Author's Note: The very nature of Mass Effect makes it unfeasible to tell a conventional, literary narrative centered upon Commander Shepard without assigning him or her a particular personality and backstory, characteristics that inevitably are not shared in each player's experience. The piece that follows, a retelling of Mass Effect 3's finale, is told through the lens of a single possible player character and is in no way meant to be a definitive vision of paths untrodden.
Mass Effect 3: Sunrise
The view at the top of the rubble heap was enough to break Shepard's stride. The Beam was less than a kilometer away now, a font of blinding, crystalline light that ripped skyward through drifts of smoke and low, angry clouds, but the pulsing monolith was not the thing that held the Commander's attention, nor were the trio of monolithic, jet claws that buttressed the base of the Beam with eighty stories of Reaper carapace. A cleared swath of slag and vitrified earth made up the slope down to the energy projector, and it was this devastation that held Shepard's eyes.
The horrors that the Reapers had brought to every world they touched were well known to the commander, better perhaps than any other organic being born in the past fifty thousand years. She had been there when Sovereign's geth sacked Eden Prime. She had seen the vaults of human biomass stored onboard the Collector dreadnaught. Images from Palaven, Thessia, and a dozen other worlds were seared into her waking memory, and her dreams echoed with the ruin of a species that once stood astride the Galaxy, a token left to her by the prothean beacon that had changed so much. The ashen cityscape to her back was itself an inescapable reminder of the Reapers' malignant power, and the monstrosities that still lurked there evoked their influence far more viscerally than a field of charred concrete.
And still, it was the unvaried deadness of the landscape before her that gripped Shepard in that moment. On every world that the Commander had opposed the Reapers since their harvest began, signs of life before the war had been all around her – half-collapsed skyscrapers, derelict homes, abandoned vehicles, even London's antique telephone boxes, gray now from ash and smoke. There was a germ of hope there, something to restore if they somehow prevailed. But this slag... it held none of those memories, none of that possibility, no indication of what it had been before it wasted into nothing. In it was the fate that waited with defeat, the cultures and peoples of the Galaxy ground into sediment and layered over the blackened concretes of the thousand civilizations that had been erased before them.
The weight of a hand on her shoulder plate pushed the rumination into the back of her mind, but a cold weight had settled in her chest where only the hot pounding of adrenaline had ruled before.
"Shepard?"
Garrus had mounted the crest of the hill. The whole of his attention seemed to be on her, as though the towering Reaper installation was just another tumbledown apartment building. She saw a pair of fresh scorings on the breastplate of his cobalt armor, felt the urge to reach out and touch them.
"I don't think I've really stopped to think about what we're trying to do, not really," she said, very quietly. "There was always another step, another mission to focus on instead of the big picture. But now..."
"Now you don't think about it for a little longer." Garrus unslung his rifle and propped it against a steel girder. "You'll have plenty of time for that after. Write a book with Liara or something. She'd like that."
Kaidan scrabbled up the last few meters of the heap and stopped beside them, his eyes fixed on the Beam. Behind him, a handful of other figures in Alliance combat fatigues were also making their over the uneven terrain from the sinkhole where their armored transport was marooned.
"The transmission's completely blown. We're on foot unless someone stops by to give us a lift."
He squinted at the triangular platform directly beneath the Beam.
"You'd think they'd try to seal it off or shut it down. The Reapers must know what we're trying to do by now."
"I'm not seeing much activity down there," Garrus said, crouched low and nuzzled up to his scope. "A few husks, maybe an armed unit or two, but not what I'd call a garrison."
"They probably didn't think we'd get this far." Shepard shouldered her assault rifle and stepped out onto the charred slope. "Let's not give them any more time to reconsider."
"Hold it, Commander." Admiral Anderson joined them, leaving Major Coates and the other marines on guard several meters below. Few of the Reapers' indoctrinated thralls were visible from their vantage point, but gunfire and inhuman screeching still echoed from districts within sniping range. "That's open ground down there, a kill zone. I can't give you cover, but you don't have to charge into this one alone, not this time."
