(A/N: This was written before most of the information was released.)

~Synthesis/Ryder~

The Nexus arrived in the Helius system, and then the Tempest's shuttle didn't come back.

The youngest of the Ryder family, a small woman named Sara with dark hair and a gracefully sturdy figure, raced through the ship. Her boots were loud on the metal alloy of the walkway as she ran. "No, no, no," she exclaimed quietly, pushing her body against a door that wouldn't open fast enough. She gasped when it finally let her in and she almost fell, stumbling and then roughly landing against the back of a chair in the cockpit. "Where the hell is my dad?"

A salarian pilot worked the main console there, concentrating and not looking at her when his seat rocked violently against the impact. "The shuttle docked with the ship in front of us," he told her. "There are no life signs from either."

She looked up at the massive view screen. "Then why is it moving toward us?"

Neither of them knew the answer. When the Andromeda Initiative arrived at its destination, its occupants thought they were prepared for any eventuality. Each one had been thoroughly briefed and then sent into a cryostasis pod where they awoke six hundred years later to a galaxy that was quickly becoming terrifying in the sheer impossibility that it presented to them.

The ship in front of them held no life signs, traveling silently and peacefully through foreign stars.

"Wait, is that the SSV Normandy?" Sara asked incredulously.

"So it appears to be," a female turian named Vetra responded, entering the cockpit. She approached the human and stood calmly next to her as they both stared at the infamous frigate: Sara's eyes wide with astonishment and the turian's darkly incomprehensible. "And yet, it shouldn't be at all."

"More like can't be," the pilot muttered. He hailed the ghost ship anyway, because it still floated decisively toward the Tempest. "State your identity and mission parameters."

"Huh," a voice marveled curiously through scattered electronic static. "Didn't expect to hear a voice like that way out here."

Vetra's mandibles flickered outward in irritation, and she leaned over the pilot's console. "Who is this?" she asked, pressing a hand into the glow of the view screen where her fingers passed right through it.

"Jeff Moreau," the voice proclaimed.

She nodded, stepping back into a formal parade rest and straightening her back, because in the strangeness of the moment the pilot of the SSV Normandy being Jeff Moreau actually made a small amount of sense. "Your ship was lost over Alchera, flight lieutenant. What is it doing in the Helius System?"

"You're kidding, right?"

"Why would I be kidding?" she snapped. "The Hero of the Citadel died in the incident."

"No, no, no. Shepard came back," Moreau said. "Cerberus rebuilt him, and he kicked the Reapers' asses."

"John Shepard was marked deceased in 2183," the Tempest's pilot responded, mostly to Vetra. He glanced back to her uneasily and added: "The Reapers were never fully proven to even exist."

Moreau snorted. "See, that's where you're wrong. He came back and fixed everything for us." Moreau's voice was growing in condescension and Sara could almost hear the smirk he sent them across the vacuum. "Shepard joined synthetics and organics, and that fixed all of our problems."

Vetra's irritation laced through her subharmonics. "How would that fix your problems? What happened?"

"Well, I got laid."

There was static again, and the sound of a struggle. "We've arrived here to scout for other races to join with us," a new voice that sounded like a quarian disclosed suddenly. "The Milky Way galaxy was liberated by the Shepherd almost instantaneously."

Sara glanced around the dim light of the small cockpit, out of place with her lower rank as a chill crept down her spine at the looming situation presented to them. Vetra's expression grew harder and more dangerous by the second, and the salarian pilot's mouth was tight with a frown as he continued to scan the Normandy and found no life signs despite the declarations of its occupants.

Sara steadied herself, her hand still on the pilot's chair. "Where is Pathfinder Alec Ryder?" she inquired loudly and without the emotion she could feel crushing against her chest. "His shuttle docked with you twenty minutes ago during an exploratory roundabout."

"He's here with us," a turian on the ghost ship replied. The sound of his voice ripped through space, corrupted into an incomprehensibly painful cadence, and on the Tempest Vetra faltered backward under a sound only she could hear.

"Shit," she muttered, holding her head and leaning heavily against a nearby console. Something horrible had screeched beneath the words, clawing through the subharmonics to escape the message. "Turn the comm off," she ordered, her voice rough.

The pilot nodded, switching it off. Data scrolled along orange screens as he finished analyzing the Normandy, reporting subtle differences in its design and occupants compared to its original layout and crew. He turned around, shifting his body awkwardly in the chair as he looked up to Vetra and Sara. "Whatever is over there isn't lying," he said quietly. "They seem to be infected with some sort of virulent and synthetic nano-biotic disease that has completely overridden their original cell structures."

Vetra's eyes flickered between the view of the SSV Normandy and Alec Ryder's daughter. "Can we help them?"

"Doubtful. They're already dead, for all intents and purposes. It seems to be infectious."

"Turn the comm back on."

"-ara, honey," an instantly recognizable voice rumbled on the comm when it sprung to life. "I'm over here now, and we need to talk. Sara?"

Sara's eyes widened. "Dad?"

"Can you fly over, or clear us to board?"

She shook her head, her breath hitching in her chest in response. Her father's voice was careful and consistent in the heavy atmosphere of the cockpit as he continued to speak to her, gently attempting to coax her over to a ship that would perhaps infect her and the rest of the crew of the Tempest with something terrible. Data flew by on the screen with colors that lingered like candlelight across her eyes, presenting statistics and explanations that flickered painfully as she read them.

Alec Ryder was also dead, for all intents and purposes.

"It's amazingly virulent. His internal systems have already degraded into machinery," the pilot said, his chair rocking once again when Sara grabbed onto it. She couldn't breathe, and so she said nothing in response.

"I am sorry," Vetra offered softly. There was little else to say.

Alec Ryder chuckled in kind tones scattered with broken electronic static. "It's going to be okay, honey. It's amazing here. The possibilities are astounding."

Vetra glanced at Sara with a sympathetic expression, because she felt that there was only one correct answer to the question she needed to ask. "Orders, Pathfinder Ryder?"

Sara bowed her head at the new title. "Destroy it," she said quietly.

There was a rumbling wail beneath her boots in response. Metal began to twist around itself on the view screen as the shots fired, ship lights blinking and then faltering into the dark as the Normandy began to break apart under the attack, and then it exploded in a flash of bright verdant light before it could infect the Andromeda galaxy with its solution.

Sara sank down to kneel on the floor, not feeling the hands that began to lift her up into a promotion she had never wanted, gently trying to comfort her as they did so. She could only see the light that lingered, bright and lovely in the stars like her father used to be.