Jeff Moreau
First Impressions

A flash of white and a burst of rapid fire. Jenkins' armor cam went to static.

On another haptic window, the gray-armored body hit the dirt. The view jerked right. Rock cover poked at its corner as slugs slammed the ground ahead. The fire ceased. The view darted around the rock. A mass effect field stopped the drone mid-flight, then two shots left a rain of burning scraps. The view turned to the other remaining marine, and the two emerged from cover into a still clearing, tinged red in Eden Prime's sunset.

Joker let out the breath he'd been holding, and he was sure other crewmen did, too. Losing the whole ground team in the first firefight wouldn't have boded well for the SSV Normandy's shakedown run.

"Hardsuit data received and verified," Ensign Hasan said. "Corporal Jenkins is dead."

First the transmission came: panicked marines overwhelmed by an unknown enemy, with some massive ship wreathed in red lightning looming in the clouds. And then the debriefing: a Prothean beacon awaited pickup, but of course big discoveries drew bigger complications like a magnet. And then drones swooped down and ripped through Richard Jenkins. All that took the crew from lively but suspicious chatter to silence punctuated only by status reports in tight voices.

"Grenado." Captain Anderson's voice carried an experienced officer's calm and confidence in droves. "Bring up a still of that drone from Alenko's armor cam. I need to know what we're up against."

After dropping the ground team, Joker had bothered to look over his shoulder a few times. Anderson roamed up and down the bridge between orders, checking on individual crew members. He didn't hand-pick an untested crew, but Joker supposed the gesture was welcome.

Funny how Anderson's presence went from confusing to reassuring—for most of the crew, anyways. Even if the Systems Alliance brass was expecting trouble, this mission had too much star power: the turian Spectre, the other N7.

"I checked Citadel databases," Ensign Grenado said from the sensor station behind him. "The drone roughly resembles geth designs from three hundred years ago."

Wonderful, Joker thought.

That other N7, from Lieutenant Kaidan Alenko's feed, was taking cover at the top of a slope while two flashlight-headed bipeds impaled a man on a huge spike. Commander Shepard took aim with his sniper rifle. The shot took one in the head. Distracted, the other went down to a third marine: Gunnery Chief Ashley Williams, whom Joker recognized from the transmission.

Footsteps from behind while Williams took point. "Thoughts, Flight Lieutenant?" Anderson asked.

Joker's eyes widened. "Wait, you want my opinion, sir?"

"I asked for it."

Yep, still sounds angry when he's talking to me. Joker looked back to the haptic windows, where Kaidan lobbed a tech grenade into a cluster of geth. Williams let loose with her rifle from the side of Kaidan's feed. Blue lightning and rapid fire shredded the enemy.

Joker shrugged. "Model officers?"

"I meant the mission, the state of the crew."

Common navy knowledge held that helmsmen had the bird's-eye view on the bridge. One of the few conventions Joker stuck to, and in fact he prided himself on it. Years of observing the able-bodied on Arcturus Station had amounted to sharp people-watching skills. "Well the weird levels definitely escalated quickly. I mean, we all knew something was up with this shakedown run, but I don't think any of us expected AI bogeymen."

"This isn't what anybody signed up for, I know. But there's a reason I picked the best in the Alliance."

Hey, that's a compliment. Even if it was an angry one. "Speaking of the best…"

The slightly grainy image of Commander Shepard prowled about the empty dig site like a hunter or an archaeologist. The red stripe on his arm turned in and out of view. Shepard said less than ten words to him on the way to Eden Prime, and all them carried a sharpness of someone who liked getting past the bullshit right to the point.

Joker gestured to the window and looked at Anderson with a quirked eyebrow. "Did you find him in a vid or something?"

Anderson gazed at the feeds. "He does have an impressive record."

For the first time, Joker looked at the view from Shepard's armor cam. Several shots of his pistol took down a space zombie, of all things, mid-charge.

"You can probably see more of it than I can, sir."

"You haven't looked at it?"

The Hero of Elysium and who knows what else. Personnel files—x commendations over y years of service, nth place in some class—almost never matched reality, even in Joker's own case. But he could see Shepard's cool ownership of a Star of Terra from his stance, from that handful of words.

"Don't need to. He kinda screams 'first in everything.' Hence the question."

But then the geth ship from the transmission, gargantuan in size and monstrous in shape, rose into the clouds. Sensors picked it up as it raced away from Eden Prime at overwhelming speeds. Joker looked back at Shepard's feed. Well, better fight one impossibility with another, right?

The beacon explosion had thrown Shepard far and left him a limp heap on the floor—not unlike the last visual of Jenkins or Nihlus. The IES heat sink dump kept Joker from going down to the crew deck to confirm, so in the meantime he heard only scuttlebutt from more mobile crew members.

The first thing he learned about scuttlebutt? Good for laughs, but not much else.

He just about added Commander Shepard to the fatality count when Ashley Williams came up to correct him. "Huh," Joker said after she finished. "And he's actually fine?"

"Doctor Chakwas says so." Williams stole glances around the bridge in true FNG fashion, but Joker thought her a decent addition to the crew. The last marine of the Eden Prime garrison had outlived not only Jenkins, but also Nihlus. "Shepard said he felt like 'the morning after shore leave.'"

"So either he was better off than we thought or his shore leaves are completely crazy." Joker wasn't sure which was worse: an icy XO or an icy XO with a secret wild side. He didn't need the mental image of Shepard dancing on a table.

Another voice chimed in. "I'll leave that to your imagination."

Joker blinked. All the beeps, hums, and chatter of the command deck shouldn't have drowned out footsteps, especially when they were right behind him. Yet somehow he missed Commander Shepard's approach. He shook the surprise off and grinned. "Imaginations are dangerous, sir. You start with vague rumors about crazy shore leaves…"

Shepard folded his arms across his chest. A long scar ran down one of them, elbow to wrist, while another poked from a corner of a blue eye into his buzz-cut black hair. "And you end with a story about me pretending to be on shore leave so I could infiltrate a terrorist cell and take out its leader."

"Wow. Where'd that one come from?"

"I heard it from an old CO. Sometimes people think I'm a spy, not a marine." Shepard stepped forward, just behind Joker's chair. "The captain sent me to check in on you. How far are we from the Citadel?"

Joker turned around and stared at the streaky blue mess beyond the forward viewport. "Just about to drop out of FTL, sir. Then it's one relay jump and we're there. You can stick around if you want, play tourist at the bright center of galactic civilization."

"Sounds like you know the place," Williams said.

"I've been there a few times. The fun places, not the fancy ones."

Shepard shrugged. "'Fun' and 'fancy' aren't mutually exclusive."

Somehow crazy shore leaves are sounding more and more likely. And so was a "yes" answer to his vid question.

Joker decelerated the Normandy to sublight speeds, rushing towards the shining core of the mass relay. A routine jump brought them from the speckled blackness of space to the purple-white misty shroud of the Serpent Nebula—and with it the Citadel and all its… glory, if one was into the sightseeing. Williams certainly was. More footsteps and more voices as Alenko and Anderson entered. Talk ensued of the sheer size of the station, of the Destiny Ascension that guarded it. Joker chipped in a few words, more focused on getting docking clearance.

He wasn't one to be awed, but he did appreciate the Citadel's scale—its sheer size, and all the species thrown together on its ring and arms. Aboard the star of the human fleet with two N7 legends, maybe the best pilot in the Alliance wasn't so out-of-place.