The Traverse, 2178
First Lieutenant Shay Shepard
XO A Coy, 1/23 Btn, 103rd MARDIV (RAIDERS)
Shepard is quiet, sharp-edged when Major Kyle gathers his officers and senior NCOs. The operations chief outlines their company's role in the coming battle. A regiment of the 103rd Marine Division and the entire 67th Marine Division will be boots on the ground after the Navy has prepared the way with cruiser fire and air strikes; the normal operating procedure is to bomb pirates and slavers to space dust wherever the Navy can, but the batarians on Torfan have dug in deep. The bombs won't reach them. The Marines will have to dig them out.
And there's more to this. This is retribution and they all know it. An accounting for atrocities left unpunished.
"What do you think, X?" Kyle asks Shepard.
He smiles like a knife. "I think we're going to kick some blink arse, sir. Always Forward."
"Get ready to drop."
Rage beats within him like a drum, a wound left behind eight years ago.
Vengeance, whispers his heart.
Duty, chides his head.
They jump. The wind rushes past his ears like a howl inside his helmet, only his breathing for company. The moon of Torfan is grey and rocky and cratered. He bangs his knee when he lands.
Then there is the chatter of gunfire. A machinegun. Then another. A scream, and then another, as Marines begin to get hit. A lieutenant is struck three times in the chest and Shepard helps drag him to cover. Blood covers his hands.
"You're gonna be okay," Shepard tells him as he presses medigel onto his wounds. The lieutenant dies anyway, and Shepard climbs back to his feet and gets out his rifle.
"That was my roommate, you fuckers!" He shouts at the machinegunners. The rage seethes and boils over and he lets it wash over him.
Alpha Company fights their way into a death trap of warren-like corridors with gunfire and grenades, choked with batarians and monofilament wires and traps. They push forward, Always Forward, but more than one platoon loses a pointman or three, metal tearing through ceramic and flesh.
Kyle is shot. Two Marines carry his twitching form from the tunnels and up to the battalion's overwhelmed casualty collection point.
Shepard is in command. Ten Marines are dead, sixteen wounded. Before the hour is up he expects five more of those wounded will die in the dust and grit of Torfan.
He orders the company to advance. Third Platoon's young butterbar LT protests, she calls it all a suicide mission. He orders her back to the surface and puts her grim-faced platoon sergeant in command.
"Make them pay for all of this," He snarls at the Marines. "For Elysium and for your brothers and sisters."
For Mindoir.
Shepard drives them onward, even as they fall, even as the other officers die and he takes control of more and more of his battalion. Revenge, he reminds them. The Marines hate. They hate the batarians, they hate this moon, they hate the stench of death and blood and explosives, they hate him.
He doesn't care. He turns their hate on the enemy, until they are the hounds they're nicknamed after and they rip into the enemy savagely.
The first time he shoots a batarian with a dropped rifle, no one says a word. The second time, three other rifles join in.
Of the 450 Marines of the 1/23rd Marines to land on Torfan, 51 return to the surface, trembling hands clasping rifles, faces blank.
Shepard sits beside the dead lieutenant he'd had breakfast with that morning and set his rifle, its muzzle warped from heat, beside him. His hands and arms and chest are bloody.
Kyle lies on a stretcher as a medic works over him. He is badly wounded but will survive - only the worst wounded are getting evacuated now by the shuttles humming overhead.
"Shepard!" He shouts, voice torn and tattered. "What have you done, Shepard?"
First Lieutenant Shay Shepard feels hollow, as if someone has scooped out his insides and replaced them with ice.
What has he done? Nothing that can be forgiven. He wonders if the blood of human and batarian both will ever wash off this armour.
The sky above him is black and cold.
Of the fourteen thousand Marines of the 103rd and 67th MARDIVs deployed to the Battle of Torfan, three thousand were killed in action or died of wounds and another four thousand were wounded. Total Alliance casualties were 7632, a staggering 54% casualty rate….
…the defending batarian privateers were almost completely wiped out, with 97% killed or executed…
…disproportionate casualties were taken by the 1st Battalion, 23rd Regiment of the 103rd Marine Division, a special operations capable infantry unit consisting of N5 qualified Marines. When the battalion commander, executive officer and company commanders were all killed or wounded, command was assumed by First Lieutenant Shay Shepard. While his decision to continue the attack carried the day by seizing the enemy's headquarters and destroying their ability to co-ordinate their defence, the 1/23rd suffered astronomical casualties, with 88% of its personnel killed or wounded. The battalion functionally ceased to exist as a fighting force…
No officer involved in the Torfan massacre has ever been charged, despite evidence that batarian fighters were executed after surrendering.
-Alice Gao, 'A Decade of Blood: The Systems Alliance and the Traverse Campaign'