Five Moments
In the year 2148, explorers on Mars discovered the remains of an ancient spacefaring civilization. Data extracted from the ruins led to the discovery of the Charon mass relay, enabling humanity to travel to the furthest stars.
In 2152 the first extrasolar human colonies were established, at Demeter, Eden Prime and Terra Nova. Within three years, the people of Earth had established a dozen more colonies scattered throughout the galaxy, connected to each other and to Earth by an ever-expanding network of newly discovered and reactivated mass relays.
In 2156 the Charon mass relay vanished without warning from the relay network. Unable to contact the solar system or return to Earth, the stranded colonists believed that they were now alone in the universe.
Four years later they discovered that they were not.
| One Year Ago | a shuttle en route to the Resolute |
Talitha stared out of the shuttle window. The world she was leaving - her home for the past few months - was already just a pale dot, barely visible in the darkness of space.
I don't think I'm ready for this, she thought.
Her parents hadn't been happy about her decision to sign up as an auxiliary, or when she'd tried to talk to them about her excitement at visiting an alien world. "You're from Earth, Talitha!" her mother had said angrily. "You already live on an alien world."
Never mind that it was the one I was born on, mom, she thought.
Of course, that wasn't the first time she and her parents hadn't seen eye to eye. She absent-mindedly put her hand up to touch the triangular pattern painted on the right side of her face. Nobody was sure where the fashion had started, but within a few years of First Contact, it seemed as though all the younger generation on the human colony worlds had adopted the turian practice of decorating their faces to show their colony of origin. Not as elaborate - or as permanent - as the face markings of the turians, but still clearly influenced by the older species' custom.
Talitha's parents - and several of her friends' parents as well - had been scandalised. Maybe that was part of the appeal. There had been lectures about cultural assimilation, the loss of identity, the memory of Earth … but what did any of the mean, really? The Charon relay had gone dark and no amount of research - whether by the Hierarchy, by the Council, or by the ill-fated Terra Firma movement - had managed to reactivate it. Whatever had happened to Earth, it was gone.
What mattered now was the humans who remained. The Remnant, as some people had begun to call them. And what they had to do, Talitha had decided, was take the chances they'd been offered by the Hierarchy, and by the Council, to earn a place in galactic society. Not sit sullenly on the colony worlds, dreaming of lost Earth. Not that her parents were ever going to accept that, Talitha realised.
Shaking her head, she turned to look at the woman sitting next to her. Unsurprisingly, Communications Specialist Traynor was engrossed in her data pad.
"More chess, Traynor?" Talitha sighed. "Don't you ever get tired of that game?"
"And good morning to you, too, Private Komarov." replied the communications specialist brightly.
Talitha had met Samantha Traynor a few days after arriving on Palaven. She was a native of Horizon, as the three green stripes along her left cheek made clear. This was not the first time they'd argued about Sam's odd fascination with a game that had been antiquated a century before either of them had been born.
"Chess is an important part of our cultural and intellectual heritage," Sam insisted, not for the first time. "It might not have the same galactic appeal as kepesh-yakshi, but it was a part of human history for centuries. People - our ancestors - devoted themselves to trying to understand it, to improve at it, to teach others about it. If we don't keep playing, who will remember their efforts?"
She frowned in concentration, tapping silently at her datapad for a few seconds.
"In any case," she added, "I think you'll find the Hierarchy approves of its auxiliaries improving themselves through regular training in a sport."
"Chess isn't a sport, Traynor." Talitha said firmly.
"Isn't it?" Sam looked up from the datapad, a puzzled look on her face.
"Of course not!" Talitha protested. "Sports require training, physical preparation … I mean, Spirits, sports make you sweat."
"Your point being?" Sam said.
"Wait…" said Talitha, slowly. "Chess makes you sweat?"
"It does if you're doing it right," Sam smirked.
Talitha rolled her eyes at that.
"Okay, history and tradition mean something, I suppose," - they certainly did to her parents - "but why care about getting better at something that even a cheap VI will always be able to beat you at?" she asked.
"That's a strange attitude for a pilot to take, Komarov." replied Sam. "Or don't you realise any decent VI could land that shuttle without you?"
Talitha would have protested that, but she supposed it was true enough. Turian customs - not to mention Council law - meant that VIs weren't trusted with flying craft with living beings on board, but there really wasn't any technical reason they couldn't do it.
"Besides," Sam continued calmly, "Some things are worth doing even if you'll never be the best." She paused and looked up. "And speaking of the best..."