He turned back and jerked his head in the direction of the destroyer's corpse. The ship had fallen across a block and a half of what had once been upscale housing and several of its jointed tentacles were buried in the remains of a neighboring complex of buildings, forming a low roof over the intervening street. A stream of troop transports had already begun to pour from the rubble-strewn tunnel, some of them so badly damaged that flames licked out from open maintenance panels. Soldiers emerged on foot as well, some missing combat helmets and other pieces of gear, even more walking with obvious wounds. And still, they came.
Shepard was watching a half-squadron of Alliance gunships skirt over the crater that had been the destroyer's eye cannon minutes before when she felt the air around her armor crackle. A sound and a sudden, familiar feeling of disorientation made Shepard turn back to the Beam and look upward. The others followed her gaze, and for a moment, none of them spoke or moved or breathed.
Like a vast, gauntleted hand reaching down from space, the Reaper tore through the cloud cover. Its six tentacle appendages splayed out beneath it as it fell, each one a colossus in its own right. When the lowermost pair struck the ground, the ship entity was deep into the wasteland on the far side of the Beam, but it still dwarfed the platform's perimeter towers, a finned mountain of impenetrable, black plate that blotted out the horizon.
Shepard saw two ranks of piercing yellow light emanating from the forward mass of the carapace before an impact tremor nearly threw her back onto the rubble.
Harbinger.
"Get to the Beam."
In one moment, Shepard was still frozen in place, staring upward at the Reaper as it settled onto its second set of tentacles. In the next, she felt her legs pumping beneath her, the weight of her rifle swinging in her arms. She was running, downhill.
"Now!"
She heard the footfalls behind her even as the command left her lips. Then there were more, running bodies flying across the melted surface. A buzz-whine filled the air above her and a deep rumble rose behind it. Shouting. The blast and recoil of a tank gun. Shepard did not look back. She just ran, and the blinding pillar of blue-white rose up before her.
A klaxon swept across the slag field in a wall of sound, pure menace. Before the noise could fade into the surrounding cityscape, one vertical rank of yellow pinpricks flared and a lance of screaming energy lashed out between two of the Beam's towers. The blow fell far to Shepard's left, but she still felt the heat of it through her shielding and combat gear, heard the bubbling squeal of evaporating steel and the concussion of something heavy collapsing to the ground.
Faster.
Shepard leapt over a ragged depression and came down running. A six-wheeled Krogan tomkah thunder past on her right, tailed closely by an Alliance gunship. The aircraft's anti-personal gun was firing at something, but Shepard did not slow to look for its target. An instinct told her to move left and she did, too distracted by the pounding behind her ears and the light ahead to give the movement any thought.
Harbinger vaporized the gunship and cut the krogan vehicle in half in a single stroke, the first in a hail of attacks that rained down in an arc around the commander. When a lone marine who had somehow managed to get ahead of her vanished in a bloom of heat, she faltered for an instant and then pressed forward again, pounding through a searing cloud of ember and what had been flesh. Her helmet's filter kept out most of the smell, but she could still feel the give of flash-heated concrete under foot. Struggling against the smoke, Shepard heard voices piping through her ear receiver, knew vaguely that they must have been echoing against the inside of her visor since the Reaper opened fire.
"Anubis Company at quarter strength, the fields do nothing..."
"Break formation! As many targets as we can give it!"
"Do you have a fix on the Commander? Was she in the comm rig?"
"Leave the damn gun and move! Get yourself out!"
Swirling ash parted and the perimeter towers of the platform were flanking her, dark blurs that swallowed her peripheral vision. The Beam was a hundred meters away now, less, a slash of white through the fog of sensation that crowded out all but the most basic thoughts. There was nothing between Shepard and its platform but a patch of flat, dead terrain.
A few steps. Past all of it but a few more...
The world beyond her helmet contorted, air and earth and light shivering and clawing at one another like living things. Shepard's muscles pulsed and a boot came up, but when it came down again, she found nothing but air. She was tumbling, swimming through air. Warmth spread across her back and into her limbs, not entirely unpleasant, working through the tension in her calves and seeping into her skull. The feeling washed into and over her eyes, a starburst of color, and then passed, leaving nothing.
Time and time again, she saw the world die. In the years since the beacon on Eden Prime had reached into her mind, that failing sphere of blood and stone had risen into the light of her mind's eye often, only to fall into darkness once again when she woke. She knew its name without ever having been told, and knew that she was the last who would ever know it.
Words, dissonant and unsympathetic, rang about her in empty space.
