Author's Musings – A little late to the party, but my husband got me the ME trilogy set for my birthday, and the plot bunnies were hopping before I had finished the character generation for ME1.
Ideally, this will be the start of a story arc that will cover the timeline of all three games. Real life being the unpredictable and frequently inconvenient creature that it is, I'm not making any promises as to update intervals. As with the BG series, it was the NPC's who captivated me, so expect lots of all of them, at least in the ME1 part, which is what this story will cover. Don't expect a lot of romance, as I found the romances in ME1 to be rushed, given the circumstances; I'll be focusing on the development of friendships between the members of the crew. Ash, Kaiden, Garrus, Wrex, Tali, Liara...loved 'em all.
As with 'What Matters The Most' (and I will be continuing with that story until it is done), expect a mix of scenes from the game (with the focus on character thoughts/reactions) and my own headcanon of what went on in-between. I'll touch on game dialog at times, just to keep things familiar, but I figure that anyone who really wants a verbatim recap of game events can just play it again. Reviews/constructive criticism are always welcomed and replied to.
OOO
CE 2177
"What the fuck happened here?"
Second Lieutenant Jayce Shepard glanced up from her contemplation of the wreckage to meet the gaze of her senior NCO. Operations Chief Wyatt 'Buck' Hightower was a veteran of the First Contact War and more than twenty years of space exploration as a Systems Alliance Marine. If he didn't know what to make of what they were seeing, Shepard wasn't going to make any wild guesses just to save face.
"Your NCO can make you or break you." Her father had told her that more than once. "If you get a good one, you listen to them. Don't let yourself get hung up on rank. When you're under fire, those bars on your collar won't save your ass, but a good Chief just might."
"Damned if I know, Chief," she murmured, nudging a corroded scrap of metal with a booted foot, crouching to examine it more closely. Akuze was a terrestrial planet with a thin atmosphere composed mainly of carbon dioxide and nitrogen, with enough heavy metal deposits in the crust to have made colonization by the Alliance a worthwhile endeavor. The colonists had been in place for just under a year when contact with the settlement had been lost. A Marine platoon had been dispatched aboard the SSV Bastogne, with the full expectation that they would discover that a damaged comm link was the reason for the silence.
The mood among the younger Marines had been a mix of high spirited bravado, lecherous talk about lonely colonist women and grumbling about wanting 'real' action. The more experienced members of the platoon had kept quiet, knowing what the rigors of colonial life – particularly in the mining colonies – did to the good looks of those who endured them, knowing also that when action did come, it would likely bring death in its wake. Instead of a shorted out comm buoy, scans from orbit had revealed no activity, either at the settlement or the dig site, and when the Marines had landed, they had found...this.
"Damned if I know," she repeated, standing and surveying the scene that stretched before her. The settlement itself had encompassed little more than a hundred square yards of precisely placed prefabricated modular buildings where the colonists slept, ate and worked when they weren't at the mine site. Atmospheric field generators had held a zone of breathable air over the settlement, enabling the colonists to conduct their daily activities without environmental suits, but they were expensive to operate, particularly since each square foot of the settlement was covered by at least two of the five generators, to provide a measure of redundancy in the event of mechanical or electronic failure. Settlement area was kept to the bare minimum required.
No degree of redundancy planning could have anticipated the current situation, however. The prefabs had been tumbled about like a child's blocks, their sides crushed and shredded, contents strewn across the ground. Three of the five generators had either been destroyed or knocked completely offline; the other two were operating on emergency power. The quadrant that Shepard's squad was searching showed some breathable atmosphere remaining, but none of them cared to test their luck by removing their helmets.
"No life readings, Lieutenant," Corporal Charlie Briggs reported, looking anxiously from the readout on his scanner to the surrounding wreckage. Shepard acknowledged his words with a nod and a sigh. It was confirmation of what the orbital readings had told them, but there had been at least a slim hope of locating survivors in the areas where some air remained.
"Where the hell are the damn bodies, then?" Hightower growled. He wasn't expecting an answer, which was fortunate, because Shepard had none to offer. The colony had held nearly a hundred members, including five families with children. All of the colonists had been equipped with personal transmitters, but not a single body had been found, nor a single transmitter signal picked up within a mile of the settlement.
"Batarians, maybe?" Private Jeff Drake suggested darkly, and an angry murmur rose up from the rest of the squad. Clashes with batarian slavers were a regular occurrence on ships moving through the Skyllian Verge, where the batarians disputed Alliance territorial claims, and there had even been raids on colonies recently, but Akuze was nowhere near the Verge.
"Batarians don't use acid," Shepard replied, shaking her head as she stepped up to a battered prefab unit that lay on its side with a massive hole melted through one wall and part of the ceiling. Similar damage could be found on virtually every surface in the wreckage, and spectrographic analysis of residues from the edges of the holes identified the cause: sulfuric acid, and a lot of it. Transporting it would have been a logistical nightmare, to say nothing of delivering it in the quantities that had to have been used here. And perhaps most telling, acid was an indiscriminate weapon that would damage the merchandise that the batarians most sought: slaves.
