Author's Note: This work is an Oral History, structured in the style of Max Brooks' World War Z, or Chuck Palahniuk's Rant. It's also called an Epistolary work, and wikipedia has an article on the style under the heading "Epistolary novel".
Scroll Down for TL;DR on the intro. Standard spoiler warning applies.
I am pretty upset by the ending of ME3, but I don't think that it will be changed. That's not how videogames or BioWare work. Remember, they've made games without endings before (KOTOR 2 anyone? I'm sure they retconned everything in SW:TOR, though I haven't played it.) So rather than writing a new ending, I'm writing this work because it's the only way I can respond to an ending with so many unanswered questions.
This is a kind of therapy to help me deal with the ending of Mass Effect 3. This, the first work in a series, is going to be my first FFdotnet submission, though I've been a lurker here for a while. I've got the next three entries partially written, and the whole story planned out.
Most of this is extrapolated from canon. I'm drawing my influences heavily from both World War Z, and Alas Babylon, by Pat Frank. If you haven't read those books, then stop reading this piece of crap and go read better authors. Off you go. Shoo.
[SPOILERS FOR MASS EFFECT 1, 2, AND 3 FOLLOW. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.]
This story talks about the immediate aftermath of Shepard's decision. In this case, a Paragon Femshep decided to destroy the reapers. You'll read why in time.
I've got the whole story planned out. There will be plenty of main characters showing up as the series continues. I don't know how quickly I'll be able to update, but updates will come. I hope that reading this helps you as much as writing it helps me. I hope you enjoy Aftermath Part 1: Angels Fall, and stay tuned for the next part in the series: Aftermath Part 2: Earthrise
Comments are welcome, even flames. Say whatever you want. I'm serious. This is therapy. Let it all out.
TL;DR: Shep is a woman, a moral person, and destroyed the reapers. These are the consequences of her decision.
Aftermath: Ending the Great Blackout, An Oral Account
Part 1 – Angels Fall
Lt. Sholto Douglas, 3rd Battalion, Alliance Regiment of Scotland - Black Watch
[Sholto Douglas is sits on a bench overlooking the bay of Portree, on the Isle of Skye. The interview takes place near his home, one of the multicolored houses on the docks. He carefully fills the bowl of a churchwarden pipe with black tobacco as he watches the fishing boats heading back out to sea.]
Do you smell that? Peat and seaweed. Before hammer landed... I was wondering if I'd ever smell this again.
[He takes a long drag off his pipe, lighting it with a few matches, expertly shielding the flame from the buffeting wind. He lets the smoke billow gently out of his mouth. The wind pulls the smoke from his mouth, and carries it out over the loch.]
We were fighting in the shadow of the Old Bailey. It was an odd sensation, I'll have to say. I was thinking that it was always a little uncomfortable being a Scotsman in London, and the Reapers didn't help one bit.
[He grins, wryly.]
It was insane - Totally insane! - for me to be thinking these things as I gunned down husks and cannibals. We were trying to get close enough to that damned tower they'd set up and make another push. We heard over the comms that Shepard had made it. We just needed to hold the line until she could activate the crucible. Hold the line. We all knew that what they meant was "Hold the line in case Shepard fails." Not that she ever failed.
[Another puff on his pipe. He gestures towards a glint of light in the loch.]
See that glinting there? Piece o' a dead reaper. I warned folk no' to go near it, and the fishermen are sharp enough to stay away. No cases of indoctrination. Yet. Even among people daft enough to work on the damned things.
[His accent thickens for a moment.]
My Mako team took out thresher maws back when they were everywhere. I'm no coward, but I'm no sae bauld as aince I was, and I dinnae trust those sleekit bastards.
[Hatred sharpens his features as he looks at the reaper fragment.]
The rest of that reaper fell on Ratharsaig. It's been four centuries since Fuadach nan Gàidheal and the island is still almost totally depopulated, even with overpopulation in the cities.
["Fuadach nan Gàidheal?" the interviewer asks.]
An old wound that's still healing far too slowly.
[He exhales smoke harshly. It billows out of his nose. His face softens as he tells his story.]