"The pattern has repeated itself more times than you can fathom. Organic civilizations rise, evolve, advance. And, at the apex of their glory, they are extinguished. The protheans were not the first. They did not create the Citadel. They did not forge the mass relays. They merely found them. The legacy of my kind."
Tendrils clad in metal lurched from the world's black vastness, and amidst them many eyes watched.
"The Crucible is not a prothean design. It is the product of the civilizations of innumerable cycles. Each one rediscovers it, improves upon it, and ultimately fails. The protheans nearly completed their iteration of the device, but indoctrinated scientists, believing that they could use the Crucible to control the Reapers rather than destroy them, revealed its location and sealed its fate. This is merely one aspect of the cycle, and it shall recur again."
These words were newer, calm and resigned. With them, a shape resolved within the curvature of the world, a plated sphere mounted upon a great pylon, its far end aglow with light and movement. The tendrils closed around it and she felt the urge to recoil, to let darkness wash away the images as it always did. But, this time, she knew she could not look away. Waking would not bring relief. The dead world was all around her, and the only way out was through.
"Strength for Cerberus is strength for every human. Cerberus is humanity."
And now, she remembered.
Shepard's body shook with a sudden spasm and she bolted up into a sitting position.
"Him."
The word tumbled out without her knowing why, a last throe of the quickly-receding dream state.
"What?" The voice was close at hand, breathless. "Shepard, are you with me? We have to move!"
She felt a jolt of pain shoot through her skull and clutched at her head. Someone had removed her helmet, and she felt blood welling from her scalp. Touching the wound brought more pain, and with it her other senses resolved. She saw chunks of slag and jagged concrete scattered about her legs, heard the screech of hyper-accelerated matter ripping through atmosphere and armor, felt something close about her and hoist her onto her feet.
"We've got to get her to cover!"
"There is no cover! We've got to make it to the Beam!"
Slowly, as though she had never moved in such a way before, Shepard looked left, then right. Garrus and Kaidan were hefting her down the last of the slope, their arms locked together behind her shoulders. Garrus' bowl-faced helmet was also gone, and she could see his mandibles flare and flatten against his jaw from exertion as they stumbled along. The biotic's faceplate was still in place, but she could see that much of the armor covering his chest was burned away, revealing a mass of blackened fabric and oozing skin.
"Kaidan..."
The major's eyes met hers through his visor and his pace slowed.
"The suit got the worst of it, Commander. Can you walk?"
Shepard could feel the tips of her boots scrapping along the slag. She willed one to move, to come down flat, and the other followed.
"Yeah. Yeah, I can." She slipped from their arms and grabbed Garrus' waist plate, testing each leg. "Keep on the objective. I'll be right behind both of you."
A blinding pool of yellow light fell across them. Garrus tried to bring his gun to bear on the source of the illumination and vortices of biotic distortion manifested in Kaidan's palms, but Shepard found herself empty-handed, her rifle lost in the blast. Her right hand shot to her hip, but the hair on her head pricked up before she could draw the sidearm, charged with a ripple of static electricity. Her hand fell away and she looked upward.
Through the glare, Harbinger looked back at her.
"Shepard." Garrus' voice was whisper. "I..."
She tried to turn away from the consuming light, but her muscles rebelled against her, as though they no longer were hers at all. Words echoed in her head, more than a memory.
Know this as you die in vain: your time will come, your species will fall.
It was all she could do to shift her arm and probe for Garrus' hand. A leaden fingertip brushed up against something solid.
The tremor was so powerful that Shepard actually heard the ground beneath her groan and crack as she was knocked off of her feet. Then she was on her back, watching immobile as the tops of the Beam's perimeter towers swayed violently against the roiling clouds. It took the commander a moment to realize that the structures were shuddering too rapidly to be simply moving under the earthquake's influence – whatever construct they were a part of was thrashing of its own accord, and the ground was moving with it. Between the clawed peaks, the crystalline light of the Beam pulsed star-bright for an instant, and when the flaring faded, Harbinger was in the air, its eyes turned skyward. The ship entity's monstrous mass effect field tore through gravity and cloud cover alike, and in a few heartbeats the only trace of Harbinger was the distant roar of a sonic boom.