Talitha turned her head to see what had attracted her friend's attention. Another human - an officer, by her uniform - had just entered the main part of the shuttle. There was something strangely familiar about her, but what?
Oh, Spirits, Talitha realised suddenly, It's her. She'd been right - she really wasn't ready to face her new commanding officer.
Three years ago, just weeks after the Hierarchy had captured Torfan, anti-turian extranet sites had started putting up images and video that - they claimed - had been leaked from body cameras and remote surveillance drones. Images and videos of the final few hours of the assault on the batarians' position. Images of what the batarian Hegemony and its supporters were soon calling the 'war crimes' of the 'turian aggressors'.
Though, in fact, it wasn't any of the turians who captured the attention of the human public. Not on Mindoir, anyway. On Mindoir, public attention focused on a single human woman. A biotic, survivor of the First Blitz, and one of the very first humans to sign up as an auxiliary. Shepard.
She was never identified in the videos directly, but people who had known her family on Mindoir recognised her, and soon the word spread. Once you started to look for her, she appeared surprisingly often in the leaked footage. Standing in front of a mixed group of turian and human biotics, barking out orders. Walking through underground tunnels, shielded by blue biotic energy, striding over ground filthy with the blood and ichor of dead or dying soldiers Staring down coldly at a kneeling batarian, raising a pistol to his head, and pulling the trigger.
Even as the Hierarchy praised and promoted her for her role in the mission, others -Talitha's parents among them - had been circulating the videos, muttering darkly to themselves about what being raised by turians could do to a human child. It seemed that everyone knew Shepard's story on Mindoir and everybody had opinion about it. The Primarchs and most of Talitha's generation called her a hero, but to others she had become known as something else.
And the woman standing at the other side of the shuttle was obviously, unmistakably her. The Butcher. She'd grown out her hair since the videos - Talitha raised a hand to her own cropped hair self-consciously - but in other aspects she seemed to have changed very little since then. Though slightly below average height, she carried herself with the air of someone used to giving orders.
Talitha remembered her last fight with her parents. "Is that what you'll let them turn you into?" her mother had demanded. "Another Butcher?"
Talitha hadn't had an answer. She certainly didn't want to be as infamous as Shepard. She was too young to remember the First Blitz; didn't hate the batarians in the way it was said that Shepard did. But she couldn't live like her parents either: burying their heads in the soil and pretending that Earth wasn't gone.
"Come on," said Sam suddenly, interrupting Talitha's reverie. "Let's go and introduce ourselves." Sam had discarded her datapad at last.
Before Talitha could protest, her friend was dragging her forwards. She doesn't know, realised Talitha, suddenly. Traynor wasn't from Mindoir. To her, Shepard wasn't the Butcher of Torfan, she was just their new commander. Talitha hoped desperately she wouldn't embarrass herself.
Talitha was still trying to think about what to say when they arrived.
"Communications Specialist Samantha Traynor, ma'am. " said Sam, saluting. "And this is Private Komarov."
"Tal. Er. Talitha. Um. Ma'am." she stammered.
Shepard's answering smile didn't quite reach her eyes.
"Relax, Komarov." she said. Her voice was unexpectedly soft. From far away, Talitha hadn't noticed the pale scar that ran almost the whole length of the right side of her face, only narrowly avoiding her eye. She also hadn't noticed that Shepard's face was entirely unpainted. Has it always been like that? Talitha wondered. She wished she'd looked at the videos her parents had shared more closely.
Shepard looked at her thoughtfully. "So, you're from Mindoir." she said.
It wasn't really a question, of course, but Talitha felt the urge to answer anyway.
"Yes, ma'am." she said. And so are you! she thought, but didn't say. It was weird - almost as weird as talking to the Butcher - but if the Commander didn't want people to know where she was from, that was her own business. And why else would she not decorate her face?
"I'm from Mindoir myself," said Shepard, almost diffidently. "But you probably knew that. I … I've heard I'm not very popular back home, these days."
Talitha didn't dare to say anything for a moment. But Sam was staring at her, challenging her to reply.
"Hav- have you ever thought of coming back?" she asked. It wasn't exactly the question she'd meant to ask, but close enough.
Shepard shook her head slowly.
"Not much for me to go back to, Komarov" she said quietly.
| Twenty Years Ago | Mindoir |
The fields were full of monsters. 'Batarians', she'd learn to call them later, but she didn't know that word yet. Easier to think of them as monsters, anyway.