So anyway, there I was. London. Fighting for my life. This husk crawled through the car I was using for cover and jumped on me, throwing me into the street. It knocked my helmet clean off with it's flailing, and my head hit the curb. I remember I saw stars and almost passed out. Most of this is pretty fuzzy, actually.
A Geth, one of the big 8-ft tall red ones, just reached down and snapped the thing's neck. It pulled me back into cover behind the car. My head was still swimming from the blow. The Geth knelt behind the car, firing. It looked at me with that flashlight head.
"Are you in nominal condition, Douglas Lieutenant?" it asked me. I just stared up at it.
"Are you Injured Douglas Lieutenant?" it asked again, and I stammered a no.
"Please return to the fight, Douglas Lieutenant. Current intelligence reports suggest that we are close to a breakthrough," it said.
So I grabbed my helmet, pushed it back down over my head, and started shooting. I'll tell you, I hit my head hard. For about two minutes, all my shots were going wide. I felt something wet in my hair where I'd hit the pavement. I was bleeding pretty badly. Head wounds always bleed a lot. My shooting slowly improved. After a few more minutes of just blasting everything that came our way, it was pretty clear that the enemies weren't letting up. I'd gone through ten thermal clips. A runner brought me and the geth a box o' the things, so we were fine, but they just kept comin' and comin' and comin'. After my thirtieth kill in five minutes, I looked at the Geth, and I said "When the hell is that breakthrough comin', Geth?"
"We were lying, Douglas Lieutenant."
"Why would you lie about that?"
"You have returned to the fight, Douglas Lieutenant, making it significantly more likely that both you and this platform will survive until Shepard Commander can trigger the Crucible."
[He breaks out into a grin.]
I swear to Christ that happened.
[His face darkens again, and he looks at the ground. He takes two more puffs of his pipe before speaking again. When he speaks, it's slowly.]
A blinding wall of red hit hit us before I could respond. I'll be honest. At first, I thought I'd been taken out by one of those reaper beams. Instead, we watched the reapers fall to the ground. Seeing those giant mechanical demons falling over and taking out thirty city blocks with them was... indescribable.
When we stopped cheering, I remember thinking "Ah well, south London was a shithole before the reapers arrived." Football rivalry. We'd just saved literally every species that would ever exist from total extinction, and I was thinking about bloody Football rivalry.
[He grinned again, but it's a more bitter look than before. He takes another puff, and then sighs, deeply.]
I turned back to talk to my new Geth friend... but I didn't see him. He was down. He'd slumped against the car, his oversized combat rifle lying on the ground next to him. I tapped another alliance soldier.
"Help me get him on his back!" I remember saying. This Asari soldier helped, though she looked pretty confused about it. Those prime units weigh a ton, but we managed to pull it... him, onto his back. I don't know what I was thinking. How do you patch up an injured Geth? I looked for the bullet hole. I noticed that the guy had taken plenty of rounds, but he wasn't leaking any of that white liquid that tells you they're hurting.
"Sorry mate," I said to the darkened flashlight head. "If you can hear this, I don't know how to help you..." It was strange. I was feeling sad for a robot. Friends of mine died when they were protecting the council from these things, and now, they were on our side. And I felt... I was mourning one of them. That's the nature of the end of the world, I guess.
We buried that Geth. I told everyone left from the unit that he saved my life, so we gave him a funeral. Full honors. Bagpipes, 21 gun salute, the whole thing. Problem was, everyone needs a gravestone, and every gravestone needs a name. So here we are, what's left of the Black Watch in london, deciding on a name for a Geth we're about to bury. MacLean, from Glasgow, was the one who came up with the name.
So if you ever come across a car door set upright in the middle of Hyde Park with the inscription carved into it: "Big Man - Died in the Battle of London - Laid to rest by his comrades in the Black Watch" you'll know who's there.
[Puff.]
