Shepard’s placid response as Aria turned to follow Tevos further into the ship while Ceraph made a face next to him.

There was nothing else to do for the duration of the voyage except to pretend that he had something to do.  He felt as if he was sleepwalking through his life, with every movement of his body only occurring several moments after his brainstem had fired off its commands.  Even the comfort of space outside did not bring him any serenity—for as long as he could remember, he had seen its vast infinitude as a promise of what was to come, but now he could only see it for the desolate darkness that it was.  Twice he had died in its embrace, twice pulled from it and thrust into the inferno.  There was a part of him that wondered how things would have turned out had he been gone for good.  He certainly would not have ushered further pain upon his friends than what they had endured already.

The issue of his own mortality frequently came to light.  No man could cheat death as many times as he did and expect to come out unscathed.  Shepard had never inquired, but he knew that most of his body was not his original one.  He had burned up over the skies of Alchera, spaced from that Collector attack, the shrapnel from the detonating Normandy slicing him to ribbons, his blood and guts whirling around him like streamers.  And then, on the Citadel, he had been consumed by fire again, thrown into darkness by the detonating Crucible, and for those brief moments he had been able to see outside of his own body, when the shockwave of the detonation had shattered him like a glass vase.

He knew what going up to the Citadel would mean for Tali all that time ago.  He both did and did not.  The truth had failed to register in his brain then, as if he was willingly shutting it out, mentally making the leap of logic that his death would mean that trillions of lives would be saved.  All he knew he had to do was open the arms, activate the Crucible, and the Reapers would be defeated.

She would live.

But what kind of life had those ten years been like for her?  Shepard wanted to understand and rip out that pain that he knew must have infected Tali then if he had the capability to do so, but for how long she had been burdened with that agony he had no idea. ^[3]

He was so lost in his thoughts that he nearly ran headlong into Jack, who had been in the middle of fixing herself a scotch at one of the open bars.  The ex-convict had hard, angular eyes, exacerbated by heavy shadow, that seemed to track his every movement.  She was slender, but underneath her lanky build brimmed a well of pure biotic power.  Even in dress blues, Shepard knew Jack could wipe the floor with most of the people in this room without breaking a sweat.

“Apologies,” Shepard held up a hand as he sidled past the rail-thin woman, still aimless in his direction.

Jack took a hearty sip of her whiskey.  “N7, huh?” she asked, also spotting his insignia.  “Neat.”

Shepard gave a quiet grunt.  He had not anticipated just how much attention his armor was going to garner him.

He decided to try and feign ignorance.  He gestured to the bars adorning Jack’s shoulders.  “Part of Hackett’s crew, are you?  Which ship are you stationed on?”

Jack arched an eyebrow and she gave a ragged laugh.  “I wouldn’t be caught dead pulling ship duty, soldier.  Haven’t made that my life for quite a while now.”

Making a show of tilting his head so that it was plain as day that he was looking upon the tattoos that crept up the bit of Jack’s neck that her collar allowed, Shepard allowed a beat to pass.  “The attire you’re wearing gave me the assumption.  Evidentially, it was the wrong one.”

Jack tipped her eyes up to the ceiling in concession and took another sip of scotch.  “You were close, though.  I may not be assigned to a ship, but I do call a station my work.”

“Which station?”

“Grissom Academy.”

“A teacher?” Shepard tried to inject as much surprise as he could without it sounding forced.  Of course he knew that Jack taught at Grissom, but Alder shouldn’t know that.  Grissom Academy was where the most gifted of humans went to study the sciences and liberal arts.  The Alliance even had a combat program affiliated with the academy, though the school itself was independent of the military.  “Something tells me that you don’t lecture on calculus.”

A warble seemed to haze the air around the woman.  Biotic power.  But Jack had adopted a cold smile, clearly proud of her status.  “Try biotic combat.”

“Impressive.”

“Ten years.  Ten classes.  All my students have gone on to become major operatives in their divisions.  Some have even comprised the best combat attack units for biotics in the Alliance.  You weren’t in one of my classes, were you?  I feel that I’d know if you were.”

Shepard shook his head and moved his hand down to pat the submachine gun strapped to his leg.  “My own long-range attacks require… a helping hand.”

Jack nodded.  “That tends to be the case, most of the time.  So, did you know him?”

“Know who?”

“Come on.  You’re N7, everyone must ask you this question.  Shepard.  Did you ever meet the man?”

Shepard had to concede that he was probably going to be asked this very question ad nauseum until he could finally rid himself of the Alder persona and reveal himself to the galaxy, whenever that was.

But what could he say to this woman?  Jack had no idea that the person that had freed her from the Purgatory, her prison, who had helped her destroy the facility that had maimed and mutilated her on Pragia, and who had subliminally convinced her to put her skill to use in training the next generations was standing right in front of her once again.

“Let’s just say,” he murmured as he made to head around Jack, the conversation making him uncomfortable, “I knew of him, but I never met him.”

Before Jack could get out another word, Shepard was moving again like a virus through a subsystem.  He was the ghost that traveled through the relay, that phantom that lurked in the corner of dreams.

He heard Ceraph call his name—his cover name, thankfully—but he ignored it, his hands grazing the tops of chair rests as he passed them by.  His helmet was filled with the ethereal glow from the holoboards above, which was projecting newsfeeds like subliminal images upon the reflective glass, his identity being subsumed by the tailored media.  He was lost to that infinite blackness now, skirting through the nonspaces and the pale grid of the web that tied his life to everyone’s.  Ten minutes to midnight.  How long had he been awake?  Would he ever even the debt he had incurred across those years of sleeping, or was that part of him already lost.

A neon vault felt as if it was consuming him as he lifted his head, Tali once again square in his sights.  She was alone, sitting in a chair, having divested herself from all conversation.

Shepard’s legs felt leaden.  An electric twinge flared at the base of his spine.  Go to her, it whispered.  He fought against it.  It would only bring her more pain.  He needed to disengage, right now.  Before she noticed that he was here.  His cover would be more at risk of being blown the closer he was to her.  Getting out of her sight was priority, like a program reknitting the fabric of a window in the process of erasing its tracks within a system.

And then, through the soles of his feet, a shudder.

It was more of a twang, like a stringed instrument being plucked once, only once.  A delicate ripple that echoed into the soles of his boots.  The cups of liquid that had been scattered on the table had jittered, as if the slightest breath had passed across their surfaces.

Shepard reached out and grasped the closest chair to steady himself.  A ship this size, with functioning shields… even the slightest of disturbances was unusual.  For a sensation to invade that equilibrium, any transgression could not be taken as an outlier.

His breath quickening, Shepard began to abruptly scan around the room, looking to see if anyone else had noticed.  But all he saw was a swell of absorbed faces, laughing and cajoling in their shared revelry.

And when Shepard turned back, the only person that he saw that shared his sudden alarm, now standing up from the table with a hand resting upon the pistol at her hip, was Tali.

On the bridge of the Soledad Starliner, the executive officer, a human in his fifties who had lost the battle with balding a decade back, frowned as he saw a blinking red popup box suddenly hover over his terminal.  Utilizing the haptic controls, he punched in onto the alert, blowing up a schematic of the ship, and swore.

The captain, an asari with vibrant blue facepaint, walked over.  “What is it, Karthik?”

“Got an alert over on deck 7.  Airlock, it looks like.  The chamber’s air pressure is starting the equalization process.”

“Atmo leak?” the captain’s brows furrowed.

“No,” the XO said.  “Pressure levels on all decks are normal.  It’s almost as if a ship is docking with us.”

“That can’t be right.  Pirates?”

“Our escort would’ve caught them.”

“Something’s off, here.  Pull up the exterior cameras.”

A tableau of nine separate screens soon popped up over the secondary projector.  The port side of the cruiser was portrayed in seven different angles, but there were no protrusions over the sleek hull that neither the captain or the XO could see, and especially not over the area of the airlock in question.

“Weird,” the XO murmured as he keyed the comm to the repair crew.  “Yeah, can someone get down to deck 7 right away?  Looks like airlock 33 is malfunctioning.  Whoever’s closest, go check it out and log a ticket if you can diagnose the issue.”

“Yeah, I’m at the door right now,” the tech was speaking into his radio as he was bending over to look at the airlock panel next to the problem door, which was flashing multiple warnings about the interior and exterior pressure being equalized.  The door was large enough to allow a krogan warmaster through, and bright LED lights were strobing atop the threshold to indicate its current status.  “I’ve tried a soft reset, but the docking cycle’s got a hold of it.  I can’t do a refresh until it’s complete.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense,” the XO replied over the comm.  “There isn’t any ship latched to us.  There’s no one there.”

“I don’t know what to tell you.  I can hear the pressure being equalized as we speak.  It’s running right now.”

“And you can’t deactivate it all from your position?”

“Not while the ship is in transit.  We’d need to get to a spacedock in order to perform a complete analysis.  What we can do here is do a full systems sweep.  Shut down targeted areas one by—”

“Absolutely not,” the captain’s voice cut in.  “The ship is full of esteemed guests and we need to give them the impression that nothing is out of the ordinary.  If they sense that something is amiss, that will cast a bad reflection on us.”

Holding back a sigh, the tech rubbed at his forehead with a thumb.  He was not paid enough for this.

“Then we’ll just log a ticket, mute the alarm, and then we’ll do a diagnosis once the ship is back in—”

There was a terrifyingly heavy clunk from the door and the tech looked up.  The strobing from the crystal light atop the door had ceased flashing.  Now it was a solitary green.  Good connection, solid seal.

A docking.

“Impossible,” the tech muttered.

“What was that?” the XO radioed, having heard the outburst.

“Th-the door… it’s…”

With a grinding of steel, the door rattled along its rails as the exterior lock unexpectedly spun and aligned itself into the open position, the rubber seal making a slurping sound as it was stretched and finally broke apart.

The tech remained frozen in place, but he had the wherewithal to engage his omni-tool’s flashlight, which he aimed towards the ever-widening gap in the doorway until the portal was completely open.

The first thing he noticed was the smell.  An acrid, dusty smell that reminded him of burning electronics.  That was supposed to be what space smelled like.

The next thing that he noticed was the airlock beyond, in that there was nothing in it at all.

Despite what all the readouts up on the bridge had been suggesting, the door beyond did not lead to open space at all.  There was a separate room just beyond the initial threshold that led to a gray door with a single viewport on it.  There were no insignias on the opposite hatch that the tech could make out.

Though, if he looked carefully, there seemed to be some kind of disturbance in the air.  Motes of dust, trapped in little gravitational whirls.  The tech leaned forward and squinted.  “What the—?”

Two things then happened in the span of the next three seconds.  The first was that all of the lights on the deck simultaneously snapped off, allowing for a frame of solitary blackness to endure before the amber emergency lighting stepped in, bathing the corridors in a cavernous and unwelcome illumination.

The second was that there was a sharp whine from inside the airlock, like a gyro being suddenly wound.  Then, without warning, an eruption of light and noise.  A cluster of plasma the color of a deepsea reef suddenly blossomed from the middle of the airlock.  The tech had not seen who had fired them.  The blast of superconducting projectiles caught the man center of mass and threw him against the far wall.  His arm, ripped off at the shoulder, flopped down the corridor, the burnt end smoking.  His guts slid out of the ragged gash in his chest.

The tech twitched once, his eyes registering a glassy series of shapes stepping from the airlock, and died in the next moment.

As soon as the lights flickered off in the ballroom, panicked screams immediately filled the void even after the emergency lights surged to life.

Shepard’s visor immediately adjusted to the change in brightness, his HUD outlining all living beings in a pale color.  Springing into action immediately, he reached down and pulled out the silenced pistol from his holster.  “Draw your weapon,” he sharply told Ceraph, next to him.

“What?” the turian gaped, bending her knees slightly so that she was not as conspicuous among the crowd.

“Just do as I say.”

The crowd of senators and businessmen seemed to collide and split apart like a cell undergoing mitosis—each group arranged itself with the people they most closely trusted in their usual spheres, with most of them appearing to be on the verge of panic.

There was a clattering sound of dishes and glasses smashing to pieces.  Shepard looked over his shoulder to find Tevos’s turian bodyguard overturning a table and positioning it towards the balconies that half-ringed the bubble-shaped room.  It seemed like he knew something the rest of them didn’t, considering that he was now taking out an assault rifle, his practiced hands immediately priming armor-piercing rounds.

Ceraph had drawn her gun by now—Aria had allowed her to take a simple Carnifex from the Omega armory.  She looked at the boxy design as if it was about to squirm alive in her hand and bite her.

“What do you think’s going on?” she whispered as she edged herself closer to Shepard.

“No idea,” he said, not concentrated on Ceraph right now as he tried to locate Tali, but to his frustration, he had lost her somewhere in the crowd.  “But I know it isn’t good.”

Chapter Text

At first glance, the hallway on the seventh level appeared to be silent, apart from the kinetic strobing of the emergency lighting.  A dull ping was resounding throughout the enclosed area—the automated muster alert. ^[1]

But underneath the noise and chaos, there was a stiff series of subharmonics that steadily chugged in the background.

Marching.  Boots on carpeted floors.

Multiple.

One of the ship’s security guards was knocking on doors, shouting for the inhabitants to lock all entrances and exits to their rooms, when the lower register of his ears picked up the sound of the brutal footfalls.  He turned, hand brushing the grip of his pistol, straining to see through the darkness—the scatter of the beaming alarms was playing havoc with his ability to see in the low light, however.

“Who’s there?” he called out.

Plasmafire answered him through the gloom.

The guard fell, holes in his body emitting charred curls into the air.  The footsteps continued, but there was no one to be seen.  The man who had been shot had all of his focus narrowed unto himself—his hands were suspended in midair as his lips fluttered in disbelief.

The floor then creaked next to his head and his eyes twitched in that direction.

Another plasma beam suddenly shot from the air at close range, as if it had pierced the veil of time and space.  The guard was already fatally wounded, but the atomizing burst opened up his skull in a gory display with a distinct pop.

The footsteps now stopped in front of one of the rooms that the guard had been knocking upon.  A tender spark began to grow in intensity at the lock of the door.  A cutting laser, but without a hand to guide it.  The crimson beam was only an inch long, projected from nothing as it sliced the door’s internal circuitry in under a minute.  With a puff of electronic smoke, the control hologram for the door winked off and the threshold was pried aside, but not from any discernable figure.

Amorth Vanden was inside the cabin, dressed in a bathrobe, brandishing a silver pistol in a shaking hand.  His eyes were scrambling in his sockets as he detected something intruding into his quarters, but he was effectively blind in this unforeseen dimout.

“I thought I was granted a modicum of fucking privacy” he was muttering.  “Is someone going to—”

Unexpectedly, from the center of the room, another savage shotgun blast.  Vanden had never even seen it coming, despite the proximity to it.  The sphere of collected plasma hit the businessman directly in the face and removed most of his identifying features.  He hit the ground, almost completely headless.

There was a shuffling sound of boots abruptly pivoting.  The sound then faded from the cabin and moved on down the hall.

The lights around the deck gave a surge.  Then they dimmed to near zero.  In the gloom, two more laser cutters could be seen at two different doors.  It took the same amount of time to slice through these barriers as the last one.

Hayden Price was in one of the rooms, his hands raised, already on his knees as the door to his cabin was rudely wrenched open.  Something strode in, a presence billowing the smoke from the ruined lock.

“Please,” he was saying, “I can give you anything.  Coverage.  Money.  I have the number of every anchor on our network—I’ll get your message out!  Just tell me what you want and I’ll give it to you!”

Apparently, he had nothing that was desired, for there was another high-pitched squeal from a plasma emitter followed by the concussive thumps of air being displaced.  Price was left on the ground, missing a hand, his chest bored with so many smoldering holes that his pale ribcage was peeking through his riddled Burberry coat.

The other holocaster, Austin McMurphy, was already in bed in his room, having a drink before he turned in for the evening.  He was given no chance to plead for his life—an automatic burst caused him to jerk in place upon the bed, ripping up the sheets and pillows, sending feathers everywhere.  The footsteps grew closer to the bed after McMurphy had stopped moving.  One last plasma bolt hit him in the face for good measure.

In his stateroom, Zaal’Koris quickly whipped out a thin case from under the bed that he had his people bring over from his frigate.  He had recognized the telltale thump of plasma weaponry when the shooting had started and his hackles had been raised for the entire duration of the hijacking.  Or at least, he thought it was a hijacking.  That, or terrorism.  With so many VIPs in close proximity to one another, the Soledad Starliner was a prime target for those ne’er-do-wells, though his only regret was that he had not sprung for more quarian guards to be admitted aboard.  Maybe it would have done him some good to let Xen’s paranoia rub off on him.