"They don't travel underground, either," Briggs observed, kicking a clod of earth toward the hole it had likely been thrown out of. The pits were scattered throughout the area: thirty feet deep or more, and seemingly connected by tunnels diving deep beneath the ground. Where they opened, the dirt was thrown back to a distance of twenty yards and more, indicating an eruption of great force from below the ground.
"All right, Hightower, take Charlie One and search the north half of our quad. Charlie Two, on me." The platoon had been divided into five ten-man squads, each consisting of two four-man fireteams, a senior NCO and a junior officer in command. Four of the squads were searching the settlement; the fifth, accompanied by Captain Thomas Manning, was searching the mine site, one kilometer to the west. "Look for survivors, bodies and anything that could tell us what did this."
The instructions were obvious, but Shepard knew they were expected of her. Her first command, small though it was, had gone from routine to anything but, and she was determined to do things right. When you were the offspring of not one but two Alliance military heroes, the only ones watching you more closely than the people expecting you to do things right were the ones just waiting for you to screw up.
As Hightower led his fireteam north, Shepard turned and headed south on point, aware of the other four falling in behind her in a staggered column; between the tumbled modules and the pits in the ground, no other formation was practical. Briggs and his scanner were directly behind her; Private Anne Tyler followed him, with Private Edward Jalowski behind Tyler and Private Joseph Lockwood on rearguard.
They picked their way cautiously through the wreckage of the settlement, stopping frequently to inspect the damage. They found no survivors, nor any clues as to the cause of the devastation, though scorching, holes and other evidence of small arms fire made it plain that at least some of the colonists had resisted whatever had attacked. An older model VT7 Grizzly was flipped onto its side, the roof peeled back like a tin can and acid burns marring almost every visible surface. Shepard ducked into the cockpit; acid damage had all but obliterated the control panel, and when she reached beneath the dash to retrieve the black box that recorded operational data, including camera views, she found the port empty.
What the - She felt around the floor, but found nothing. It wasn't unusual for colonists to remove the data recorders to conceal evidence of activities that might void their contract with the sponsoring company: mining an unmarked lode to sell under the table, or exceeding approved working hours to meet a quota. There were logical explanations for the absence, but it still added another piece to a puzzle that already seemed hopelessly jumbled.
She drew back, glancing toward the pilot's seat, and almost wished she hadn't. The pilot was gone, but whoever it had been had left a layer of cooked flesh and material seared onto the seat, with a few days worth of decomposition adding to the fun. Glad that her helmet protected her sense of smell, she leaned out of the wrecked vehicle.
"Briggs, get me a DNA kit," she ordered brusquely. If the tissue wasn't too deteriorated, they should be able to recover enough of a sequence to identify whoever it had come from; it was a safe bet they weren't still alive. Not with that much meat left behind. But where were they? Batarians didn't take dead bodies; no one did.
"Aye aye, Lieutenant," Briggs replied. "Found a body?"
"Maybe enough for an ID," she replied, watching the apprehension ripple across his face behind the shield of his helmet, knowing that he'd be even more apprehensive if he saw what was in the cockpit. The corporal was two years younger than Shepard and had not yet seen combat; few in the platoon had.
As he reached in the pouch at his hip for the DNA sampling kit, the scanner in his free hand let out a trilling alarm. "Contact!" he cried out, almost dropping the scanner as he fumbled to free his rifle from its sling, the rest of the fireteam reacting to his panicked actions by bringing their own weapons up.
"Hold your fire, damn it!" Shepard scrambled out of the Grizzly and strode toward Briggs, pulling the scanner from his hand and shoving the muzzle of his rifle down. "That's a Marine ID chip transmitter sequence, Corporal!"
"Oh, shit!" Briggs went white inside his helmet. "I'm sorry, Lieutenant!"
Shepard ignored him, studying the readout on the scanner. Single contact, fifteen yards. "Approaching Marine, identify yourself!" she barked out, turning in the direction the scanner indicated. "You are about to get your ass shot off!"
"Don't shoot!" a voice squeaked over the comm, and Shepard felt her heart sink as a slight figure stumbled around a pile of wreckage, even as a mixture of groans and snickers rose from the rest of the fireteam.
"Damn it, Private Riley, why aren't you with Bravo?" Shepard demanded irritably, knowing the answer before it came. Benjamin Riley was barely eighteen, fresh out of boot camp, and Shepard was damned if she knew why the kid had enlisted. A more unlikely soldier she'd never seen. Short and skinny, with a face scarred by acne and no aptitude whatsoever for military endeavors, he was the embodiment of the FNG both loathed and dreaded by the rank and file soldiers as the one most likely to get someone killed through sheer ineptitude. And he had, for reasons indecipherable to Shepard, latched onto her like a lost puppy.
"I – I guess I got separated from them, Lieutenant," Riley admitted miserably. "I heard something, but no one on my team would come, so I checked it out, and I found this." He extended the hand that he'd been cradling against his body, and Shepard found herself staring down at a kitten that seemed more dead than alive. Rail thin, and barely a couple of weeks old, it peered at the world through a single green eye; the other had been obliterated by an acid burn that was crusted and oozing, the black and white pattern of its fur all but indistinguishable beneath dirt and dried blood.