I remember what came next. The silence. We'd all been plugged into the Alliance Battle Interface. I know now that it was based on the old American LandWarrior system. Every soldier had their omnitool tuned in to local alliance command. Command was relaying orders, enemy positions, that sort of thing. After the blast, our omnitools were completely dead. As a result, we went from the noise of constant battle and radio updates, to cheering, to total and complete silence.
The power in all of our armor was out too. Some of the heavy weapons guys had fallen over when the red wave hit them, and had to be helped out of their armor. Some of those suits weighed about 180 lbs, but you didn't feel it because of the mass effect field they put out. Our comms were down, kinetic shields were down, none of our trucks would work. Everything went dark, as dark as the reapers. As for our guns, the only weapons that still worked were old. Pre-Thermal Clip M8's, Mattocks, that sort of thing.
Medevacs weren't available, and our medics set up field hospitals. They were trying to patch up the wounded, but without the medical programs in their omnitools most were pretty useless.
[Another puff from his pipe. This time he exhales through his nose.]
I hadn't read him at the time, but there's this old human philosopher, Rousseau. He once wrote that our inventions ultimately rob us of vital skills. Essentially, the day mankind invented the ladder was the day we forgot how to climb. After everything eezo based went dark, it was like ladders had completely vanished from the universe, and every problem was a tree, or later, a cliff.
The only medics of any use were either old men who remembered what it was like before eezo, impoverished street rats who were afraid to go to the doctors, or colonists who were too poor to have been accustomed to omni-tools. Medics who were regular alliance military were standing around with their cocks in their hands, while colonists patched up all the wounded. When the wave on an omnitool can stop bleeding, you forget how to make a tourniquet in an emergency. Soldiers all operate based on training, and in caring for the wounded, our training just didn't matter anymore. So we let the street rats and the colonists work.
The best medics at that point were those creepy folk from Zhu's Hope. They seemed to know where every wounded soldier on our line was, and they worked together without speaking to each other. They said plenty to the wounded, telling them they were going to be okay, but...
Look, I'm special forces. It's part of my job to notice things. And I noticed those colonists. They would be talking to the wounded, and one would reach back, and someone would just put a bandage, or a tourniquet, or scissors, or whatever it was into the medic's hand. Never asked for a damned thing. It was bloody unnatural. I got out of there as soon as I could.
We thought the blackout was just local, something caused by a Reaper's death. We talked about sending runners, but we had no idea where to send them. With no orders, no command, and not a damned thing to do, we all immediately started drinking anything we could find.
[A smile begins to tug at the edges of his lips at the memory.]
London has pubs everywhere. It was rare to find a fresh Keg, but there was plenty of liquor. We were alive, the human race was alive, and that was enough for us. So we just drank.
It was then that we heard the first explosion, deep and distant. Our faces tensed. No one said anything, and we willed away the idea that the distant explosion had anything to do with us. We all pretended it was something normal. Ammunition cooking off. Something collapsing. I took another shot of 4000-credit-per-bottle Scotch. There was another explosion, this one far closer than the first. Then came another. We stepped out of the pub, and looked up.
[He shudders, closes his eyes, and shakes his head as if he's trying to will the memory away.]
We thought it was dead reapers at first, pieces of the citadel. But we looked through our gunsights, and we could make out the shapes of the ships that were falling. Shepard had rallied the whole Galaxy, what was left of us. Even with all the death, and all the losses, this was the largest fleet in galactic history. That red wave burned out every piece of technology we had that used eezo. I don't know much about ships, but I do know that if their mass effect field goes down, they're dead in space. No eezo drive. No mass-effect field.
[He took one final pull, and then flipped his pipe over, tapping the underside of the bowl against the palm of his hand. A shower of ash and sparks fell out onto the granite sidewalk.]
There wasn't a damned thing we could do. We stood there on a London street and watched the Largest armada ever assembled fall out of the sky.
Admiral Amrack Vorhesh, Turian 7th Fleet
[Amrack Vorhesh is the highest ranking member of the Turian fleet left alive in the Sol system. Like all Turians on Earth, he's in a hospital bed, suffering from acute malnourishment. Various IV's are sticking into his neck. One of the bags reads "Colloidal Silver." Most of the bags contain a solution of metals. His exoskeleton is flaking, and discolored.]