Last night she'd celebrated her sixth birthday. Her extended family - uncles, aunts, cousins and more distant relatives - had gathered in the family home, travelling from all over the world to get there. Not quite all her family, of course - her parents still used to talk in hushed tones about the relatives left behind on Earth when they thought she wasn't listening - but everybody on this world, anyway. It had been good to see them all again, to see her parents happier than they'd been for a long time..
Every one of them was now dead.
The monsters arrived early that morning. Their ships dropped down from the sky before the sun had risen over the horizon. She'd been woken up by the sound of screams, humans and cattle alike, as strange lights flickered overhead. Buildings the lights touched collapsed, melted into nothingness, or burst into flames. People the lights touched fared no better.
The house she grew up in was now a smouldering ruin. The tractor that her mother and grandfather spent so long repairing last year had been wrecked beyond recovery, tipped onto its side in a pool of mud and engine oil. The air was thick with the smell of charcoal and blood.
She'd been lying under the tractor for … she wasn't sure how long for. Hours, maybe? She'd always had somebody to ask about these things, or a machine to check, but now she was alone. It felt like it been a long time. Eventually she realised that she was going to have to move.
If I can just make it to the Jankowski's farm..., she thought. They were sure to be able to help. Her parents had always told her that if anything happened, that's where she should go. They'd been talking about a dust storm or a power failure, but … well, surely this was an emergency too? If she could reach the Jankowski's, just a few miles away, she was sure things would be okay. She was sure.
But the fields were still full of monsters. Strangely proportioned, twisted creatures with green skin and four bulbous eyes. Some of them were digging through the rubble, while others wandered around the ruined fields, dragging bizarre dog-like animals with them on long thick leashes.
Wait until they've turned away, then run for it she told herself.
It was just like playing tag with her cousins. They'd done it hundreds of times. She was a fast runner and she just had to get to the Jankowski's farm. She wouldn't think about what would happen if she was caught. The nearest monsters had turned to walk away from her. This is it. She took two rapid breaths, then ran.
Almost as soon as she started a terrible cry sounded behind her. Alien voices raised in anger; the not-dog creatures barking and howling. They'd seen her. She risked a look back over her shoulder - the monsters were chasing after her, shouting words she couldn't understand.
She was running as fast as she could, but it wasn't fast enough. They were going to catch her. She hadn't even made it as far as the edge of the fields.
She looked up towards the setting sun. Somebody was standing on the side of the hill, looking down toward her. No, not somebody … something. Another alien, but this one didn't look like the others. He didn't exactly look human, either, but he didn't seem to be working with the monsters. Maybe he could-
"Get down."
He didn't shout, but his voice carried. She threw herself to the ground as the air above her filled with bullets and blue energy. The shouting voices behind her turned to screams.
She pulled herself to her feet slowly. The new alien didn't seem to have been scratched. He holstered the pistol he'd drawn and cocked his head slightly to one side. He had the bluest eyes she'd ever seen. And he was tall - taller than anybody she knew. He seemed to be wearing a suit of armour of a type she'd never seen before. It made him look something like a skeleton; of a bird maybe, or a dinosaur.
"My name is Saren," the alien said. "I'm here to help. What should I call you?"
She didn't answer, but turned slowly to look at the bodies of her pursuers lying face-down in the field behind her. Five of the monsters. They seemed a lot smaller now.
"Did they hurt you?" the alien asked, gently. Saren, she reminded herself. His accent was very strange. She wondered where he'd learned to speak English. She knew it was the common language of the colony worlds - the one language they all had in common, to one degree or another. Perhaps it was the common language of aliens, as well.
The thought of how her grandfather would have reacted to that idea made her smile, briefly. At home, he'd muttered angrily whenever anybody spoke anything but Russian or Polish. Then she remembered the monsters dragging her grandfather out of the burning farmhouse, and her smiled faded.
She realised she'd been silent for too long, and that Saren was waiting for an answer.
"Um. No," she said slowly, "They haven't hurt me, but-"
"Don't worry, child. They will not hurt you, I promise." Saren knelt down so that their eyes were level. She wanted to say something, but she didn't trust herself to speak.
She looked up, behind him, her eyes widening slowly. More monsters, creeping up behind them.
"How many?" he asked softly. She didn't know how he knew.
"S-seven."
"Well, then." He seemed to frown, his voice becoming less certain "You may wish to close your eyes."
She did want to, but she couldn't look away. She'd never seen anybody that moved like him before. His limbs didn't move like a human's, and he was so fast. He spun around, pistol flashing out, and had shot one of the monsters through the eyes before the others had a chance to react. The other monsters snarled and fire their own weapons, but the bullets and energy bolts seemed to flash harmless against him, arcing out in blue flashes as they neared his body.