He flipped the latches to the case and opened it.  Upon a bed of packed foam was a black prototype carbine.  It had been created by Xen’s skunkworks division and was still in the prototype stage.  Koris quickly flicked the weapon on and he heard the hum of the arc coils beginning to warm up.  An aqua neon glow began to warp from the spine of the weapon, which was a ridged construction that looked that it had been taken from the backbone of a large animal.

His visor flared a warning.  Carcinogens in the air.  He whipped his head over to the door.

Where the lock to the door was located, a cherry-red gleam was now emanating.  Something was cutting its way through.

Koris searched for a good spot to hide, but his quarters, although luxurious for a quarian, were downright sparse for a deep-space cruise liner.  There was just the living room and the bathroom.  There was no sense in hiding behind the bed—it made for poor cover.  And the bathroom was a no-go as well—too close to the exit.

He glanced down at the carbine, which silently confirmed that it was at full charge.  He shouldered the weapon and hunkered down into a crouch, aiming at the door.

“Whoever you are,” he said to the door, which continued to sizzle as molten metal began to ooze from a newly formed hole, “you should probably know one thing…”

The bubbling of the door’s frame suddenly ceased, but smoke continued to pour from the opening.  The door was soon wrenched aside with a rude squealing of uncooperative rails, exposing the empty hallway.

“…it’s never a good idea to try and surprise a soldier.”

The carbine in his hand gave a frightening wail right before a thick lightning bolt of the purest white zapped from its emitter and struck the far wall, leaving a darkened scorch mark against the opposite door.

Koris stood, keeping the trigger held down as he slowly swept his carbine in a short arc, covering the width of the doorway.  He could not see what he was shooting at—his HUD was trying to pinpoint his targets, but was unable to locate any contacts.  More bolts of the deadly current sparked across the walls, sending out shards of glowing debris, carving up the place and leaving smoldering trails that flickered with the tiniest of flames, each pull of the trigger resulting in that screaming of dynamos, an engine on full bore.

The scatterglow of the carbine filled Koris’s view with a blank spot.  An afterimage of blindness.  He kept firing, the recoil of the weapon nonexistent, though he could already feel the growing heat through the gloves of his suit.  Overlapping flares burned spots through the edges of his vision, despite his visor polarizing as best as it could to protect him against the glare.  Each firing of the gun left a vacuum of noise after the arc had finished emitting, as though as his eardrums were throbbing once in protest before he restarted his attacks all over again.

“Right, then!” he bellowed over the din of the carbine.  “Come at me!”

And then the weapon in his hand died, the spent battery automatically ejecting from its port.

Koris cursed.  Xen had warned him about the weapon’s short fire time.  He had not been paying attention as much as he should have.

His hand reached back towards the case, where he had left it on the bed, groping for the spare battery.

Plasma bursts, impossibly close inside the room, suddenly razed through the air.  Koris never saw the shooter, which he found odd considering that his helmet had an auto-brightness feature.  He grunted as a series of three bolts speared him square in the chest, one of them just grazing his heart.  His knees lost all tension and he crumpled, his legs splayed out, his back resting against the bedframe.

Shaking hands rose and touched the smoking wounds.  Breathing was difficult now—he noted that he was wheezing.  Punctured lung.

Something shimmering was now standing in front of him, but Koris could not distinguish it between reality or a fiction that his failing brain was conjuring for him.  He sucked in a wet breath, pain radiating through him, a numbness in his legs.  His lips fluttered for a moment, the admiral mustering his strength to relay one final word.

He ran out of time, for he felt something press against his helmet rudely.  A circular thing digging into his sehni.

A muzzle.

The last thing that he heard was the intricate click of a trigger.

Through the panic, everything seemed to condense.  Filtered into a perfect teardrop of time.

On guard within the ballroom, Shepard’s helmet picked up the hair-fine length of red light, filtered through an additional wavelength, as it swept through the air.  His heart pounded and everything seemed to slow.  The needle of ruby light gently swayed, momentarily focusing on people that Shepard did not recognize, as if its holder were playing god, deciding upon which life he wanted to end first.  The gentle beam hovered, twitched, and flicked across the room, taking advantage of the consternation that had everyone in the room gripped as if nooses were upon all their necks.

Something pulsed in his brain.  Blind fury.

The laser sight whisked over, past another overturned table.

Resting upon Tali’s purple sehni, like a string connecting her to a puppetmaster somewhere above.

The edge of vomiting was in his throat.  Shepard was unaware that he was already moving from cover, smashing aside people and throwing them to the ground in his hasty bid to close the gap.  He heard Ceraph scream something—not his name—but he shut all that out as a roaring sound of metal filled his ears.  Maybe it was the blood pumping in his head.  Maybe he was the one shouting.

He dove and tackled Tali just as the sniper’s bullet fired.  It missed his coat by millimeters, the concussive wave of the round pulsing against his armored spine.  There was a crimson spray of blood as the bullet kept on traveling and lopped off a suited man’s leg at the knee nearby, who went down screaming.

He rolled, taking Tali with him, the floor getting chewed up by more sniper rounds, until they were behind the closest bar counter.  He ignored the protesting of the quarian in his arms—her indignation just meant that she was unharmed.

“What are—?” she was trying to say after they had ceased their scrambling, but Shepard just raised his submachinegun.

“Get down!” he shouted and he momentarily popped out of cover to deliver a razing burst to the third story balcony.  He saw sparks cascade against the guardrail, but there wasn’t anyone that he could aim at, or at least that he could see.

More bullets spat on course for him, blowing up glassware and bottles of liquor inches from Shepard.  A bottle of tequila detonated from a stray round, dousing the right side of Shepard’s helmet with the acrid alcohol.  A ricochet from an incendiary round caromed off the bartop and the spilled alcohol was suddenly set alight.  Shepard reared back, his helmet aflame, but Tali was already dragging him back down to the ground, despite the bullets whizzing by overhead.  Her hands beat at the flames until they were out.

“You okay?!” she was yelling over the din.

Shepard grunted and blinked his eyes several times.  The temperature sensors in his visor were starting to darken.  He gave her a thumbs-up as he got back into a crouching position.

From his position, he could see Jack throwing out biotic shockwaves to the levels above, wrenching the brass metal railings and shattering the glass tabletops positioned there.  Tevos’s bodyguard was also leaning in and out of cover with his rifle, letting off a few shots of his own.  Even Raan, he could see, was joining in the fray, but she only had a pistol on her person and her attacks were less than coordinated.

Shepard tracked the direction of their counterattacks.  A lot of noise and destruction, but he still could not see the shooter.  The amount of return fire had lessened, though.  Shepard did not know if that meant that the sniper had been wounded or killed already, or that they had already beat a retreat with their assassination having been spoiled.

Loud reports next to him.  His head whirled.  Tali had stood up, holding a curved pistol in a taut two-hand grip.  Crystal beams plunged through the smoke overhead, her shots brimming with heat.

Adrenaline shot through Shepard’s veins, the inherent danger sending alarms in his brain.  “I said get down—” he began to bellow.

“I can handle myself!” Tali snapped back, her eyes vivid slashes through the violence that flowed across her visor.

Shepard nearly recoiled in surprise.  The quarian had never talked back to him like that before.  He was almost about to protest until he realizing that the act of doing so would just make an ass out of himself.  She was an admiral, after all, and he was… well, he had no idea what he was anymore.  No doubt Tali only saw him as a mercenary, with petty cash as his one true god.

Crouching, Shepard returned his attention to the sniper’s perch.  He swiped through the various wavelengths, but could no longer see the slender needle of the laser sight anymore, nor could he find any evidence of the sniper.

He then became aware of a screeching sound over to his left.  He looked in that direction—behind the overturned table, Tevos was shouting at her turian bodyguard.  The woman’s dress was rumpled and her expression was contorted into one of terror.

Shepard momentarily tilted his head.  He had not noticed Tevos returning to the ballroom.  Wasn’t she supposed to have been occupied in her quarters with Aria?

Aria.

The thought of his benefactor was nearly enough for him to lunge out of cover and make a break for the closest hallway to link back up with her again.  He would have done so, had he not heard what Tevos screamed next.

“Keep firing!  Don’t just sit in this position, you fool, there could be more waiting up there!  This is no time to be cautious—they all need to die!”

All need to die.

“He could hold a gun against all of our heads and the galaxy will merely cheer him on.  He needs to die!”

He needs to die.

It was the same timbre as in his dreams.  The same inflection.

The same voice.

The soundproof door to the presidential suite slid open and Aria entered with a scowl.  Tevos had always been a snob for the finer things in life, even down to the rooms she housed herself in while traveling.  The suite was elegantly upholstered, with a carpet patterned like silver scales on a fish.  The couches and chairs were the color of cream, the cabinetry was Spanish and minimalist, and there was even a full bar that was completely stocked with bottles of the most expensive liquor.  And if that was not enough, one of the rooms contained a grand piano, though Aria knew that Tevos did not contain a singular musical note in her body.

On her way over, she had been in the middle of castigating herself for being so foolishly taken in with the promise of some stress relief.  When she had been with Tevos before, there had been some thrill to their trysts, knowing that it was viewed as improper for a sitting councilor to be involved in any way, shape, or form with the pirate queen of Omega.  Even though nothing had passed between them, be it in the form of currency or promises, it had been mutually clear that their relationship had been transactional from start to finish.

Still, for those nights when they had been lying in bed together, passing smokes between the two of them, there had been some kind of comfort in the serenity, knowing that she was both using and being used at the same time.

That was when the lights had snapped off.

Aria bore the sudden change with an air of almost boredom.  The windows from outside allowed her to still see within the room, mainly from the dim light of Sol filtering in.  Typical that Union Eterna couldn’t even keep their most luxurious ship properly running.  Not a good first impression to their partnership together.

She walked over to the sink at the bar and ran the taps.  Cold water gurgled out.  Aria figured that as long as there was water pressure, she might as well take a few minutes to prepare for Tevos’s arrival.  Even though Aria held a dislike to the frilly kind of ostentation that Tevos so treasured, she did have to admit that she appreciated a well-furnished and luxurious bathroom.  Marble floors, glass shower, steam-filled room, it all honestly sounded pretty damn good to her.

The bathroom beckoned and Aria began to head over to it, when she stopped, all of a sudden.  Her eyes squinted.  A soft shuffling sound had registered in her ears.  Quiet enough to dismiss it as the ship settling.

Or that someone was in the room with her already.

Someone not Tevos.

Aria whirled, fingertips already blazing with the power of the universe, but a series of searing plasma bolts skipped through the thin air over by the long window, seemingly out of nowhere, and crashed into Aria’s shins.  The asari smelled burning flesh, felt her muscles come alive with pain, and she screamed, despite herself.  The pirate queen of Omega never screamed.

Her legs no longer supported her weight and she fell heavily to the carpeted floor, which saved her from cracking her head upon the ground.

Scuffing sounds of feet across carpet.  Aria raised her head and saw dim shapes of the purest glass whisper against the backdrop of stars, debris, and the swollen lobe of Earth.  Hard to tell how many there were—she was already seeing double due to the pain. 

Grunting, she instinctively clenched a fist and a barrier sprung up before her, right before there was another burst of plasma.  The beams ricocheted off the curved wall that Aria had materialized between her and her attacker, which struck some of the furniture and set them on fire after rebounding away.

There was the distinct rustle of scrambled radio chatter and Aria detected more footsteps quickly hurrying over to her unprotected flank.

Bellowing, Aria splayed out her right hand, another barrier emitting again just in time, causing the next batch of plasma beams to bounce into the ceiling, scorching it.

With her other hand, she made a wide arc, violent purple energy flowing from her palm as if she was painting with an inferno.  The biotic wave swept up furniture, bits of carpet, and Aria could see the far window crack as something was picked up by the inescapable wall of force and slammed against it.  There was a grunt and Aria hissed in victory as she was sure that she had hit her target.

Her relief was short-lived, for there was a new pain that suddenly slammed into her, driving the wind from her lungs.  The biotic energy that crackled at her fingertips faded almost immediately as her eyes widened.  She wheezed, trying to draw breath, but it was as if someone had placed a stopper in her throat, leaving her unable to take in any more oxygen. 

In her incredulity, as the feeling began to coalesce, Aria became aware of the blade of cold steel that had been driven into her back.  Her torso lost all feeling below her hips.  She then knew that her spine had been severed.

There was no pain as the knife withdrew from her body.  There was only the lingering frustration that she had not thought to cover her rear once the shooting had started.  Stupid, stupid mistake.  Centuries of wants and regrets began to flow through irregularly, like a damaged data disc.  Her plans for Omega.  The future she had thought she solidified.  Her thoughts then turned to Tevos and her betrayal—had things really deteriorated that badly for them that she would resort to this?

Then, incredibly, Aria found herself thinking about Shepard.  Such an unusual, emotional man.  Goddess, she could not stand him, but there had just been this alluring quality about him that she had never been able to place.  One that she both detested and admired.  In the next few moments, she realized that she was hoping, blindly, that he would eventually find what he had been yearning for, all this time.  It would be something that she would never get to possess, she sadly realized.

Omega’s first and only politician was so concentrated on her own self-flagellation that she nearly missed the watery shapes that looked like hands slip past her eyes.  Active camo, she realized too late, but unlike anything she had seen before.  Fascinating.

There was a line of cold that pressed against her neck, followed by a wire of heat as the blade began to cut into the skin.

Aria closed her eyes.  The pirate queen then smiled.

“Bet you can’t finish it one cut, you fuckers.”

A second later, the arc of fire dug in deep into Aria’s throat.  There was a grating sound that echoed into the recesses of her skull.  A sound of tendons and cartilage catching and, finally tearing on the imperfect edges of the knife.  A splattering noise emitted and there was a flash of jugular blood that arced across the carpet, proving Aria wrong in an instant.

The asari pitched forward, still smiling, the carpet rushing up to meet her.

His anger was a living thing.  A coil around his heart.  The embodiment of all those years of his life that had been stolen was kneeling right there, just feet away. 

Tevos. 

“He needs to die!” 

The words would not stop echoing in his head.

Shepard’s hand had clenched down upon the grip of his pistol and he started to twitch it parallel, fixated upon the former councilor.  Simple, really.  All he had to do was lift an arm.  Pull the trigger.  And he would be one step closer to righting the wrongs that had been done unto him.

But logic stayed his hand and he hunkered back down behind the bar again with an agonized series of breaths.  No, a quick death was too good for Tevos.  He would not grant her an easy out right away, at least not until she gave up her co-conspirators.  There were two others out there who had been in on the plot.  Plus, it would be difficult to explain himself if he shot Tevos in the head at point-blank range in front of hundreds of witnesses.  Whatever he was going to do to her, it was going to have to be quiet, simple, precise.  Perfect. 

But Tevos’s panic puzzled him for a moment.  By her cowering reactions from this hijacking attempt, she was either a tremendous actor, or this entire encounter on the Soledad Starliner was not of her doing.  Coincidence?  Double-cross?  His questions compounded, leaving him more in the dark than before.

He was still contemplating the nature of Tevos’s inevitable demise when, all of a sudden, Tali grabbed his arm.

“Follow me!  I’m going to need backup!” the quarian shouted and, before Shepard could protest, she was rising up out of cover and running towards the closest exit, whisking through the smoke and hurtling over toppled chairs and tables.

Shepard gaped at her for a split-second, unable to comprehend what had just happened.  “Damn it all, woman,” he grimaced, swapping his pistol for his submachinegun, ejecting his half-spent thermal clip in exchange for a fresh one.

He reached Tali by the double-doors that led out of the ballroom and he pressed himself against the opposite end of the threshold.

Tali was checking her shotgun and loading a few extra clips into it.  It was a new model that Shepard did not recognize, but based on the assortment of tubes and wires that spooled out from the housing, it had to be a heavy-duty gun if it required that much additional heat reduction.

“Okay, I’m here.  Now what?” he asked, his throat tight.  He was suppressing his inclination to take the lead on this one to preserve his cover.  As much as he wanted to keep her safe, he knew that if Tali set herself to a task, there was little chance of talking her out of it.  And Tali had been in the political game for ten years.  He had not.

Tali racked the slide of her shotgun with a heavy ka-chunk.  “I’ve tapped into the shipwide comms,” she said.  “All of the action is confined to deck seven.  The intruders aren’t making their way to the bridge, but they are condensed close to the drive core.  That’s probably where they’ve entered.”

Something in her tone of voice gave him pause and he recognized it a second later.  “Deck seven is where the room assignments for your people are.”

“And Aria, too,” Tali added, but there was the hidden incredulity embedded into her words, aimed at Shepard seemingly being so cavalier towards his employer’s fate.  “I’m going to go quick.  I’ve got the shotgun so that I can clear the hallways effectively.”

“A counterattack, then.  Our aim is to push them off the ship?”

“Exactly.”