"It was under some crates in one of the prefabs," Riley went on hurriedly, as though sensing the officer's rising ire. "The mother was there, too, and three others, but they were all dead; it looked the mama cat tried to shield them with her body, but this little guy was the only one that made it."
The rest of the fireteam clustered around, peering down at Riley's find. "Colonies don't allow terrestrial pets," Jalowski said. "Something about the potential for interference with local biospheres."
"Guess somebody snuck them in," Tyler shrugged. "Pretty sure that an Alliance citation is the least of their worries right now."
It was the least of Shepard's worries, too. "You investigated an unknown situation without backup?" she asked quietly, trying to rein in her impatience. "You know better than that, Marine!"
"I tried to get them to help me check it out, but they wouldn't listen!" Riley repeated earnestly, close to tears. "As soon as I had him, I tried to catch up, but...I must have gone the wrong way. Couldn't I just fall in with you until we regroup?"
Shepard sighed and opened her comm link. "Bravo Leader, this is Charlie Leader. Are you by any chance missing a Marine?"
"Why yes, I believe we are," Second Lieutenant Douglas Bertrand replied, the lack of concern in his voice confirming Shepard's suspicions. "I take it you've gained one?"
"Affirmative," Shepard growled, knowing better than to give vent to her thoughts on an open link.
"Not sure why the captain didn't assign him to you in the first place," Bertrand offered carelessly. "Keep hold of him until we link back up."
"Will do. Shepard out." She killed the link, gritting her teeth. She wasn't any happier about Riley's piss poor skill set than Bertrand, but deliberately leaving him behind was a juvenile stunt that could easily have backfired. And wouldn't a friendly fire incident look great on her record?
"Lieutenant?" Riley was watching her with that kicked dog expression that irritated the hell out of her.
"Fall in, Riley," she sighed, ignoring the glares that the others shot her way. "Center column." No way could he be trusted on point or rear. "And if we run into trouble, you'd damn well better drop the cat and pick up your rifle." She was already bracing herself for the pussy jokes that were going to be flying once all the squads linked back up.
The almost pathetically grateful look he gave her irritated her even more. "I won't, Lieutenant. I mean, I will," he clarified hastily, opening the pouch at his hip, pulling things out willy-nilly: first aid kit, nutrition bars... Shepard watched in bemusement as item after item hit the ground. This couldn't be happening.
"See, Lieutenant?" Riley tucked the kitten into the now empty pouch and looked up at her, eager for approval. "He'll ride just fine there, and my hands are free!"
It occurred to Shepard that, with what she'd seen of his marksmanship, it might be safest for all concerned if he was holding the kitten instead of a weapon in a firefight. Lockwood met her eyes briefly and sighed.
"That won't work once we're away from the generators, Riley," he told the other private. "I'll help you rig up something off of your auxiliary port." Each of their environmental suits featured an auxiliary oxygen port that a squadmate could hook into if their suit's air supply was compromised; the kitten wouldn't put too much additional demand on Riley's system.
"Corporal, the DNA kit?" she reminded Briggs as Lockwood pulled out a length of air hose, and Tyler and Jalowski moved to retrieve the gear that Riley had discarded.
Briggs handed her the kit and followed her back toward the Grizzly. "I'm sorry, LT," he said in a low voice. "I should have recognized the signal."
She glanced back at him. "Think you'll recognize it when you hear it again?"
His reply was an immediate and fervent, "Yes, ma'am!"
She nodded. "Good enough, Corporal," she told him before ducking back into the vehicle. She'd made her own share of rookie mistakes, under both good and bad Commanding Officers, and she vividly recalled the shame of her error being compounded by the humiliation of being raked loud and long over the coals. She'd encountered some Marines who needed the reinforcement of a verbal dressing-down, but Briggs was the type who learned from his errors. Captain Manning wouldn't be hearing about the near incident from her.
Take care of your team, and they'll take care of you. More words of wisdom from her father. The men and women under Mike Shepard's command had followed him into hell and back, from his days as an NCO in the First Contact War through his battlefield commission and rise in the ranks during the subsequent years of colonization and expansion, when the Systems Alliance ships and soldiers had been humanity's chief defenders against a galaxy that was by and large indifferent at best, openly hostile at times to the newest addition to the spacegoing races governed by the Citadel Council. He'd retired from active duty last year as a General, taking a teaching position at the military academy on Arcturus Station, where he was quickly commanding the same fierce loyalty from his students
She entered the cockpit, running the sample swab through the mess in the driver's seat and sealing it into the preservative media. Instruments back on the Bastogne could compare the genetic sequencing with those on record for the Akuze colony.
When she emerged, Lockwood had managed to cobble together an oxygen tent in Riley's hip pouch using a plastic bag scavenged from the wreckage, and the kitten was once more stowed out of sight, the tubing snaking around Riley's side into the pouch the only evidence of its presence. She gave brief thought to not mentioning it in her report, but she knew that the word would spread like wildfire once the squads hooked back up; old women had nothing on soldiers when it came to gossip.
"LT, this terminal is still intact," Jalowski called from the ruin of a nearby prefab. "I can pull the local user memory cards."
She nodded. "Do it." The terminals they had found thus far had been either smashed or melted beyond salvage. Everything they had seen indicated that the destruction of the colony had been a sudden, catastrophic event, but there remained a chance that the daily computer entries of the colonists might provide some clues.
