I

A Reason

Shepard knelt by Jenkins's corpse. "Stupid, overeager bastard," she muttered. "Too battle-hungry to watch his damn step, and we knew something'd gone down."

The new lieutenant, Alenko, was looking like he was about to lose his lunch. As a biotic, he probably hadn't seen a lot of frontline action. He hadn't been supposed to see it this time, Shepard reflected bitterly. This was a shakedown run on the books—a damn test drive—and even off the record, an uncomplicated pick-up-our-package. That had been the plan. There weren't supposed to be hostile geth. No one was supposed to die. Smoke rose in the distance. Shepard had a nasty feeling it was the colony burning.

"His family was here," Alenko said. "Saw that vid in the briefing, and . . ."

Shepard cut him off. "I know." Alenko flinched at her tone, and Shepard stopped. She hated losing people, but that was no reason to take it out on the one man she still had with her in this shitstorm. Kryik was off doing his Spectre thing all the way across the colony. Anderson had ordered radio silence. They had no backup, no plan for the current situation, no idea what the hell the current situation was. Kaidan had to be able to work with her, or it could be the two of them on the next hill, just like Jenkins.

Shepard breathed in, stood up, and unclenched her fists, and tried again. "We'll send a team down here later to retrieve the body," she said. "Give him a proper service. But right now our priority has to be to secure that beacon. You good to go, Lieutenant?"

"Aye-aye, ma'am."

Shepard gave Alenko the once-over. She didn't know him yet, hadn't ever worked with him before he'd been assigned to the Normandy, but his jaw was set and his hands on his pistol were steady. The nausea seemed to have passed, and he did seem like he could go on. "Move out."

The place was crawling with synthetics. Shepard didn't know what the hell they were doing on Eden Prime. She'd never seen them before. But something somewhere had kicked some kind of hornet's nest hard. Bodies were everywhere. Bodies in and out of uniform. Too many bodies, but somehow, not enough. Not as many as there should have been—not if a unit and a good part of the colony had been attacked. Mostly, the colony was deadly silent, and it set Shepard's nerves on edge.

In a way, it was a relief when they heard someone shooting in the distance. It meant Shepard, Alenko, and Kryik weren't the only organics still alive in the colony. But when Shepard and Kaidan crested the hill and saw their company, the soldier was in a bad way, pinned down by three synthetics, surrounded by the bodies of the fallen. And one guy . . . Shepard hissed as the synthetics impaled him on an enormous steel stake, like this was Transylvania or something.

"What the hell?"

The soldier on the ground fired at the synthetics closing in on her. Female in Sirta Foundation armor. It looked like the woman was wounded, but not beyond saving. Shepard knelt behind a rock, pulled out her rifle, and picked off the synthetics. Three shots, three exploded flashlight heads into their synthetic component parts, and the human woman stood up, looking around for her rescuer. Shepard went up to her.

Mid-twenties, average height and weight, vague nationality, seemed fighting fit, though justifiably shaken. Shepard evaluated the soldier's condition without even thinking about it. Considering the woman's nonregulation armor, she was probably an officer of some sort. She seemed to be taking similar stock of Shepard. Her too-bright brown eyes ran over Shepard's uniform and caught the commander's stripe on the shoulder, as well as her N7 designation, with the standard slight widening of the eyes. "Thanks for your help, commander. I didn't think I was going to make it. Gunnery Chief Ashley Williams of the 212. You the one in charge here, ma'am?"

"I'm Commander Shepard. This is Lieutenant Kaidan Alenko," Shepard confirmed. "The Alliance sent us to retrieve the Prothean beacon. Are you wounded, Williams?"

She pulled up a medi-gel application on her omni-tool, scanning Williams's armor for breaches, but Williams waved her off. "A few scrapes and burns. Nothing serious. The others weren't so lucky."

Her eyes wandered off to the guy on the stake, and she started shaking. "Oh, man, we were patrolling the perimeter when the attack hit. We tried to get off a distress call, but they cut off our communications. I've been fighting for my life ever since."

"We received a partial transmission," Shepard said. "It's geth, isn't it?"

"I think so," Williams confirmed.