“We don’t know the scale of their weaponry,” Shepard pointed out.  “We know they have long-range weapons, but once we get deeper into the ship, we’re going to be close-quarters.”

Tali hefted her shotgun, as if demonstrating it to an admiring fan.  “Which is why I brought this along,” she said almost impishly.  “But we need to make sure we keep moving.  They’re going to try to slow us down.”

Shepard smirked underneath his helmet.  Like old times.  Almost.  “You’ll find that I’ll be able to keep up.”

“We’ll see.”

“I’m coming, too!” Ceraph slammed her shoulder against the wall right behind Shepard, her chest rising and falling as she was on the verge of hyperventilation, her eyeballs refusing to stay in one place for very long as she scanned the upper levels, ready to drop to the ground at a moment’s notice.

Tali craned her head over Shepard’s shoulder.  “And who are—?”

“Ceraph’s an affiliate,” Shepard said quickly, trying to placate Tali.

“Affiliate?!” an outraged Ceraph barked, scared enough to abandon decorum.

Turning, Shepard placed a hand on Ceraph’s shoulder and added, “A close one.”  He could feel the turian twitching in his grip, nervous out of her mind.  “And one who’s not tagging along with us.  You’re going to stay right here with everyone else!”

“Oh, right!” Ceraph snapped back with a frantic and crazed laugh, fueled by adrenaline.  She gave her head a brutal tilt the way she had come.  “And you’re really sure that I’m going to be safe here with them?!”

Shepard glanced in the direction that Ceraph had been indicating.  A room in disarray, with flickering electronics painfully spluttering.  Chairs broken, tables toppled, with people either screaming or trying to curl into balls to get them out of the line of fire.  There were corpses lying on the ground, sticky pools of blood around them, and a few loose limbs were left alone on the carpet.

“Point taken,” Shepard said acidly.

“Fine,” Tali groused as she slapped the door control.  “As long as the both of you don’t slow me down.”

The corridors beyond were muted with adumbrations.  The emergency lighting that splayed against the maroon carpet gave it a perversely gory hue.  Tali took the lead, her shotgun braced against her shoulder—for such a comparatively diminutive woman against Shepard’s bulkier frame, she had the arm strength to heft the oversized gun without complaint.  Shepard was close behind, his submachine gun aimed just past Tali’s form, his head on a swivel as he scanned for movement across all of his helmet’s usable wavelengths.  Behind him, Ceraph was nervously stutter-stepping, both of her hands clenched upon her pistol, which was directed towards the ground as she fought very hard not to make a sound of panic.

They came to an elevator bay, but none of them were that stupid enough to use the lifts.  They were known as killboxes for a reason.  They took the stairs instead, with Ceraph ending up being sandwiched between the two as they ascended the spiral fabrication, their weapons lifted high towards each corner, fingers delicately positioned upon the triggers.

Shepard checked his motion sensor again when he spotted the sign that they were nearing level seven.  Only Tali’s and Ceraph’s yellow contacts were on the disc at the corner of his HUD.  There were no red icons that he could see.

They reached the next level and Shepard scanned the environment.  He noticed an issue.  Everything was too pristine here.  The walls were undamaged, with no bullet marks gouging the wood paneling or having destroyed any of the light fixtures.  The carpet was unscorched, unblemished by either fire or blood.

“You said they were on deck seven?” he asked.  “This place doesn’t look like it’s seen any action.”

“Agreed,” Tali said.  “Good place to set a trap.  Hold on.”

Tali sent out her combat drone, a series of segmented hardlight panels that resembled a partial sphere, out into full view of the cramped corridor beyond.  When it did not draw any incoming fire, she deactivated it, calling it back using a command on her omni-tool.  Shepard was struck by déjà vu.  Many a time that drone had saved his life when Tali had used it as a distraction on enemy forces, either by using it to shock a hard-to-reach sniper, or by projecting it in the middle of a group and detonating it in a vibrant flash.  Quite the handy device to keep around.  He wondered if she still called it “Chatika.”

“Still can’t see anything on sensors,” Shepard reported over the private channel frequency that Tali had given him.

“I don’t have any contacts as well,” Tali grimaced, readjusting her grip on the shotgun.  “They might be scrambling our tech.”

“There’s been a lot of weird developments with this group and it’s not limited to the sensors.  We still don’t know what we’re up against.”

Cautiously wading out into the hallway, Shepard was dismayed at its less-than-ideal dimensions.  Even though the Soledad Starliner had been conceived as a luxury cruiser, it had still been built to conservative specifications.  Thin halls made it nearly impossible for two armored soldiers to travel fully abreast.  Maneuvering was going to be a problem if a full-fledged firefight erupted here, and if somehow they ended up getting flanked, there was going to be nowhere for them to go.

He was about to say something to Tali, calling out the wrongness of how quiet everything seemed to be here, when they came to a junction and hooked a left.

The devastation in this offshoot was so condensed it was like all of the carnage had been laser focused to this one point to draw off any immediate suspicion from opposing incursion teams.  Bodies lined the hall, some slumped against the wall, or distributed across the floor in pieces.  Shepard could see that they were either crew from the ship, or random guards from the various races that had wandered into the killzone.  Blood had splashed and dried nearly everywhere they could see and parched circles of blackened heat had scarred the doorways, a few strands of flame still weakly flickering amidst the dimness of the macabre sight.

“Good god,” Shepard whispered, momentarily struck at the sight.  Death was not an unfamiliar sight to him—he had seen the horrors of carnage that had been inflicted upon soldiers and civilians, but the scale of the violence here was almost uncomprehensible.  The people here looked like they had been ripped apart.  He had seen this type of devastation before, ten years ago, and it was at a level that only the Reapers could have delivered.

Tali momentarily dipped her shotgun as she approached one of the doors on the left, which was ajar, the lock still smoking.  “Koris,” she gasped, and kicked open the door before Shepard had a chance to warn her.

Entering the stateroom, Shepard was struck by the similarities of how it had been on the Alarei, searching for Tali’s father.  It had ended badly for the man then—Shepard had never got to meet him, despite Tali warning him that they were probably going to end up at loggerheads with each other.

The same fate had been set for Koris, who lay slumped near the bed, Tali kneeling next to him.  Shepard quickly checked the bathroom and the corners of the cabin for hiding intruders before he came over to where Tali was.

Someone had shot the admiral at close range.  Jammed a weapon against his head and fired, from the looks of it.  The side of his helmet was completely blown out, exposing a gaping hole that Shepard tried very hard not to look at.  Gently, he pushed Koris’s head to the side, the more intact portion of the helmet facing upward.  He suppressed a noise of anguish.  He had mixed feelings about the admiral; he may have been gung-ho for exiling Tali all those years ago, but he had possessed a modicum of common sense to vote against going to war with the geth to protect the civilian quarian population.  In the end, he had been a man who lived by his principles.  That had to count for something.

He studied the wound at Koris’s temple.  “Plasma,” he announced aloud.

Tali nodded in agreement, eyes heavy, and looked at the blackened marks upon the walls.  She limply gestured to the marks and gave a sigh.  “He put up a fight, at least.”

“You think he was the target?”

Wracking her mind for even the barest shred of a plausible answer, all Tali could do was shake her head.  “I… I don’t know.”  She then shot up.  “The other admirals,” she hissed.  “Xen!”  She then whirled around, leaving Koris behind, for there was nothing anyone could do for him now.  Shepard and Ceraph followed.

The opposite cabin door had been broken into, as well.  Shepard made sure to take point this time and repeated the exact same procedure that he had performed back in Koris’s cabin in pronouncing the room secure.

There was no one inside.  Save for the corpse on the ground.

“Shit,” Shepard grimaced as he looked at the body.

Xen had been left in a less dignified position than Koris.  While the other admiral had managed to look somewhat poised in death, Xen’s body was crumpled and contorted, as if a giant hand had squeezed her and had rudely deposited her onto the ground.

Behind him, he heard Tali pound the wall in frustration.  “Damn it!  Xen…”

A spray of blood had misted upon the bedsheets.  Shepard walked around the gigantic pool of blood that had collected under Xen’s body.  His hand reached out and prodded the corpse, searching for any wounds.  And then he gripped Xen’s shoulder, turning her over.

A gagging sound from Ceraph emitted in the background as everyone was able to see.

Xen no longer had a face.  It had been blown off completely.  The shattered visor that framed her missing visage was a jagged wreath, flecked with dark blood.  Shepard could see an empty cavity, a few scorched teeth, and the half-emptied brainpan which was encrusted with carbonized gore.

The continued sounds of Ceraph’s hacking drew his attention.  He rose from the body and guided the turian towards the bathroom.  “Don’t look at it,” he told her.  “You shouldn’t have seen something like that.”

He watched as Ceraph gripped the edges of the sink, her chest heaving as she made noises of expulsion, but nothing was coming back up.  The utter despair on her face felt like Shepard’s chest was being carved open.  He knew that horror all too well.  After coming back from his first mission—the first time he had killed someone—he had thrown up in the shuttle.  It had been a pacification mission on some godforsaken moon somewhere.  He had been leading an infiltration squad in an abandoned building, trying to flush out batarian terrorists.  One had suddenly sprung up from behind a trash bin, his hands raised.  Shepard had just reacted, twitching his assault rifle over, and fired three rounds into the alien’s chest before he recognized that the batarian had just been trying to surrender.  It was only afterward did he realize that his last round had actually hit the batarian’s jaw, tearing it off and ripping open his neck.  The medic had had to give him a sedative to stop shaking hours later once he was back on the ship, having processed what he had done.

Then he noticed that Tali was watching him.  Observing the sympathy he had for the turian.  Shepard willed himself to become steel, to embrace that hardened side of him that he knew lay dormant deep down.

He double-checked his submachinegun before he approached Tali again.  “Two admirals are dead and we know that they were trying to target you, too.”

“And Raan’s back in the ballroom,” Tali said.  “Security should be grouping there now.”

“Unless they’re in on the plot, too.”

“Good point, but we can’t be everywhere at once.”

He hefted his weapon.  “We need to find Aria.  You don’t happen to know where Tevos’s room is, do you?”

Tali tilted her head.  “Why would Tevos’s room be an indication of where…” she trailed off and Shepard could see her eyes blink before they slightly widened.  “Ah.”

“Admiral.  Focus.”

She gave her head a shake.  “Sorry.  She’s… she should be just around the corner.  The presidential suite.”

“Right,” Shepard said, already in motion.  He pointed behind him, towards the bathroom where Ceraph was.  “Keep her safe.  I’m taking point again.”

He could hear the quarian protesting behind him, but Shepard had seemed to have inherited Tali’s sense of urgency.  With every minute they remained stationary, the enemy, whoever they were, had more of a chance of taking over the ship’s vital systems.  The fact that they had not run into any more of the incursion team just yet weighed heavily upon him.  He knew better to let his guard down.  For all he knew, they were lying in ambush for him, just waiting for him to make a wrong move.

“Ceraph?” Tali said behind him.  “Come on, we have to go.”  And as she was turning to leave, she was staring at the back of Shepard’s coat when she, for whatever reason, decided to look down upon the carpet.  Shepard had stepped into the bloodstain that had seeped from Xen at some point, leaving behind a macabre trail.

And next to him, Tali recognized the sweeping shape of a three-toed boot with a uniquely curved arch.  A quarian’s boot.  She quickly checked her own soles and found them to be clean.  Strange.  Her breath caught in her throat, but she quickly disregarded the seeping of dread pool in her gut like bile.

Shepard scanned the corridors, his muzzle sweeping across the thin width of the bloodstained halls.  Pronouncing the area clear, he waited until Tali and Ceraph were grouped up behind him before he rounded the corridor, the suite door already in sight.  He took cursory glances behind him, just to confirm that no one was sneaking up on them.

Possibilities upon possibilities.  It was not enough that he had to be put away for ten years.  Now, someone was trying to kill Tali.  What danger did she represent to anyone in this galaxy?  Why her?

And why now?

The unification.  Rannoch becoming one with the rest of the galaxy.  It was the only answer.  This raid had to have been in the makings for a long time.  Months or years.  The timing had been precise, down to the day.  Board the ship, kill the newest ambassadors, and start a new era of chaos.  And when the fighting was at its thickest, the true mastermind would rise from the ashes and consolidate power, their enemies having been weakened from infighting and suspicion.  There may have been another explanation, but until he came up against a more plausible one, this was the narrative he was going to stick with.

To himself, he swore that once he ripped the names of Tevos’s partners out from her throat, he would write down the names of those that were threatening the woman that he loved with everything he could muster.  His list would grow, his duty extended.  But it would all be for something, if she was safe and unharmed.

He muscled open the door and burst inside, a tidal wave that could no longer be restrained.  His lip curled in disgust at the opulence of the place—Tevos had not taken up different tastes since her ousting, evidentially—but it was quickly replaced by a gnawing alarm as he recognized the state of destruction that the room was in.  Furniture had been overturned, some having broken apart.  Tables had been smashed, the glassware on them having shattered to pieces.  Even the far window was heavily cracked—something heavy had to impact it in order to leave a mark like that.  Heavy and fast.

“Aria?” he called out, clutching his submachinegun in a fierce two-handed grip.  His armored fingers were about ready to bend the metal frame of the weapon.

And then he saw her just past a destroyed couch.  Dead, just like the others.

“No,” he whispered so quietly that only he could hear his own voice.  He knelt by the body.

Aria’s eyes were still open, staring at nothing.  On her lips was a permanently frozen smirk, one that Shepard had known all too well, as if she was about to laugh at another’s misfortune.  Perhaps she had thought the prospect of death to be amusing.  The deep gash in her throat had been what killed her.  That, or the stab wound to her back, which was delicately adorned with a still damp mar of blood upon her coat.  Her legs had been savaged by the familiar plasma wounds he had seen before, but they had not been what had killed her.

Shepard curled a fist so hard his arm was shaking.  By rights, Aria should have outlived him.  She was an asari who had taken many risks in her lifetime, but it was a life borne of calculation and cold, unrelenting logic.  She had always won out by hedging her bets, gaining the upper hand either by pure strength or by attrition.  There had always been a plan when it came to Aria.  She had been living centuries before Shepard was even a thought.  She should have had centuries more to forget him.

“They were gunning for all of you,” he said, his voice emitting like the voice of some emaciated prisoner.  He bent his head, an ache pounding at his skull.  “Son of a bitch.”

A hand then came to his shoulder.  Tali.  She was pulling at him, trying to lead him away from Aria’s body.  Trying to tear him away, as he had done to her on the Alarei.  Time would not stop for grief.  He accepted her guidance as he stood, his body limp, his mind humming like a hungry wildfire.

“I should’ve been there,” he whispered, the words tumbling from his mouth, fingers twitching in anger.  “I should’ve said something… done something…”

“You couldn’t have known this would happen,” Tali squeezed his wrist, the sensation faint through his armor.  “You can’t save everyone.”

Hasn’t stopped me from trying, he was about to say before he forcibly wrenched his throat closed.  Suppressing his old -isms was a quirk that proved easier said than done, but would Tali buy the sentiment if he expressed it, anyway?

He looked down at the quarian’s hand that still gripped his wrist.  He wondered if he should alter his arm, so that his hand slipped into hers, propriety be damned for every second he spent with her, a little bit of his willpower slipped away. 

Coming to his senses, he gave a firm wrench, tearing him away from the woman’s grasp.  He lifted his weapon again and his breathing grew into a bare hiss.  He seemed to be focused at nothing, nodding almost absentmindedly.  Dangerous.  “I’m going to at least stop them from hurting anyone else,” he growled as he pushed past Tali and Ceraph.

The gridded passageways of the seventh level offered up placarded maps of the area at every junction.  It was simple for Shepard to get his bearings and to locate his destination.  The bonewhite maps did not label the engine room specifically—the ship was made for tourists after all—but Tali had already downloaded a schematic of the ship that she had somehow plucked off the extranet and superimposed it upon the provided maps, an overhead layer.

“Another right at the next intersection and the engine room is a little less than fifty meters in that direction,” Tali said as she pointed to an access hatch upon her digital map.

“That is, if this is to scale,” Shepard pointed out.

“It never is,” Tali groused.

They continued at their plodding pace, their prior haste replaced by a careful deliberation.  The shadows had seemed to have grown bolder here as they continued toward the ship’s drive core, threatening to choke the life out of them.

The pathway widened at this location and there was a moving walkway that none of them took at their convenience.  The signage was small here, difficult to read, but at least it let them know they were heading in the right direction.

Shepard hooked a right at the intersection that Tali had indicated.  He frowned as he beheld the expanse before him.  Empty.  Something was not right here.  The ship was massive, yes, but for them to have gone all this time since the ballroom and not run into any attacker set the marine on edge.  The hairs on the back of his neck were starting to prickle.