The vibrations of the towers continued for a few more seconds before subsiding into a metallic shriek that emanated from the ground beneath them. Another sound rose and entwined with the clatter as Shepard and her companions were pulling themselves back onto their feet, a chorus of ghoulish wailing that any Alliance solider could identify instantly.
"The husks," Kaidan said, his sidearm aimed at the Beam platform.
The low, spike-trimmed structure was less than thirty meters away now, close enough that Shepard could make out the guardians that Garrus had scoped out before Harbinger's arrival. Her pistol was in hand and trained on the gray, corpse-like creatures before her eyes truly registered them, her muscles primed for the ingrained shoot-shoot-stab-stomp routine that would put the mindless things down and keep them down for good. But the first knot of husks she saw weren't shambling down from the platform, skeletal, once-human hands outstretched – half a dozen were flat on their naked backs, cybernetic-knit spines arched stiffly upward as they moan with mouths that did not move. Another group, clustered around a spine of Reaper carapace that jutted from the edge of the platform, was still upright but just as oblivious to the living bodies close by. They had one of their own number surrounded, a corrupted turian by the remnant of a crest at the back of its skull, and seemed intent on tearing it limb from limb. The beset creature was armed with a projectile weapon and cut down a handful of husks until one, relieved of half its face and most of its left arm by the gunfire, leapt onto the turian's plated chest and began clawing with its remaining hand.
Shepard brought a hand up to her ear and was rewarded with a burst of static from her transceiver, still in place even though her helmet was lost somewhere in the killing field behind them.
"Sword, this is Hammer," she said. "Are you still up there, Admiral?"
There was a pause, long enough to draw a look from Kaidan.
"Affirmative, Commander." A flurry of indistinct voices accompanied Hackett's. "What is Hammer's status?"
Shepard glanced back at the ruined slope. A haze of dust and ash hung heavily over much of it, opaque and ghostly in the Beam's light. There were hints of movement further up the slag, far-off sounds that mingled with the husks' wailing, but there was little to suggest that the combined military might of the Galaxy had marched at her back only minutes before.
"We're... a few of us made it to the beam, sir," Shepard said. "Harbinger got here before we did. There was no way anything could have made it through that kind of a barrage, but it just withdrew before it could finish us off."
A new voice carried over the line.
"Hostile destroyer groups two, three, five, and nine collapsing! All capital ships in that zone have begun to fall back towards orbital terminus three!"
Hackett issued a few quick, inaudible commands and then spoke back into his communicator.
"Same thing on our end, Commander. The Reapers were really tearing into us, and then they just stopped advancing. Best guess, something's disrupted their command and control capability. Damned if I know what, but we're not going to get another chance like this. I'm bringing in the Crucible now."
"And we'd better have the Citadel open when you get there," Shepard said, voice rising as a sudden burst of interference clogged the channel. "Acknowledged, Admiral."
"Hostile exiting the Beam!"
Garrus raised his rifle to his shoulder and trained it on the center of the platform. A large figure, nearly the size of the krogan-turian amalgamations that the Reapers used as shock troopers, was lurching out of the white-blue cascade. Shepard and Kaidan trained their weapons on it as well, and the commander took a step back, acutely aware of the lack of cover anywhere nearby.
The thing had the death mask of a typical human husk, the same lamp-like eyes and metallic skin, but there was still evidence of clothing over its grotesquely-muscled frame and a recognizably human weapon was half-fused into one arm. The shoulder plate draped awkwardly above the gun bore a familiar gold symbol, recognizable even at range: one elongated hexagon laid upon another.
Cerberus.
After clearing the Beam, the new arrival found itself standing over one of the smaller, immobile husks. Its head lacked a neck to pivot on, but the creature shifted its weight abruptly, a marionette-like movement that brought its eyes into contact with those of its slighter fellow. The husk did not recoil or move in any way, but the pitch of its wailing spiked, producing a noise that was unsettlingly close to a genuine scream of terror. The noise amped higher and higher, until the corrupted Cerberus agent crushed the husk's head under the hard mass of synthetic flesh and cracked composite that had once been its foot.
The creature turned to dispatch the next prone form, but the husks still capable of movement turned from their smear of cybernetic implants and turian biomass and lurched toward the larger figure, that same unearthly cry beginning to rise from their frozen maws. Gun-arm flashed, rattled, and the first husk disintegrated under a brief and brutal burst of fire. The next exploded mid-leap, withered flesh and augmented bone shredded from sternum to groin.
