A/N: Well, here it is, my foray into Mass Effect fanfic. Written with the assistance of Ghostdragon31, who sacrificed a good fifteen minutes of his life untangling how you serve under a Major Kyle at Torfan (Marines) and are Anderson's XO as Commander Shepard (Navy).

Absolute Magnitude

Prologue

Her parents named her Amity.

They'd thought it was a good name, a very Mindoirian sort of name. Full of promise and optimism for a better way, a kinder way.

She wondered sometimes, when she let her hands and mind fall idle, what they would make of their daughter being known throughout the traverse as the Butcher of Torfan. She never lets herself reflect on what they might have thought of her if they'd known the epithet didn't even sting. Even when she had lost everything but memories of that place, millions of light years from "home," there were still things she wanted to cling to.

That she was someone still capable of receiving a parent's love was one of those things.

Mindoir would always shape her, no matter how fast or far she flew.

Like many of the settlements in the furthest reaches of the Attican Traverse-in echo of ancient patterns of human migration and diffusion as populations grew, peaked, splintered-Mindoir had been a tight-knit community formed around a shared set of values. Government sponsored rather than corporation controlled, they'd fulfilled their primary mandate of putting enough people on the ground for the Systems Alliance to claim the territory. And once that was done, they settled in to live life as they saw fit, far from the congested urbanized colonies that formed the core of Alliance space.

Primarily agrarian on too small a scale to be commercial, population limited enough to operate effectively under town hall doctrine, cohesively religious in a way that most of the population felt limited how 'metropolitan' humanity was considered in the galaxy at large. That was the Mindoir she had known.

And it was young enough yet for those values to stand unchallenged, because the greatest part of the population had chosen to come to Mindoir, hadn't happened to simply be born there and have to bear those beliefs like an ill-fitting coat.

Crime was negligible, the workload tolerable, and their protections laughable.

But the last wasn't something they'd thought of in those earliest days of her memory. They'd known, been advised, that they abutted the Terminus systems. And they knew that those systems were full of all sorts of ungodliness, but those things weren't on Mindoir.

Until they were.

She'd been sixteen. Amity had grown up respecting the fruits of hard labor, had been a budding naturalist with an excellent memory for the plants and animals of her homeworld, and she'd had a steadfast belief that with enough effort, good things came to good people.

While her colony burned and her friends, relatives, family were branded like cattle and implanted with control chips like something lower than that, she'd put the first and the second to use. She'd escaped, run, faded into the forests beyond the fields with a woodcraft honed by that childhood where she'd just hoped to avoid startling pretty birds.

Even when she'd shipped out to boot, she'd never known fear like those long, grueling days, waiting and praying for someone to come. Amity hadn't appreciated that advantage then, could only now with distance and perspective see that she'd undergone her own hell week years earlier than her fellow cadets.

Amity knew that she'd have been dead or worse if she'd stayed, but the guilt of surviving alone had been terrible. Even after the SSV Einstein had intervened and she'd been light years from the colony, she'd spent so many nights awake and spent so days in a waking dream of what-she could-have-done that she'd eventually collapsed, prompting a very frank, very painful discussion with a counselor. She'd learned to divorce herself from the guilt, to compartmentalize, to build that very necessary wall that would kept her emotions safely in check and would contribute to making her a terribly effective operative.

At sixteen, she hadn't lost her belief in God. But she'd learned a little about how vast the universe was, how small her place was in it, how indifferent it was to the fortunes of the 'good' and the 'bad'.

It was at sixteen, raging and miserable and so very lost, she'd come to understand what free will meant. It meant that all the prayer and faith in the world wouldn't stop other beings from exercising it as they pleased. That was best done with a hyper-velocity bullet. For her own sake, for Mindoir's sake, for all the Mindoirs that might come, she couldn't be satisfied to think that all those terrible things were someone else's problem.

All her plans had dissipated in the smoke of her colony and Amity turned her face from growing things to killing them, her study of plants becoming a study of peoples.