That done, they continued their sweep, finding a few more scraps of seared flesh to sample for DNA, and a couple more terminals intact enough to salvage, but no bodies or any definitive indications of what lay behind the destruction. When they met back up with Charlie One, Hightower lifted one bristly eyebrow at the sight of Riley, but said nothing, though the look on his face when the private pulled the kitten out of his hip pouch was almost enough to improve Shepard's mood.
The rendezvous point was the drop zone, one klick away from the colony; even before the debriefing, it was apparent that none of the other squads had discovered anything. The high spirits and horseplay of the journey out had been replaced with frustration, wary puzzlement and uneasy murmurings as the squads gathered around the troop shuttles.
"Squad leaders, assemble in the command shuttle," Manning ordered, looking around with the scowl that was a near-permanent feature of his expression. "The rest of you, get tents and generators set up. We'll camp planetside tonight and expand our search perimeter in the morning."
Judging from the expressions, no one was thrilled with the news, but no one was stupid enough to protest, either. As the enlisteds moved to retrieve the bivouac gear from the shuttle cargo holds, the five second lieutenants headed for the 'command shuttle', which was identical to the other four, its designation stemming from the fact that Manning had ridden in it for the drop. It was crowded; the shuttles each had enough seats to transport a dozen soldiers, but since Manning remained standing, the rest of them did, too, clustered in the minimal floor space of the passenger compartment.
"All right, report," the Captain growled. One by one, the squad leaders detailed what they had found, which was all but identical to what Shepard had encountered: no survivors, no bodies, and no clues as to what had caused the destruction. Jayce had known them all before being assigned to the platoon; they'd been at the Academy together: Adam 'Trip' Trippler and Gina Santorelli had been in Shepard's class; Mark Sanchez had been a year behind; Bertrand two years ahead. When the others were done, Shepard delivered her findings, pausing at the end before adding, "Private Riley discovered a dead cat that one of the colonists had apparently smuggled on-site. It had a litter of kittens; one was still alive."
"I am aware of that, Lieutenant," Manning replied, glowering at her. "What were you thinking, allowing him to cart the animal along? This is a Marine unit, not a zoo!"
Not a word to Bertrand about letting Riley become separated from his squad, and she knew there wouldn't be. Manning was a brass-kisser who preferred to command brass-kissers, and Bertrand was his current favorite, while Shepard was the daughter of the general who was the reason that Thomas Manning would never rise above Captain, and why he was assigned low-risk details with novice junior officers and green recruits. Shepard wasn't sure exactly what Manning had locked horns with Mike Shepard over; scuttlebutt was vague and varied, agreeing only on the point that Manning had definitely been on the losing end. And she got to reap the rewards.
Buckle down and ride it out. More advice, this time from her mother. While neither as brash nor as brilliant as her husband, Captain Hannah Taylor Shepard had a rock-solid reputation as an officer: steady under fire and skilled at diplomacy. A first lieutenant in the battle to retake Shanxi, she had risen steadily through the ranks of a military organization that frequently clung stubbornly to notions about gender that had been long abandoned by most of the remainder of human society. She hadn't done it by challenging the assholes head on; she'd done it by being consistently and undeniably better than the rest, doing her job and then some, proving herself to the ones whose opinions really mattered in the long run.
It was an ethic she'd instilled in her only child, and Jayce had known from her first few minutes under Manning that she'd be relying on it extensively. "It was the only thing we'd found alive, sir," she replied. "At this point, it appears to be the only survivor of the colony."
"You let me know how your interview with it goes, Lieutenant," Manning said, layering on a heavy dose of sarcasm, "and you are not to expend Systems Alliance resources on it, am I clear?"
"Yes, sir," Shepard answered crisply. He glared at her a moment longer, searching for any hint of insubordination in her words or tone. Finding none, he went on:
"Apparently, the batarians do not share the fondness that Private Riley and Lieutenant Shepard have for the feline species." From his tone, it was plain that he was trying for biting humor, but Jayce focused only on one word. Wary glances were exchanged between she, Trip, Gina and Mark; after a moment, it was Sanchez who spoke up.
"Batarians, sir?"
Dark eyebrows arched at the query. "Did I stutter, Lieutenant?" he asked quietly.
Let it go, Shepard warned with her eyes, but Sanchez responded, "No, sir. It's just that what I saw, and what the others have reported - the use of acid and the tunneling - don't fit anything I've heard about the way the batarians operate."
The eyebrows arched higher. "I was unaware that I had been graced with an expert on batarian tactics, Lieutenant. What have you heard?"
Mark flushed under the sarcasm, but held firm. "I'm no expert, sir. I only know what I've read about the batarians in my studies."
Shepard kept her mouth shut; she wouldn't help Mark's case by chiming in, but Trip spoke up. "Lieutenant Sanchez is correct in his assessment, sir. I've fought batarians in the Verge, and they don't utilize acid, or attack from beneath the ground. They leave the dead, too. There's no profit in transporting corpses, and the evidence we've found strongly indicates that at least some of the colonists were killed in the attack."
He was right, and Manning knew it; Shepard could see the flush rising on the back of the Captain's neck, the tightening of his jaw.
