A/N: Gulp... Well, having put doing something like this off for rather a long time, it seems like as good a time to upload this as any… welcome to the first of my series of ME3 stories! This is the first time I've really tried anything like this, so think I'm rightly nervous about it all! Please follow the story, leave a review or do whatever you personally do, but I hope you enjoy this particular take on one of my favourite games of all time...
This story will mainly follow my (main) original character through the Reaper War – Staff Lieutenant Naylor, an N7 Paladin who serves onboard the Normandy. It will eventually feature a romance between him and Liara, but that will be quite a way off towards the end of this part of the trilogy. Some of the back story with Naylor may seem rather extravagant, but I will get round to explaining it in time, and I try as much as I can to keep it solid through the story.
Along with Naylor, I've added a host of original characters to the Normandy's crew in this story. But, before you start with all the "Oh god, he's going to change everything!" most of them are going to be so incredibly unimportant. Think the nameless crewmembers in the CIC and those helmeted soldiers that appear on the Normandy in Priority: Vancouver and Priority: Earth and you'll get the gist of things. And on the note of changing things, this won't exactly be a stuck-to-canon story – if it was perfectly adhering to what happens in the game, then I wouldn't really bother with posting this, instead telling you to play Mass Effect 3 over and over in place of each chapter.
So yeah, it's a slight left-of-canon story, the main character's an original character I've created with a weird back story, there are lots of original characters and it's my first ever story of any reasonable length. Oh, and I write in British English, so expect lots of u's and spelling mistakes if you're used to American English (no hard feelings!).
I hope you enjoy!
Day Zero. March 16th, 2186. Sol system, Local Cluster
The Everest shook as more impacts slammed into the invisible kinetic barriers surrounding it. Electrical fires were breaking out inside, explosions filling the dreadnought's corridors as sparks from damaged wiring and terminals ignited against leaking flammable gases being released from broken pipes. Claxons drowned out the sound of hundreds of crew members shouting at each other, everyone working to save their ship from the forces opposing them. One final shot tore down the kinetic barriers, the round smashing the armour on the ship's side apart and exposing entire compartments to the cold void of space. In the CIC, the ship's commander, Captain Alicia Crockett, was close to panicking. The vessel she had commanded for a decade, referred to by her crew as the pride of the Alliance Navy, was falling apart around her. The first human dreadnought was meeting her end at the hands of an unknown synthetic enemy.
"CAPTAIN! We've lost barriers covering the starboard side, while our port kinetic barriers are at eight percent! Starboard compartments nine through thirteen on deck fourteen have been torn open to space. The starboard batteries are being evacuated." Another hit smashed into the starboard side, the hologram of the Everest lighting up red where the hit was recorded. It was perilously close to the dreadnought's drive core, and if a shot hit there, then the entire ship would be in extreme danger.
"God. How many killed?"
"Eight, captain. We will lose many more if we don't act now! We need to get out of the battle line, escape and conduct repairs."
"We can't do that, Captain!" Another crew member shouted with a report from her station. "The drive core is destabilising! We've lost contact with engineering!"
When Crockett took time to respond, her XO shouted again, his voice straining to be heard above the noise of the bridge. "What do we do, captain?"
"Damn it all! All hands, abandon ship! Abandon ship!"
"All hands. All hands. Abandon ship, repeat, abandon ship." Naylor ran from his position in the ready room attached to the hangar bay as the automated announcement rang out across the entire vessel. His platoon ran with him, ducking through the corridors and avoiding the explosions that erupted in their paths. Crew members mingled with the platoon as they ran, the nearest escape pods barely a few seconds away ahead of them. Private Michaels pulled ahead, aiming to hold open the final door ahead of them for the rest of the crew. A single blast erupted around him, a single metal spur falling from the roof of the corridor and smashing into his head. The spur blocked the hallway, burning the hands of the few crew members who tried to push it out of the way.