"The geth haven't been seen outside the Veil in nearly two hundred years," Alenko observed. "Why are they here now?" Shepard shot a look at him. Why was hardly the question to be asking right now. What are we going to do about them was much more important.

"They must have come for the beacon," Williams shrugged. "The dig site is close, just over that rise," she said, pointing. "It might still be there."

The way she was shaking, still looking back at that guy on the stake, the blood on her armor where she'd probably tried to carry some other poor bastard to safety, the whole thing was like looking in a mirror, six years back. Shepard stood where Templeton had stood, coming in to pull Williams's ass out of the disaster zone, and knew Williams was seconds away from totally falling apart unless she gave her something to do fast. They weren't out of the fire yet.

"We could use your help, Williams," she said. "We lost a man back there, and we don't know what we're going into here."

Williams's jaw set then. "Aye-aye, ma'am," she said. "It's time for payback."

She set off, leading the way to the dig site. Shepard looked at the lieutenant, pointed at Williams's back, nodded. You watch her.

Alenko nodded. He got it. As the three of them pressed on, Alenko helped Shepard watch Williams's back, make sure she didn't break under fire after all she'd been through. For all her experience, Shepard hadn't worked with too many human biotics, but Alenko could do this thing where he could send the geth floating over everyone's heads, a much easier target for their guns. It was nice. Williams wasn't quite so unusual. She wasn't a tech or a biotic, just a damn good soldier, but the Alliance always needed more of those. She kept it together, too. And as the three of them pressed on toward the colony docks, Williams keeping it together got more and more impressive.

Everything was burning. Nothing was the way it should have been. The beacon wasn't at the dig site. And further on, they ran into more bodies impaled on the stakes. Only this time, as they drew near, the stakes shrank back into their bases, and the bodies slid off, now things, hybrid abominations. Tech zombies. They straightened to their feet, and began running toward the team with empty, glowing eyes and gaping mouths.

"Oh, god! They're still alive!"

"What did the geth do to them?"

"Never mind that! Open fire!" Shepard shouted.

The things kept coming and coming, impervious to a shot that would have made the humans they used to be fall to the ground screaming in pain. Only an explosive shot to the torso or a perfect headshot, it looked like, brought down the things. Except the thing was, when they were shot like that, they exploded in electrical bursts. The lieutenant was close to one, and cried out in pain as the charge went through him. Shepard ran over to him. One swipe of her omni-tool brought back the medi-gel application she'd almost used on Williams. She applied it to the burn, and the gel went to work, repairing the damage.

There were only two survivors at the research station where the archaeologists had been living, and right after that, Nihlus, who had been giving Shepard regular updates on his status over the radio, went silent, and Shepard just knew they'd found a whole new level of bad.

They continued on once the research station had been secured, toward a dock Nihlus had mentioned. And then, on the horizon, leaving the planet, they saw a ship, massive. The one that had been visible on the partial transmission from the 212 earlier. It was shaped like an enormous black hand, or a squid, trailing crackling red energy. It rocketed up, and away from the burning buildings of the colony, up ahead. Watching it, the hair on the back of Shepard's neck stood up inside her helmet, and she shuddered. It was like someone was walking over her grave.

"Whatever that ship left behind it can't be good," Shepard murmured. "Let's keep moving."

There were just four survivors on the docks among the geth rear guard and the human corpses. And one turian corpse. One of the survivors had been hiding behind the crates and had witnessed Nihlus's murder by another turian, one called Saren. One of the surviving scientists back at the research station had mentioned a turian, but Shepard had discounted his statement because he'd referred to the turian arriving before Nihlus could have possibly arrived, and the scientist in question had been more than a little unsettled by the attack. But now Shepard realized she'd been informed there'd been another turian in play.

The dock worker, Powell, told them the other turian, Saren, had taken the cargo train to the other docking platform. As Shepard looked at the geography of it, she realized the ship they'd seen before had to have left from the other platform.

"Let's move," she said. "Double-time."

That was how they found the charges. Shepard's bad feeling had been right on. The turian, Saren, had set the geth at the rear to blow up the docks. When she saw the first charge, with the timer five minutes and counting, she yelled.

"Lieutenant, chief, keep 'em off me! Gotta shut these down or we'll all be blown sky high!"