Mindoir hadn't concerned itself with the world outside its atmosphere, had hardly concerned itself with Earth, and she'd seen what that brought them. So for the two long years she'd waited to enlist, she'd spent her time patiently, methodically exploring the extranet until she was a reasonably well-educated xenoanthropologist. She'd read not only what humans had to say about aliens-both the peer-reviewed articles that took her days to trudge through and the forums that sparked incredulous laughter-but what aliens had to say about themselves.

Her sources were limited of course, especially in translation, but she'd painstaking taught herself the written form of the turian language. As the soldiers of the galaxy, it was they who'd written about people as she wanted to know them. Much later, she'd do the same for the salarians and the asari.

The turians didn't like batarians either, which made her predisposed to like them, despite the Relay 314 Incident. From the descriptions of the Rachni Wars, which generated almost as much data on the extranet as the Krogan Rebellions, she'd willingly set 'First Contact War' aside as an inflammatory phrase. Her childhood hadn't prepared her to see Shanxi as anything but a name and Mindoir was present and burning in her mind, not some far-off colony thirteen years surrendered and recaptured.

Boot changed that, a little, gave her more of a sense of that defeat being her own, but she would always be habitually polite. She saw no conflict in saying "please" and pulling the trigger.

The Alliance took her native intelligence, broke her of all impatience, and trained her as an infiltrator.

They made her Shepard.

And she was very good at it. There were no doors that did not open for her, both literally and figuratively.

When she proved repeatedly to be the most able marksman in her class and then her battalion, they did her the singular honor of training her as a sniper. No longer part of the fire teams that formed the core of every maneuver, Shepard was instead attached the squad as a whole. Shepard and her spotter, a women who was one of the most brilliant mathematical minds she'd ever encountered outside an engineering specialization.

For a colonist from a pacifist world-or any world really, but they'd driven that one home-she'd torn through the enlisted ranks and earned her commission before most soldiers made Corporal.

Her former spotter-now Sergeant Hanson, out of Sathur, survived by her fiancé-died on Torfan. Some days, she felt as if everyone had died on Torfan. Even now, years later, she didn't quite know how she'd come to be the lynchpin of that massacre. Not when they'd had a higher-ranking CO on the ground, who by all rights should have taken the credit and the blame. But when the bodies started falling, someone had to rally the remainder. Major Kyle either couldn't or didn't. She'd never spoken to him to ask, even before his discharge.

Shepard had never been very good at sitting back and dying. Once, she'd run away. Now she ran into the thick of things, did the job she'd been trained to do.

It was one of the largest ground operations she'd ever taken part in, let alone participated in as an officer. Her specialization meant she'd never spent much time in the trenches with the grunts that formed the backbone of their military strength. She was too much of an investment on the part of the Systems Alliance Marine Corps for that.

Close combat was eliminating onlookers or unlucky guards with brutal hand-to-hand or silenced pistols, not dozens of batarian mercenaries who by dint of being batarian and therefore slavers were well-prepped for raids. Whether by Systems Alliance Marines or the competition didn't matter much to them.

Battles of attrition were ugly things, made far worse by bad intel. They'd had causalities, too many causalities. So when the batarians had begun to surrender, she wasn't about to risk her remaining men on taking that surrender on good faith. They didn't have the manpower to take prisoners, so she'd shot the first batarian who'd emerged with his hands up, palms empty. And her men-angry, obedient-had followed her order.

She'd regretted the Marines who'd died. But she'd felt no remorse for the batarians, not at the inquiry that followed, not when Major Kyle had received an honorable discharge because he couldn't bear the weight of it. Shepard was not charged with war crimes, despite some public pressure among the batarians and among some humans, because the Hegemony had insisted beforehand that there'd been no such mercenaries operating in that sector. You could not be charged with the massacre of people who did not exist.

Shepard might not have particularly broad shoulders, but she didn't flinch against the public outcry.

Because behind that wall in her mind, Mindoir was always burning.

