Author Notes: I don't own the Mass Effect IP, but I enjoy it so much that I write about it. This is a story starting with ME1. Thanks for reading.
Where we've been so far: We will meet Lieutenant Commander Havil Shepard. (Thanks, Pteaset, for the idea of adding little summarizing headnotes.)
*Bang. Bang.* As the metal partition she had leaned her head on thrummed with impact, Lieutenant Commander Havil Shepard's eyes shot open. Before the visual input traveled to her brain, she had already wound her fingers tightly around the assault rifle, and once assured by its heft, flexed her wrist to find the familiar pressure of the omni-tool strapped on her right wrist and let a tingle of biotic energy race down her left arm. Only then did she notice her shotgun, armor, and go-bag idling in the corner.
Part of Havil's mind registered that she was alone in a standard Alliance shuttle, which is why she had allowed herself to sleep. A solo transport was unheard of-even prisoners had guards-and if she had friends, Havil decided, they'd crow about the luxury the brass had afforded her. Even as this thought passed, the rest of her mind fought off smoke and screams.
She shut her eyes again and forced the cold air of the shuttle to burn her throat and chest, holding it deep in her lungs. Her body shuddered with the pounding of her heart, and she pressed herself into her physicality, starting with her toes loosely boxed in by combat boots. The chill seeped through her uniform pants, especially at her knees, and crept with icy fingers up her side. Opening her eyes anew, she finally exhaled and watched the little cloud of vapor hang for a moment and dissipate. She sent another breath after it to extinguish the flames and flickering now silently sinking under consciousness. A battery of calisthenic exercises usually did the trick for her when she woke, the slick sweat and lactic acid build-up founding an inescapable present. Confined to the shuttle jump seat, she settled for pressing her spine firmly into its unyielding metal and then leaned forward against her safety harness so gray straps cut sharply into her shoulders until the pain crested and broke a final wave over the dream.
What could possibly possess the Systems Alliance Navy, Havil wondered as she considered the empty seats around her, to send a shuttle to transfer a single soldier in the middle of third shift? She stretched out one leg, rolling a cracking ankle and then did the same to the other. The secrecy and unknowns in her reassignment orders irked her like a smudge on her combat visor: pack up and ship out, destination, mission, and posting classified well past her pay grade. "Ours not to reason why," she muttered to the empty seats around her as the shuttle docked. They didn't reply.
"Commander Shepard, you're wanted on the bridge," buzzed over the comm as she stepped into a lifeless cargo bay. The bay was dim, and in the faint glow of lights Havil could only pick out contours. Had any of the highly educated engineers at Alliance Central ever served on a ship, they couldn't have designed a better scene for a bloodbath. Without a helmet HUD to identify enemies and friendlies, she thought, a fight down here would be ugly. Among the disordered stacks of crates, she made out a ground vehicle, and there, in the slight orange glow of a weapons bench, a set of lockers.
She slung her gear into one of the many empty lockers and made for the cargo elevator. The initial heavy pull of the metal box against the ship's mass effect field hit her joints with a jolt. Havil again took control of her senses and reached underneath the passing memory of a heavy planet's gravity to detect instead the long, slow pulses of the ship's drive. What was a cruiser's cargo bay doing with a dreadnought's heart? As the elevator finally opened to the second deck, she frowned. The tiny mess would certainly be stocked with dehydrated meals. Havil didn't mind Alliance rations, but she despised the sleeping pods she spotted to the aft. Sleeping, she thought, was best done under an open sky, and if not there, then in a hammock or bunk, but not under floor decking. She tried to remember the pleasant feel of her last real warm shower, during Sol service time's first shift today. It would probably be some time until she had more than a wet wipe to look forward to in the morning.
With each step of the stairs to what must be the bridge, Havil became certain she had never seen a ship quite like this. This was a shakedown run, and the brass was trotting her, the so-called Hero of the Skyllian Blitz, out for the media announcement afterwards like some kind of blue-ribbon sow at the fair. For the last 35 years after they discovered a mass effect relay at the edge of the Sol system, humanity had reached into the galaxy, almost lost a war, discovered alien races, established colonies, and joined intergalactic civilization. But it still needed a female marine to smile for the cameras and assure them all was well in the cold expanse of space. Her face hardened into a scowl. Every sow, Havil thought, eventually meets the cleaver.
Havil was no hero. Once curiosity had gotten the better of her, and she had tapped through the unclassified parts of her personnel file. The Alliance's technical term for her was a "genetically superior soldier." In other words, she thought as her lips pressed into a thin line, and her legs coiled and extended in her brutally efficient stride, she excelled at killing. It was true. She could probably one up the marines she knew who kept counts-snipers, mostly-but the concept turned her stomach. A fight wasn't about numbers, but about either shooting or watching your people get shot. Kill or get killed was the right phrase, she remembered, but she'd never quite gotten the hang of the getting killed bit.
That, and to Havil battle was too fluid to get caught up in arithmetic. It wasn't that she didn't make rational decisions, but that she had so much training and, according to her file, a strong intuition-really her mind's ability to perceive minute discrepancies, like, she suddenly realized, this ship's lack of grime, dust, or mismatched light bulbs. Thinking too much about it would interrupt the flow. This and her abundance of fast-twitch muscle fibers, reasonable IQ, and biotic capability had propelled her to Lieutenant Commander.