My dissertation at the Academy was on human conflict in the 19th through 22nd centuries. It was just after the Relay 314 Incident, and we thought at the time that Humans were the new Krogan. The whole fleet thought we'd be at war with you again in a year, so there was a trend at the Academy on Palaven to study the history of human conflict in order to understand your tactics and thinking.
We were distressed to discover how... Turian you were. The Asari have their commandos, the Salarians have their spyplanes, the Krogan just use wave attacks with no regard for anything, and the Batarians are bullies who'll only fight if they outnumber their enemies three to one... But you! You had discipline, order, organization, and a military thought process that rivaled ours! Our strategists and academy students learned all this, and it... bothered us. What if you DID end up the next Krogan? The next big threat to the Galaxy? A disciplined enemy would be much harder to beat than the Krogan were. We knew you were a patient species, too. You wouldn't cause problems, we thought, until you were ready to endure the consequences.
It was only after all these papers were written that our thinking changed. That's why we helped you build the Normandy. High Command knew that in time, your power and prowess was going to rival ours. Eventually, we'd have to work hard to keep up with you. We saw how fast you were growing, and how you weren't intentionally causing problems for the other races, and we decided that it would be more... prudent to have Humanity as a friend. Sure, you're dishonest, but so were the Salarians and Asari, and we learned to trust them in time. And you're nowhere near as bad as Batarians.
The analogy we used was the United Kingdom and States, respectively. They fought two bitter wars, and ended up friends because of their similarities. We saw a lot of ourselves in you. If we could become your ally, then it wouldn't matter if you surpassed us eventually. Under our guidance, we thought, the galaxy might be better off with a powerful Human Race. Hence the Normandy. Hence having Turian Spectres sponsor Human ones. You proved that we were correct when you saved the Destiny Ascension from Sovereign and the Geth. After that point, few Turians questioned the honor of Humanity as a whole. Individual humans, well...
[His eyes narrow.]
I'll say one word: Udina.
[He starts coughing, a nurse hurries over and puts a syringe of some liquid full of shining metal powder into his IV line. His coughing subsides.]
No one really thinks about the logistics of galactic war, the sheer numbers involved. Most of your readers are going to be Human, so let me put this in a Human perspective. In just one of the hydrocarbon wars you fought, the first one in Iraq, there were 1.5 million soldiers fighting on both sides. 1.5 million soldiers fighting over one tiny country. The SA, sorry, the UN, the predecessor to the Systems Alliance, brought a million soldiers to the fight. So lets increase the scale of that conflict. Let's say that you're invading the whole planet, which is essentially what we were doing to liberate Earth from the reapers. The Academy was decades ago, but I still remember our invasion plans for earth.
["You had invasion plans?"]
Did I not tell you that my dissertation was on Human Warfare? The title was An Analysis of Human Strategy, Tactics and Warfare, 1860-2148. Why the hell would an Academy grad be encouraged to study Humans if we weren't worried about having to fight you at some point? Of COURSE we had plans to invade Earth.
[He stops, and his eyes go wide for a second. His face seems to indicate that he misspoke.]
I mean... let me clarify.
We didn't have "plans" in the sense that we particularly wanted to invade you - though plenty of Turians who lost friends at Shanxi did! - but we had plans in the sense of "We might have to, so we should probably have a plan just in case." I know the Alliance probably had backup plans in case of another war with the Turians or Batarians.
[The interviewer pauses, unsure what to say to him. They share an awkward silence.]
It's the Fleet's job to be prepared! So that's what we did, we prepared! And those plans came in handy when the it came time to go after the Reapers. The Systems Alliance hadn't exactly planned to invade themselves, now, had they? We ran into similar trouble on Palaven. The plan for taking London? We designed something almost exactly the same back at the Academy during the Contact War.
["I see. Please, continue. You were talking about the logistics of Galactic war."]