And then he saw it.  A closed door flanked by armored portals and a singular vidscreen.  A few bodies lay dispersed before the threshold, all in the attire of the ship’s crew.  Beyond that, the drive core.

Yet, despite himself, he stopped in place, holding up a fist in the universal signal to halt.

“What is it?” Tali said as she came up beside him.  “It’s clear.”

“I know,” Shepard said.  “But if that’s the way they came in, there’d be someone standing guard.”

There was a dull creak in front of them.  A telltale sign of pressure being administered in the wrong place.  A careless placement of the foot.

Only, there was no one to be seen.

Tali shook her head.  “This is—”

All of a sudden, catastrophic laser fire suddenly illuminated the hallways.  Achromatic beams sparked through the empty distance, clashing upon the walls in sprays of scintillating metal.  The pale streaks burned against Shepard’s retinas and he was instinctively pounding open the closest door, a closet, hauling a protesting Tali inside before he then shoved Ceraph inside to join the quarian.  Trading a panicked burst in response from his submachine gun, he whirled away, a beam of plasma nearly missing his abdomen, and crammed himself into the closet with the other ladies.

“Multiple shooters,” he said.  “I couldn’t see who was firing.”

“Neither could I,” Tali gritted.  “They’ve got us pinned.”

“I can make it a little harder on them,” Shepard said and he raised his weapon, setting off another burst of bullets into the door right across the hall, setting off a close-range explosion of metal.

“Hey!” Tali was yelling.  “Alder!”

But Shepard was already in motion, barreling through the hail of plasma for his shoulder to collide with the damaged door, which caved in immediately, exposing the interior of another barebones stateroom.  Recovering, Shepard moved back to the ingress, wedging himself against the jam while he ejected his half-spent clip, quickly slotting in a new one.

Dropping to a knee, he leaned out of cover and loosed another attack from his submachinegun.  The flash hider did an admirable job of masking the fiery emissions from the muzzle, but it was almost as if he was aiming at empty air.  His visor was not reading any contacts—he even cycled through his wavelengths again and was getting no positive hits.  No heat sources.  Nothing on X-rays, either.  And no electrical field disturbances.  They were fighting against a void.

But, in the split second that he could see before he was forced back into cover, those glimmering needles of plasma were springing completely out of thin air, midway between his position and the door to the drive core.

Only one explanation was possible.

“They’re using cloaking tech!” he called out before he levelled off a burst, lower this time, right where he had seen the last few beams of plasma cascade from.

His aim was true this time and he could see the angry furrowing of liquid static that emanated in the hallway.  There was a shifting of light, like a beacon funneled through an irregular glass, and he realized that he had only hit the shields of the cloaked trooper.  Got you now.  He had gotten used to the recoil of his weapon and fired it two-handed, a violent spray smashing against the camouflaged individual that he had just rooted out.  But the shields continued to hold, impossibly strong, absorbing every shot that Shepard sent the trooper’s way.  There was a twisting of adumbrations and Shepard realized that his shots were hitting the far wall now, the cloaked intruder having moved off into cover.

Shepard felt cold dread beneath his armor.  This was not like any tech that he had seen before.  Personal cloaking devices had only been a recent development by the time the war had broken out, but they were beset by extreme limitations.  The devices were power-hungry and could not be sustained indefinitely without causing excessive wear on an armor’s battery, with a life of around thirty seconds at full charge.  Additionally, making any sort of excessive movement or firing a weapon with the cloaking activated automatically overwhelmed the cloak’s heat suppression systems and caused it to fail, rendering the wearer visible to deliver their sneak attacks.

But what Shepard had seen was a radical advancement in that tech.  Whoever these soldiers were, they possessed a cloaking armor that could be sustained indefinitely and while firing their weapons, too.  A weapon that could change the course of warfare as we know it.

More weapons fire forced Shepard back into cover.  On the other side, Ceraph was making a timid attempt to lean out of cover, her eyes half-closed from nerves while plasma boiled the air through the hall.  A series of bolts hit the edge of the doorway, sending a spray of molten metal that narrowly missed the turian’s face.  She squeaked and spun back further into cover.

“Stay down, Ceraph!” Shepard barked.  The last thing that he needed was for another person to get killed today.  Ceraph was a noncombatant to boot.  She should have been elsewhere.  Somewhere safe.  Why did she have to insist on coming along?

But now Tali was leaning out with her shotgun, already laying down the law.  Catastrophic bursts of volcanic force spewed from the weapon and the kickback was enough to shatter an unarmored soldier’s shoulder, but the quarian had planted her stance, taking the recoil in stride without so much as uttering a grunt of pain.  Each blast from the gun seemed to emit a miniature sun within the confines of the corridor.

Shepard glanced around the doorjam and saw Tali’s volley hit a cadre of three cloaked troopers.  But none of them fell from the brutal rounds, their shields sizzling.  There was a hissing noise, a blast of white feedback, and the cloaking of the closest soldier snapped in and out of existence for a brief series.  Shepard could see that the stormcloud gray armor was closely contoured to a humanoid frame, sculpted like an Olympian god.  A stiff shawl, reminiscent of a poncho, wrapped up half of the trooper’s body, with a taut hood thrown up over their helmet.  There was a brief flash of yellow chartreuse light—twin spears from the optics of the helmet, masked by the curtain of shadows from the overhanging hood—and the cloaking swallowed it up into the backdrop once more.

We’re not doing a damn thing against these guys, Shepard thought.

“Alder,” Tali called out.  “On my mark, we retreat back down the hallway and regroup.”

A buzzing heat infected his mind.  Go back?  If they gave up ground now, they would just allow more time for these bastards to get dug in.

“The hell with that,” he shouted.  He stepped partially out into the open again, his weapon chattering in his hands as he filled the hallway with noise.  He could see the results of his aim skip across the shields of the cloaked troopers, but they seemed to absorb his attacks with little more than annoyed flinches.

“Damn it!” Tali screamed.  “I don’t care if you’re not under my command.  I outrank you and I order—”

“Then do what you like!  I’m pressing forward!” Shepard roared as he kept firing, even though the act of rebelling against Tali felt like he had swallowed nails.  But this… this was a part he could play.  The insubordinate ruffian.  It would only distract Tali from the truth and allow him to operate under his own guise.

Besides, he just wanted to hurt these bastards.  Badly.

Tali hung back, torn.  She was a pragmatic soldier to the end, but she could not abandon those that were staying behind to pursue their shared objective.  This Alder irked the hell out of her, but he was still steadfast in the face of overwhelming odds.  Out of foolishness, more than likely, but there was something else to back up his self-assuredness.

Shepard ejected another thermal clip, the redhot cylinder scorching the carpet as it rolled upon the surface.  He quickly stuffed a fresh one into his submachinegun, but he had run out of spares by this point.  He was down to just what was contained within his weapons.

And what was hanging from his belt.

Holding up the grenade that he had just retrieved, Shepard made sure that Tali saw what was in his fist.  Her eyes widened as she saw Shepard’s hand relax, the spring-loaded pin quickly flinging away with a ringing noise.

She pushed Ceraph further into the closet.  “Fire in the hole!” she called out.

Shepard stepped back out into the hallway, arm already primed.  A bolt of plasma splashed across his chest.  His shields angrily flared, but held, though they were drained by 75%.  It did not matter, for his arm had already reached the apex of its throw, and he loosed the grenade from his fingers like he was a star bioti-ball player.  He followed it up by a three-round burst from his submachinegun, chewing up the ground around the grenade before he hurled himself back into cover.

The high-ex device exploded with a BOOM!

The walls and ceiling vibrated, sending a pulse of dust trickling from the heavens.  Shepard waited two seconds before he finally crouched back out into the hall.

The grenade had ripped a hole into the wall, exposing the backbone of the structure.  A busted pipe leaked water onto the carpet, and ripped wires dribbled sparks.  A screen of smoke remained sedentary within the hallway, no puffs of air disturbing the languid spirals.  No additional bodies had been dispersed upon the ground though and Shepard wondered if the shields of those troopers was enough to withstand a grenade blast at point-blank range.  But there was some cause for relief, as the door at the end of the hall, the one leading to the drive core, was ajar.

Relief was not the same as celebration, as Shepard knew very well.  As he started to stalk towards the door in question, he felt a firm hand grasp his arm and he turned over to face what he recognized was a quite an angry Tali, and she was in an irater state than he had ever seen her before

“You got lucky that time,” the quarian seethed, “but that’s going to change, going forward.”

Shepard was so deep into his own character that he easily came up with his next reaction.  “I’m not one of your grunts that you can command at will, admiral.”  He added a little extra bite on the last word, though Tali could never know just how much he was hating himself for acting so brusque toward her.  She was completely undeserving of his venom, but she had no idea how much hurt he had undergone to get to this point.  I will have to ask for a lot of forgiveness, once this is over.

He could hear the clench of Tali’s hands as they tightened upon her shotgun.  “I don’t have any use for people I can’t control.”

“Then you can save the lecture for later,” Shepard shot back as he stalked in the direction of the drive core.  “I have my own mission to look after.  You’re welcome to retreat.  I don’t have that luxury.”

Tali gave an audible sigh of frustration behind him, followed by the rapid pitter-patter of boots close behind him.  He smiled—he still knew the woman, after all.  Never one to shy away from a fight.

And bringing up the rear, Ceraph jogged in a hunched-over position, anxiously scanning the adjacent hallways, carefully maneuvering her feet so that she would not step in the spilled gore from the brutalized crew.  Shepard was at least relieved that the turian appeared to be holding herself together, albeit only just, but it was incredible as to the things one could accomplish while under pressure.

The drive core of the Soledad Starliner was a complex room of twisting catwalks and clashing support beams.  The sphere of cataclysmic energy, surrounded by a shield of spinning containment rings, ushered in a thin purple light that washed about the multi-leveled area.  Shepard had only a layman’s awareness of the intricacies of drive systems, but even he could tell, upon first glance, that it was an inferior model to the Normandy’s.  His old ship had possessed an elegant configuration that had expertly been able to supply the antiproton thrusters with a steady concentration of primed mass, running the ship clean and quiet without any excess heat.  In contrast, the cruise liner had been built for torque and not for stealth strikes or loitering missions—a sprawl of tubing like two octopi joined at the head snaked in all directions, surging liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen, and antimatter to the thrusters of the ship.  There was a distinct inelegance to the tubing as they seemed to jut in odd directions for no reason, or to evade running into the support structures within the engine bay.  In contrast, the Normandy’s conduit lines had been thoughtfully engineered to run between the floors, through the superstructure, making the drive core construct appear like a monumental totem.

His submachinegun had been running low on clips, so Shepard had swapped to his silenced pistol.  Small but scrappy, it was supposed to pack a distinct punch.  He walked forward, the barrel guiding his path.  His mind felt clearer than it had ever since he had been roused from his frozen slumber, he noted.  Miraculous what being given a singular task, an enemy to destroy, could do.

Beyond the next corner, Shepard could see the airlock door, the green lighting indicating a good seal.  It was still open, which meant that this had been the egress point from where the cloaked assassins had entered.

And, judging by the flurry of hazy shapes that milled near the threshold, they were in the process of retreating.  Odd, for they had pretty much free reign of the ship.  Why withdraw now, unless they had already accomplished the objectives that they had set out to achieve?

Shepard made a gesture for Tali to approach.  It seemed like their advance had gone unnoticed thus far.  “Go for non-lethal shots.  I want one alive.”

“For interrogation?” Tali asked.

“Something like that.”  In truth, Shepard had no idea what he was going to do if he got his hands on one of the assassins.  One inclination was to beat the hell out of them with his bare fists for threatening Tali’s life.  Another was to simply lock them in a crate and starve them for a week, only returning to pry out every last bit of information and dignity that he could rip from their minds.

Careful, he had to remind himself.  You’re not far off from becoming a monster, yourself.

Isn’t that what I am already?

Almost without thinking, Shepard sprung out from cover, his pistol blazing away as he yanked at the trigger so fast that his finger was a blur.  The weapon kicked back comfortably in his grip and he saw his shots hone on target, kicking out bursts of static around the figures of warbled glass.  An answering laser blast curved just next to his head, enough that the temperature sensors in his armor momentarily skyrocketed.  He kept firing, even as the cavalcade of plasma ripped apart and melted the guardrails and floor of the catwalk all around him.

Some of his shots hit a cloaked assassin that was in the process of exfiltrating via the airlock.  The number of combatants was dwindling.  A few more seconds and the assassins would be off the ship, never to be seen again.

Frantically, Shepard reached for a chaff grenade and hurled it towards the airlock.  It detonated in a dry whumpf that concussed against Shepard’s body, momentarily pulsing his organs.  The grenade was not meant to kill—it was filled with tiny bits of shrapnel that could confound electrical sensors in a small radius, that and it could thoroughly discombobulate a person if they were too close to the blast.  And Shepard saw one of the murky shapes of haze stumble away from the airlock, staggering after having been hit dead-on by the burst of the grenade.

Tali then chose that moment to lean out with her own pistol.  She unleashed two rounds, which sparked against the nearby pipe that the cloaked assassin was situated by.  Her aim had been true—pressurized steam immediately burst from the two pinpricks that had been drilled into the duct, spraying directly onto the assassin.  The temperature of that steam was over a thousand degrees—even hardened shields had no chance at withstanding that kind of heat.  Two seconds later, there was the familiar pop as the shields of the assassin broke, along with his cloaking, revealing the muted gray armor and the rigid cloak that had been draped over his head and shoulders.  There was a blast of feedback from the trooper’s vocabulator—a type of scrambled transmission—and he staggered over to the guardrail in an effort to get away from the boiling steam.

Shepard aimed down and fired, seeing the foot of the assassin burst in a furrow of blood and bone.  There was another electronic howl from the man and he instinctively flinched backwards, his back hitting the guardrail, the force of his recoil already sending him over the edge, down to the pit of electrified ozone five stories below.

In motion, Shepard closed the distance and managed to grasp the assassin’s wrist just after he toppled over the side.  But with a wrenching motion, his hands clamped down and held on tightly.  Shepard cried out, now hoisting the full weight of the man as he dangled off the catwalk, pressing Shepard’s body uncomfortably against the guardrail.  But the assassin was just staring up at Shepard, his faceless helmet exuding a wan light, almost as if he was disappointed to have been caught off guard.

“Who are you working for?!” Shepard bellowed, shaking his arm to reinforce his seriousness.  “Who ordered you onto this ship?”

The assassin didn’t respond.  He seemed to recognize the score, that there was no way out for him without his life or dignity being forfeited.

Shepard grunted, trying to hold onto the man, but his grip was failing him.  The assassin’s gauntlet was starting to slip through his fingers—his armor did not have enough friction to hold him in place.

“Last chance!” Shepard roared.  “You can live if you tell me everything!”

For a moment, it seemed that the assassin was taking Shepard’s offer under serious consideration, for his body stilled and became stiff like a plank.  Then, the trooper slowly reached behind his back and brought his arm back out again.  The light of the drive core winked off the barrel of the chrome pistol, and the assassin straightened his arm, bringing Shepard’s head into his sights.

There was a crackle of a pistol being fired and Shepard jumped.

The tension in the assassin’s arm went slack in Shepard’s grip.

He realized he had closed his eyes as they opened once more.  Smoke gently wisped from the hole in the side of the assassin’s head, followed by a steady trickle of blood.  There were a series of clanging sounds as the deposited pistol hit the various substructures on the way down to the ground floor.

Looking up, Shepard saw Tali still locked into firing position upon the corner of the catwalk, her own weapon oozing a trail of smoke.  She was breathing heavily, her stance wide, eyes open and nearly trembling through her visor.

Shepard glanced down at the dead man that he was holding aloft.  Damn it all.  He released his grip, but had turned away so that he would not hear the impact as the body smashed against the lower levels, but he heard the meaty splattering sounds all the same.

Clanging sounds as Tali approached.  “He was going to—”

“I know,” he cut her off, a rasping sound infecting his voice.  “You had no other option.”

It could have brought me to you sooner, Tali.  What if that had been my only chance?  Our only chance?

There was no sense bemoaning his bad luck right at this moment.  The airlock against the drive core room had been sealed during the scuffle, the red light of a softlock blazing upon the entrance.  There was a distinct rumble that echoed throughout the superstructure—the guardrails rattled for three seconds.

Recognizing the signs, Shepard hurried over to the closest window and tried to peer out towards where the docking area was.

For a brief portion of time, there was nothing that Shepard could see.  His hands pressed against the glass of the window, like a child who was experiencing his first planetlaunch, utterly glued at the sight of the cosmos.