"And as the voice of experience," he said in a tightly controlled voice, "do you have an alternative to offer, Lieutenant Trippler?"
"I don't know, sir," Trip replied, his farmboy face open and earnest, "and neither did Chief Lane." Trip's senior NCO had almost as much time in as Hightower, and Trip was clearly troubled by the admission. "Sir, with all due respect, I think that we should contact Alliance forces at the Citadel. Maybe one of the other races in Citadel Space will have an idea of what we're dealing with."
"I agree with Lieutenant Trippler, sir," Sanchez said, swallowing nervously as the Captain's gaze snapped toward him.
"So do I, sir," Santorelli put in, head up and gaze direct, meeting Manning's glare without a hint of fear.
"So do I," Shepard said at last. She wasn't at all sure that adding her opinion wouldn't do more harm than good, but she couldn't stay quiet any longer.
Manning's jaw tightened further, a visible pulse leaping in the temple that Shepard could see. "Your suggestion that we create the appearance that Systems Alliance cannot manage its own colonial affairs is duly noted and rejected. This matter will be addressed in greater detail during your next performance reviews. For now, you are to return to your squads and oversee the setup of camp. Tomorrow, we will expand our search area, using ground penetrating radar to follow the tunnels back to the batarian staging areas. Lieutenant Bertrand, remain here to assist in determining tomorrow's search areas. The rest of you are dismissed." Bertrand didn't bother concealing his smirk as the rest of them snapped crisp salutes and turned to go.
"And Lieutenant Shepard?"
Shepard drew a breath through her nose and turned back, knowing that whatever Manning had to say was intended to goad her. "Yes, Captain?"
His expression remained bland, but his eyes glittered unpleasantly as he said, "Since you seem to have such a rapport with Private Riley, I'm assigning him to your squad. Instruct Private Lockwood to report to Bravo Squad.
He was waiting for her to get mad, wanting it, but Shepard could feel Gina's eyes on her back, warning her.
Buckle down and ride it out. "Aye-aye, sir," she said, saluting again for good measure before turning and exiting the shuttle, chin up and back straight, a litany of profanity unspooling in the silence of her mind.
"Damn it," Trip muttered as they walked away from the shuttle, his expression grim. Sanchez looked like he was going to be sick; Gina's dark eyes were flashing with anger.
"You had to say something, Trip," Shepard told him. "I should have said more." If she was going to get fucked over anyway, she might as well have done something to feel like she'd earned it.
He shook his head, a cynical smile quirking his lips. "Hell, Shep, if you said that gravity pulls down, Manning would start trying to prove that it pushes up instead."
"And that asshole Bertrand would be right there, backing him up," Gina growled. "What say we have a blanket party later?"
Shepard indulged a brief and pleasant fantasy; the notion was a tempting one, but - "He's not worth it, Toad," she warned Santorelli.
The dark haired woman gave her an unrepentant smirk. "Says you, Badger." Gina's father had been killed in the First Contact War; her mother had remained with the Alliance, frequently serving alongside Hannah Shepard. Jayce and Gina had been spacer brats together, growing up on one ship or station after another. The nicknames had come from their mutual love of The Wind In The Willows, along with a certain 'wild ride' involving an Arcturus Station shuttle when they'd both been ten.
"She's right, Gina," Trip agreed. "Three years out of the Academy, and Bertrand's still stuck at the rank he graduated with? He's a dead-ender, and if he's dumb enough to think that hanging on Manning's coattails is going to get him anywhere, I'm willing to let him. The rest of us just need to hunker down and do our jobs. We'll get reassigned sooner or later."
"Yeah, but what about performance reviews?" Sanchez asked worriedly.
"Not gonna happen," Trip replied calmly, "because by the time we leave here, it's going to be obvious to anyone with half a brain that it wasn't batarians." His face settled into bleak lines as he spoke. "At that point, Manning is going to forget that he ever said it was, and he's not going to want the fact that he did as part of any official report."
"That sounds about right," Shepard agreed, watching him closely. "You OK?" Trip was colony-born; he'd been with his family on Mindoir seven years ago, when the batarians had raided it, killing or taking most of the inhabitants. Trip had seen his mother and sisters slaughtered, his father forced to undergo a cranial control chip implant with no anesthesia; he'd been saved by the arrival of Alliance troops, then been given a survivor's hardship scholarship to the Alliance Academy. Trip likely had the most direct experience with the batarians of any of them, including Manning, but the Captain either hadn't bothered to review the dossiers of his officers, or was an even bigger bastard than Shepard had believed.
"I'm fine," he assured her with a smile and a shrug. "Manning just thinks he's a badass; we survived Gunny Demon."
That got grins from Shepard and Santorelli, and even a shaky laugh from Sanchez. Gunnery Chief Albert Damon had terrorized a decade and a half of Alliance cadets during PT. During the second week, he'd roared at Trip as he was bent over with his hands on his knees, puking up his guts halfway through a ten klick run, asking if that was how he'd bent over for the batarians like a cheap Asari whore. Trip had finished the run, swearing and crying, and spent two days in the infirmary afterward. They'd all hated the man that first year, but by the time of graduation, all but a few came to regard 'Gunny Demon' with a blend of respect and fierce pride.