"Roberts, Clarke! Biotics, now!" Sergeant Roberts, one of Naylor's sentinels, and Corporal Clarke, a vanguard, illuminated the hallway with blue fire, wrenching the spur from its position and tossing it to the side, away from the final door and freeing the corridor to allow the many dozens of crew members to reach the escape pods. The thunder of boots rang out above the din of explosions, barely allowing Naylor and Roberts a chance to pull the unconscious Michaels to his feet and haul him with them. "Westmoreland, Campbell! Prepare a pod, and get down whatever medical gear you can find!" The two privates ran ahead of Naylor, opening the pod's entrance and dragging medical gear down from their storage compartments. Clarke followed them, grabbing Michaels' shoulders and hauling him into the pod, Roberts and Naylor entering after them.
More explosions ripped through the escape pod bay, several crew members being tossed into bulkheads by the shockwaves. Knowing that to delay the launching of the pod was to sign their own death warrants, Naylor hit the launch button for the pod. Before the armoured shutters could slam shut, a single figure dove into the pod, his uniform scorched and torn, but the crew member was visibly unharmed. The pod was closed off from the rest of the dreadnought; explosive bolts firing as the pod was flung from its berth in the belly of the vessel. Boosters accelerated it away from the stricken ship, barely making it before more shots crashed into the Everest's flanks. Reaper vessels fired incessantly, cruisers and frigates exploding around the pod as it made good its escape from the battle line.
"Lieutenant! The network's going crazy, First Fleet is falling back through the relay, the Fourth's being annihilated over Earth!" From the single porthole in the pod, Naylor watched as the battle descended into chaos, several squadrons of Alliance ships beginning to disengage from the battle and escape through the looming Charon Relay. Other ships, those too wounded to make the faster than light jumps, remained, sacrificing their vessels to allow others to escape. Yellow blasts tore through the inky blackness of space, signalling the death of more servicemen in a futile struggle against the vast hordes of Reapers.
"How much air do we have?"
"Enough for two or three days, Lieutenant. If we add our armour's supplies, we should have enough for three days, maybe four if we regulate our supply."
"Sir, I'm Serviceman First Class Mira. I don't have an armour supply, sir."
"Then you use any oxygen masks we find instead of a helmet. Clarke, get Michaels' helmet on, but disconnect the breather plate for now. As soon as we reach critical levels of air, we get our helmets on and switch to our personal supplies." The marines pulled their helmets on, disconnecting the in-built air supplies and switching over to getting air from the pod's supply of oxygen. Clarke finished, before struggling with putting on Michaels' helmet without putting any pressure on the site of the head wound that he had taken. The visor on Naylor's own helmet, a specialist design based off of Inferno-pattern Armour, was hinged upwards, disconnecting the inbuilt supply of air in the back of his hardsuit and letting him breathe the onboard oxygen supply in the escape pod.
"Lieutenant, what the hell are those things? They're tearing through our ships like butter." Naylor zoned out from the conversation as he watched the final few moments of the Everest's life as a ship, the explosions reflecting off of his eyes as the last remnants of the First Fleet's rearguard was annihilated. In the din of the combat, he could make out a few human bodies, the life sucked out of them as they were exposed to the cold void of space. "Roberts, what do you think?"
"I think they look like Geth, Sarah. Remember the big dreadnought those synthetics used to attack the Citadel three years ago?"
"Nah, I think the batarians. They've had it in for us since Commander Shepard destroyed the Bahak-Alpha Relay in the Viper Nebula."
"They don't look like batarian ships, Clarke. The ships that the four-eyed bastards use are triangular, like cheese wedges. I still think they're Geth."
"They're not geth."
"What, Lieutenant? They batarian?" Naylor turned around from where he had been sitting by the porthole, looking at the rest of the group in the flight harnesses around him.
"They're Reapers."