And then, a momentary flicker that turned into an angular shard of light.  Reflected from the sun, a craft of what appeared to be made up of thousands of shards of black glass lazily spun away from the hull of the Soledad Starliner.  It hung there, amidst the backdrop of space, crystalline and quiet.  A deadly blade.  Only for a shimmer to overwhelm it and, like a gentle wave, the ship was doused with a mirror-like light that contoured itself to its awkward dimensions.  But the distortion soon solidified with a few spears of fragmented light, and the ship itself disappeared from Shepard’s view as if it had never been there in the first place, lost to the canvas of stars and the sphere of infinite black before him.

Chapter Text

There was an air of disbelief that hung over the entire scene in the ballroom of the Soledad Starliner, a dark haze.  Like no one on board could have believed that something like this could have happened to them. 

How quickly they could forget the boot that had been over their collective neck, once.

The ballroom of luxury liner was in complete disarray.  Chairs and tables had been overturned, creating a ragged maze, the tablecloths ripped from shoes stamping upon them in all directions.  Shattered glasses and upended plates of food lay in their dissected states, their contents soaking into the ruined carpet. 

Looking from above, there lay several scattered pools of blood that blotted the floor, next to the darkened smudges from where plasma beams had razed the design of the carpet.  The sounds of groans and weeping filled the air.  Well-dressed people were milling about in a daze, some of them slumped against nearby walls, others trying to help with anyone who was wounded, all of them wearing numb and confused looks on their faces.  A woman in an elegant white dress was rocking back and forth against one of the bar counters, makeup ruined upon her face, her skirt speckled with drying red dots.  Some people were wandering in aimless circles, stuck on a loop, as their brains struggled to process what had happened.

The number of tablecloths draped across still forms kept racking up.  Dark stains blotched the fine threads, gradually spilling across the sheer white surface.  Human.  Alien.  All walks of life had been targeted, their sheer wealth ultimately a flimsy barrier in their final moments.

Just beyond the massive crystal teardrop of the main ballroom window, the arms of the Citadel were swiftly positioning into view, the station growing closer as if it meant to hug the cruiser.  Gunboats adorned with the Union Eterna insignia flanked the ship as it moved in to dock, with a few fighter squadrons doing close-range passes.  Everyone was on high alert.

Shepard sighed as he gazed at the sight from where he was standing, about three-quarters of the way up the staircase that led to the second story balcony.  Nearby, Ceraph was sitting on the steps, hands held tightly together to stop themselves from shaking, eyes sightless and refusing to focus.

The turian hung her head, her mandibles flexing an agonized rhythm.  “I’m sorry.”

“There’s nothing to be sorry for,” Shepard said, keeping his gazed locked to the floor below, as if he were lording over all the chaos.  He counted nineteen bodies so far—the sniper on the upper levels no doubt had a field day while Shepard had been in the halls of the ship, picking off billionaires like they were fish in a barrel.

“I froze up.”  Ceraph stared out in front of her, before she rasped, “Again.”  She was replaying the moment in her head when she was trying her damnedest to do the right thing—to provide the great Commander Shepard with even a solitary second of cover fire, only to shirk away when the enemy bullets had blistered too close to her.  She had not even gotten to fire her pistol once.

Shepard made a minute shake of his head.  “You did more than most.”

“I doubt that.”

“No?” Shepard asked, still not turning over to look at the turian below him.  “You chose to come with me.  You thought you could make a difference.”  He rotated his arm a quarter and gestured to the people below, the corpses draped with the cloths that had supported their last meals.  “What do you think they did to help?”

Bleary-eyed, Ceraph gave the ground level below a few seconds of consideration before she went back to contemplating the day’s events in silence.  The adrenaline comedown was brutally eating away at her, her joints feeling like they were made out of fiberglass.  Her eyeballs were sandpaper and an electric bite was gripping the roots of her teeth.  The sounds of the wounded below were not making things any better and she was about to clasp her hands over her ears to drown out the sobbing as she slammed her eyes shut and made a soft noise of pain.

Shepard was not oblivious to the turian’s plight, but he knew he could not afford to have any distractions.  Still, he kept a part of himself tuned onto the woman, ready in case things went south quickly.  PTSD was not a predictable beast—he had known marines the size of full-grown bulls reduced to shells of their former selves after seeing too many of their friends get blown away.

He wondered what Ceraph had seen during the war that had left such an impression on her.  It was clear she was a fighter, but she was a greenstick fracture away from shattering completely.  Quick to anger, but fragile on impact.  He could not push her hard, for he still needed her, that much he knew.

After the last skirmish in the engine bay, Shepard had performed one last floor check of the immediate area to confirm that no more cloaked troopers were on the ship, but had quickly come to the conclusion that rooting out the camouflaged soldiers was going to be a tall order, especially if some of them were lying in wait.  Fortunately, the captain of the Soledad Starliner had possessed the good sense to immediately come about back towards the Citadel, where an intercept fleet had converged into a defensive cordon around the ship, guiding it back to the docks.  The surviving guests had all been forced to congregate in the ballroom, with the majority of all security personnel assigned to guard the area.  It would be foolish for anyone, even a soldier equipped with a wavelength-proof armor, to try anything with such an exaggerated security force in the vicinity.  Though, Shepard knew better than anyone to never relax completely with so many uncertainties abound.  He was just one nerve-twitch from whipping out his pistol and plugging away at the next mote of air distortion that his HUD could pick up.

Arms now crossed, Shepard continued to observe the unfolding mess below him.  Union Eterna guards were now stationed at every entrance and exit, monitoring every person that passed between their barricades.  Medics attended to the wounded as best as they could, applying medi-gel and tourniquets, depending on the severity.  He had even heard a defibrillator go off a few times—some of the more elderly guests had developed heart issues as a consequence of the battle popping off within the ballroom, this being perhaps the most stressful moment they had undergone within the last ten years.

One of the medics he had seen earlier, the burly man by the name of McLeod, was down over by the stairwell.  The medic kneeling down by the body of a salarian while the rest of his team huddled around, talking openly amongst themselves.

“You want to call it?”

“What for?” McLeod was saying in a very offhand tone as he was snapping off a pair of plastic gloves.  He looked down at the salarian.  “Guy’s about to walk out of here on his own two feet.”

“His guts are hanging out, Sam.”

“I know that, Stevenson.  He was in asystole for ten fuckin’ minutes, too.  Just go and grab a bag—the rest of the guests shouldn’t see this shit.”

“Too fuckin’ late.  I think some of the guests got too curious at our work.  They’re puking right now.”

A low grumble rose from Shepard’s throat and he resumed his reconnaissance.

Just past the window, he could see the intricate assemblage of the superstructure, one of the Citadel’s arms eclipsing the sun just overhead.  The jetbridges were in sight now—it would be around ten more minutes until the ship was docked back at the station.

He moved closer to the edge of the staircase and put an arm on the guardrail.  None of the people below looked up at him.  Over in the corner, he could see the moneylender, Haas-Mase, quietly confer with the warmonger, Koenig.  They had been among the lucky ones.  Their pals Vanden, Price, and McMurphy had been found in their cabins, same as Koris and Xen, their corpses in the exact same mutilated rictus from eating a barrage of plasma.

Slowly moving his head until he honed in on his next target, Shepard’s hand gradually clenched down onto the guardrail as he saw Tali near the double doors, who was currently making strong hand gestures to a squad of Union Eterna guards, with Raan hanging just over her shoulder.  He could have used his helmet’s audio enhancer function—it could pick up specific speech patterns from across a crowded conference hall—but Shepard could not shake that as an invasion of Tali’s privacy.  Besides, from Tali’s agitated body language, it was clear that she was in the middle of dispensing orders to the ship’s security staff.  Either that, or she was giving them a piece of her mind for their complete failure in preventing this massacre.  Regardless, it did not seem like a good time for Shepard to interrupt her.

He had to force himself to turn away so that he could no longer stare at her.

Yet again.  Yet again, Tali had been in danger.  And while he might not have stopped the threat completely today, Shepard wondered what could have happened if he hadn’t been here at all.  Those cloaked troopers had been merciless, killing everyone in their path.  If Tali had been in one of those rooms like her fellow admirals, or had clashed with the assassins without any backup, she could have been killed this very day.

That image of the sniper’s round, searing so close to his neck as he bodily tackled Tali out of the way, ate into his mind.  He resisted the urge to tear off his helmet so that he could grip his skull with his hands and squeeze.  To even think that he had been so close to losing his only tether to this galaxy, the source of the love that poisoned his very heart with every second he was apart from her, was too much to bear.

It had hurt just as much, though, when she looked at him the way one would gaze upon a stranger.  He might as well have been one to her, with the façade he was putting on.  There were no former bonds tying them together—whatever connections had been there, he had deliberately severed, hoping to knot them somewhere down the line.  A small part of him hoped that Tali would have been able to see through the lies and the mask, and just place a hand upon his arm, like she was wont to do when they had been alone in his cabin together on the Normandy.  A light touch from her upon his neck could allow him to forget about the fact that there was a war going on.  With her, he could shut out anything.

“Son of a bitch,” he muttered to himself, though it had been so quiet he did not know if he had said it or thought it.  Distractions.  These were nothing but distractions.

And the biggest distraction in the room was situated several paces away from Tali, smack-dab in the center of the ballroom, a fortress of broken chairs making a ring around her position.

Tevos.

The asari was standing close to her armored turian bodyguard, noticeably distraught and twitching.  Her hands were twisting into knots and she seemed to be fighting with indecision whether she should stand up straight or crouch in case there was any more sniper fire due in her direction.  She was looking across the room at the sea of wounded and debris, her weight shifting from foot to foot as she was understandably eager to leave the ship once it docked back at the Citadel.

Shepard sighed again and his hand slowly moved towards his holstered pistol, but he prevented his fingertips from brushing the grip lest anyone saw him make any aggressive moves.  His heart rate was starting to spike and a dread sweat began to break out upon his brow.

He had no proof, no promises, absolutely nothing, but he knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that Tevos had played a part in locking him away.  The twisting feeling in his gut was just confirmation of what his mind was thrumming. 

He tried closing his eyes, which did not work.  All he could hear were Tevos’ cries of wanting him killed into his ears, interspersed with quick flashes of a wounded Tali, supported by Garrus, as he headed back down the Normandy ramp, her arm outstretched, fingers dripping blood. 

Shepard clenched his jaw.  Was this really something he was prepared to go through with?  Everything that he had promised himself since his awakening was all going to lead to this crucial crossroads—he was openly courting the possibility of murder.  And not just murder, the murder of one of the former councilors of the Citadel Council, someone who had used to be his boss.  While it was true that he and Tevos had never seen eye to eye for most issues, there had never been a moment prior in which he had thought about filleting the asari from sternum to groin, but such violent fantasies were a common occurrence now, even during his waking moments.

With an effort, he pried his hand from the orbit near his sidearm, and returned it to the guardrail.  Justice and vengeance.  Two sides of the same coin.  He had not decided how either would be dispersed.  Maybe it would all come to light once he looked into their eyes, waiting until they had realized the depths of their failure.  Then he would snuff it out or do unto them the same punishment they had delivered upon him. 

Either way, he would even the score.

Behind him, Ceraph gave a groan as she wobbled to her feet, unsteady.  A hand clasped to her forehead (another sign of adrenaline comedown), she slowly made her way over to the edge of the staircase, situated a couple of steps below the human.

Ceraph opened her mouth to say something, but she noticed just how rigid and locked that Shepard’s head was in its present situation.  Following what she estimated was his eyeline, she slowly scrutinized the ballroom floor below, taking a few spare glances until the plate at her eyebrow arched suddenly.

“The ex-councilor?  What’s-her-name… Tevos?”

“Yes,” Shepard just rasped in affirmation.

The turian’s eyes narrowed.  “I don’t know… but it just seems that you’ve been eying her for nearly—”

“It’s her,” Shepard breathed, the vocabulator in his mask creating a magma rumble in his voice.

Ceraph fell silent, performing a quick double-take.  “What?”

“Tevos.  She was one of them.  The group that put me under… she was a part of it.”

Only Ceraph’s eyes moved, her body now consciously still.  Then, as if she did not want to draw any undue attention to herself, she slowly straightened.  “You’re absolutely sure?”

“I remember her speaking right before my cryo pod closed, Ceraph.  And then… when I heard her yelling just today… there was no question.  The voice was the same damn one.  She knows what happened to me and why.  Somehow, she’s the link between me and this whole assassination attempt.  It all leads back to Tevos.”

The tip of Ceraph’s tongue tapped at the roof of her mouth for several second, her head minutely shaking back and forth, fighting with uncertainty.  “But… but you don’t have any real proof…” she whispered.

“I know,” Shepard said, well aware of the conundrum that he faced.  “That’s all what is to come.”  He then turned to her for the first time, subtle holograms shifting like darkened shadows past the stifling curve of his blackened visor.  “There’s always a trail.  And when I find it, then I’ll act.”

“You’re talking about—”

“Setting things right, Ceraph.  It’s just the first step.  But there’ll be more that…”

He trailed off as he saw Tali begin to ascend the staircase towards them.  He had not noticed that she had moved away from her position below at first.  From her determined pace, her destination was obvious, her shoulders locked and her head tipped upward.

She stopped a few steps below Shepard and Ceraph, but she did not reach out to grasp the guardrail for support.

Shepard swallowed his nerves down.  “Admiral,” he managed to stiffly elicit, managing to not make a strangled sound.

“Alder,” Tali returned with equal frost, looking rather alone down there upon the stairs, despite her scuffed and bloodied armor.  “I… I just wanted to… express my condolences.  Aria was unlike anyone I’d ever met.  I was looking forward to working with her in such an equal capacity.”

“She certainly was unique,” Shepard nodded along.  “Her legacy isn’t dead yet.”

Politely, Tali glanced to the side for a couple of seconds before she resumed eye contact.  “What are you going to do now?”

Shepard chewed the inside of his cheek.  The truth would be a ludicrous thing to blurt out, that he was going to start compiling all of the different ways that he could brutally torture Tevos if she was unwilling to provide him with the information that he wanted.  But if he was going to return to her someday, as just John Shepard, then he needed her to see him as the man she had always envisioned, instead of what he was willing to become.

Instead, he made a small motion with his hand, his fingers splaying outwards as if he were making a polite gesture at a card table.  “I’ve been asking myself that same question.  I suppose, however you choose to look at it, I’m not going to be sitting idly by.  Aria is dead.  There has to be some recompense.”

“Alder,” Tali said coldly, “this is going to be something that has to be resolved over official channels.  My people are going to be running their own investigation—I guarantee it.  And Union Eterna will open up one as well.  You need to get back to Omega, convene your people, and coordinate with the investigative committee.  This affects all of us.  We need to present a united front.”

It was as if she was talking to a brick wall, for Shepard slowly crossed his arms, the faceless marine putting up an inscrutable barrier.  Tali might have even considered the fact that he was not doing her the courtesy of even looking upon her.

There was some truth to that, because Shepard was doing his damnedest to avert his gaze.  As much as he wanted to snap at her, for that was what “Alder” would do in that moment, he yanked that inclination back like it was a rabid dog.  Tali was just playing the political game that she had been thrust into as a reluctant player, he reasoned.  The days of galivanting across the galaxy, tagging along with a Spectre and ripping up the red tape at every opportunity, were over.  Her battlefields were now board rooms and podiums, her words and policies the salvos that she delivered.  She was not the same Tali that he had left behind.  She had become something better.  She had grown into the role that she had perhaps been born to play.

His helmet gave a hiss of atmosphere and his head tilted ever so slightly.  “You may be right,” he said.  Yet after a pause, he added, “But I think I’ll be probably staying on the Citadel a little longer… Admiral.”

He saw Tali’s hands clench in frustration and it was a wonder that the woman had not provided a grumbling expulsion of breath.  It was clear she was getting agitated from his attitude.  Good, that’ll throw her off the trail.

“I know I can’t tell you what to do, but if you jeopardize this inquiry in any way—”

“I told you before,” Shepard interrupted.  “You have your mission, I have mine.  There’s nothing really else to it.”

“No,” Tali raised her chin and slowly blinked, her composure returning.  “I suppose not.”  She turned to leave, moving back down a few of the carpeted steps before she suddenly stopped about a quarter of the way from the ground floor.  She glanced back up at him and, for a brief moment, Shepard thought he saw something cross the glow of her eyes, but the moment faded before he could take stock of it.  “You’re a good soldier, Alder,” she said.  “I wish I knew more like you.  But you’re a liability to everyone in your orbit if you’re not going to be cooperative with me or anyone else.  And I don’t know if I could ever work with someone like you for very long.  Aria saw something in you.  I wish I did.”

He accepted her judgment with a bare nod and watched as she suddenly reached the floor below, hurriedly heading off to rejoin Raan and the others.

A few seconds later, he emitted a ragged gasp, his lungs feeling like they had been crushed flat.