_x_

In the fallout of Torfan, Shepard was selected for the N-program, which meant that she officially belonged to the Navy as part of their Special Forces. She would never make Major and instead once again bore the rank of Lieutenant, which was faintly irksome after all the effort to earn her Captain's bars. But if she'd lost men on Torfan, she'd lost none of her talent or drive. Promotions came quick and steady, until she was Commander Shepard, who'd directed as many black-ops missions as she had ones without sealed files and was the go-to girl when the Alliance had an impossible mission it couldn't afford to fail.

When she was assigned to the Normandy, she'd had killed a great many aliens without working closely with any of them. No matter their current campaign for representation on the Council, humanity was somewhat isolationist on the whole and she'd always taken postings far from the hub worlds where the species mingled. She was not interested in being a set of dress blues on display at the Citadel-even if she'd still entitled to wear them-would rather spend days in a miserable, drizzling rain on a convenient rise within scope-sight of a batarian mercenary base.

She did not join the armed forces to gawk at asari, no matter how many lines in her file were praise from commanding officers who'd noted her persuasive diplomacy and tried to recommend her for diplomatic functions and commands that would take her out of the field.

(There was a deep-rooted suspicion about asari, regardless, because she did not believe in universal physical attractiveness. She did, however, believe in broad-spectrum pheromones. She was more bemused by her own strange reactions to the sharp, predatory, painted turians whose alien features don't quite hide their resentment of her kind cluttering up their Citadel. They aren't even mammals. But, then again, none of the other sentient races are. She wondered about that, sometimes, if extinction events on her own planet and the changed climate were the only things that prevented her from having scales rather than hair. She didn't talk about God much, because religion is less popular than ever, but she believed in evolution. She just doesn't believe in quite as much evolution as other people. There's no statistical probability equation in the world that can explain the soul.)

But her own preferences had to give way to the Alliance's needs. She'd accepted the order that would take her out of the field with professional composure, no matter how grudgingly she regarded it in the privacy of her mind. There was the faint, niggling thought, Should have stayed enlisted, but while she was fully capable of following orders, she preferred accomplishing mission objectives according to her own sensibilities.

So she boarded the most advanced ship the Alliance fleets had to offer, becoming the executive officer under one Captain Anderson. She'd spent a lot of time in zero-g, but not as personnel. Usually she'd just been payload, being ferried from problem to another. The kind of problems that required an N-7 team and permanently sealed records.

That was what she did, what she was to the Alliance, the special forces equivalent of the omnitool. So she wondered, as she made the rounds of the ship on that first day, what it was she was supposed to do for or about the Normandy. With her aboard and Anderson, a legend in his own right, in command, she didn't doubt that there was a mission beyond taking the Normandy for her virgin flight. But as the days dragged by and she settled uncomfortably into her new role, she began to feel the first edges of impatience. It was one thing to wait in pursuit of an objective, another to wait for an objective.

Unlike the rest of the crew, she was actually grateful when the Spectre boarded. With one of the Citadel's Special Tactics and Reconnaissance officers on deck, it became more likely that they were being sent on something more than a shakedown mission and that meant she wasn't being sidelined.

So there was real warmth in her tone as she introduced herself to Nihlus Kryik, swallowing a smile as he offered her the courtesy of a handshake. Human habits were like thresher maw spores-they could root anywhere and many aliens viewed them as just as much of a menace. "Commander Shepard, Systems Alliance Navy. Welcome aboard, Spectre Kryik."

"Commander," he replied, subharmonics thrumming. She noted how elaborate his colony markings were, brilliant white against rust-colored plates.

"Why don't you give him a tour of the ship?" Anderson suggested. "I'm sure he's seen the plans, but it's another thing entirely to see her in person."

"Of course, sir." Shepard glanced back at the turian, curious as whether he carried a rank outside his Spectre status that would give him the clearance to see the Normandy's plans or if a Spectre's powers were more far-reaching than she'd been briefed. He could demand transport on any ship belonging to a Citadel-allied race, but that gave him access only the public areas of a ship-quarters, mess, the head.