Behind the escape pod that Naylor had abandoned ship in, the Everest was in her final death throes. Captain Crockett stood defiant on the bridge, working rapidly at damaged terminals and consoles alongside the few volunteers that were staying with the ship until her death, and theirs. The few weapons still operational on the vessel fired as fast as their automated reload cycles would allow. Hundreds of rounds blasted through the void, mostly impacting ineffectively against the kinetic barriers of the Reaper vessels tearing through the Alliance's First Fleet. A few were lucky shots, hitting the far weaker armour of the smaller destroyer-class vessels, and though they caused minimal damage, a very tiny number caused enough damage to disable the main weaponry on the destroyers, if only for a few minutes before another ship took the damaged one's place in the carnage.
"Captain, take a look at the readings from the drive core." The readout in front of Crockett showed a bleak sign. Were the ship to take another hit, the vessel would soon be annihilated as the drive core fully destabilised underneath it. The Everest is going down, Captain." The captain knew there was a single option left to them, something only done when a captain knew that his or her ship was beyond hope, beyond the possibility of withdrawing and repair. "
"I understand. I am initiating General Order No. 1. Ladies and Gentlemen, it has been a pleasure serving alongside you. Proceed to the last remaining escape pods on this deck. I will remain behind to enact the order." None of the remaining crew members moved from their posts, the highest ranking man amongst them stepping forward when the captain looked at them with one last, quizzical look.
"Ma'am, permission to speak candidly?"
"Granted, Chief."
"Ma'am, if the Everest is going to die, then we request permission to die with her." The captain nodded, smiling at the devotion that her crew still showed to their ship, even when their death would be guaranteed by doing so. Crockett smiled slightly, a small tear being shed from her eye as she walked towards her terminal at the rear of the CIC.
"Computer, initiate order one. Authorisation code Delta-One-One-Charlie-Oscar."
"Code confirmed. Drive core destabilising. Estimate time to destruction – thirty seconds."
"It has been an absolute honour to serve alongside all of you" The captain snapped a final salute, the crew members around her doing the same. "I'm not religious, nor do I know whether any of you are, but the first round in whatever lies beyond is on me. That is all." The countdown on the holographic display counted down, twenty seconds quickly descending to ten, then to five. The crew members around her tensed up as the display ticked over to zero.
From the porthole in his escape pod, Naylor watched as the Everest was annihilated in a ball of white fury, the explosion catching a trio of disabled cruisers around the ship, annihilating them and setting of a massive chain reaction, destabilising the cores of the cruisers caught by it and immolating a huge swathe of space around the corpse of the dreadnought. Naylor's pod barely made it out of the radius of the explosion, buffeted by the shockwaves and barely managing to reach safety, while a number of other pods were caught, the occupants dying a mercifully swift death as the pods around them disintegrated under the heat of the explosion. The occupants of Naylor's pod all looked outside the single window, "The Everest's gone."
Day Zero. Citadel space station, Serpent Nebula
The Presidium ring on the Citadel was a haven of peace and quiet, the conversations taking place around the entrance to the embassy complex being kept to respectable levels of noise, no-one being forced to raise their voice over the conversations of anyone else. A lack of urgency could be used to describe the diplomats there, calmly going around their ordinary day-to-day lives, ignorant of the situation that was slowly engulfing the vast swathe that was human-controlled space to the galactic east of the Citadel.
From her office high above the curved floor of the Presidium. Councillor Celia Tevos watched the people below, casting a careful eye over the hundreds moving about their daily lives on board the immense space station. How much would that scene change in the next few hours, she wondered, running a hand over her crests as she turned back to the proverbial mountain of reports she would have to go through, datapads piled high on her desk, taunting her for every moment that she delayed going through them.
It was not her fault. Barely half a standard day earlier, ten short hours, and she had been in a meeting with a tired, worn-out man she had never thought to see again. Aral Kharaz, the Batarian ambassador to the Citadel before his famous departure in the early years after the arrival of humanity into Citadel space, had requested a meeting to allow hundreds of Batarian refugees to seek a place of safety on the Citadel. He claimed that the Hegemony had been attacked, eradicated even, by a force orders of magnitude more powerful than the Batarians, despite their leaders' claims of militaries that rivalled the Turians and an economy in excess of that of the asari. Kharaz' argument seemed so illogical – to Tevos, it had originally sounded like the ambassador was wanting the Council's permission to allow the Batarians a chance to smuggle soldiers onto the station, to try and seize power from the Council and wreak petty revenge for what had been done decades before in better times.