Ceraph kept her eyes locked upon the quarian and waited until she was a good clip away.  Tali momentarily disappeared behind one of the support pillars, giving Ceraph her cue to turn to Shepard.

But Shepard was glaring at her—the turian was keenly aware of this even though the man was helmeted.

“Whatever you’re about to ask me,” he gritted out, “don’t.”

“I—I was just—”

“You thought that would’ve been the right time?  ‘If not now, when?’  Do I have that correct?”

“It’s…” Ceraph swallowed and gently lobed her eyes up at him from the steps below where she stood.  “You do plan on telling her everything, right?”

Shepard could only shake his head in disbelief and he clenched a fist at his chest for a moment before he swiftly sliced his arm down to his side as if he were cracking an invisible whip.  “My answer is going to be the same.  She’ll know the truth when everything is finished.”

The passengers to the Soledad Starliner had lined up at least fifteen minutes before the ship had docked with the Citadel, creating a throng of people at least a couple dozen deep. ^[1]  No doubt everyone was keen to preserve their own lives by getting the hell away from where all the chaos had occurred, only to unintentionally press themselves in a crush potentially even more dangerous than the squad of assassins that had just been on board.  Fortunately, no one entered into a panic and the crowd slowly filtered out the doors and onto the skybridge once the ship’s docking procedures had concluded, still pressed together, shoulder to shoulder.

Ceraph tightly melded herself to Shepard, who had taken care to position himself at the outside of the river of bodies.  He was looking past the array of heads, easily able to spot the armored turian bodyguard several paces in front of him.

And next to the warlike alien, Tevos was clinging onto him like a life preserver, fearful that she would be swept away into the crowd.

Shepard still refused to take his eyes off her as they moved down the twisting pathways, the corridors becoming thinner and thinner, creating bottlenecks of bodies in the process.  You’ll see me soon, councilor.  One of these days, we’re due for a little chat.  Should’ve followed your own advice.

The line stopped and started intermittently, with seemingly no reason for the interruption in transit.  They were now passing through a series of blank white hallways that reminded Shepard of a customs office.  He could hear the crackle of radio chatter and glimpsed a couple of private security personnel, all touting automatic weapons, as they came to a larger room that opened up into a waiting area.  Rows of cheap plastic chairs had been assembled, akin to a government waiting office.

Shepard’s blood ran cold for a few seconds.  He whipped his head around, looking for something, when he found it.  A doorway, just a few feet ahead.

He gripped Ceraph’s wrist.  “Come on,” he said as he stepped past the holo-stanchions, which flickered red and gave an annoyed beep as he passed through the barrier.  Ceraph was partially resisting, not understanding what was going on, but eventually surrendered to Shepard.  He walked over to the door, shouldered it open, whisked the turian on through, and swiftly closed the door behind him.

They were now in a blank hallway, even more featureless than the last one.  No one was following them after they waited a few seconds, with everyone in the adjacent hallway having been absorbed in their own thoughts to notice that the two had slipped the line.  Their footsteps clicked wetly as Shepard made a heavy stride down the passageways, Ceraph struggling to catch up.

“Wait a minute!” Ceraph said, her head surging back in the direction of the door and back to Shepard in quick succession.  “What are we even doing?”

“Keeping a low profile,” Shepard said as he took a right at the next intersection.

“By jumping the queue?”

“The next room was a staging area, Ceraph.  If I were in charge of security, my first order of business after an attempted assassination would be to collect all of the guests from the AO and interview them, one by one.  I couldn’t take the chance that they would let us off the hook that easily, and I’m also banking on them not being particularly amenable to my current armored figure.  And I don’t think I’m going to come across anyone sympathetic to me showing up dead in their database.  That’s going to be an awkward conversation that I don’t want to have.”

The turian’s eyes scrunched.  “That really something that you think will happen?”

“First time I was brought back after the Collectors spaced me,” Shepard said, “the scanners here told C-Sec that I was dead.  Confused the hell out of their sensors for a bit.  I had to have a conversation with the captain on duty and convince him that I had not declared myself dead for tax purposes and that there had been a legitimate reason for my change in status.  Now, I could get away with that once, but if the same thing happened to me twice, someone’s bound to notice the discrepancy.”

Ceraph’s eyes lidded upwards.  She noticed the black security camera installations perched on the ceiling and tapped Shepard on the shoulder.  “I think someone’s bound to notice, regardless.”

“Taken care of,” Shepard tapped the side of his helmet.  When Ceraph blinked at him in confusion he explained, “Passive localnet virus.  Infiltrates any security system in close proximity and plays the preceding five seconds on a loop until we exit the field of view of all cameras.”

“Sounds expensive.”

“I never asked.  It was given to me as a gift.  Stored a copy for myself in an unmarked extranet storage site in case I lost the original file.”

“Sounds like quite a friend,” Ceraph said in awe.  “Who gave it to you?”

They were now coming up on a set of metal double doors.  Shepard approached the threshold and gingerly placed his hand upon the cold pushbar.  “You saw her in the ballroom a few minutes ago.”

He then applied pressure to the pushbar and, with a wrenching sound of disused metal and a distinct sensation of fighting against the suction of a rubber seal, the soundproofed door was pushed aside and they were suddenly upon the wide avenue within the wards of the Citadel.

Ceraph had to take a moment to adjust.  The amount of noise from the bustling crowds barraged against her, in addition to the rampage of synthetic sounds and colors, the shouting and the sirens.  The effect was very similar to space disorientation syndrome, replete with the sudden nausea that typically came with a shifting perspective.  The calmness, the searing neon, it was all a mutilating onslaught that hummed at her nerves, vibrating her bones.

“Can’t stop,” Shepard said, grabbing at her arm again, guiding her.  “Got to keep moving.”

“Where?” she whispered, feeling an arctic blast after passing underneath an air conditioning vent.

“Anywhere but here.”

They kept at their brisk walk, taking the inside lane of their intended route of travel.  No one paid them any mind.  They passed by a few holo-maps of the Citadel, which was color-coded to indicate which areas were safe to traverse, which were currently under repair, and which had been damaged to the point of being irreparable.  The storefronts were a blur as they passed them by—game shops, armories, food courts.  All intricately detailed with blazing holographics that swerved and cascaded in intricate patterns, some of them displaying cartoon animations from popular net series in an effort to catch the eye of passerby.

The smell of food roasting hit the pair as they kept on walking, but neither had a particularly strong appetite.  The chemicals that were still surging around in their bodies from their little jaunt in the Soledad Starliner had suppressed their cravings.

Shepard kept his head on a swivel, never once allowing himself to relax.  The Citadel had been the de facto capital of the Milky Way for longer than humanity could remember.  The largest artificial object in all of memory, the station was a natural home for a civilized government, in addition to the ultra-wealthy.  The various levels of the Citadel catered to all walks of life—one could spend every waking moment within a few square blocks of the station and come up with everything they could need.

More security patrolled here, decked out in jet-black armor.  The intimidating looking weapons that Shepard had glimpsed earlier seemed to be a universal loadout among these guys.  Chimera.  That was Koenig’s outfit, he recalled.

There was a tap on his shoulder and Shepard glanced behind him.

“Think we can make a detour?” Ceraph asked.

Shepard’s brow furrowed as he considered the question, slowing his gait down.  Finally, he shrugged.  “What did you have in mind?”

“I wanted to see the tower.”

Assuming that Ceraph meant the Citadel Tower, the former site where the Council was based, Shepard then asked, “Something there that interested you?”

“It could be something that you would want to see as well.  Unless, we actually have a destination that we needed to get to…?”

There was no sense in lying to the turian in that he had no place in mind that he was looking to get to.  He had no immediate safehouse that he could use while on the Citadel.  Of course, there was always the apartment that Anderson had given him, but considering it had been ten years since his disappearance, he imagined that the place had been long sold to another resident by now.  It didn’t make much sense to risk it.

They had some time, anyway, and Shepard needed all of it to figure out his next move.

“Let’s find an elevator, then.”

The signages were detailed enough to guide them to the closest elevator bay.  There was no line for any of the lifts, which meant that Shepard and Ceraph ended up getting one all to themselves as they rose through the needle-spire that jutted at the center of the station like a syringe. 

It was about a two-minute ascent, enough time for Shepard to be reminded of how much he hated to be trapped in these things.  Even though they were moving at a rapid clip, it never seemed like they were getting to the end destination fast enough.  His hands, clasped together in front of him, began to ache as his fingers helplessly twitched while he watched the shattered design of the station slowly transform before him as they rose higher and higher, able to see the ragged slashes of skycar gridlock and the endless blocks of buildings that sprouted up from the opposite ends of the station like cilia.

He tried not to think about the past that much, but it kept turning up like a bad card.  When he had been chasing after Saren, he had needed to shoot his way out from an elevator, much like this one, in order to reach the top of the spire.  Geth dropships had deposited wave after wave of krogan and synthetics between him and the rogue Spectre, trying desperately to stop his ascent.  And the last time he had been here, he had navigated the labyrinthian bowels of the station, making his way across narrow bridges, past the shifting apparatuses that were the oversized energy conversion units, the air stinking of ozone the entire way.  At the end, both Anderson and the Illusive Man had been waiting for him, and at the end of that encounter, Shepard had been the only one left standing, ready to face his destiny, which had been intertwined with that of the Reapers’ from the get-go.

Or so it had seemed, for he was standing here now, wasn’t he?

An ache in his side throbbed and he instinctively clasped a hand to the affected area.  The gunshot prior to when he had entered the beam to the Citadel.  The wound had healed, but he could still feel the agony as the bullet had entered his body and had skipped off a rib, exiting somewhere out his back in the blink of an eye.  A wound like that would have been fatal if left untreated—he would have bled out given another hour.  And that was to say nothing of the third-degree burns that he had sustained upon surviving Harbinger’s last punishing attack, the beam zapping so close to his body that his entire life had flashed before his eyes in the span of three seconds.  There had been so many variables, the entire deck stacked against him, yet he was still standing.  He had always been the last one standing.

When they finally reached the top of the tower, Shepard was struck at what he was and was not able to recognize.  The entrance from the elevator bay was now a narrow canyon of rock from which fleshy vines and clumps of moss clung upon the sides.  The stone walls were embedded with tiny diodes that glowed like bioluminescent algae in the sea.  The walls then swiftly opened up, revealing a small complex of what looked like museum exhibits to Shepard.  There were twisted curves of wreckage that had come from various ships propped up on pedestals, bronze placards faintly glimmering and explaining what each piece was.  Vibrant holographics laced the ceiling, a second sky, depicting various cosmic phenomena along with the brief glimpse of an epic space battle every few minutes or so.  Ceraph took particular interest in some of the exhibits while Shepard kept on ambling ahead, aimless.

Large installations projected footage that had been recorded from the war; a small crowd remained apt in attention before them.  Shepard passed by one and saw that what was being played was a pirate militia broadcast from Earth on 2187 that depicted a ragtag hunter-killer squad as it was going after a Reaper staging area in an overrun refinery—an overhead satellite, unaffiliated with the troopers, had recorded the entire thing.  The squad had been behind enemy lines somewhere in the Great Plains area of the North American continent, with the intent of sabotaging the refueling base so that their aerial attack fighters would not have a foothold in the area.  They ended up completing their mission brilliantly, with the entire Reaper wing being exterminated thanks to a careful application of plastic explosives onto the tanks of pure hydrogen fuel.  But the Reapers, having been put on alert, had caught wind of the squad that had so thoroughly crippled their advance force and proceeded to hunt them down on the plains, a towering destroyer making the finishing move upon the squad’s captain as it unleashed its devastating power, creating a gouge in the earth a mile long when the fateful beam had fired from its apparatus.

The audience was stone-faced for the most part, but Shepard could detect a faint shining in some of their eyes.  Someone gave a sniffle.

Shepard was no longer watching the footage anymore. 

He was watching all of them.  The people. ^[2]

If he had not been beholden to his mission, if he had not promised to put everything else aside as he sought his vengeance, he would have perhaps broken right in this moment.  He wanted to go up to every person, take their hands in his, and beg for their forgiveness.  He wanted to tell them just how sorry he was—that he should have done more to stop the Reapers, that he had been too slow, that he carried the responsibility of every death within him.

A pulse of electricity felt like it was jittering at his jaw.  He turned away with a ragged gasp and moved away from the holo-screen.  No one noticed his departure.

He found a bench close by, over where the dais to where visitors to the Citadel Council would once stand to make their appeasements.  He took a moment to peer over the side of the guardrail—the glass ceiling to the sealed garden below had been replaced a long while back.  He remembered it shattering when Saren’s body had tumbled from the platform above after he had shot himself in the head to rid himself of the influence of the Reapers.  Large and jagged shards had sliced the ex-Spectre’s body to ribbons, but the Reapers had been able to exert control of the corpse via the implants in the turian.  A prolonged battle had erupted in that tiny little environment, from which Shepard, Garrus, and Tali had sustained multiple wounds from claws, burns, and in Tali’s case, she had even suffered a spate of broken ribs.  He still remembered how his brow had itched, pinpricked from shrapnel as the skeletal remnants of what used to be Saren fired a pulse weapon in his direction, superheating the floor wherever the beams touched, causing them to violently explode.

Settling on the bench, Shepard continued to watch the crowds.  In his full armor, he could be anonymous here.  He could be safe.  It was simply the latest in a long line of these moments where he could take comfort in the fact that these people were free to live their lives however they pleased, thanks to what he had done.  And even if they never knew that Commander Shepard was sitting in their midst, just plaintively observing them, then that was just as well.

A flash of memory sifted into his consciousness like a malfunctioning deck.  The feeling of a dim warmth on his face.  A sunset.  The smell of waves.  A voice.  “I look at all this… this picture of hope and peace.  And all I see is everyone I’ve lost.”

“Goddammit,” he whispered, hanging his head, clawed fingers clutching at the back of his helmet as though he was about to rip off the covering.  “What am I doing wrong?  What is it that I’m not seeing?”

The answers, almost expectedly, did not arrive, and Ceraph soon came to join him after she had her fill of the exhibits.  The turian was somber, her right hand clutched upon her left wrist as she sat down next to him.  They looked at each other for a bit, understanding the solemn nature of the room they were in.

“It was rather humbling, being here,” he told her.  “It was a good suggestion.”

Ceraph lidded her eyes in a soft smile.  “It’s just been a long time coming that I was due to visit this place,” she said after a halting second.

Shepard detected something that the turian wasn’t saying.  “You lost someone.  During the war.”

The flexing of the mandibles on the sides of Ceraph’s head indicated that he had touched a nerve.

Slowly, Ceraph nodded.

The man had to fight to not curse out loud.  Of course, why had he not seen it before?  Rather, why did he not have the wherewithal to even find out more about the person who had saved him?

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Don’t,” Ceraph rasped, her voice sounding like it was emitting from the end of a long metal pipe.  “It was not your fault for what happened.”

“Is it all right if I ask you about it?”

The turian looked out into space for a long moment before she glanced at Shepard.  Her eyes lidded in the approximation of a sad, little smile and she shook her head.  “I don’t think so.”

“Then you’ll never hear it from me again,” Shepard promised.  Now a bit eager to change the subject, he gazed around the site of the memorial for a bit, just absorbing the sight of the shuffling men and women as they moved from exhibit to exhibit.  Many were embracing one another.  Some suited veterans were even quietly sobbing in the corner.  The thrum in Shepard’s throat had returned and his heartbeat seemed to double.

The turian noted Shepard’s anxiety.  “There isn’t a shortage of places like this across the galaxy.  Monuments.  Memorials.  People have needed them.  Badly.  I guess… we needed some way to memorialize what we had and what we were left with.”

“I’m just glad you didn’t want to drag me to the museum devoted to myself,” he said, trying a bit of levity.  When Ceraph shot him a mirthful look, he just shrugged.  “Yeah, I saw they had installed that recently.  The maps of the Citadel really made it prominent.”

He had to concede that it was probably a matter of time before an entire exhibit, let alone a building, would be created in order to memorialize him.  Just him.  Shepard found the general idea to be ludicrous, for he was not convinced that the entirety of his life had the capacity to fill even a novel, but he had to reason that he was a very poor judge of his own worth when he knew that people looked at him in a glowing light.  To all of them, he was different.  A paragon of his own kind.  And someone like that, a hero, deserved to be honored across multiple worlds so that the galaxy would repeat his name forevermore, so everyone else would proclaim.  His name would be acid-carved into the hardest stone, never to erode, and take on a variety of meaning in so many languages.

But thinking of how his image had been lofted so high was starting to create a feeling of nausea and Shepard had to hang his head again so that he could stare at the polished metal tiles underfoot. 