"What the hell's going on up there?"
By way of response to Kaidan's question, Garrus fired off a shot that put a fist-sized hole in the Cerberus thing's chest, right where the heart should have been. It turned away from the remaining husks and swung its weapon towards the turian, but another bullet socketed into the creature's mouth and ripped out the back of its skull. Limp, it spun backwards and collapsed on its side, a scant meter from the eddying light of the beam. The husks were on it in an instant, blade-like fingers grating against armor and digging out chunks of desiccated viscera.
"Can't say I'm very fond of the Cerberus friends we've been making lately," Garrus said as he thumbed another explosive round into the chamber of his sniper rifle. "And it doesn't seem like the full Reaper treatment has done much for their dispositions."
Shepard nodded. Worrying about why the indoctrinated were suddenly attacking one another was as useful as lingering on the fact that Harbinger hadn't reduced the lot of them into a dispersing cloud of cinders when it had the chance. The biggest question mark of the insane assault still lay ahead, and any Reaper infighting, no matter what might be causing it, only increased their odds.
"Let's hope the Illusive Man didn't deliver the Reapers too many more recruits when he went over. Come on, we don't have much time."
Shepard took a step towards the platform, her weapon trained on the frenzied husks, but Kaidan put a hand on her shoulder before she could advance any further. His other hand was raised to the side of his helmet.
"Commander, switch back to the main Hammer channel," he said, clearly distracted. "I think... yes! We're not alone out here! It's the..."
The ground between them dissolved into a spray of smoke and chipped concrete. An impact at shoulder level sent Shepard spinning sideways, away from Kaidan. A wash of heat and electrical hissing instantly told her that her suit's kinetic shielding had absorbed a hit, but without her helmet's HUD she couldn't be immediately sure what had shot her, or from where. She managed to catch herself and crouched low, trying to reduce her profile as much as possible in the open terrain. Somewhere next to her, Garrus' rifle cracked and was answered by the chatter of fire from the direction of the Beam. Three more of the Cerberus creatures were wading out of the light with their weapons raised and spraying.
Shepard took a breath, focused on the foremost hulk and fired in its direction until the thermal clip of her pistol heat-discharged. It was a long shot for an unscoped weapon, evidenced by the unfocused nature of the return fire, but more than half of her rounds found their mark. Each hit prompted a flash of light that momentarily obscured a part of Shepard's target, but when the luminance receded, the thing was still moving. It plodded forward, leapt from a raised lip of the platform onto the melted surface, and raised its misshapen weapon arm into a firing position once more.
"Some of these things still have shields," Shepard said as she slapped another clip into her pistol and began to back away from the advancing creature. "Kaidan, can you disrupt them?"
The response that came from her right was more a grunt than any word she could understand, but a mass effect field flickered into being around the indoctrinated trooper's torso and lashed against its suit barrier. A storm of minute distortions, whirlpools of light and fluctuating gravitation, quickly overwhelmed the weakened defense system and the wearer suddenly found itself floating half a meter off of the ground, caught in a bubble of neutral gravity. Garrus was quick to take advantage and the thing's gaping, rigid face was flying away from its body in several pieces by the time the biotic anomaly subsided a few seconds later.
"Next target!" Shepard shouted. "Left!"
Another of the corrupted humans collapsed before it reached the edge of the platform, but the others advanced unperturbed, firing with accuracy that increased with each step. A flurry of bolts shattered a centimeter from Shepard's forehead, staggering and blinding her momentarily. Her suit's shield projectors weren't designed to deflect weapons fire indefinitely, and the smell of ozone filling her nostrils was anything but a positive indicator of their status.
"No good, Shepard!" Garrus called out over the din. His sniper rifle lay discarded a few paces in front of him and a close-range turian repeater fired short bursts in his hands. "We've got to break!"
"No!"
Shepard knew that if they turned and ran flat out for the nearest of the Reaper spires, one or two of them might make it to cover. But then what? The Beam and whatever lay on the other side of it was everything, their only shot. If they broke now, there was a good chance that no one would ever get close to the platform again. If she turned away, everything she had done and everyone who had sacrificed themselves for this moment would be dust on a dead world.