"At least Gunny had a reason," Gina observed scornfully. "Manning's just an asshole, and incompetent to boot."
"Yeah, but he's our CO," Trip replied with a rueful look, "which means that we follow his orders."
"Right now, yeah," Gina conceded, "but what do we do when he gives us an order that we know is going to get us killed?"
"We deal with that when it comes," Shepard told her quietly. None of them had any doubt that it was a matter of when, rather than if. "Right now..." She trailed off, staring back toward the ruined settlement, all but lost in the encroaching darkness. "He didn't give any orders about how we're supposed to bivouac, so we treat it like hostile territory. We set up a defensive perimeter, post sentries, get through the night."
"Sounds like a plan," Trip agreed, "and just to give us something to look forward to, how about the one whose Chief has the best reaction to Manning blaming the batarians buys the first round at Flux when we get to the Citadel?" He spoke to them all, but his blue eyes were on Jayce, the expectant look in them making her stomach do a pleasant flip-flop.
"You're on," she accepted with a laugh that was echoed by Mark and Gina. As she headed toward the spot where her squad was setting up, she felt the tension in her neck and shoulders starting to ebb. Shore leave on the Citadel, Flux, drinks and dancing. They just had to get through tonight and finish searching tomorrow, and they could get out of here. There was no one to save and nothing to fight; let the eggheads figure out the puzzle. Likely they'd never know for sure what had happened to the colonists, but she couldn't do anything about that. She just needed to do her job, keep her nose clean so that Manning had no excuses to discipline her, and wait for a better detail. Just ride it out.
OOO
"If this was fuckin' batarian raid, I'm a goddamn asari lap dancer," Hightower growled, provoking a mental image amusing enough that Shepard didn't mind that she was all but guaranteed to be buying the first round at Flux. Her amusement only lasted as long as it took her to duck inside the squad tent, however.
"Thanks a fucking lot, Riley," Lockwood snarled as he shoved his gear into his pack, the resentful glare he directed at the other private easing only marginally when he noticed Shepard's presence. "Lieutenant," he said curtly. "Corporal Toombs told me -"
"I know," she replied quietly, aware that she was walking a fine line. As little respect as she had for Manning, he was still the platoon's CO. Get a reputation for undermining the chain of command, and you were unlikely to advance on it. "Captain Manning's orders. You're a good soldier, Lockwood. Just focus on doing your job, and you'll be fine." Half the soldiers in Bertrand's squad seemed to be absorbing his assholery, like Corporal Toombs; the other half were desperately hoping for reassignment. Jayce hoped that Lockwood would prove resistant to whatever was in the water.
"Yes, ma'am," Lockwood replied resignedly.
"C'mon, Joe," Drake told him. "I'll walk you over." They ducked out of the tent, leaving Shepard alone with Riley...and the damn cat.
"What are you doing?" she asked, frowning slightly as she approached.
"Feeding it," he replied. "I crushed up one of my ration bars and dissolved it in water, then poured it into one of my spare gloves and put a little hole in the tip of a finger. He – he caught on quick."
He certainly had; the once half-dead looking handful of fur-covered bones was gnawing eagerly at the finger of the glove, paws kneading, tiny growls emitting from its chest, and the formerly hollow belly was now round and tight. "You treated the burns?" she asked, seeing the telltale gleam of medi-gel on lesions that were definitely not as inflamed as they had been only an hour earlier.
Riley nodded. "It was just a little bit" he said anxiously. "He's so tiny, it didn't take much."
All of this had undoubtedly been done while he should have been helping to set up the camp, and using Alliance resources, to boot. Maybe she should just write up her own reprimand, save Manning the time.
"Lieutenant?" Riley's timid voice interrupted her thoughts. "I'm glad I got assigned to your squad."
The look he gave her was meant to be ingratiating, but it only succeeded in pushing Shepard's simmering irritation past the boiling point.
"It's not a reward, Private," she snapped,"for either of us. You're not going to have any easier of a time under me, because I'm damned if I'll let somebody else get killed because you don't know how to do your job! What the hell are you even doing here?"
"You think I wanted to?" Riley demanded bitterly. "I never wanted this, but he -" He broke off and hung his head.
"Who?" Shepard wanted to know, but Riley shook his head.
"It doesn't matter," he whispered, his shoulders sagging in defeat. "I'll try not to be any trouble, Lieutenant."
Don't try. Do it. The words were on Shepard's lips, but she didn't let them pass. The satisfaction of having someone to vent her frustration upon had faded as the tears rolled silently down the kid's cheeks, and he still held the kitten so very carefully.
Damn it. She took a step closer, studying the way the burns had been dressed, and Riley flinched, as though he thought she was going to hit him.
"Have you ever thought about training as a medical corpsman, Private?" she asked him quietly.
"N- no, ma'am."
She nodded. "When we get done with this mission, I'll see what I can do about getting you into training." It was entirely possible that he would prove as inept at that as he had everything else, but judging from the care he'd given the kitten, it was the best chance he'd have...and it would get him out of her hair.
The almost pathetically grateful look that he gave her had a mixture of renewed irritation and guilt churning her guts into an acidic stew. "Thank you, Lieutenant."