There followed in the file a large redacted section under psychological make-up. Havil pushed that thought away as she saluted to the bridge guards and found an unfamiliar and again annoyingly dim space. She strode down the long barrel of the ship's prow until she found a man with captain's stripes in dress uniform standing directly behind the pilot.
She saluted and listened to herself say, "Lieutenant Commander Havil Shepard, reporting for duty, sir."
The man only briefly glanced back with narrowed eyes. In the racial mixing following Earth's global unification, his dark skin and closely shaved dark hair had become a common genetic inheritance, but she knew him at once-Captain David Anderson, a highly decorated soldier. What gave him away, however, was the set of his shoulders, an aura of confidence and deadliness that she would recognize anywhere as an N-trained special ops fighter. He was the first Alliance soldier to earn the terminal rank they shared-N7. Though he had aged out of active combat and into command, the ripple of muscles under his uniform as he clasped his hands behind his back still warned her of his raw power.
Shepard was determined to stand at attention as long as necessary in the oppressive silence, but the pilot wouldn't. A non-regulation cap and beard sneaked a look from his chair and curtly nodded with an even less regulation wink. To get away with that, he must be, well, beyond good. Next to him, looking stiff in the tactical station and unwilling to gawk must be an officer, probably the one she was replacing. From her position, she could just see a little grey speckling near his left temple, putting him in his thirties, though it was hard to tell now that gene therapy and medical advances slowed human aging and extended lifespans to 150 years or so. He had a career man's excellent posture and the discipline not to give in to curiosity... or wink. How many decades had it been since sideburns that length were fashionable?
"Shepard," the Captain's rich bass finally sounded. As he left aft, he followed with a deep, non-committal, and infuriatingly non-informational, "Good. Get to the comm room. Tell Nihilus I'll be there shortly."
Shepard stood at ease. The Alliance wasn't always well organized-Havil recalled her shock at the multi-million dollar price tag on replacing a shuttle window a repair team had accidentally run their space truck into-but she hadn't been this uninformed in uniform since drill instructors started firing rubber rounds while she was eating her "last meal" before N training. "The comm room?"
Ballcap's chair spun around in an automated movement. "All the way back past the galaxy map," he said. He scratched at his hair, re-seated his worn cap, wary. "Oh, and careful. Nihilus is, well, you know how Turians are. Has a stick right up his-"
"Jo-ker," the tactical officer-Shepard decided to call him Sideburns for the moment-reprimanded the pilot with what had to be the man's call sign, a note of exasperation dragged over the two-syllable rasp in his voice.
"What? He is," Joker slowly shrugged with is palms facing up, "and you know it. Besides, all the secrecy, a stealth ship, a Turian with enough firepower to level a cruiser, and now Shepard?" The pilot pointed to her, "The Lieutenant Star-of-Terra Commander Shepard?"
Shepard's back stiffened, and she folded her arms. "What of it?"
"I'm just sayin', something's up," Joker replied.
Sideburns turned to him, "None of our business." Joker responded with an eye roll before turning his chair back around. Both men shifted uneasily in their seats.
"Unless either of you is suggesting the Captain ought to be relieved..." Havil's implied rebuke hung in the cockpit.
"No, no ma'am" and a bewildered head shake answered.
"Good to hear it. Carry on." She executed a perfect heel turn for effect. In addition to discipline, the pilot lacked distance. Havil, like most junior officers, was too young to have fought alongside the many humans who fell in the First Contact War, a bloody misunderstanding of galactic traffic laws. Human explorers and colonists, like her parents, found the opportunity of distant travel the mass relays afforded intoxicating; they lodged on every inhabitable world, fulfilling that insatiable human curiosity. What they didn't know, and what Havil and every other human schoolchild had since learned, was that there are rules for activating the giant slings-mass effect relays-that sent ships hurtling from system to system in hours instead of hundreds of light-years. They also didn't know there were galactic traffic cops until ships started firing-Turian ships.
Shepard suddenly checked her stride, stopping near the captain's post. That was it: Turian. This was Turian ship design. She remembered the dimmed lighting for sensitive Turian eyes from N7 combat scenarios on a variety of alien vessels. Turians were so painstakingly aware of their chain of command that offing the captain at the first breach of the bridge didn't faze them. Someone else just assumed duties, all the way to the last man.
"Adam Jenkins, ma'am! And it's an honor, ma'am!" A young blond sergeant had taken her momentary reassessment as an opportunity to salute. She was surprised he hadn't hurt himself raising his hand so quickly. Wide-eyed gaze, smile, rigid posture... Havil knew the type: star-struck.
"At ease, Jenkins."
As she turned away, she heard his glee. "I bet we'll finally have a real fight now!" He couldn't have fought the Turians, and he had probably even missed the Batarians. Havil thought he certainly hadn't held a dying soldier in his arms, or listened to a friend screaming on the battlefield for help that wouldn't come.
"Careful what you wish for. You can't just patch everything up with medigel, like after the simulators in basic."
The man's ramrod posture and bright idealism never wavered. He, too, had the confidence of his training behind him, whispering in his ear, like it still did in hers, that he could perform any task, scale any mountain, neutralize any enemy. "I'll remember that, ma'am!" he returned with sparkling blue eyes. Havil left before any of the dead in her mind took control of her fist.