It was only when Tevos received the reports from the Alliance that Batarians were flooding from Hegemony space through Alliance checkpoints, all talking of fearsome tides of death and destruction enveloping their worlds. It was so sudden the Alliance initially believed it to be an invasion of their space, before Fleet Admiral Hackett and Admiral Anderson, the former human Councillor, stepped in. The Alliance had declared that their entire military might was being placed on their highest alert levels. Coded transmissions were sent to the militaries of the salarians, turians and asari. All were initially ignored, but once the respective races' admirals paid attention, and the transmissions decoded, they all had the same message written in the open: The Reapers are here.
For the past three years, Tevos had been forced by the will of her own people to deny the entire idea of the existence of the Reapers since the attack on the Citadel in 2183. She had seen it there first hand, a single Reaper and the geth supposedly enslaved by it tearing ribbons through the turian, asari and salarian ships defending the heart of galactic space. She couldn't deny something she knew to be true – it was to go against the principles on which she stepped up to the role of councillor a century and a half before as a young matron, inexperienced in the chaos that could erupt in galactic politics. But her own government, her colleagues on the Council, Sparatus and Valern, and the governments of all four Council races had denied the reports. Only Anderson, Hackett and herself tried to prepare for the arrival of the Reapers, culminating in the Alliance sending Shepard to annihilate the Alpha Relay, wiping out an entire system to give the galaxy six more months of peace. And ignorance.
So when the Alliance sent the message out, she knew them to be telling the truth. Reconvening the meeting with Kharaz just two hours after she had sent him away in disgrace, the councillor accepted his plea, allowing the first of hundreds of refugee ships to disgorge thousands of batarian families onto the station, women and children making the vast majority of those fleeing the carnage in their own space. When she saw the news reporters questioning the arrival of so many batarians, she knew her decision would prove problematic. Already Donnel Udina, the hideous replacement for David Anderson, was questioning her decision relentlessly, displaying the typical bigotry that the Alliance extended to their equally-bigoted batarian counterparts. Sparatus agreed with the human, asking why when the security services for the Citadel were already under strength across the entire station. Only Valern extended compassion to the batarians, but that was just on the surface - he stalwartly refused them access beyond the docks and into the areas of the station where they could be properly treated and housed. It took a monumental argument in the chambers to force her colleagues to allow doctors and charities the access to help the refugees. Entire docks were turned over to use for refugee families, housing hundreds at a time in squalor and filth, but safety under the watchful eyes of C-Sec officers.
The docks had been barely suitable for the first families to arrive at, poorly maintained by Citadel authorities at the best of times. Tevos had been forced to save time and give the role of organising reconstruction work for the facilities to Councillor Udina, but she had heard little from the human since. It worried her that the councillor was always focussing on aspects of the galaxy he couldn't control rather than smaller things that were taking place barely any distance from where his lavishly appointed office standing high above the Presidium.
"Councillor, is this a bad time?" The high-pitched voice of her attendant, Morila, wafted over to Tevos, snapping her out of her thoughts and turning the councillor's attention back to the matters that she was trying to desperately forget.
"No, Morila. What is it? And please, I would prefer to be addressed as Tevos, not by a title I do not feel entitled to right now."
"Of course. I have news, councillor. I mean, Tevos." The councillor motioned towards the sofa set up in the middle of the room, allowing her to relax after long hours of tedious meetings and endless signing of paperwork. As the councillor relaxed, finding herself being embraced by the warm confines of the sofa's corner, Morila sat nervously, deliberately distancing herself from her employer, her posture rigid and upright.
"What news do you bring? Have the other councillors begun organising the emergency construction teams for the refugee docks yet?"