He wondered, though, if he had really accomplished everything he had set out to do.  Based on the menagerie of political ads he had seen on the Citadel already, the incendiary language laced within the advertising, it seemed as if things had gone back to the status quo.  Backtracked, even.  There was still an undercurrent of fear that seemed to simmer in this galaxy.  A fear of the balance of power being upended by the wrong people.  Union Eterna—just a clone of the Council with influence more easily able to be bought by the outside billionaires.  Firmament Omina—running on distraction and fearmongering to stealthily push forward their goals of isolationism.  This was what he had been fighting for?  All he had ushered in had been a decade of political squabbling and financial gridlock.  Progress had been stalled, people had been hurt from inaction, and someone behind the scenes was pulling at the strings.

Somebody knew what the endgame was.  And Shepard swore to himself that, before long, he would know it, too.

He heard Ceraph ask him something, but he wasn’t listening.  “What was that?” he said as he raised his head, trying desperately to ignore the dark pulses that were furrowing in his mind.

“I guess I was just wondering… what’s next?”

This entire time, Shepard had been trying to answer that very question.  He gave a limp shrug to the turian as he folded his hands together, eyes distant towards a nonexistent horizon.

He tried playing back the events of the assassination as best as he could.  His mind whirled as he parsed through the gossamer strands of memory, fighting hard against the natural neural decay.  But he knew that the firefight that had happened tonight had been the start of something big.  It had been a decisive attack, as precise as a scalpel.  This was not the work of terrorists—if it had been, there would have been far more collateral damage than just the people who had been killed.  They would have taken hostages, made demands.  But there had been no attempt to gain leverage—their only goal that Shepard could plainly see of the unknown assailants was to simply act as a search and destroy squad.

The list of people who had been eliminated by that squad was not insignificant.  Aria.  Koris.  Xen.  But was there anything that connected them all?  It seemed that the cloaked troopers had sought them out, deliberately.  Was it what they represented?  Aria and the quarian admirals held obvious value, being the latest ambassadors that were uniting their respective governments with that of Union Eterna.  The others, the CEOs, were decisively less important, but there had to have been a reason why they had been targeted alongside the other VIPs.  And the rest of the dead were donors for Firmament Omina, so an alternative explanation was that someone had held a grudge against a singular political party, but he could not come to that conclusion definitively, considering the wide array of people that had been killed from across the political spectrum.

“I just need to see the connections…” he murmured to himself.  Louder, so that Ceraph and only Ceraph could hear: “The ones on the Soledad Starliner.  The ones who were shot.  Why do you think they were singled out amidst the entire ship?”

The turian looked lost for a minute, scrambling along pathways that she never had a chance to use until now.  Then, she suddenly brightened.  “The media,” she said.  “They’ve got to be relaying this on all networks right about now.”

To prove that point, she engaged her omni-tool and angled it so that Shepard could see.  Scrolling down the endless feed, he was easily able to see the various headlines of variations on the word “massacre” understandably linked to the signing ceremony aboard the cruise liner.

“They’ve got to be reporting the death count.  You know how it goes,” Ceraph continued.  “Count is… somewhere around twenty-five, now.”

“And how many were on board?”

“Well above two hundred, according to this extranet page.”

Shepard absorbed this sagely.

“Have they singled out any persons of interest as being KIA?  Other than what we already know?”

Ceraph gave a grave nod.  “I’ve got… the quarian admirals, Koris and Xen.  And… Aria, but we already knew that.  It looks like the newscasters, Price and McMurphy, were also among the slain.  And Vanden, too.  You know, that buffoon we met early on?”

“Yeah,” Shepard said.  “I remember him.”  It was hard not to forget that type of person, one who was making an unmistakable ass of themselves but not having the self-reflection to even notice.

“The other two we met,” Ceraph added as she kept on scrolling through her feeds, “Koenig and Haas-Mase.  You know, the PMC guy and the financier?”

“Yeah, we saw them back in the ballroom after the whole thing was over.”

“Well, they were all ready for the cameras, apparently.”

Some of the extranet pages had embedded media files in them.  Ceraph queued one of them up to start playing, with the audio on silent.  A visibly sweating Hamilton Haas-Mase—the chyrons taking great pains to demonstrate his link to SolBanc—was speaking off-center while a camera drone focused on his face at an angle.  The subtitles in the file indicated that he was attempting to describe the dramatic nature of the scene in the ballroom, how he had bravely attempted to thwart off the attackers, to no avail as he was quickly overwhelmed, quite conveniently leaving out the truth that he had been more likely cowering somewhere in the ballroom while the shooting was taking place.

It was Shepard could do to stop rolling his eyes and Ceraph quickly shut the video off after that.  “I know, it’s hard to take,” she said.

“It figures,” Shepard grumbled.  “We just had to lose some good people today and these guys still have breath to draw in their lungs.”

He tapped his fingers on his armored kneepads.  Thinking for just a moment.

Holding out a finger as if he might have stumbled upon a thread, Shepard stilled himself.  “But we did think at first that all the killings were targeted, yes?”

“That’s right,” Ceraph bobbed her head.  “You think you might have something?”

“Maybe.  It’s just something that I’m considering.  We already know the backgrounds of Aria, Koris, and Xen.  To a point, at least, that we know which sides they were firmly on.  Rannoch, Omega, that sort of thing.  I guess the next question to follow up on is: which sides were the others on—the ones who had been assassinated?  McMurphy, Price, and Vanden.”

Ceraph switched extranet pages, trying to keep up.  “What should I be looking for?”

“Donation records.  Public statements.  Link it to any keywords if you can.  Maybe anything related to either ‘Rannoch’ or ‘Omega.’”

Shepard was performing his own search simultaneously, using whatever filters were at his disposal to sift through the detritus of useless extranet links.

“I’ve got a bunch of garbage here,” Ceraph squinted at her screen after a minute.  “So, all of the articles related to McMurphy and Price just link back to a bunch of their broadcasts.  The metadata indicates that the slant to their statements indicates a strong bias against Union Eterna’s acceptance of Omega and Rannoch into their ranks.”

A hand at his armored chin, Shepard tried to parse that out.  “They publicly thrash this expansion, yet somehow they got an invite to the ceremony?”

“This is what I mean,” Ceraph shoved her omni-tool in Shepard’s face again.  “This just makes no sense!  They have all of these clips where they bash this whole unification effort by Union Eterna, right?”

“Right…”

“But, look at this!”  She switched the view to another webpage, which depicted an un-editable document that had an official-looking seal emblazoned upon the cover page.  “This is Price’s list of taxable donations for the last year.  Of course, it’s crazy that these things are public, but if—”

“Just tell me what I should be looking at,” Shepard put his own arm down, gazing at Ceraph’s tool in interest.

With a flick of a finger, Ceraph scrolled down the document until she reached the section marked “Donations.”

“This is where they report their deductions.  I don’t think I would have caught this if I hadn’t been using the keyword search but, if you look here…”

Shepard followed the turian’s finger to where she was indicating on the screen.  Past a few generic looking institutions in which a dozen or so thousand credits had been deposited for the fiscal year, Shepard saw that one of the line items on the invoice had been directed to an entity called the “OR Unification Effort.”

“I’ve never heard of this OR Unification Effort,” he said.  He hadn’t heard of the other items on the document, but that was beside the point.

“Neither have I,” Ceraph said.  “But I had been running a simultaneous search with the keywords you mentioned, remember?  And ‘Rannoch’ and ‘Omega’ were hits on the home page of the OR Unification Effort extranet page.”

“Huh,” Shepard ruefully chuckled.  “OR.  Omega/Rannoch.  Not very imaginative.”

Examining the page more closely, Shepard was only growing more and more concerned.  The amounts that had been donated to the OR Unification Effort were in the hundreds of thousands of credits, far greater than anything else that had been supplied on the document.  Obviously, Price had a vested interest in seeing that ceremony with Union Eterna went off without a hitch and he was willing to bet that he would see similar line items on McMurphy’s and Vanden’s balance sheets as well.

“Castigate them publicly, yet support them privately,” Ceraph rasped.  “Why?”

The commander had an idea. “Say you get a tip on a major development that a company is due to announce.  How else can you maximize your investment?  Talk it down to everyone you know while you continue to pour money into the company.  And with the influence these guys wielded, reaching millions of people a day, they were able to keep the anticipated value of the investment down until it was time to reap the dividends.  Get a massive payout once their instruments vest.”

“Calculated charity, then.”

“If they get a tax deduction on their ‘donation,’ then that just compounds the benefits that they received.”

“You think that someone took notice of this dichotomy?  Found out that the newscasters were playing both sides and decided upon retribution?”

It was a good theory.  Shepard knew that one of the unsaid rules for business was that it was fine to fuck with the people in lower income brackets, but if you fucked with the ones who actually held the money, then your days were pretty much numbered.  Maybe these guys—Price, McMurphy, and Vanden—had bitten off more than they could chew and someone had sent over a kill squad to send a message to anyone else looking to try and underhand them.

The one burning question he had now, but could not answer, was that if this shadowy force was the same one that had planned his own imprisonment all that time ago?

He gestured at Ceraph’s screen again.  “Do another search.  I want to see something.”

“Keyword change?”

“Try anything with ‘Koenig’, or ‘Haas-Mase.’”

His younger cohort gave him a look.  For why would they run a search on the two people they knew had not been offed in the firefight back on the ship?  But, dutifully, she plugged the names into the search that she had programmed.

Two seconds later, the extranet was giving her hits on donation documents in their names.

Pulling them up, a quick search easily highlighted the OR Unification Effort in their donation forms.

“They were also plugging money into the institution,” Ceraph noted.

Shepard resisted the urge to pound the bench in satisfaction.  “That’s our link.  They were being targeted too.”

“What, anyone who donated money to ORUE?”

“Someone has a particular interest in seeing that the relationship between Rannoch, Omega, and Union Eterna breaks down.  Enough that they were willing to kill the individuals involved in the talks, including some of the wealthiest and most powerful donors.  Which means that Erich Koenig and Hamilton Haas-Mase’s investment in the entire development, despite their statements to the contrary, has put them on someone’s kill list.  I need to know everything they know about ORUE, the individuals they’ve interacted with, and anything else that I can’t immediately think of.”

Ceraph already saw where Shepard was going with this.  “Interrogation?”

Carefully, Shepard affixed the turian with his cold, faceless stare.  Maybe she understood the depths he was willing to sink in order to get closer to the truth and was denying that he had the capacity to go to such a level.  Or perhaps she was still blinded by what the media had told her about him, that he was an infallible icon that was capable of no wrongdoing.

With a crackling sound of armor over a bodysuit, Shepard stood from the bench and gently smoothed out the arms of his coat.  “Whatever will happen all depends on their cooperation.  Koenig and Haas-Mase may just be oblivious pawns in some grand scheme that is being played upon this galaxy.  Or they may very well have an inkling as to what just happened today and why.”

He brought up his omni-tool again and ran another query search.

“And… how convenient.”

“What?” Ceraph asked, also getting to her feet.

“Koenig’s scheduled to make an appearance at a conference for the defense industry in just a couple of days here on the Citadel.  No doubt to make some sort of victory lap after the signing ceremony.  Obviously, things didn’t go as planned today, but the site hasn’t indicated that his appearance has been canceled.”

“So, the plan is that you, what, go to this conference in a couple of days, confront him, that sort of thing?”

“I’m a flexible person,” Shepard said as he closed his omni-tool, beginning to head down the stairs back towards the elevator bay.  “I can improvise when needed.”  He did not know exactly what he was going to say to Koenig when he was face-to-face with him, but he had a feeling that the words would come to him in the moment.

“I don’t suppose you have an idea of how you’re going to get into that conference?” Ceraph trotted up alongside him, clutching at an arm nervously.  “For something like that, you’re going to need an invitation, unless you’re planning on sneaking inside?”

Shepard just shook his head.  “There’s always a more elegant option at our disposal, Ceraph.  For instance, you wanted to know my plan?  It’s simple.  I’m just going to walk through the front door.”

The trip back to the hotel was all a blur for Tali.  After spending what felt like half the day in customs, answering questions from agent after agent, repeatedly having to offer her contact information for future interview sessions, her brain was fried.  Upon exiting from the building, Raan already had transport waiting, which was provided by her ship’s security force.  Raan had explained that their personal squads would be in close proximity to them after the assassination attempt today, which made a certain amount of sense, but Tali could not help but privately bemoan the lack of personal freedom.

The hotel, an OmniWest, was not as luxurious as the InterContinental, but it was still grandiose compared to quarian stylings.  Polished tile floors and cylindrical overhead chandeliers that reminded Tali of massive databanks in the lobby.  The selfsame army of valets and concierge in their impeccable suits.  The details were only tangible for a split-second, however, as Raan quickly whisked Tali into the closest elevator, leading her to their room many stories above.

“Security has already swept this level,” Raan said upon guiding Tali into the darkened area.  “Personnel will be stationed at every other room, and we’ve already arranged for aliases to disguise our location.”  The lights flickered on, illuminating a king-size bed that faced a thick dresser, upon which a holo-screen was already blaring the news of the attack.  Raan shut the screen off.

Nearly listless, Tali trudged over to the edge of the bed and sat upon it.  Raan made a quick flick of the fingers to the bodyguards that had been trailing them and they exited, leaving the two admirals alone.  Not wanting to let old habits die hard, Raan performed a cursory check of the room, analyzing every nook and cranny, just in case someone was perching behind the curtains, lying in wait.  Ordinarily, Tali would have called this behavior from Raan paranoid, but now, it simply seemed prudent.

“We…” Tali finally breathed once Raan had finished checking the bathroom, “…we need to get a statement out to the media.  Within the hour, if possible.”

“Not going to happen,” Raan shook her head, a move done with a practiced grace it was as if she were a resolute judge that delivered her damning sentence with an inappropriate kindness.  “I know you want to say something to affirm our stance, Tali, but the situation has changed.  Things may be out of our control, now.”

“No, no,” the young admiral raised her hands as if she was about to cover her ears, “there’s still time.  We can fix this.  Start course correcting.  We just need to reaffirm our support to our alliance and petition for a universal committee to be formed—”

Raan knelt down by the bed, looking up at Tali, much like she used to do when Tali had been a kid on the flotilla, regaling the child with some of her war stories.

“Tali.  Xen and Koris are dead.  Not to mention some very wealthy individuals that had donated to our cause, either directly or indirectly.  There’s nothing to take from this other than it was a purposeful attack on the Rannochian Federation and the Omega Collective.  The other quarian captains have heard the news and from what I’m hearing, they all want blood—”

“The captains know?” Tali’s head snapped up, eyes wide, finding it hard to believe that Rannoch had already been updated.  “So soon?”

“Yes, because I told them.”

“You told—” Tali spluttered, her anger rising to a level so quickly it was impossible for her mouth to catch up.  She was the admiral of the Heavy Fleet, damn it!  For Raan to go over her head, as though she still thought her underqualified, almost drove her into a fury until the elder woman raised an allaying hand.

“They needed to know the truth, Tali.  And they needed to know as soon as possible that nearly half of the Admiralty was murdered during the Union Eterna signing ceremony.  Did you think that was something that could be covered up so easily?”

Tali felt her cheeks grow hot with indignation.  “N-No… I just thought that we needed to present a unified front to the people first.  Govern how this information spreads.  We can’t afford to let them see that this attack fractured us.  If we get in front of the cameras, we can control the situation and stifle any potential panic—”

“Control?” Raan tilted her head.  “Tali, it’s a little late for that.”

“The hell it is!  You and I just need to align on the message we’ll put forward and—”

“The captains are calling for an immediate convening of the Conclave,” Raan interrupted coldly.

Falling silent, Tali felt a hollow mass start to form in her brain.  Back on the Migrant Fleet, the Conclave was comprised of ship captains that had been elected by their peers into serving a higher office to adjudicate what had remained of their people.  Tali had only known the Conclave to call for emergency meetings for one topic only: when a quarian was at risk of being exiled.  Today, instead of ship captains, elected leaders of Rannoch’s continents made up the body of the legislative branch, and in an effort to not repeat the mistakes of the past, the Conclave tended to perform their administrative duties at a very sluggish (and decidedly not-reactionary) rate.

For the Conclave to begin an immediate gathering, Tali knew that a judgment was expected within a matter of days.  But judgment… for what, exactly?

“The… the Conclave?” Tali uttered, her hands turned upwards as if she were trying to keep sand in her palms from slipping through her fingers.  “But… the Admiralty… with Koris and Xen dead…”

“Admiral Tyder back home will be coordinating the convention and will be judging in our absence,” Raan said, referring to the fifth Admiralty member who had deigned to stay on Rannoch, having no interest in schmoozing and pontificating in such a formal setting.

Tali leapt to her feet with a fluidity that startled Raan.  The younger woman levelled a finger and leaned towards her peer, her elder, her mentor.  “We are still alive!  Tyder doesn’t have the authority to make any acts in our stead.  This is a perversion of the interconnected relationship between the Admiralty and the Conclave.”