Then he leapt forwards, further than she'd thought possible, and was suddenly in the middle of them. One arm flashed forward, and a monster fell, clutching feebly at its throat. A booted foot struck out precisely, and a second monster curled forwards, its legs breaking useless beneath it. Saren's pistol pointed down and fired twice.
One of the monsters snarled and lunged forward, but Saren simply stepped to the side, sticking out a foot to let the monster trip to the ground. The other monsters started firing wildly, but once again the bullets simply flashed harmlessly away, a blue glow shining over Saren like a shield. The monsters had no such protection, it seemed - another shot from Saren's pistol left one of them reeling backwards, dark green blood pouring over the muddy fields.
She could only watch in fascination. Only seconds had passed, and yet-
-oh no, she thought, suddenly spotting movement on the edge of her vision. Please.
One of the fallen monsters had only been stunned, and now - with Saren facing the other way - it was climbing to its feet, weapon raised. Saren was still fighting two of them, and his back was turned to the third. She couldn't tell if he'd heard anything. He's going to die, she thought bleakly. They're going to kill him like everybody else. She felt sick.
She screamed, wordlessly, and pushed at … she didn't have the words to describe what. Her head hurt worse than she could remember. But tens of meters away, the monster stumbled, its shot firing wildly over her defender's shoulders. Saren spun around at the noise, fired his own weapon once, and the monster fell to the earth. The remaining monsters broke off and fled back the way they had come.
Her vision wavered, and she would have fallen if Saren had not suddenly been at her side to catch her.
"How did I do that?" she asked him, hearing her words slur together. "I've never…"
She wanted to be sick.
"How…" she mumbled, "How can we stop them all?" It struck her then that, if this was happening here, it could be happening all over the planet; all over the colonies. Saren might have saved her, but who would save the others?
"Don't worry, child," said Saren, "You are not alone."
She tried to answer but it was just too much effort to stay awake.
An hour later there were three turian dreadnoughts in orbit. Six hours later there were no living batarians left within a light year of the planet.
Nine months later the colony of Mindoir voted unanimously to accept the Hierarchy's offer of clientage. And eight years after that vote, she was one of the first humans to sign up to the Hierarchy's auxiliary program.
| Four Years Ago | Torfan |
Ripper died a few minutes after they made it into the tunnels. By then, they all knew things had gone badly wrong.
This was supposed to be a simple operation, Marius thought. A few months earlier, batarian proxies - mostly slavers and privateers operating in the Terminus systems - had launched a sudden assault on the human colony worlds under the protection of the Hierarchy. The fighting had been fierce and bloody, but after some time the invading forces had been pushed back. Now the war had moved back into batarian space.
High command had identified key enemy outposts on this moon. Some of the very people who had organised the original blitz attack were understood to be hiding out here. The Hierarchy had ordered Commander Vyrnnus's cabal to take out one of these outposts. The kabalim had spent days studying blueprints and reports, working out a plan to enter the underground tunnel system that long-range scanners had picked up.
Bringing us down into an ambush probably wasn't part of that plan, thought Marius.
They'd underestimated the batarians. That was the simple truth. It was a mistake that was probably going to get them all killed.
Vyrnnus and most of the senior members of the cabal were already dying or dead, and only a fraction of the survivors had managed to fight their way to the tunnel entrance where they'd been ordered to assemble.
Ripper had been the highest ranking member of the cabal to make it this far. After him,by Marius's reckoning, the next highest ranked was Shepard, one of the human auxiliaries. Glancing around the tunnel, it seemed that everyone else had reached the same conclusion.
Marius hadn't served under a human before, but there was a reason that high command had already promoted her to this rank. He'd seen her fight with his own eyes, ripping apart the enemy's defences with her biotic powers with seeming ease. She could handle a pistol as well as a turian, too. And as for leadership ... if his superiors thought she could do the job, then it wasn't his place to question that.
Then again, he thought grimly, Sometimes high command makes mistakes.
Shepard pulled herself up onto a ledge to address the other survivors. Marius found himself towards the back of the crowd, looking up towards her. He kept his face schooled, not wanting any misgivings to show.
"I'll keep it short." she said. "The batarians have killed a lot of our friends today. Good people, people we'll miss. My guess is that they think it's just a matter of time before we give up, go back to the Citadel and ask the Council to step in. Before we stop fighting and let the diplomats argue over how the Overseer and his pirate friends should best be rewarded for attacking our worlds and terrorising our civilians. For killing our friends."
