Prologue
Shortly after his heroics in the Skyllian Blitz, Commander Shepard had his pick of posts (basically) when he returned to duty in the Alliance. He asked to be the man in charge of a small group of marines serving as the security on an exploration vessel, the SSV Prometheus. The ship was originally sent to study the Maroon Sea cluster for two years, but only weeks in things went terribly wrong. The following events happened four years before Mass Effect 1…
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"Scanning the nebula now, Captain." A young woman whom Shepard could knew as the CSO, or 'Chief' as her subordinates called her, stated as she tapped buttons on a console and the holographic interface in front of her. "Twenty-eight percent Argon, four percent Neon, sixty-eight percent copper dust, and a few chunks of Aluminum from an asteroid that past through it no more than five days ago."
"Can we salvage any of it?" The Captain asked, her head hidden by a cup of coffee.
"I could probably fix some of the damaged bulkheads on Deck 3 with that aluminum." The tall and intimidating Chief Engineer walked over to the hemispherical glass viewport. The dark red nebula tinted everything red, the consoles, the floors, and the crew. Shepard was nearly blinded by all of the reds as he stepped onto the command deck.
"You're just in time, Lieutenant." The Captain swiveled her chair to face Shepard and put her coffee down on one of the cream white armrests. "It seems Jerry has a job for you."
"You shouldn't talk to him like that, Fiona." The XO, Commander G. Richards, was once again offended by her tone towards Shepard. "He's not just another jarhead that's only good for seeing to your every whim, this man is a tactical genius, and the Hero of Elysium."
"It's all right, Commander." Shepard put his hands up, signaling for him to calm down. "If the Captain wants a dirty job done, my team and I will handle it. And I don't think my achievements should earn me special treatment, after all I did ask for this post."
The Captain rose from her chair and approached Shepard, she took a good look at him and sighed. His posture reminded her of the man Shepard replaced, a muscle head named Lange. He was the main reason she disliked soldiers so much.
"Shepard, could you pleas--" Her sentence was cut off by a sudden shockwave. It shook the small vessel violently, causing the bridge crew to tumble to the ground, including Shepard. Consoles blinked with 'warning' and 'danger' symbols while an alert klaxon sounded off repeatedly. Shepard and the other crewman looked to the viewport as the red color faded from the room. What was seen after no one could believe.
A hole hundreds of kilometers wide opened in the nebula. It spiraled outward quickly and soon was large enough to block out all other objects once visible in normal space, even the stars. Soon after, the stars reappeared but the nebula was nowhere to be found. Many of the crew noticed the stars were in the wrong place, and the system's star Matano was much larger and brighter than it is now. The CSO got to her feet and began scanning what was on the other side of the hole by quickly typing away at her console. "Captain, you're not going to believe this."
"Lay it on me." She replied while brushing dust of her uniform.
"I've compared the star positions on the other side of the anomaly to our databases, including that star in the foreground, and the results… They don't make sense."
"Just tell me." The Captain started to get annoyed.
"We are sitting in front of a temporal rift, connecting the present to the same point in space… 38,000 years in the future."
"What?" Commander Richards jumped up and checked the scan results at the Science station. "Captain these scans are correct. But the rift is unstable, and could close at any minute, I don't recommend going into the hole.
"Detecting multiple ships coming into scanner range." The Chief Engineer had long since recovered and worked his console as he spoke, but the crew was focused on the events that played out from the dome-shaped viewport.
Three dark grey warships came into view by exiting odd looking wormholes, the vessels had an almost gothic theme to them, and each ship bore the symbol of a two headed eagle. Three others came from the opposite direction, obviously decelerating from FTL travel. These vessels were gunmetal grey and boasted large green crystal pylons. Soon after they were within visual range of each other the vessels opened fire.
"They're hailing us." Shepard noticed from the comm. station, the communications officer was knocked out in the shockwave, so he took over.
"Open a channel." The Captain ordered as she returned to her chair.
A large screen appeared inches from the viewport, there was static at first, but then a man in a formal uniform appeared. He had a large silver apparatus covering the left side of his face, with a bright red lens replacing his eye. Medals covered his torso and a two headed eagle stretched across his hat. "I don't have much time, so please, ask no questions." The image shook periodically as the ships traded weapons fire. "We know you are from the past, farther than any of us can fathom. This tear in space-time is a weapon of desperation. I have opened it to send a warning. My future, rather humanity's future, is a dark and grim time now. Here, humanity has no hope, here there is only war. For ten millennia our race has endured, surrounded by heretics, traitors, and aliens. I understand that--"
"Commissar, two Imperial Battle Barges coming out of warp space. It's the Adeptus Astartes." A voice off-screen stated with a deep, almost mechanical voice.
"Confirm their identity to be sure, the last thing we need are Necrontyr and heretics." There was a brief silence, but a figure in the man's eye lens nodded to him. "What Chapter?" The man asked.
"The Ultramarines, sir." The uniformed man seemed to whisper prayers of unimaginable gratitude to someone called 'The Emperor', and then he continued his harrowing speech.
"I hope this small look into our present can help change your future." The transmission cut out just before two pale blue warships came out of the strange wormholes. They were designated by the flipped omega symbol on the rear bulkheads of the vessels. Seconds later, the green crystal pylons on one of the metal ships glowed bright and constructed a huge whip-like laser that tore through the abyss of space and cut one of the engine sections from one of the blue ships. A flash of colors and an explosion ensued, propelling the removed section towards the temporal rift.
"Helm, hard to port!" The Captain screamed as the titanic chunk of ship grew closer to the rift. When the Prometheus was far enough away, the tear suddenly closed, effectively reducing the wreckage to half of its original size. The crew was in shock, not entirely aware of what they had just witnessed. The ship slowly turned to face the floating remains of the severed section, which still dwarfed the Prometheus many times over. Shepard could make out dozens of decks, but no signs of life.
An hour later, Shepard and his team of four other Marines (for a crew of twenty, five was a normal sized security staff) went on an away mission to study the ship. All sorts of scans could show no signs of life at all in the section of the vessel, but many rooms were shielded or too cluttered with debris to get a clean reading. And less than a fourth of the rooms had any atmosphere, which was declining rapidly. The Prometheus moved towards the bottom of the wreckage and opened the port airlock. Shepard and those under his command jumped through the absolute zero of space and onto the edge of the deck. He watched while his four subordinates crossed the gap, and when they were all accounted for, they pressed on. Shepard attached a spotlight to his assault rifle and led the team as they explored the dark hallways.
The ship lacked internal bulkheads in most areas, leaving the only walls to be rows of cables and exposed conduits. The lights flickered periodically, and some of the soldiers could see the cables short and spark periodically, but in a vacuum the hallways made no sound. Oil and other colored liquids floated out of the openings in the wires and cords, floating forever in the abyss of space. At the end of the hallway stood a thick steel door, it slid up into the ceiling halfway before jamming. With a little problem solving, Shepard and another marine used all of their might to force it open. There was no one on the other side, but a large suit of armor was laid out upon a table…
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Mass Effect: Imperfect Future takes place during the events of Mass Effect 2, coming soon.