There were returning shouts of affirmation, but Shepard was already moving. She shut down the last charge with seconds to spare and stood with the others, on the now vacant platform, breathing heavily.

"Commander, look," Williams said.

She pointed to the edge of the dock, where a tall, unmistakably Prothean artifact stood, glowing green. "It's the beacon," she said. "But it wasn't doing anything like that at the dig site . . ."

"It's been activated," Shepard said. "Don't—"

She was already getting the idea that Alenko was too smart, too curious for his own damn good. He kept asking the why and how questions, when those were better off waiting until they'd got out alive. Now he proved her right about him again by stepping just a centimeter too close to the beacon. He gasped, tried to cry out. Some energy field from the thing started to lift him off his feet.

The only thing that flashed through Shepard's mind then was she was not losing anybody else. She tackled him, but then she was in the field, and she couldn't get free, and a vast, alien presence drove into her mind like red hot poker.

And then it was a blur of images. Protheans screaming, blood spurting, buildings toppling, planets exploding into dust. Everything, everything, falling to fire and crumbling to ash. An overwhelming pain, loss, anger flooded every part of Beth Shepard's mind. The suffering of an entire species, an entire civilization, and one black ship, like the one she'd just seen, against a dying star.

It was too much. Beth blacked out.

When she came to, she was back on the Normandy, with Doc Chakwas leaning over her and Alenko looking like he was afraid he'd killed her, until she told him that aside from a splitting headache, she was fine. Then it was all debriefs and explanations and what-the-hell-do-we-do-nows, and at last a decision to report what had happened to the Council on the Citadel. It was that big.

The colony on Eden Prime had been almost completely destroyed. So had the beacon, after whatever vision it had transferred directly into Shepard's brain. Apparently it had been damaged, anyway, damaged either by Saren, who Anderson thought must have activated it and used it first, and attempted to blow up the port so no one else would be able to access the information it contained, or already damaged when it had been unearthed at the dig site. Anderson thought that the damage might account for the disjointed quality of the information Shepard had received. Shepard thought it was probably because she wasn't a freaking Prothean.

Saren was another Spectre, like Nihlus. Anderson seemed to know of him. Hate him, too. He seemed incredibly eager to report Saren's rogue alliance with the geth, the destruction of Eden Prime. Not just because it was the right thing to do. Like it was personal, somehow. He didn't tell Shepard about it, and Shepard didn't ask. It was personal for her. More personal than anything had been in years. Anderson left Shepard in the med bay. For a while, even though Doc Chakwas had cleared her, Shepard stayed, staring at the wall.

"What do you fight for, Commander Shepard?" Nihlus had asked, just yesterday, in what had to be the last conversation he'd had before his death. Shepard hadn't been able to give him an answer. If he'd asked now, she thought she would be able to answer.

Eden Prime. What Saren and the geth had done to the colony down there set her angry on a deep, deep level. Angrier than she'd ever been in her life. Shepard had seen a lot of action. A lot of suffering. But she'd never seen anything like what the geth had done to the people down there. They hadn't killed them. Hadn't raped or enslaved them, where there was a chance of freedom, of healing. No, the geth had changed those colonists, those soldiers, turned them into mindless, monstrous tech zombies. Nonhumans. Antihumans. Abominations. Hacking people, mutilating corpses, using corpses as weapons against their former friends. Not only was it unnecessary, it was dirty, wrong, on the most basic level. Jenkins's family had been down there. Shepard wondered if one of the things down there had once been Jenkins's mom, or one of his siblings. She stopped that train of thought cold. That was a quick way to go the hell to pieces if she'd ever seen one. But fighting against the things that could do that to people? That was more of a reason to destroy something than Beth Shepard had ever had in her life.

But there was more to it, even. That vision, that freaking trip that had burned through Shepard's brain. Shepard didn't know what the hell it was about, but if Saren wanted to know about it, Shepard suspected this could be bigger than a rogue Spectre and geth beyond the Veil, even. Whatever the hell she'd seen was relevant to what Saren was doing, and that scared Shepard out of her mind. She couldn't piece together a single image's significance from her vision, except that ship, a ship just like the one she'd seen over Eden Prime. Saren's ship. In the vision, it was pretty damn clear what the ships like that had meant, even if nothing else made any sense at all.