Her knowledge of turian history and culture as it related to warfare didn't make their expressions or subharmonics any less inscrutable in person. The inane thought itching at her brain was that someone needed to fund a study, though she had a suspicion that some salarian somewhere had probably already put together a lexicon.

Their tour began in the bridge and Shepard was careful to introduce the Spectre in such a way as to convey the message that disrespect would not be tolerated. The crew was handpicked, true, but for their practical skills, not necessarily for their circumspection. Joker was a shining example of this, commentary perfectly audible to her dogging them as they made their way toward the commander's station.

Turian hearing was less acute than human hearing, for all that it took in a broader range in the lower Hertz, but the Normandy had been designed acoustically for orders issued from the commander to be clearly audible at the forward stations. And for replies from the forward stations to be just as understandable.

Shepard had no problems with conversation that didn't interfere with the task at hand or Joker's sense of humor, but she did have a problem when he displayed both of them in front of a Council representative.

Nihlus chose not to comment on it. She hoped it was politeness-if it had been her, it would have been more along the lines of accruing evidence. "I thought it was interesting that they preserved the turian bridge design so completely."

Shepard took his conversational cue and spend the next two hours discussing how well Alliance procedure was meshing with turian design sensibilities and she noted his surprise when she asked his opinion on how turians would have made use of the Alliance anologue of the same spaces. For a species obsessed with analyzing their own cultural development, humanity hadn't made a very good public showing of curiosity of the kind that didn't involve dissection.

It shouldn't really come as a surprise that the Council races saw humanity's aggressive expansion as the prelude to the next Krogan Rebellion.

That was her opinion, at least.

Given that, she began to think that perhaps she was slated to be either made an asset or dealt with preemptively, as the next several days saw her with a seven-foot shadow. Nihlus was watching her too closely without engaging her in conversation for it to anything but some sort of evaluation. Irksome, but she ignored him for the most part. The information was obviously need-to-know and likely wouldn't end in her cooling corpse. She'd worked with Anderson before-he was a soldier before he was a politician and wouldn't leave her to the varren for political expediency.

Udina would, and she could respect that, but she wasn't prepared to die just yet. She might have broken records for batarian killcounts if she'd been allowed to claim responsibility for some of those asteroids returned to rock and empty buildings, but there were a lot more bodies waiting for her bullet before the scales of Mindoir were brought into balance.

It was only when they closed on Eden Prime that she discovered just what was afoot. Joker was complaining about Nihlus again, with Alenko trying that soft-spoken, ineffective way to suggest a little professionalism. Alenko might win time-in-service promotions, but unless he learned to manage his human resources more effectively, she didn't see him being tapped for real commands.

Still, at least he wasn't doing it where Spectre Kryik could hear anymore and asking complete professionalism from Joker was a losing battle, so she let it pass.

Nihlus was waiting in the comm room with a view of Eden Prime on the screen, turning to look at her as the hatch hissed open. "Good," he said. "I was hoping you'd arrive first."

She automatically lifted a brow in question and Nihlus had apparently spent enough time with humans to interpret it as exactly that.

"What do you think of our destination?" he asked, mandibles shifting in a way that might have been faintly analogous to her eyebrow lift. "I understand that Eden Prime is something of a symbol for your people."

"I somehow doubt that my opinion of whether it's a symbol of our triumph over our own self-destructive tendencies or simply a sign that space travel has allowed us to defer the suicide of our species through rampant industrial pollution indefinitely is really relevant. Though, given those ugly prefab habitats we tend to use regardless of environment, I'm more in favor of the rampaging virus released into a fresh host population theory."

"...that's a very salarian way of thinking."

"It should be. I'm quoting one. And paraphrasing old arguments between human philosphers."

"Your species' inability to produce a unifying philosophy is very odd."