She shook her head.
"Hell, if we were asari or salarians, maybe they'd be right. But the Hierarchy doesn't respond to aggression with diplomacy and fancy words. We don't ask our enemies what we can do to make them leave us alone. When people try to start wars against us, we end them. And when the primarchs decide that dropping rocks on our enemies from orbit is too merciful, they call on us.
"Like I said, we lost a lot of good people today. But I came here with a job to do, and I plan to finish it. If anyone or anything on this rock wants to stop me, they're welcome to try."
Without waiting for a response, Shepard hopped back down and started barking out individual orders.
"Marius, get to work on these lift controls. If we override the security locks, intel says this shaft leads straight into the batarian command bunker."
Marius nodded and raced over to the controls. Batarian security systems were nothing special; a little bit of prodding and tinkering would work to break through most of what the Hegemony could produce. The pirates might have got hold of something better, from somewhere - the salarians, maybe - but he was confident he could deal with that too, if he had to.
"Kyle, take your pick of the rest of the squad and set up a defensive perimeter. For now, we have the element of surprise, but that won't last. When the batarians realise what's hitting them, they'll scramble everyone they have up on the surface to get back here. We need you to keep this chamber clear so we have an exit path."
Kyle - another human - was somebody Marius knew better than Shepard. They'd served together in the Terminus systems before, fighting vorcha and krogan mercenaries. Kyle was one of the few human biotics whose powers had manifested before First Contact. His mother had lived downwind of a eezo mining complex, which had been the site of huge fires six months before he was born.
Kyle's parents hadn't been sure what to do with him after his powers began to manifest. Even with all the advances gleaned from the Prothean ruins, human science had been wholly unprepared for biotics. The arrival of Hierarchy forces - and their establishment of biotic training camps across the colony worlds - had been an unexpected but welcome resolution to their dilemma.
Marius's own biotics had first manifested while he was in the engineering corps - he'd been reassigned to a Cabal soon afterwards. But he still thought of himself as an engineer more than anything else. His biotic powers, he knew, were nothing special. Machines, tech, computer systems … that was where he could be of the most use.
Speaking of which… he thought, grimly. This system was proving to be more of a challenge than he'd expected. Vyrnnus wasn't the only one who'd underestimated the batarians, he admitted to himself. With any luck, his mistake wouldn't prove as costly as the commander's had.
Breaking into security systems like this required a combination of brute force and technical skill. On Marius's left-hand side, he'd cracked open the case of one machine; tearing and rerouting wires to disable some of the hardware challenge protocols. To his right, the screen of another machine flashed messages at him urgently. He'd been able to give himself limited root access, and was trying to convince the system to shut down and restart.
But he wasn't the only presence active on the system - there was some sort of simple VI guard-dog routine in there too. And the VI seemed to sense he didn't belong. The VI threw up barriers and obstructions to stop him making progress, but thankfully it didn't seem to be able to disconnect him. The talons of his right-hand flexed and tapped against the machine's screen desperately as he tried to … there!
The screen faded to black. Marius allowed himself a brief moment of panic, then - did the VI manage to disconnect me after all? - before the right-hand machine powered back to life. At his command, the security systems deactivated, the locks on the lift clicked open, and the doors slowly slid apart.
Marius stepped back and took a deep breath. He'd been so focused on his task that he hadn't noticed Shepard coming up behind him. From the look on her face, he guessed she had some idea of the problems he'd had. Briefly, he wondered how he could explain how tricky the security had proven to be. He didn't know if the human had any tech background, but-
"Good work, Marius," she said simply.
He tilted his head towards her slightly in acknowledgement. Sometimes high command don't make mistakes, he thought.
Kyle and the biotics he'd chosen stepped away, Marius hoped they'd be all right, but he knew that their odds of holding this position against the bulk of the privateer forces for any length of time were slim.
We'll have to be quick then, he told himself.
The remaining members of the Cabal readied their weapons as the lift dropped down into the darkness.
| Seven Years Ago | Horizon |
Doctor Blake had only one more patient to see that evening. But she was one of the troubling ones.
"Now…" she said brightly. "Your file says you don't like people using your given name, but it doesn't say what you do like. Should I call you Miss Shepard, or …?"
"Just Shepard's fine," the girl sitting opposite her muttered awkwardly. And she was a girl, thought Blake, whatever the Hierarchy insisted. Nineteen year old children shouldn't be old enough to be shell-shocked combat veterans. This was the twenty-second century, not the twentieth. The future was supposed to be better than this, she thought sadly.