The commander chanced a sideways look at Garrus, fully aware that more creatures were emerging from the Beam and that the ones already out weren't going down quickly enough. Shepard had known and fought alongside the turian for years, shared the most intimate of experiences two sentients could with him, and she still hadn't mastered his subtle, alien facial expressions. His eyes, though, she knew, and the alertness in them told her everything she needed in that moment.
"We hold here," Shepard said. "You're with me?"
"Always."
The gun of one of the Cerberus troopers traced a path in the slag between the two of them and they responded in kind, firing until it dropped onto one knee, oozing black ichor from its wounded organic components.
"And you, Kaidan?" Shepard called, not daring to turn away this time.
Something moved above her head and for a heartbeat Shepard expected to hear Harbinger's baleful klaxon, but the object was too small, too fast, and too close. It streaked over her and landed behind the staggered trooper like an artillery shell, sending it flying three full body lengths. The air around the impact site crackled with biotic energy as a slender figure rose up at its heart, its fists engulfed in spheres of roiling distortion.
"You run with the nicest guys, Shep!" Jack appraised the next rank of once-humans with a grin. "A few of them look like they need a good fucking, and I'm in a damn good mood for it!"
She was in the middle of them before Shepard could even begin to respond, a blur of coruscating energy and tattooed flesh that made the indoctrinated hulks look like dented metal trash cans caught up in a hurricane. The commander watched the spectacle transfixed, a mixture of relief and confusion swirling around in her head like the anomalies rippling down Jack's bare arms. A spinal column cracked loudly somewhere in the melee, and a hundred other sounds poured into Shepard's conscious mind with it.
The rev and hum of motors and drives. The unmistakable clamor of many feet running. Weapons of a dozen different makes and classifications cracking and hissing and roaring. And above it all, voices. Different words, different languages, vocal apparatuses of wildly divergent biology and none at all, rising together.
A battle cry.
The first wave rushed past Shepard with the reckless abandon of a force ten times its number. Shepard guessed that there were no more than two dozen individuals in the battle line, mostly Alliance marines with a handful of alien soldiers scattered throughout – asari commandos, salarian special forces, even a quarian with a missile launcher slapping against the back of his environment suit as he ran. Many were only armed with sidearms, and a few didn't seem to have any weapons in hand at all, but they threw themselves at the Cerberus monstrosities all the same. The remnants of the vanguard that Jack hadn't already crumpled into twitching bricks disintegrated almost immediately under the sudden barrage, but more were still spilling out of the Beam. Many more.
A hand closed around Shepard's ankle and she looked down to see a man in battered Alliance combat gear collapsed at her feet. She dropped down and slid her arm under his shoulders as delicately as she was able. The soldier's helmeted head rolled backward and Shepard saw that the visor was smashed, the composite around in it ruptured least two places. Unable to see through cracked and tinted glass, Shepard didn't recognize him until she noticed the large, matted wound on his chest.
"Kaidan..."
It came together in a dreadful instant of realization, the frantic single-mindedness of the battlefield swept away. Shepard had seen the wound Kaidan had sustained during the charge, but she hadn't had time to ask him if his personal shields were still functional. They had been exposed to enemy fire for well over a minute and Kaidan had been fighting, drawing fire, for all of it. The commander remember the shots exploding in front of her face and a crushing pressure clamped down on her gut.
A wheeze escaped through the fissured faceplate.
"We need a medic! Garrus!"
The turian took in the scene in a glance and jogged off without another word, angling towards a small group of armored vehicles that were weaving their way down the blasted slope, headlights and combat lamps illuminating snapshots of Harbinger's ruinous power in the deepening gloom.
Shepard activated her omnitool and ran the holographic interface over Kaidan. The readings weren't precise, but she had seen battlefield trauma far too many times, and there were some signs that didn't require much interpretation. The pressure had spread into her throat, and when she tried to speak, the effort was almost too much to bear.
"I'm getting this helmet off of you, okay Kaidan?" She brought her hands to the neck seal but paused when she found the lining cracked and leaking blood. "I've got medigel. Just a little and you'll be fine. Just wait a second, Kaidan. I'm right here."
Shepard caught a whispering, burbling sound and Kaidan shifted in her arm, as though he was trying to sit upright.