She shook her head. "Don't thank me yet." She cocked her head, studying the kitten. "You named it yet?"
"No," he replied, pulling the glove away and scratching the unburned side of the tiny head gently. "He's a survivor; he deserves a special name, don't you think?"
Shepard nodded noncommittally, hoping like hell he didn't decide to name it after her. "I've got a book back on the Bastogne that you can borrow, might give you some ideas," she offered.
He looked up at her in surprise. "A real book? Pages and everything?"
"Yeah." She shifted uncomfortably, already regretting the impulsive offer. "In the meantime just...keep it out of the Captain's sight, all right?"
"I will, Lieutenant!" he promised, beaming at her as though she'd given him a field commission, then jumping to his feet to salute, cradling the kitten with his free hand.
"As you were, Private," Jayce told him as she turned to go.
OOO
"Why me?" Jayce lamented, staring up at the stars overhead.
"Because you're Badger," Gina replied. She and Jayce were sitting back to back outside of the camp, their rifles beside them and the few lights still functioning in the settlement gleaming faintly in the distance. Others had been assigned official sentry duty, but Jayce had been unable to shake the lingering unease, unable to relax enough to sleep, and Gina had stayed awake with her.
"I don't want to be Badger," Jayce pouted. "I want to be Toad for a while. You can be Badger."
"That's not the way it works," Gina told her. "I get us in trouble, you get us out. You'd make an awful Toad. You tried to talk me out of borrowing that shuttle."
"I believe that the term on the incident report was 'stealing'," Jayce reminded her.
"See?" Gina responded. "You get too hung up on little details like that to ever be Mr. Toad. You take care of people, protect them, like you always did the younger kids...and me. That's why Riley's glued himself to you. He knows you'll look out for him and Bertrand won't."
The quiet confidence in her friend's voice only increased Jayce's feeling of shame. "I don't want to," she admitted. "He's going to get someone killed and me reprimanded, and if I'm lucky, the only body will be his. I just want him to go away, be someone else's problem. That's the only reason I even mentioned the medic training."
"No, it's not," Gina replied. "You can tell yourself that all you want, but I know you. You even offered to let him touch your T.S. Eliot! Shit, you barely let me handle it!"
"That's because it's old and fragile and you break everything," Jayce retorted. "Anyway, I only said that to keep him from naming the damn cat after me. We're already ass-deep in pussy jokes, and if he calls that thing Shepard, I'll never hear the end of it." Just the thought of it was enough to make her wince.
"Oh, yes." Even though she couldn't see Gina's face, Jayce could all but hear her eyes rolling. "And the sad thing is, I had every damn one of them listed in my head before anyone said anything. You'd think at least some of them could be original. And they think they're hilarious." Her voice shifted tone, mimicking Corporal Donner, "The only one to get any pussy is the one guy who has no idea what to do with it." She sighed. "Men are such idiots."
"Most of them," Shepard agreed, hesitating for a moment before adding, "What do you think about Trip?"
She felt the shift, turned her head to find dark eyes gleaming at her with a knowing expression of mirth and impatience. "I think one of you needs to get off your ass and ask the other one out before I expire of old age and boredom. You two have been dancing around each other for years, both of you too damn duty-bound to make a move."
"You know the Alliance doesn't encourage fraternization," Jayce replied defensively. Her mother's ship had been among the responders at Mindoir, and she had brought Trip back to the station where the children of fleet members in that sector resided while their parents were deployed. He, Gina and Jayce had bonded, but the ties had been strictly platonic then as the two girls had helped him get past the grief of losing family, friends...hell, everything. It hadn't been until they were at the Academy together that Jayce had first realized that the currents between them were changing, but Trip was a gentleman, old-fashioned in a way that was rarely encountered in spacer society, and Jayce -
Gina made a rude noise. "Like that stopped your parents? Or mine, for that matter. They're not as touchy when the one you're banging is the same rank, anyway."
"Banging?" It was Jayce's turn to roll her eyes. "And here I thought you were developing a romantic streak, Santorelli."
"As if," Gina snorted. "Right now, I'd just settle for you getting laid more often, and his ass is to die for."
"If you like it so much, why don't you -"
"Because it's you that he's head over heels for, idiot," Gina cut her off, shaking her head in disbelief, "but if you don't make a move, I just might."
"All right, all right." Jayce couldn't decide if it was dread or anticipation churning in her stomach. "We're going out to Flux -"
"Along with everybody else," Gina replied dismissively, "but it's a starting point. You just need to get him off alone."
"How?" Jayce asked plaintively. It wasn't that she hadn't been involved with anyone before, but they had been short-term things, more about mutual physical attraction than anything else, and there hadn't been all that many of those since graduation. Not like Gina, who flitted from lover to lover like a butterfly in a flower garden, and still managed to stay on good terms with most of them.
"Leave that to me, Badger," Gina replied in a smug tone that set the warning bells ringing, "but if I come up with a brilliant plan, you'd damn well better follow through and get that man naked."
"I will," Jayce promised, but Toad was having none of it.
"Pinky swear," she insisted, shoving her right arm behind her, pinky extended.
"Seriously?" Jayce demanded in exasperation, but she was smiling. "We're not twelve any more. My word as an officer isn't enough?"