"Shepard, thank you." Doctor Blake smiled, making sure to keep eye contact. "You can call me Doctor Blake, or Helena if that's easier for you."
Shepard didn't seem to think that merited a response. She just sat in her chair, fidgeting uncomfortably.
"Now, Shepard," Helena Blake said, her voice turning serious. "Do you know why we're talking like this today?"
Shepard puffed up her cheeks and sighed, her jaws working silently for a moment or two. Helena waited patiently, not sure why she found the gestures so unsettling.
"The Alliance passed a law mandating regular counselling and medical check-ups for all biotically-enhanced minors brought up in Hierarchy training camps," Shepard recited woodenly. "Sessions are required every year, or as soon as possible following any reports of potentially serious injury or trauma." Helena wasn't surprised to see that she'd memorised the usual spiel by now.
"How long have you been serving as an auxiliary, Shepard?" she asked, trying to keep her tone as light as possible. She already knew the answer. It isn't right that they do this to a child, she thought privately. Especially after what happened to her family.
"Four years, now", Shepard said. For the first time since their session started, Helena could detect some clear emotion - pride - in her patient's voice. She angled her head to one side, a gesture Helena realised she'd last seen used in such a way by the local garrison commander. A turian gesture, then. She wondered if Shepard was conscious of the fact she was doing that.
"Can you tell me about your last mission, Shepard?" asked Helena, hopefully.
Shepard frowned, shook her head. "We're not supposed to talk about operational matters," she said slowly. "Security. I know you get the reports, but I don't know what..."
"Tell me about Private Taylor, then" Helena said coaxingly.
"Jacob?" said Shepard. "He's - I mean, he was…"
She frowned, and sighed.
"He died for the cause, I guess? That's meant to be a good way to …" Shepard trailed off and stared at her feet. "He was a nice kid. I couldn't save him," she muttered.
"I'm sorry, Shepard," Helena said carefully. "I'm not sure the microphone caught that. Could yo-"
Shepard looked up again, her face flushed and angry.
"I couldn't save him!" she said heatedly. "It was my job, and I let him - I let the unit down."
"Nobody thinks you let anybody down," said Helena, soothingly. "In fact, in your file it says your commander recommended you for a very prestigious award. Everyone I've spoken to, everything I've read … people seem very impressed."
… that you killed a thresher maw, she didn't finish. That's the elephant in the room, isn't it? Nineteen year old children aren't supposed to fight monsters like that. They're certainly not supposed to kill them. Shepard's file had also been very clear that Shepard didn't like talking about the aliens she'd fought. Or explaining why she'd never painted her face the way the other colony children had started to do.
"But it wasn't enough," the girl said, stubbornly. "I need to do better. I have to be better."
Dr Blake frowned slightly. "Did somebody in the Hierarchy tell you that?" she asked. "Because-"
Shepard was already shaking her head.
"Nobody tells me that," she said flatly. "You- they all pretend…" she trailed off.
Helena scribbled something on her datapad, thoughtfully. "Let's go back to Jacob," she suggested. "Did you talk to him much?"
Shepard shrugged, defensively. "We talked a bit, I guess."
She paused for long enough that Helena wondered if she was going to speak, but then she continued. Her voice was quiet now, more thoughtful.
"His mother brought him up, I think," she said slowly. "At least, he never talked about his father. Maybe something happened to him. I think he was thirteen or fourteen when his biotics started manifesting."
Something about the matter of fact way she said that troubled Helena more than she'd let show. The sudden emergence of biotic powers among human children - at just around the time they made first contact with alien life - was still something most humans struggled to accept. But to Shepard, of course, it was just lived reality.
"Thirteen's quite young, isn't it?" Helena asked carefully.
"I guess," the girl was back on the defensive now, her voice guarded. "During puberty's pretty normal. Earlier, sometimes, if there's the right sort of mental or emotional trigger."
Helena sighed to herself. Shepard was back to reciting things she'd memorised. They didn't seem to be making any progress. Perhaps it was time for a different approach.
"What do you think of thresher maws, Shepard?" she asked.
"They're very big," Shepard said, coldly. "Hard to kill." She paused for a few seconds, contemplating. "They look really ugly, too. Honestly, they're pretty disgusting."
"Do you spend a lot of time fighting thresher maws?" Helena asked carefully.
"No." Shepard seemed to want to leave it at that, but as the doctor stayed quiet the teenager clearly felt compelled to fill the silence.