Ah. Yes. So for Iraq, the SA brought about a million soldiers. Just doing some fast and dirty math, lets's say you only needed a million soldiers per country on Earth. This is way too few, but let's pretend that it works, and that the math all balances out. One million soldiers per country. One million soldiers to not only destroy the Enemy military, but to handle all of their civilians. In this battle, the military are Reapers, and the civilians are husks, so the analogy fits, but you need even more soldiers.
That's already around 200 million ground troops. Now imagine that every military in the Galaxy has enough soldiers to go on a planet grabbing campaign, that is, every military has at least 200 million troops. Now imagine that every single one of those militaries is in the sky over London. Even after being decimated fighting the Reapers, this was still one of the largest fleets assembled in Galactic history.
We're talking about almost 70,000 ships, 35,000 of which were Quarian. We're talking about 30 million crewmen. We're talking about every freighter, pirate raider, and garbage scow with an anti- fighter cannon that could be scraped together. One of the Turian vessels operating as a troop transport was a hastily refitted 200 years old museum ship. It went up in the first few minutes because its starboard GARDIAN control had been replaced with a gift shop, and one of those damned eyeball fighters was able to cut inside and blow the mass effect core. 10,000 Turian and Krogan infantry, dead. And that was just the beginning.
The entire course of the fight, shuttles kept ferrying troops down from the transports. We just didn't have enough shuttles to get all the soldiers down. The geth were easy. Those prime units can drop from orbit, but the rest of us needed transports. When the crucible fired, I estimate that sixty to seventy percent of our infantry was still in orbit.
We lost a lot of ships in the battle, but...
[He shakes his head.]
Our frigate was in upper atmosphere when the wave hit. We were lucky. We were angled properly, and our attitude wasn't too severe, so we glided down. Our airframe let us splashdown in Chesapeake bay. Thank god we landed somewhere shallow. Turians don't swim very well... Plenty of us weren't as lucky.
[He sighs, and begins speaking slowly, and quietly.]
Because we started in upper atmo, though, and were going fairly slowly, we saw... everything. Every ship used a mass effect generator. It's literally a million times more efficient than any other drive, and it only takes a few hours to go from system to system. It's so efficient that smaller ships don't even need fuel. The first Normandy was a good example of that principal. The Mass Effect Field Displacement to Actual Mass ratio wasn't just greater than 1, it was almost 3. A ship with that much engine never needs fuel. Damned expensive though, and not worth it for a larger vessel. You see, as the actual mass increases normally, the mass effect field requirements increase exponentially...
[He stops.]
I'm sorry. I'm talking about engineering, because I don't enjoy talking about what we saw.
[He sighs again.]
We were in upper atmo. We were decelerating, preparing to do a flyby on those Sovereigns that were causing problems near the tower. We were overcharging our Thraxis cannons. Bad for the long-term health of the guns, you can double your damage for a few shots before the system burns out. If we couldn't pull out of the dive in time, it would have been a suicide run, but it might have given our ground forces more time, and time was something that we were out of. So we decelerated to just a few times past the speed of sound, waiting for our computer to work out a descent and targeting solution. And that's when the shockwave hit us.
Everything went dark. The whole ship just went black. Our suits were powered by a tiny eezo reactor, so we couldn't even use infantry lighting. The only light we had was coming from viewports.
[Another pause.]
We couldn't do anything but watch! The fleet, the whole fleet, every ship out there was in a similar situation. Some got caught in Earth's gravity well. Some were maneuvering when the wave hit. Some drifted off into deep space... some were going towards the planet but weren't angled for reentry like we were. We watched them hit atmo and break up on the way in. Through one window, I watched thirteen ships break up as they reentered, six of them dreadnaughts! In six minutes, I watched 50,000 soldiers burn up in Earth's atmosphere.
[He's quiet, again, and looks at his hands.]
We were all completely helpless. That's the worst part. There was nothing we could do, nothing anyone could do. We just watched ships burn and their crews die.
[He coughs again. He continues speaking with great and increasing difficulty.]
I'm grateful, at least, for the humans. If it wasn't for you, if it wasn't for the fact that this happened here, on Earth, then the death toll would have been much, much higher. I don't think there would be any Turians or Quarians from the armada left alive if this had happened anywhere else.