Slaughter.

Death.

Extinction.

The feeling curled in Shepard's stomach like a six-foot rattlesnake, bloated, heavy, hard, and deadly poisonous. It was urgent she stop Saren from doing whatever he meant to do with the information in that beacon, information he'd killed a good portion of an entire colony to get. Shepard slid off the medical table, pinned her hair back up, and strode out of the med bay.

Williams was sitting alone at a table in the mess, tracing designs on the surface with a fingertip. Her eyes were glassy, her mouth slightly open. She was still back on Eden Prime. Shepard knew the signs. Anderson was Anderson, but no one else had even caused a blip on Shepard's ladar since Akuze. She hadn't let them. Never again, she'd promised herself after Akuze, and she'd kept that promise. But promise or no promise, something in her told her that if she ignored Williams now, it would be unforgivable. She wouldn't be able to live with herself.

Sweeps had confirmed. Gunnery Chief Ashley Williams was the sole survivor of the Alliance 212.

Beth sat down across from her. "It's like you've been spaced, isn't it?" she said without prelude. "Like you're lost, suffocating back there, watching them die around you again, and again, and again."

Williams sucked in a breath, closed her eyes, clenched her fists.

"Say it, Williams," Beth ordered her.

"They're all gone," Williams whispered. "Dead. My entire unit . . . the whole 212 . . ."

"Yes. They are. Williams. Look at me."

Williams turned her haunted face up to Beth. Her jaw was clenched. Sheer will kept her from shattering. Beth respected that. "I'm probably the only one in the fleet that can say I know exactly what you're going through," she said. "It was five years ago for me. I was about your age. Operations chief. And like the 212, the 179 had no warning before the attack, no chance to call for help. And just like you, I was left alone in the end, with all my unit, all my friends, dead around me, wondering why the hell I'd survived when they didn't."

"I wouldn't have. If you hadn't been there—" Williams began.

Shepard cut her off. Had to stop that kind of thinking before it had a chance to take root. "Maybe not, but you did, and now you're here, alive, so listen to me," she said. "What you're feeling right now will paralyze you if you let it. But you can't let it. Thresher maws are one thing, but what we just saw . . . if it's half as bad as I think it is, the Alliance will need you at the top of your game. I'll need you. You and Alenko are the only other military witnesses we have, and I'll need you to help me fight the enemy."

"Thresher maws . . ." Williams blinked. "Akuze. That was you? How did you . . . ? Commander, they're all gone. They were good people, ma'am. Why? Why them and not me?"

Beth dropped her gaze. "I asked myself that question every day for six months, Williams. I still don't know. I was up when the attack hit. Most of them weren't, but we had some damn quick risers in the 179. Augustus, we always said he slept with one eye open and his finger on the trigger. There's no reason in it. It was luck. Fortunes of war. Fate. Hell, God, maybe. Don't know if He was saving or punishing me." She grimaced. "Maybe my gun just didn't overheat, or I was the only one anal enough to carry around my radio everywhere, even when we thought we were safe. Orwell and Granger heard me. No one else did. And Orwell and Granger . . . they didn't make it. For whatever reason, though, I'm here, and they're not. You're here, and they're not."

Williams closed her eyes, gripped the table so hard the metal creaked and her knuckles turned white as bone. Two tears squeezed out from under her eyelashes and ran down her face, but no more. She just sat there, silent, fighting the battle to keep herself from breaking, and winning.

Beth sat with her until the shaking had slowed, and stopped, and Williams had opened her eyes again. This time, she saw Beth and the mess, not Eden Prime. "Thanks for saving me, ma'am," she said. "I'm glad you're here. What we saw—the Alliance will need you most of all."

"You and Alenko were the ones that dragged my ass back to the ship," Beth said. "Thank you."

"The LT did most of the dragging. Though carrying that monster rifle of yours was no picnic. That thing's as big as you are, ma'am, and it weighs a ton." She forced a smile.

Shepard smiled back, encouraging the effort. And if her smile was a little forced too, Williams was too distracted to notice. "Packs a hell of a punch, though. Carry on, Williams." She stood, clapped Williams on the back.

"Aye-aye, ma'am."

"Let's take this bastard down."