"Most of the time we fight batarians," she said quietly. "Pirates. Slavers"
"And what do you think o-" Helena started to ask,
"Batarians are also disgusting," Shepard said, heavily, "You know I think they're disgusting, and you know why I think that. And now I think you're wasting my time."
Shepard stood up, shaking her head, and stalked towards the exit. But just before she got to the door, she paused, turning around again to face the doctor. She grinned - No, Helena realised, She bared her teeth. Like a turian - and her grey eyes were cold. "They're not hard to kill though." she added, as she walked out of the office.
She should probably have chased after her, Helena knew, but the girl was right. She would just have been wasting both their time. Instead, she sat in her office writing up her reports. They were mostly done anyway - this interview wouldn't have added much even if it had gone on as long as scheduled.
The official report took the longest, as usual. She had to collate medical reports, transcribe the interview, paste in any number of charts and tables and figures. She had to prepare a plan for follow-up treatment, as if there was any chance of Shepard agreeing to come back to see her before the mandatory year was up
This was all largely pointless, in Helena's private opinion, but there were bills to be paid and this was a good a way of earning money as any other.
As soon as she was finished with the official report, Helena reached into the bottom of her desk drawer and pulled out a cheap unregistered omni-tool she'd picked up from a stall selling knockoffs and counterfeits out in the slums earlier in the week. The market trader hadn't asked her why a professionally-dressed young woman would be so keen on being able to send untracked messages, but she'd sensed his curiosity all the same. So she'd casually let slip that she was involved in something complicated with a married colleague, one who - not to put too fine a point on it - was a lot bluer and balder than the sort of girl Helena's parents would have wanted her to date.
Helena was rather proud of herself for not giving away any hint of just how nauseous that suggestion had made her feel. It had assuaged the trader's curiosity, and that was all that mattered.
Now, alone in the office, she frowned thoughtfully while she typed out her message. As soon as it was safely sent off - to an extranet address she'd memorised earlier in the week and would never contact again - she pulled the power source from out of the omni-tool and cracked it deliberately into pieces. The now lifeless tool would be disposed of in a public trash incinerator on her way home, and she'd pick up another one from the grey market in a few weeks time.
She'd been practising this routine for months now. Unnecessary, probably, but one could never be too careful.
A few minutes later, and the office was deserted. Dr Blake's official report sat waiting on her office computer, where tomorrow she'd reread it, revise it, and finally send it off to the Subcommittee for Transhuman Studies. And her other report flew out invisibly among the communication buoys of the relay network, to be seen by a very different group.
||||||| SUBJECT 0116-7
While 0116-7's commendable hatred for batarians seems undiminished, her adoption of the turian's social and political attitudes is highly worrying. Her biotic abilities are well within the top 5% of all candidates, but it is difficult to assess her mental state. She is unlikely to respond well to anything she views as disloyalty to her own unit or to Hierarchy high command, in whom she has clearly invested significant emotional energy following the deaths of her family and the events of her subsequent upbringing. Recruitment efforts are therefore highly contraindicated at this stage. Suggest continued long-term monitoring.
| Four Years Ago | Torfan |
Gharvak hadn't seen the shot that hit him. One of the turians must have got lucky - firing right at the moment his shield generator failed, just before he'd ducked into cover as he'd been trained to. Well, turians had never been short of luck.
The turians had been lucky sixteen years ago; stumbling across the human colony worlds in the Attican Traverse mere weeks before the Hegemony. Hegemony scouting parties already rounding up new slaves had been left stranded when the warships of the Hierarchy emerged without warning through the Shadow Sea relay gates. Cut off from reinforcements and supplies, the scouts had had no chance, and the human worlds had soon been swallowed up into the turians' growing empire.
The turians had got lucky again when it turned out that the humans - the slow-witted, soft-skinned, ugly humans - had begun to develop biotic powers, something which both the Hierarchy and the Hegemony were sorely in need of.
Of course, the Council had turned a deaf ear to the batarians' pleas for diplomatic resolution of the disputed territories. It was no surprise at all that the asari and salarians had sided with the turians at the expense of the Hegemony. Ever since the end of the Krogan Rebellions the three races had been inseparable allies - a relationship which had benefited the turians countless times through the centuries.
Now they had been lucky once more.
The shot had smashed open his visor, blinding him in both his left eyes, and knocked him clean off his feet. He'd lain on the floor, stunned, while the turian troops and their human lackeys pushed through the barricades his squad had set up hours earlier. All aliens were ugly, Gharvak reflected, but these humans were hideous. Even with their biotics they seemed barely worth the trouble of training as slaves.