[He chokes out the next few words, fighting back another coughing fit.]
I know it's hard to hear, but... this is the only way the Galaxy will recover any time in the next 1,000 years. If the Reapers hadn't made their stand here- It had to be Earth. If... If it hadn't been...
[His breathing stops and his eyes roll into the back of his head. He begins spasming, moving into a seizure. Nurses rush hold him. One of them is slashed across the arm by the Turian's clawed hand. An orderly pushes the interviewer out of the room.]
[Admiral Vorhesh never regained consciousness, and died three days after this interview.]
Dr Charaka Shrivastava, Civillian, London
[Dr. Shrivastava speaks in perfect Eaton English. The child of a Tory Parliamentarian, his younger brother was elected to the Systems Alliance parliament and died during the reaper attack. He stands on the roof of the only remaining hospital in London, drinking home made gin out of a mason jar at the end of his shift. This particular wing of the hospital was gutted by a reaper beam, and is deserted.]
The Medical situation? It's still a mess. We're dealing with three species that match our aminochirality. Asari, Salarian, and Batarian. That is, their physiology matches ours. Two of them, Turian and Quarian, don't match our physiology at all. The Krogan can adapt to just about anything. The Volus... well... I don't think there are any Volus left in the Sol system. If one were injured...
People don't realize that chemically, Oxygen is a corrosive gas. Rust is iron oxide: Oxygen which has corroded Iron. The air we breathe literally destroys the metals it has contact with. Volus don't just stop breathing in an oxygen environment, they suffer chemical burns. Unless you can get them into an ammonia chamber before you treat them for their wounds...
[He takes a gulp from the mason jar.]
And where are you going to find one of those when there's almost no electricity? All the ammonia chambers we had in the hospital used eezo generators!
It took us about six months to get power here in London, and that was only when someone found a 50 year old old hot-fusion reactor freighter, gathered enough h-fuel to run the thing, landed it in the courtyard and plugged the reactor into the hospital's electric grid. It didn't do that much good, anyway. Most of our equipment was eezo based. Almost everything I'm using now is either jury-rigged or was salvaged from museums or abandoned facilities. The two newer pieces I have are on loan from a hospital in Eyl, Somalia!
The first few months were brutal. At last count, there were almost 200,000 Turian ground troops who survived the war in London alone. England was so devastated that there was barely enough human food to go around, much less food suitable for Quarians or Turians. None of my Turians lived. Producing metal supplements... giving them rad doses to stimulate vitamin production in their exoskeletons... we didn't have any way to do that. I had one doctor trained in Turian physiology. He knew what to do, but... we just didn't have the resources.
[Sip.]
Humans have the rule of threes. Three minutes without oxygen. Three hours below freezing without warmth. Three days without water. Three weeks without food. The Turians each had a week's worth of rations, and some of them were able to scavenge more.
[He pauses, and takes a massive swig of gin. The jar is now half-empty. The doctor is slurring his words very slightly now]
Michael MacKenzie was the only other doctor we had. Old, old man. White hair. That man had it bad. The day of the attack, this alliance shuttle was flying people to safety in his neighborhood, but they were overloaded. He gave up his spot. He made his family get on that shuttle, told them he was an old man, and that he loved them very much, and that they all needed to get the hell out of there. He watched them fly off. Watched as a reaper vaporized their shuttle. One of the sovereign classes.
[Sip.]
That man threw everything he had into helping our Turians. In the last week, he didn't sleep. He took bacterial cultures, he was trying to synthesize some kind of Turian algae that could keep them alive. He'd collected wedding rings from the dead, silverware from houses, precious metals and old coins, and was grinding all of it up and dissolving it in Turian amino-acid solutions. But... there was no way in hell he was going to save even one Turian, much less the thousands who were starving. When the last Turian died... Michael wrote me a note. Told me his story. Then he came up here, got drunk on gin, and jumped.
[Swig. The interviewer can hear the sound of him swallowing.]