"Don't move," she said, fumbling one handed for one of her hip pouches. "No one's leaving you here. I've just got to get the medigel, and you'll be up in no time. Can't have you racked up in the hospital again. Just one second."
With a suddenness that made Shepard catch her breath, Kaidan went stiff and a wave of energy swept down his body, covering both of them in a sheath of swirling, flame-like distortion. Then his hands were on her back and arms imbued with an irresistible strength pulled her closer, until her face was level with his. She still couldn't make out flesh beyond the shattered glass of his visor plates, but now there were two points of blue light burning in the darkness.
"Everybody dies." Kaidan's voice was calm, quiet, and perfectly clear. "My time, not yours. Do what you've always done, Shepard. I'm sorry that I couldn't see you to the end. I'm sorry for doubting. I'm sorry... sorry that I never told you."
The lights burned for a second more and winked out. Shepard's skin tingled with the lightness of the biotic field, and then that too was gone.
"You never had to."
Shepard lowered the limp body to the ground and rose. She looked down at the helmet and was taken by the sudden urge to remove it, to let Kaidan look free on Earth's dark sky, but the commotion of battle was already filtering back into her awareness. Automatic reactions took over and Shepard felt herself turn away, draw her weapon and check its clip, appraise the disposition of the fighting nearest her. As she watched a marine empty her rifle into the chest of a toppled Cerberus monstrosity, it occurred to Shepard that she couldn't remember the last time that she had cried.
The thought retreated as the three-wheeled frame of a Mako ground to a halt between her and the battle line.
"Its damn good to see you still breathing, Commander." Admiral Anderson jumped from the back hatch of the transport and grabbed her by the upper arm, giving it a good shake. He seemed to be favoring his right leg slightly as he moved, but was otherwise unhurt. "I haven't seen anyone move like that in a long time. Where's Major Alenko?"
A handful of soldiers followed Anderson out of the fighting vehicle, Garrus with them. Shepard shared a look with him and the turian's eyes fell to the ground.
"Kaidan didn't make it, sir," she said.
Anderson nodded slowly.
"That's... he was a fine soldier. One of the best."
There were a thousand ways Shepard could have responded, a thousand things that absolutely needed to be said, apologies and thank yous and goodbyes for everyone she had cared for and lost without having the chance... but Kaidan had asked one thing of her. Just one.
She would do what she always did.
"Yes, sir. The best."
Garrus was fiddling with the range finder of his rifle, adjusting it and readjusting it with quick snaps of his fingers, just as he had done when he had learned of Legion's sacrifice on Rannoch.
"Admiral." Major Coates was leaning out from the Mako's hatch, the right half of his face covered with a medigel patch. "The last group's reported in. We're waiting on your order."
Anderson edged out of the cover provided by the vehicle's hull and Shepard and the rest followed. The remnants of Hammer were almost to the edge of the platform, using the fallen Cerberus hulks and blast holes in the slag as cover while a mob of still-functional indoctrinated units rained fire down on them at close range, unrelenting even as their barriers failed and parts were shot from their synthetic-encrusted frames. Jack and a several other biotics stood in the middle of the crossfire, projecting shields of nullified space to cover the allied forces as they advanced, but Hammer was still taking casualties as fast as the creatures were, and more monstrosities were still lumbering out of the Beam.
"We can't clear that platform with ordinance without risking the Beam and we can't try and attrition these things out," Anderson said, raising his voice so that everyone gathering around the Mako could hear. "Major, give our heavies a go. We're doing this the old fashioned way."
Coates ducked back out of sight to relay the order and Anderson lifted his assault rifle one-handed into the air. The assembled marines broke for the rest of Hammer without hesitation and Shepard fell in with them, Anderson and Garrus close on her heels. Other small groups were moving from the night into the luminance cast by the Beam as well, some of them bellowing or chattering in tongues that Shepard had heard on the opposite side of the battlefield more often than on hers. Ahead, a geth prime, twelve feet of integrated weapon systems and crimson plate, waded out into the line of fire, its pulse rifle burning through barriers and turning exposed Reaper synthetics into puddles of molten metal.
Anderson matched Shepard's pace, his limp made obvious by the effort of running, and shoved his rifle into her hands before drawing his own sidearm.