This time should have been different. The Hegemony had been cultivating allies in the Terminus systems for years, biding its time, waiting for the right moment to strike back. And now the turians were - should have been - distracted by the separatist crisis on Taetrus, by the recent failed assassination attempt on the humans' President, by rumours of economic uncertainty on Irune. A short, coordinated military strike against the turians' most far-flung outposts should have made the Hierarchy's leadership aware of the weakness of their position. It should have brought the turians back to the negotiating table, prepared to make a more realistic settlement in the disputed systems.
The strikes hadn't been as decisive as the Overseer had wished - their allies just a little slower, a little less well equipped than they had counted on - and the turians response suggest that the Overseer's advisers had badly misjudged the new Primarch on Palaven. Heads had already rolled for that mistake.
Lost in his thoughts, Gharvak realised he'd been drifting out of consciousness only when he heard voices in the corridor behind him. Suddenly he was fully awake again. A small party was approaching his position, marching from the central control room. Reinforcements, or … but no, his spirits fell again. He could hear turian and human voices, not batarians. We've lost, he thought, numbly. The idea of Torfan falling had seemed unthinkable even this morning. The thought of it filled him with unexpected despair.
Laying down your life for victory in combat - that was something of which the gods approved. But compounding the shame of defeat by falling to the enemy on the battlefield? That was something that the gods would not forgive. This is no way for a soldier to die, he thought.
There were only three of them, he realised. Two turians and a human. They all ignored him - lying against the wall in a pool of blood, no doubt they assumed he was dead or unconscious. Their mistake, he thought. And his weapon was still in arms' reach. Maybe the gods had decided he was due a little luck.
The turians were the real threat, he decided. He'd kill them first, then deal with the human. She'd already wandered ahead - with luck she'd have no warning until he was ready for her. He waited until the two turians were crouched down, examining a security terminal, then in one smooth motion grabbed the gun by his side and fired twice. The first shot went wide, but the second struck true, hitting one of the enemy cleanly in the skull.
He heard the human cry out - she must have been closer than I realised, he thought - even as he was firing again, wild shots now, no need for stealth. The second turian went down too, and a stray shot must have hit the terminal he'd been investigating, sparking a chain reaction which had the whole bank of terminals in flames. No chance of the turians surviving that, he thought grimly, turning to find the human.
That's where it all went wrong.
Somehow she was already back inside the barricades, wreathed in blue energy and shouting something Gharvak couldn't hear. He tried firing again, but his weapon wouldn't respond - it was painfully hot to the touch, so Gharvak simply threw it at the human. Her hands twitched - the tell-tale sign of a biotic recalling mnemonics - and the weapon spun away around her, clattering into the floor somewhere in the shadows beyond.
Gharvak tried to grab for another weapon, but the shot he'd taken earlier had left him too slow, too weak. The human's pistol barked once, and he felt a sudden sharp pain in his chest. She gestured with her hands again and Gharvak felt himself being torn off his feet and hurled backwards.
He crashed heavily against the tunnel wall, a sharp pain in his lower back. He tried to reach for his weapons one last time, but his fingers twitched helplessly and his arm hung useless at his side.
The human walked up towards him, pistol drawn. He couldn't read whatever emotions passed across her face. But he knew he was dead, either way. Still, better a quick death than bleeding out in a tunnel.
The human pointed the pistol at him, then paused, as if considering. He noticed she'd taken a wound of her own, a thin line of bizarrely red blood dripping down over her one right eye. It was like looking at a creature out of a nightmare, or a demon.
"Do you believe in hell, human?" Gharvak asked, slowly. "I know the turians don't. Or at least, they say they don't."
The human just looked at him. Discussing theology with an animal, he thought, distantly. Why not? He wasn't even sure she could understand him.
"I believe in hell," he continued. "I know that the just and the merciful are rewarded by the masters of creation, while the weak and the cowardly are punished for eternity. I know what fate awaits me in the world after this."
Gharvak coughed, weakly, spitting green blood onto the cavern floor. He struggled up to his knees, his right arm still twisted unnaturally. He wasn't going to die on his back like an insect.
"One day, human," he continued, "One day you too will be judged. One day your eyes will look upon the last world your masters will ever send you to conquer. The world where your body will fall, unmourned, as whatever passes for a human soul seeps from your eyes like poison. On that day, perhaps we'll meet again."
His two working eyes closed, for the last time. He felt himself tremble slightly as the as the alien rested her pistol against his temple. He took two rapid breaths, then another.
"Well, get on w-"
A sound like thunder echoed in the subterranean chamber.