"No councillor. It is about Earth." The last words caused Tevos to freeze in place, her vision narrowing so she could only focus on the sofa and the nervous asari sitting at the far end of it. Her heart began beating, faster and harder against her chest. A small shiver ran up her spine, sweat beginning to rise up amongst the folds on the back of her neck. "A few minutes ago, Councillor Udina and Ambassador Osoba lost all direct contact with Arcturus Station. Their emergency channels are not being answered, and transmissions from the Sol system have been dramatically cut."
"But-"
"There is more, Councillor. The Alliance has sent another coded transmission, this time from the SSV Orizaba, a dreadnought with their Fifth Fleet. It reads two words: Sabre One." Tevos blanked out for a brief moment. Sabre One, words that caused her heart to almost skip a beat in panic. Sabre, Alliance code for an attack on a human-settled world. One, the Alliance designation for Terra, Earth. It could only mean one thing. "Alliance vessels have been sighted pouring through relays into salarian space and the Serpent Nebula, many of them critically damaged and seeking immediate repairs. There has been no word from two of the seven Alliance Fleets, the Second and the Fourth, while the First fleet has taken very heavy casualties."
Though Morila was still recalling the information she was told to pass onto her, Tevos' brain ignored the words being spoken to her after she had mentioned the arrival of Alliance ships into salarian space. The universe shrank around the councillor, her brain ignoring what was potentially vital information and focussing on one thing alone.
"Kori." The word was whispered softly, quiet enough so that only Tevos could hear what she was saying. Morila caught the sound of a word, but it was too quiet for her to understand.
"What was that, councillor?"
"Goddess, no." Tevos' lower lip began trembling, her hands began shaking, the vibrations initially small but rapidly overriding the composure she usually covered her emotions with when in meetings. "What happened to the first fleet?"
"The first fleet has taken casualties of over fifty-five percent, councillor. The flagship of that fleet, the SSV Everest was not among the vessels reported to have arrived in the Annos Basin, while the surviving captains report that a portion of the fleet was sacrificed to save any remaining vessels."
"The Everest? The dreadnought?"
"Yes councillor." A solitary tear dropped from Tevos' left eye, further beads of moisture quickly being blinked away before they could fall as well. Morila leaned forward, but was waved away by the councillor, who pushed herself up and stumbled over to her desk, resting her hands on the carved wooden surface before slumping into the chair behind it, head buried in her hands. A small, nearly inaudible cry could be heard, piercing through the air like a bullet, suddenly developing into a wail of anguish and terror. Morila darted forward, placing a hand on the councillor's shoulder, but it was forced off by a violent twist. Unsure of what to do, the maiden retreated, still clutching the datapad with the report she had just delivered against her chest. "Was there someone you know with the Alliance? Someone on the Everest?"
Tevos fought back the sobs and tears, lifting her head up to stare at Morila with blood-shot eyes, the normally golden hue interwoven with violet. "Yes. A Lieutenant, serving on the Everest. He, I-" When the tears returned, cutting the councillor off from the words she needed to say, Morila placed her hand back on the councillor's back, this time the reassuring gesture being accepted by the older asari in front of her.
"Councillor, it is okay. This day would always have come. I only hope your bondmate has found peace with-"
"He is not my bondmate. His name is Staff Lieutenant Peter Naylor, and he is my son."
A/N: I appreciate people being honest with me – was that any good for a first chapter?
I hope the whole premise of Naylor and Tevos having a small shared history isn't ridiculous to some people, but to those that it is, I won't be explaining it for a good couple of chapters. It's only the start of a story, and who would reveal all the fun stuff in the first chapter anyway? Plus Tevos is a really hard character to write for, especially when trying to create from scratch the character behind what we see in the Council Chambers. And for the record, the word 'kori' is the phonetic Greek spelling for daughter… apparently. I'll be using a number of Greek phonetics to represent some of the older words that aren't a part of the standard asari language – you thank PMC65's use of Greek in The Shepherdess and the Questing Beast for that idea. I take no credit.
I'll more than likely be relentlessly posting all the chapters I've written for the next few weeks so that I actually make an effort to keep the pace of writing up, so keep an eye out for the next chapter at some point down the line. In the mean time, please leave reviews, and happy reading!