Chapter 1
"Commander Erin Shepard, Spectre. Service Number SA-477-39-95." The armored woman in the center of the room stared resolutely at a pile of firearms on the table in the corner of the room, stubbornly refusing to make eye contact with the filthy man in front of her.
"C'mon sweetheart, don' be like that. Skiddy's gonna treat'chu right. You just gotta prove you're a cape and we'll be all good. Like fucking family. You know I saw that glowy-ass blue shit you did back in the alley. 'Course, if ya don' tell, we're gonna have a fuckin' problem, ya hear?" Skidmard leaned in and grabbed the redhead's chin, forcing her to look him in the face. He saw her grimace in disgust before she spoke again.
"Commander Erin Shepard, Spectre. Service Number SA-477-39-95."
"A'ight bitch. We'll do it your way." The grimy man turned away from his captive and readied a syringe. He had already shot her up with a number of different substances to try to make her talk, but other than a bit of blankness in her stare the myriad drugs in her system seemed to do nothing to her.
This last drug was special, though. He had ordered it from a chemical tinker out of state as a specialty item with the exotic effect of inducing loyalty in the person it was injected in. Once the drug took effect, the victim would become fanatically loyal to the first person they saw. The effect wasn't permanent, but it did last a number of hours. Skidmark planned to take full advantage of that time. He was about to have a girl who would do whatever he told her, and as a bonus was actually quite attractive. He saw no reason not to have a bit of fun.
Skidmark put on a cocksure expression and sauntered up to the woman. "Up 'till now I've been real fuckin' nice with you. I gave ya all the chances to tell me what I want, but you din' say nothin'. So now you're gonna be real nice with me, got it?" He shook the syringe in her face. "Once this hits ya you'll be beggin' to tell me everythin'. So I'll give you one last goddamn chance. What's. Your. Power?"
The woman stared him straight in the eyes, unblinking, and Skidmark stared back. Seconds ticked by, until finally the woman seemed to reach a conclusion and the ghost of a smirk flickered at the corners of her lips.
"Commander Erin Shepard, Spectre. Service Number SA-477-39-95."
"Bitch! Motherfucker! I'm gonna shoot you up with so much of this shit your children will beg to be my fucktoys! I'm gonna use you raw and fucking dump your naked bitch ass in the goddamn Bay! You hear me?! No one laughs at Skidmark!"
The man grabbed the woman by the throat and jabbed the needle into the side of her neck.
Or he tried to. As soon as the syringe started its way downwards the woman exploded in a corona of blue and purple light and Skidmark went flying backwards, cracking his head painfully against the cinderblock walls.
While her captor was still in a daze the woman applied the same shimmering energy to the cuffs holding her to the chair and they shattered with a shriek of protesting metal. She then turned her attention back to her captor. Skidmark was attempting to claw his way to his feet when suddenly he froze, a glowing blue aura holding him in place.
The woman was only slightly unsteady as she casually made her way over to the table and grabbed a helmet from it, then fitted it over her head and sealed it to the rest of her armor with a soft hiss and click. After locking the various futuristic weapons to magnetic strips on her armor she turned back to Skidmark, who was still trapped inside a glowing barrier.
"Look. I don't know who you are, or what you want. But you just tried to detain me and drug me, so we are not friends. And, as a friend once said, my enemies have a way of dying." She pulled her pistol from her hip and held it lined up with Skidmark's forehead. She spoke as her hand glowed blue and the stasis field around the man dissipated.
"It's been fun and all, but I'm nobody's bitch."
Erin Shepard walked out of the building to find a city that was far more intact than she expected. Which was saying something. This city was clean by no one's reckoning. The buildings were cracked and battered, the windows were nothing more than a few shards of glass still clinging desperately to their frames, and the road looked like something even her old Mako tank would have difficulty crossing.
All that was secondary to the fact that it looked old. Really old. It looked like something built at the end of the 20th Century. Instead of the sweeping lines of late 22nd Century construction, this city was all old cement and brick. She wondered how she hadn't noticed this before even through the haze of the half-a-dozen drugs Skidmark poured into her veins before she woke up. These were the times when she really appreciated her increasingly cybernetic body. Her upgraded liver and kidneys were the only things protecting her from an overdose, and they were the reason why she regained enough lucidity to fight.