TRAILER FOR GETH ATTACK! (2183), THE SEVENTH VID WITH A CHARACTER BASED ON COMMANDER BETH SHEPARD (PLAYED BY GRACE WILSON)

Black screen. A gruff, deep, male voice yells:

GETH ATTACK!

And the words appear in big, white caps across the screen. A strong drumbeat and an electric guitar start up. A dark-haired, human woman in thick, blood-red armor, with a bloody bandage tied around one massive bicep, throws a geth (or a fairly good prop of one) over her shoulder to the torn-up, dirty ground, and shoots it in the face with her shotgun. Behind her, there is a shower of blood as another human is impaled on a spike encircled with electrodes. More geth come up on the woman, surrounding her, beeping and clicking menacingly.

GUNNERY CHIEF ASHLEY WILLIAMS: You want more? Come on!

Away in the colony proper, men, women, and children scream as geth come swarming over a hill. Drones are buzzing through the air, firing down at the scene below. A destroyer sets a house ablaze. A woman throws a vase at its head but can do little else, as another geth blocks the door. Her child comes to cling to her hand, watching the flames with large, terrified eyes. The woman throws herself at the geth at the door. She's gunned down. Blood spurts, and her lifeless corpse falls to the cheap prefab floor.

A man in the colony has a shotgun. He aims at one of the drones and shoots it out of the sky. As it falls, he picks it up and hurls it at another with a roar of rage.

Over the hill and back in the field, the smoke is rising. An enormous blonde woman in black armor with a red N7 on it is carrying an equally enormous shotgun. Beside her is a mammoth of a man, with a jaw like granite and dark curls down to his shoulders, wreathed in a (obviously computer-generated) biotic blaze.

LIEUTENANT KAIDAN ALENKO: They're burning the colony!

COMMANDER BETH SHEPARD: Come on!

The guitar goes crazy, riffing as a selection of increasingly violent, awesome scenes flash on the screen. WILLIAMS throws a grenade at a mob of geth, and charges through the flying mechanical parts toward more. ALENKO leaps off a small cliff, and send geth floating biotically all around him, as SHEPARD shoots them out of the sky. Just as WILLIAMS looks like she might be overcome, SHEPARD and ALENKO charge in, sending geth flying left and right, machine oil spilling all over them. COMMANDER SHEPARD throws one geth into another.

Against the background of the burning colony of Eden Prime, the faces of SHEPARD, ALENKO, and WILLIAMS are superimposed as the music builds to a crescendo. They look very heroic and determined. Then the audience sees a geth prime, full length, raising its cannon to chest height. There is a close up of the barrel, pointed straight at the audience. The geth fires, and the screen goes black.

3.3.2183

A/N: Welcome to Awakening, the fourth part of my series The Disaster Zone, and the first part to be set during the Mass Effect trilogy. If you're new, welcome! If you're interested, check out the prequels on my profile: Nobody's Child, Little Beth, and Soldier. They cover Beth Shepard's childhood in foster care, her time with the Tenth Street Reds, and her early military career, including the tragedy at Akuze.

If you've been following me for a while, welcome back! Obviously the characters and events here will be much more familiar than events in the prequels, and by now you know Beth pretty well too. I hope you continue to enjoy her journey. Awakening will continue on in the same style as the other entries in the series. This is not a novelization any more than the earlier stories were, but rather a succession of chronological one-shots, more concerned with Beth's character development and her relationships with the universe and people around her than with the action of a game you've probably all played many times. There will occasionally be "special features," such as the trailer above of the horrendously BAD action movie made for the krogan in 2183 in my head-canon, and more.

I am actually writing a more action-oriented novelization, not of Mass Effect but of Mass Effect 2. Sometimes Grace will be posted at first concurrently with and then after the next entry in this series, The Disaster Zone: Resurrection. After Resurrection concludes, I will not begin posting the sixth part of the Disaster Zone until Sometimes Grace has also concluded, so this series will be on hiatus for several months. But don't worry about that just yet. You've got several more weeks of uninterrupted Disaster Zone updates headed your way—and both Awakening and Resurrection are ten chapters long, as opposed to parts One through Three's seven chapters.

As ever, reviews are very welcome (and I respond to every one!) but not required.

Yours,

LMSharp