"Not for anything important," Gina asserted, keeping her arm extended. Jayce sighed, reaching out to link her pinky with her friend's, shaking to seal the bargain.
"Happy now?"
"Yep." Gina wrapped her arms around her knees and leaned back into Jayce smugly.
"You gonna tell me what you're going to do?"
"Nope." Gina shook her head firmly. "I give you too much lead time, and you'll start trying to poke holes in the plan. You do much better when you improvise...and it's more fun for me."
"All right," Jayce sighed, knowing that arguing would do nothing but encourage her to be even more creative. "I'm going back to the tent, get some sleep."
"Sweet dreams," Gina offered in that absent way that Jayce knew meant that she was already developing her plan. "What the - did you feel that?"
The sudden sharpness in her voice made Shepard pause in the middle of pushing herself upright. "What?"
"The ground. It just shook." Gina sat up straight, both palms splayed on the ground, her expression intent. "There it is again!"
"What the hell?" Jayce could feel it now: a vibration in the earth beneath her feet, growing stronger every second. Moments later, the shrill tones of proximity alarms sounded from within the camp, and the voice of one of the sentries blared over the comm.
"Got a contact, half klick out northeast and closing fast!"
"What is it?"
"Can't tell...signal's distorted, but it's big -"
"What the hell is going on?" Manning's voice, thick with sleep, from the direction of his private tent.
"Christ, there's another one closing from due north and - fuck, there's something coming up right under us!"
The shaking was growing more violent. Jayce exchanged a wide-eyed look with Gina, and they both dove for their weapons as the world exploded.
"Shoot it! Shoot -"
"Captain! Lieutenant! We're under attack! We are under - Oh, my God! What is-"
"Platoon, form up into fire teams!"
Jayce hit the ground hard, her rifle flying from her grasp as clods of earth rained down on her and a massive shape loomed upward.
"Gina!" She couldn't see where her friend had landed. She scrambled to recover her rifle and regain her feet on the shuddering ground, craning her head, trying to make out the form that was cast in a riot of shifting shadows by the lights that had been sent tumbling. What in the hell was it?
"Jayce!"
"Lieutenant! Captain Manning! Somebody help-"
"Damn it, I said form up into fire teams! That is an ord-"
"Badger!"
OOO
CE 2183
Lieutenant Commander Jayce Shepard jerked awake, her heart thudding dully in her chest. Not the raw-edged panic that had gripped her hard during the long weeks of recovery. On some level, she remained aware that it was a dream, but there were still several moments of disorientation and desperate hope that it had all been a dream, that she was still on board the Bastogne, that she would roll out of her bunk, assemble her squad and drop onto Akuze to investigate the colony there with Trip and Gina and that bastard, Manning.
As always, though, disorientation faded and memory reasserted itself, settling beneath her breastbone with a dull ache that would persist for several days until she no longer noticed it...until the next time. It was a cycle she had grown familiar with; the nightmare returned faithfully at the start of any new assignment. Gina, Trip, Manning and the rest were dead, had been dead for six years. She was in temporary quarters at Arcturus Station; tomorrow, she would be reporting for duty as the Executive Officer on the SSV Normandy.
The warm mass nestled into the curve of her waist shifted and crawled onto her chest. A single green eye, luminous in the glow from the bedside clock, regarded her steadily as Mac extended his head forward until his nose brushed hers. She reached a hand up to scratch his ear, and was rewarded with a rumbling purr as the eye slipped shut.
She glanced at the clock, sighed. Six more hours until the alarm, and she wouldn't be falling back to sleep any time soon. Lifting Mac by the scruff, she set him aside and sat up, turning on the bedside light; he immediately moved to settle into the warm spot she'd left behind, watching as she stood and walked over to the doorway, gripped the bar that had been secured a foot below the top of the frame, flipped upside down and hooked her knees over the bar.
She didn't bother counting the vertical crunches: arms crossed over her chest, up slow, hold, down slower. She'd done her regular workout regimen that morning; this was therapeutic. Up, down, up, down, again and again until her abs were burning, thighs screaming, sweat soaking her skin and nightclothes.
Stronger.
She switched to pullups, alternating in front and behind the bar, pushing for speed this time, until her shoulders and arms were on fire.
Faster.
To the floor now for pushups, plank position, weight on her toes and knuckles, body held rigid as elbows and shoulders flexed and extended. Up, down, up, down, lactic acid heat building in her muscles, sweat stinging her eyes, breath hissing in her throat.
Better.
She sank to the floor, lay there for a time, feeling the coolness against her skin. She rolled to her feet, stumbled to the shower, stripped down and leaned against the tile as hot water rolled over her, soothing the ache in her muscles to a drained weariness.
She dried off, pulled on a clean tank top and shorts and crawled back into bed, nudging Mac aside, then lifting him back onto her chest as she retrieved the book from the bedside table. Most of her collection was packed, but the slim volume was one that remained with her. Her free hand idly scratched at Mac's ear as she carefully leafed through the well worn pages.
The naming of cats is a difficult matter.
It isn't just one of your holiday games.
You may think at first I'm mad as a hatter
When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.
She had drifted off into dreamless sleep before the end of Growltiger's Last Stand.