"Not so odd," she countered. "The turians are clearly an apex predator species, physiologically speaking. Keen eyesight, natural weapons and armor. Your only crippling weakness is an inability to handle low temperatures, which wasn't an issue on your home planet. Humans, on the other hand, survive because we're quick to adapt. We're like our own DNA mutation writ large. With so many different approaches to any problem, at least one will be successful and others are quick to adopt whatever will help them thrive. And those that don't-well, we call it natural selection. You might consider that our unifying philosophy."

Nihlus's green eyes were looking at her as if he'd never seen her before. "I didn't think someone of your reputation would be a philosopher."

"I don't know if I'd go that far. I believe there's a point where thinking has to give way to action. But that's neither here nor there, Spectre."

"I suppose not. I was just surprised. I was expecting a comment on the scenery." His lateral mandibles shifted into something that conveyed amusement. "Somehow, I don't think you've missed the fact that this isn't a simple shakedown mission."

"Those usually don't require a Spectre, experimental stealth technology or no," she agreed, crossing her arms and shifting her weight into something more comfortable. For a member of a highly formalized, military species, Nihlus seemed to conduct himself with a certain lack of ceremony.

"This ship does represent a step forward in turian-human diplomacy, but you're right to say that wouldn't prompt Council intervention. It simply happened to be a convenient excuse."

"For?"

It was Anderson's rich voice that interrupted their conversation. "Retrieval of Prothean tech, discovered by the farmers on Eden Prime."

The part of her that remembered Mindoir didn't consider what they did on Eden Prime farming-there was a certain disgust for the vast commercial farming interests that controlled equally vast tracts of land on selected garden planets and allowed fully urban planets to outsource their need to eat. But that was an old prejudice and, as she'd said to Nihlus about her feelings on Eden Prime, irrelevant.

She didn't know much about the Protheans, except that they had lived in what passed for a mythological age for species that lived a thousand years. But she did know that their detritus was worth a lot of money in the right markets, which would explain why it was a military pick-up and not a research team coming to examine it before it was removed from whatever field they'd found it in.

The only unexpected factor in this was the Council intervention. What concession were they buying with handing this find over? If she'd asked, Anderson might answer that their scientists might discover something that theirs couldn't, but scientific advancements had always been about the acquisition of new knowledge. And she didn't see any of their researchers surrendering something like this gracefully.

"Why was I brought in on this, sir?" she asked instead.

"This is your first shipside command, isn't it?" Anderson remarked. "Most of your assignments have been short-term, small-unit special forces actions. You've built yourself a reputation, Shepard."

Nihlus nodded. "It was Torfan that brought you to our attention," he explained. "Though, now that the Systems Alliance has agreed to open your files for the Council, you were an exemplary Spectre candidate long before that." His mandibles pulled into another sharp approximation of a smile. "So when the Council decided that it might be time to consider appointing a human Spectre, I put you forward."

And there was the concession. It must have been a very good find-a data disk wouldn't have bought a human a place among the Spectres.

"I still don't understand why I was brought aboard the Normandy," Shepard admitted. "You clearly don't need an XO with my background and there are missions better suited to observing my skills. Unless, of course, what the Spectres really want from me is the self-control necessary not to smack irreverent helmsmen upside the head," she said dryly.

Nihlus chuckled, a low sound awash in subharmonics. "While valuable, that would be more likely to see you promoted into politics, not the Spectres. You were brought aboard the Normandy because, while I evaluate your potential on behalf of the Council, we'll be executing joint missions on behalf of the Council. During that time Captain Anderson's Normandy will be given some positive exposure that will make it clear that the joint project was a success, before being relegated to a role more suited to its stealth-tech. But a simple grab-and-go seemed to work best for our inaugural mission. Give us a chance to smooth over and differences, build trust, before we face live combat."

In a more perfect universe, that might have been how it worked. She served the Council well, opened the way for other human Spectres, and within two hundred years humanity would be granted a seat on the Council because it was too large, too dangerous to be allowed to consolidate its power in a splinter faction.

As it was, Joker's voice was the harbinger of worse things to come.