I don't blame him. His last patient was dead. When a doctor outlives all of his patients, well. It's not like there's much of a point to soldiering on, is there? As soon as I had a line to Alvarez-Urdnot, I got absolutely everything I needed. If I had a patient that came down with some rare disease, I had everything from experimentals to homeopathics in 24 hours. The man knows how to manage a supply line. My stores of antibiotics are growing, because he always sends more than I ask for. He got us two more doctors, but we're still busier than ever.
["What about Liara T'Soni?" the interviewer asks. His face darkens and he looks down at the ground.]
That was...
[He pauses, looking off at the setting sun.]
I didn't have any Asari experts on staff. I didn't realize that she needed extra eezo supplements because of the baby until the 8th month, and we were rationing eezo. If I'd known, I would have gotten her more. By the time we knew what we needed to do, the child had leeched most of the eezo from her body. She kept talking about feeling weak. She kept describing the same loss that all biotics were feeling when the wave shorted out their implants. We didn't realize that was she was feeling was categories greater because of eezo deficiency. Asari and human physiology is so similar that eezo is the only real differentiating nutritional factor. As long as they take their eezo, Asari can eat human food and survive just fine.
The thing is-
[Gulp.]
-eezo just suffuses everything on Thessia. The food, the water... and even the air has trace amounts of it...
[He pauses again, now looking directly into the setting sun as it disappears to the west.]
Lack of information was the problem. It was eight months before we were able to reestablish communication with command. Eight months before Alvarez started running us supplies en masse. Sure, there were plenty of Asari, but most of them were very young commandos. Few of them had ever had a child. With a 1,000 year lifespan, you have plenty of time to plan that out. Fewer still knew anything about the medical side of having a baby. There were medics to be sure, but there were no doctors. Medics know triage, they know bullet wounds, they know radiation sickness and chemical burns. We had no one experienced in Asari neonatal care, not even a damned nurse. So we only found out around month 8 - when Alvarez got communication lines open - that we needed to double her normal eezo intake.
Eezo can be toxic if absorbed too quickly. It's similar to... it functions in Asari the way that anti-seizure medicine functions in Humans. Asari physiology prevents toxicity by only allowing the body to absorb a small amount of it in a 24 hour period. In most Asari, you'd just give them an extra dose of the supplement, and let their body absorb it for a few months until they stabilize. But Dr. T'Soni was pregnant.
[He took a deep breath, and let it out, slowly.]
It was my fault. I should have known. I should have found some way to check her eezo levels. By month 8, the baby was leeching eezo out of her mother's body faster than we could put it in her.
[Sip.]
She survived birth, but we were having a lot of trouble stopping the bleeding. Eezo is integral to the Asari's cellular regeneration process. An eezo reaction is how their skin heals itself. That's part of why they're blue.
[He coughs several times, fighting back tears.]
For all the Asari's vaunted superiority you'd think they'd have evolved something to make childbirth safer!
Liara lived, and so did her child. But... She was unconscious for three days. We tried everything. Blood from other Asari with plenty of eezo. Tripling her eezo supplements. I even tried a pure intravenous eezo drip towards the end. Her blood pressure kept dropping. I went in to try and stop the internal bleeding, but...
She died on my table. There was nothing I could do.
[The doctor finishes the gin.]
Nine hours after giving birth, Liara, regained consciousness for about two minutes. She was able to ask for her baby, able to hold her. She wasn't conscious long enough to tell us the baby's name. That was the last time she was awake, holding that tiny blue child.
Alvarez sent a transport for her. Liara and Shepard's daughter has family, still. I'm told they're somewhere in British Columbia.
[He looks at the empty mason jar for a moment, and then hurls the empty vessel into the ruined landscape, watching it spiral into the empty darkness.]
I keep asking Alvarez for more doctors. He keeps sending me them. Soon, I'll have a few extras, and then-
[He sighs, smiling softly, and his body relaxes. The stress just seems to melt out of him.]
Then, I can come back here to this spot, polish off a few jars, and follow in Michael's footsteps.
[After a discussion with one of Dr. Shrivastava's colleagues, the doctor was temporarily hospitalized for severe depression. He has since returned to his duties.]