"You're better with that than I ever was," he said, panting. "Sorry we didn't have time to go back for your helmet. I know you've already lost one once."
"I'll pick it up when we get back," Shepard said. "Try and find it while I'm gone, if you're feeling guilty."
"Oh, I'm not letting you jump into this one without me."
The two of them veered out of a spray of fire and crouched behind a dead hulk as rounds ripped into its flesh. Peering over the thing's shoulder, Shepard saw an asari in the distinctive uniform of a justicar fling an armored monster in a pack of smaller, more husk-like creatures that had just materialized from the light cascade.
"You deserve to have someone watching your back, Commander," Anderson said, pistol held at the ready. "Whatever happens up there, remember that it's not just you and your team, not this time. We're all behind you."
And then they were out, adding their own fire to a barrage that intensified as more and more of the battle line saw Shepard stepping out into the fray. In twos and threes, warriors of every species and affiliation leapt from what meager cover they had been able to find, and the sound of weapons fire drowned out everything save the pounding the commander felt drumming against the inside of her skull. The sheer ferocity of the attack seemed to finally give the defenders pause and as they cringed back behind failing shields and shattered limbs, a path to the Beam opened in their ranks. Once again, the commander became the crest of a wave of bodies in desperate motion, but this time there was no machine god to break it.
Shepard came to one of the wide ramps that converged on the light cascade and began to climb, her rifle reporting in a constant, rapid rhythm as she advanced. Halfway up, some instinct or flickering in the corner of her eye sent Shepard spinning to one side. She saw the thing as it dove at her from the base of a slender pylon thrust from the platform, skeletal arms outstretched, scythe-like fingers splayed, dual-pupil eyes trained on her like firing nodes. An impact changed its trajectory and ripped out a length of its spine before Shepard could bring her gun to bear, sending it tumbling off of the platform with a gurgle of ruptured wetware.
The commander knew the shooter without having to search for him. Garrus still had her back.
That knowledge propelled Shepard forward and she cleared the rest of the ramp without slowing. She caught a glimpse of Jack to her right, felt the shockwave that sent half a dozen creatures sprawling onto the unyielding Reaper plate. To the left, a roar bludgeoned its way through the cacophony, resounding as much with joy as it did with rage.
Within meters of the Beam, a corrupted trooper of extraordinary size stepped across her path. Unlike its fellows, this creature had shed every discernibly human feature save its general body shape, and the weapons it had at the end of each arm were like nothing she had ever seen, entwined and infused with Reaper technology that made their muzzles leak the cold, bluish light of mass effect cores. The shots she pumped into its outthrust chest caromed off of a black carbon sheen that covered it from head to waist. It leveled a weapon at her but she was already inside its range, ducking and pivoting around its trunk legs, now almost close enough to the Beam to touch it.
The shaft of the other encysted weapon slammed her hard onto the platform. Shepard forced herself onto her back and brought up the rifle, firing blind. The flat of a foot the size of a human torso loomed above her face, its toeless rim already caked with gore. It was moving down when she registered it and Shepard had no time to do anything other than close her eyes.
A roar punched through the wall of noise once more, this one punctuated by a throaty grunt and the rip of a projectile weapon. Shepard forced her eyes open and found that her field of vision was clear save for the Beam reaching up into darkness behind her. She pushed up onto her elbows, still dazed from the blow. The huge creature was thrashing on its back a few paces away, a krogan boot on the place where its neck should have been and an automatic shotgun unloading into its belly. A reptilian face slashed with a vertical, four-part scar looked up from its work and met Shepard's unsteady gaze.
Wrex's lips mouthed a single syllable before the prone monstrosity jerked upward, forcing the krogan to smash it back down with the butt of his weapon.
Shepard rolled over once again, finding her hands and knees. A wall of blinding luminance soared up in front of her, so close that she could feel the slight warmth and vibration of the device projecting it. She began to crawl, one hand forward, then a knee. Something smashed into her side, overloading her barriers in a flash of ozone and sending a jolt of pain up her spine. She kept moving, hand then knee, hand then knee.
The Beam closed around the commander, a waterfall without moisture or pressure or sound. She tried to orient herself, tried to stand, but there was nothing within the column but light, nothing solid to counteract a sudden feeling of weightlessness. And then, she was flying.