“And you’d be right,” Raan responded coolly.  “On most occasions.”

“On most occasions.  What are you saying?”

“Tali.  Let’s not try to pretend that we aren’t aware of what can or cannot happen.  There have been times—and you lived through one of them—in which the Admiralty is capable of overriding the Conclave, either if emergency powers from the Conclave are provided, or—”

“Or if the Admiralty were to declare an act of war,” was Tali’s hollow realization. ^[3]

“Precisely.”

The youngest member of the Admiralty suddenly felt tired.  The day’s events were starting to catch up on her and a gravitational tug of fatigue started to exert its force on the back of her eyeballs.

Was what Raan suggesting even possible?  During the war, the Admiralty had seen fit to render any judgment from the Conclave to be null in the face of their summary invasion of Rannoch, their desperate attempt to retake it from the geth before the rest of their time could run out.  In doing so, a large margin of the population had soured against the admirals, mostly from the civilians under Koris’s purview, believing that the admirals had gone too far and had overstepped their bounds, in the process devaluing the concept of their government.

Her arm slowly dropped back to her side.  “You think we’re on the verge of declaring war.”

Raan’s eyes shifted, as if she did not want to flaunt the truth so openly.  She merely opted for a simple nod.

Tali surged in a defiant series of breath, trying to see all the angles.  “Raan… you can’t let them… we don’t even know who it is we’d be declaring war with.”

“In our present circumstance,” Raan said evenly, “the ‘who’ is immaterial.  The attack against the Admiralty is cause enough for us to consider increasing our combat readiness.  And we know that Omega will soon join in our stead, what with Aria T’Loak’s death and all.  We have a common cause, for we have both suffered an injustice.”

“I don’t understand.  You’re insinuating that we wage war against… no one?”

“Some wars are fought with bullets.  This one will be fought with optics.  Could you imagine seeing the headlines for yourself, Tali?  The Rannochian Federation and Omega Collective both have their representative heads murdered during the ceremony in which they were inducted into Union Eterna?  Where do you think the blame will be placed for such a debacle?”

Falling silent, Tali dared not speak for the longest time, fearful that her next words would somehow manifest the reality that was quickly becoming her nightmare.

Finally, she closed her eyes and raised a hand to her visor.  “Union Eterna,” she sighed.  “They will bear the brunt of the criticism for allowing the assassination to happen.”

“We’re on the cusp of amassing the largest amount of public sympathy we have ever faced,” Raan was now whispering, almost as if she was eager.  “Alliances from the former Council worlds will be split on how to altruistically project their magnanimity towards our people.  And I’ve already received initial reports that the amount of funding from grassroots organizations will make up a substantial portion from the donors that were killed today, though I’m still going to have to meet with our largest supporters while we’re on the Citadel and shore up additional financial support to take advantage of the situation.  The momentum is on our side, for once.  You were right about us projecting a united force, Tali, but not for the reason you were expecting.”

Everything was rushing past Tali’s mind at a hundred miles an hour and she was just struggling to catch up, only able to parse out scant details.  But through the growing myopia, that gray haze that threatened to choke her, she was able to claw her way ahead of the oncoming fugue.

She did not ask Raan what the expected endgame was going to be, for the other admiral had indirectly revealed it to her.  If what Raan was saying had actual merit, then the Conclave’s convening would not only be deciding the direction that would dictate quarian politics for the next several decades, but it would be tearing Union Eterna apart as collateral damage, with those who had sympathy for the quarians looking to lash out, to try and find someone to blame.

There would be a power vacuum with the infighting, Tali realized.  So if the quarians were not going to actual war with anyone, then it was to give everyone else the appearance of them going to war.  And in the chaos that would be borne of this frightening development, Raan could see an opportunity at play, here.

A chance for the Rannochian Federation to get an even larger foothold within Union Eterna itself.

Tali’s legs wobbled, but only once.  Some reserve well of strength had finally been tapped, saved for the direst of moments.

“Is this the Conclave’s direction?” she dryly asked.  “Or is it yours, Raan?”

The elder admiral gave a scoff, as if she could not believe she had been asked such a question.  “You know that I need the Admiralty to remain on good terms with the Conclave.  If this is direction that they want to go with—and trust me, that is the way this is looking like it’s turning out—then I’m not going to be in a position to snarl this up in legal gridlock.”

Tali’s response was automatic, ripped straight from the heart.

“And what if I will?”

Raan did a double-take.  The gleam of silver behind her smoked visor narrowed into tight strips.  “Be very careful about what you say next, Tali.  I don’t want you to make any judgments too rashly.  I can protect you only so far.”

The opening was there, and it was quite tempting for Tali to snipe back with reminding Raan of her decision to vote for the war to retake Rannoch, a decision which had been too costly for its own good, but she bit her tongue.  Like it or not, she was on the same side as Raan and the future of her people was not worth jeopardizing her relationship with the other woman.  Not again.

“I don’t need to put anything through a committee,” Tali clarified, but a hard look now infiltrated the space behind her mask.  “Because I don’t need to sit in some board room to bring about change.”

Raan got what Tali was saying almost immediately.  “You’re saying you want to take direct action against the assassins?  You did bring up the point that we have no idea who’s conspiring against us.”

“Well, we haven’t yet begun to try on that part, have we?”

There was nothing else for Raan to do except make a conciliatory motion.

“All I’m asking for is time,” Tali pressed, the ice in her mind throbbing and starting to melt.  Her spine ached with a hidden warmth and filtered air surged down her throat.  “Give me a few weeks at the most.  That’s enough for me to make some progress on finding these people, whoever they are.  And if that time period elapses and I have nothing of substance, I won’t put up any resistance, Raan.  I’ll go with whatever the Conclave deems necessary.  For the good of our people.”

Slowly turning her body ninety degrees away from Tali, Raan crossed her arms and considered her cohort’s proposal thoughtfully.  In the quietus, the air conditional slowly flicked on, filling the air with a gentle white noise.

“Two weeks,” Raan said as she looked back over at Tali.  “I can’t guarantee any more time than that.”

Tali’s jaw clenched in victory but she managed to keep her emotions in check.  “Full support?”

“Provisional, provided we see results.”

“Thank you, Raan.”

“Don’t thank me just yet,” Raan said as she turned to leave the hotel room.  “You may still need to hold up your end of the bargain.”

Her brow furrowing in annoyance, Tali said, “I wouldn’t have offered this compromise if I didn’t think I could follow through with it.”

The door hissed open and Tali could see the shadows of the bodyguards on the opposite end of the hallway.  Raan stood in the middle of the threshold, a dark silhouette against the luminated corridor.

“I know, Tali.  But you and I have both learned that some battles can only be fought for so long.”

The Presidium sky was a 0.8 nanometer length armature that spanned the entire circumference of the Citadel’s connecting ring where the five separate arms were joined to form the singular superstructure.  There was no day/night cycle—a perpetually sunny day, patched with clouds, was continuously projected amidst the idyllic landscape of the stepped white terraces that lined the crooked series of creeks and lakes that split the gravitational “ground” of the station right down the middle.  Night was only projected when the station was either in the middle of an emergency or if it had suffered a massive power surge, though the scenarios were not mutually exclusive.

Ceraph struggled to take this new section of the Citadel in.  It was her first time coming to the Presidium, not that she would have had a reason to do so previously.  This was where the Citadel’s most valuable real estate was located.  A lot of money flowed through this part of the station.  The embassies for the various races were clustered in a specific neighborhood nearby, as were the headquarters for the galaxy’s most valuable companies.  Luxury condominiums lined the highest levels of the canyons of white metal.  Clusters of vegetation and vines spilled from planters over the edges of the irregular structures like old growths.

Shepard led the way as they headed across one of the many bridges that spanned the bluestreamed gap of the Presidium.  Across the way, misty fountains wisped gentle cones of translucent white.

“It’s all so… perfect,” she was unable to keep from marveling.

“Yeah,” Shepard said.  “I never liked it.”

“Was it like this at all when you were here last?”

Shepard waited a beat.  “Spotless.  Down to the last microbe.”

There were only two reactions that people had whenever they came to the Presidium: awe over its first-class extravagance and wealth, or outright apprehension and unease over such naked displays of excess in contrast to the rest of the galaxy.

Some people had pegged the Presidium for what it really was right off the bat.  A masquerade.  A place for people to delude themselves into thinking that they had suddenly stepped into the center of the universe, without giving any consideration as to what was beyond the confines of the station.  Shepard recalled that the Normandy crew had seen through the veneer right off the bat, going as far as to openly question why everything and everyone here had decided to pretend that their lives were normal in a decidedly abnormal time.  Everyone on the station had seemed that they were willing to blindfold themselves to any mention of the war, preferring to isolate themselves in their little bubbles of ignorance, carrying the dim hope that the war would not infiltrate their own precious world, upending any semblance of normalcy in the process.

Shepard had been a witness to this self-imposed deception back then, a silent judge from afar.  Everyone had been so thoroughly shielded from the truth of the Reapers he had uncovered, though, that it did not seem fair to create a panic by telling everyone about the inevitable threat heading their way.  One more mistake to add to the pile, he thought grimly.  Had he not given a damn so long ago and had chosen to broadcast everything he knew about the Reapers to the entire populace of the Citadel, there may have been a chance he could have saved more people.

He shook his head, his thoughts jumbling from his mind like they were suddenly thrust through a filter.  Indicating a rather threadbare storefront devoid of signage, he said to Ceraph, “I’m trusting that he’ll still be here, where I last saw him.”

Inside was a room that was just as austere as the entryway.  There was a desk and chair that had been situated at the end of the pill-shaped room, but in the corner, someone had the sense to throw in a splash of color in the form of a potted plant.  Artificial, of course.

A squat volus occupied the desk, typing at a haptic keyboard with a clumsy three-fingered hand.  The volus looked up as Shepard and Ceraph approached.

The rotund aliens were strange, even by galactic standards.  Like the quarians, they were encased in isolating suits of their own, but theirs had to be pressurized to support their ammonia-based biochemistry and gravitational environment.  They were also quite diminutive, with the tallest of specimens barely reaching Shepard’s chest height.

“Good evening, Earth-clan,” the volus said.  “Assuming that you’ve come here purposefully, is there something that I’m able to assist you with?”

The volus’s words were soft and calm, but it would irregularly interrupt its own sentence to take in a sucking breath, like it had suffered a punctured lung.  All volus had the same speech affliction—the atmospheric mix they ingested was a far diluted concentrate than they were used to breathing on their homeworld of Irune, thus they had to breathe at a more rapid clip than a human, and far deeper.

Shepard took the lone seat without being offered.  Ceraph stood awkwardly behind him.

“Barla Von,” he said in an announcing tone.  “You come recommended.”

That was not exactly the truth, for Shepard had actually had previous correspondences with the volus before.  Barla Von’s day job was to act as a financial adviser to the rich and famous—most notably, he was quite skilled at distributing large sums of money around in order to get his clients the biggest tax benefit, or to help them garner no taxes whatsoever.  Or, if a particular client wished to keep the details of his transactions or conflicts of interest private, he was adept at lending a helping hand to that as well.

He was also an agent for the Shadow Broker when Shepard had known him last.  It was an open secret among Citadel regulars, though Barla Von was merely an occasional supplier of information to the Broker.  The volus had confided in Shepard years ago about his theories as to the Broker’s identity, though little did he know that Shepard had deduced the creature behind the moniker a long while back, as well as who his replacement turned out to be.

The volus moved his hands away from the keyboard and gently placed them upon the rim of the desk.  “It appears that I have been caught at a disadvantage.  Curious.  I tend to know the names of those that pass through this station.  The ones that are worth knowing, at least.”

“And you won’t know mine,” Shepard said as he crossed a leg, smoothly transitioning into the role of an arrogant connoisseur.  “I heard you were an informant for the Shadow Broker.”

The volus sucked in what sounded like an agonized breath.  “The bluntness of your talk is familiar, Earth-clan.  But you are correct, in the past tense, that is.  I was an agent of the Shadow Broker, up until the network mysteriously went down shortly after the war ended.  Or did you not realize that such a resource had up and vanished without fanfare?”

Shepard frowned underneath his helmet.  He supposed that it made sense that Liara would not have wanted to act as the Shadow Broker for the rest of her life—with what many centuries she still had ahead of her.  Liara had made it clear to Shepard that she had taken the role primarily to act as a force for good.  All the information she had at her disposal could upend the very fabric of democracy, should she have chosen to disseminate it all in one massive leak.  But Liara had wisely known that such a resource of spies and deception would be an invaluable tool against the Reapers, and had used it to the fullest effect in the fight against them.  She had acted as the Broker, apparently for as long as she could stand.

He kept himself composed, though.  “Old habits die hard, Barla Von.  I wouldn’t think that a man of your reputation would let the loss of a resource like that prevent you from continuing to make a name of yourself.”

“Flattery will get you many places, Earth-clan.  But I still remain mystified by your unexpected arrival.  It is an enigma that I will be mulling over for quite some time, if you aren’t willing to be forthright with me.”

“I don’t need to be forthright,” Shepard responded, his body statuesque.  “Just direct.”

Volus’ expressions were harder to read than quarians’.  There were little to no tics that Shepard could detect that could give even an inkling of their mood at any given time.  The only area that he had a hope of deciphering was their body language.  Every species seemed to behave the same when under duress.  Sharp, agitated movements.  Fitful and restless.

Barla Von was eminently stoic.  The volus had clearly practiced an air of indifference in order to handle his clients.  That made him unreadable, giving him the advantage.

But there was a clear relaxing of the shoulders, which Shepard imagined that Barla Von wanted him to notice.  The volus raised a hand for a short moment.  A gesture of détente.  “Direct, I can do.  So, Earth-clan, tell me how I am able to help you today?”

The tete-a-tete was finally over.  Now they could get down to business.  “There’s a conference helmed by the galactic defense industry over the next couple of days on the Citadel.  I’m going to need an invitation to the event.”

“Interesting.  I’d ask why, but I wouldn’t be a mainstay in this business if I took a peek past the veneer of whatever my clients wished to erect between me and them.”

“The fee should not be an issue,” Shepard said, trying not to let his anxiety get the better of him.

He felt a nudge at his shoulder.  Ceraph knelt down to whisper at head-level.

“Pay with what?” she asked.  “You don’t have any money!”

She was right.  With him being officially declared dead, the main account in his name at his bank would have disseminated his funds to his next of kin (or anyone he had designated as a beneficiary) before closing it out.  And while Shepard did have a few accounts in private banks across the galaxy, the kind that only accepted an account number instead of a name, he did not want to risk withdrawing any funds, lest those accounts were being monitored.  For if Commander Shepard was supposed to be dead, then who would be withdrawing out of those accounts?

But Shepard disregarded the turian with a soft grunt.  A signal for her to be quiet and watch.

“Information or services that I may or may not be able to provide come at a premium,” Barla Von said, all business.

That was the opening that Shepard had been waiting for.  He lifted his arm, omni-tool engaged, and opened up a star chart projection.  It depicted a dusty brown world, swirls of storms colliding upon its face, in the Faryar System within the Hourglass Nebula.

Barla Von did not even need to read the legend at the bottom to identify the world.  “The planet Daratar,” he said as he leaned forward to get a better look at Shepard’s omni-tool.  “A resource rich world abandoned by the large firms due to its unpredictable seasonal storms.”

“I can send you coordinates to a specific spot on the planet,” Shepard withdrew his arm.  “You’ll find a cache there of credits and raw mineral deposits.  Whatever you find is yours to keep, in exchange for the invitation that I require.”

Shepard silently gave a sigh, suppressing a shiver.  The coordinates to the cache had been a gift from Aria, a token of her appreciation after he had run a few errands for her back on Omega a few months before the war had broken out in earnest.  Shepard had found the stash a long while back and had sold half of it to Cerberus to build up credits so that he could retrofit the Normandy with better onboard systems to fight the Collectors. 

Now, if no one had managed to locate the remainder of the horde after all this time, then he was in luck.  But if it turned out that someone had plundered what remained of the loot, then he was going to look rather foolish in front of the volus.

Barla Von seemed to absorb this information in stride.  “I still have some contacts that operate in the Horsehead Nebula.  If you’ll allow me a business day to verify the find, you’ll have your invite in the mail within an hour of my receiving the positive confirmation.”

“I’ll hold you to that, Barla Von,” Shepard said as he flicked the packet of information containing the cache’s coordinates over to the volus’s omni-tool.  “I don’t suppose I need to emphasize just how much of a hurry I’m in?”

“My reputation has been built on two pillars, Earth-clan: accuracy and promptness.  And if the veracity of your information holds up, you will be witnessing both for yourself in short order.”