Now that her head was clear and she had a grasp of her surroundings, she realized that she looked extremely out of place. In a city that looked to be all crumbling city blocks and homeless people, she stood there in top of the line N7 armor, a Paladin heavy pistol, a Tempest sub-machine gun, a Phaeston assault rifle, a Geth Plasma Shotgun, and a Black Widow sniper rifle. Such a heavily armed and armored individual would stand out anywhere, but in this city from the past she was a spectacle to be seen.
Deciding it would be better to be out of sight and at a vantage point, she put on her helmet and walked to the side of the sturdiest building she could see. It was a four story tall warehouse: plenty short enough for what she was about to do. Remembering the lessons she got from Samara before their suicide mission she flared her biotics around her and jumped.
Her reduced mass and superhuman strength sent her rocketing into the sky, far overshooting her target perch but giving her a panoramic view of the city around her. Activating a modified stasis field around herself, she locked into place in the sky.
Now she could see that her initial assumption was wrong. The entire city wasn't run down. She had just happened to wake up in the slums. A few miles away, across a bay, was a gleaming city-center of skyscrapers and lights. It was still nothing as impressive as the skyline of Vancouver, which she had had ample chance to study while incarcerated before the Reaper War, but it did look like the place where the authorities would be.
Or she would have thought that, if something truly unexpected hadn't been sitting right out in the middle of the bay. It looked like once, a very long time ago, it might have been an oil rig, but now it only shared that general shape. It had been transformed into a shining spire of white, and Shepard had no doubt that this was the center of government in the city.
The base out in the bay had missile pods attached all over its hull and a large domed kinetic barrier wrapping around it. These looked more familiar to Shepard, and she decided that that was the place to find answers. She briefly wondered why a city that looked so old sat next to a very modern government installation, but that wasn't a question she could answer right then.
Letting her Stasis field disperse she gently lowered herself to the rooftop. Pulling out her Black Widow she scanned the city through the scope, looking for a way out to the rig. She could see broken hulls of ships sitting dead in the bay, but nothing stood out until she saw a tiny ferry begin moving from the far side of the bay towards the rig. That ferry station was where she needed to go.
As much as she hated Infiltrator training, Shepard did have to admit that the knowledge came in handy. Trying to cross an entire city in armor from a different era was hard enough when you have a tactical cloak module and know how to stay unseen. Having to do it without all that would have been a nightmare. In the four hours she had spent sneaking across the city she had already had to cloak past groups of gang members patrolling the streets, and had even seen a group of what looked like homeless people in a brawl with a group of Asian gang members.
After that the groups of people on street corners had changed from homeless druggies to groups of Asian gangbangers all in red and green clothing. Shepard assumed those were the gang colors of the seemingly pan-asian gang that controlled this area.
This new gang was more organized than the last, and the groups that lingered on street corners had lookouts a block away in each direction, presumably to warn them if law enforcement was coming. This made Shepard's travel a little bit more harrowing, but the half-light of dusk helped to hide her from their sight.
It was as Shepard prepared her cloak around the corner from a group of these gang members that she was forced to stop. A phone rang in the pocket of one of the gang members, and Shepard's unique translator implant gave her instant fluency in old Japanese.
"What…Yeah?...Ok. We'll be there in five minutes." The man turned to his companions. "Lung calls us. We are attacking tonight. Go, grab your guns and gather at the meeting place. Do not be late."
The men scattered, all heading in different directions, and Shepard cloaked herself to stay out of sight. Now there was a dilemma. Attack? Who were they attacking? Regardless of their target it couldn't be good. But was investigating worth the delay in getting answers? Shepard didn't have long to decide, so she went with her instincts. They were rarely wrong.
She ducked around the corner and hid behind a dumpster in the alleyway. She had eyes on the gang member with the phone. He would be the best one to follow. It took another minute of watching the man mess with a 20th Century pistol at his hip before the man decided it was time to go and started off.
He headed deeper into the gang's territory, as Shepard had anticipated, and never once saw the commando moving unnaturally quietly in armor behind him. As they travelled, more people began to appear, all headed in the same direction, all armed to some degree. For some it was pistols, others, knives, and still others had nothing more than a baseball bat or golf club. It was a true mob, but none of them spoke, all moving with grim determination to their destination.
Eventually they reached a sort of square, boxed in on the outside by a number of warehouses, and stopped. In the middle of the square but set a bit off to one side was a monster of a man standing on a ramshackle stage made of wooden crates. He was not any taller than the average person, but he was muscled almost as much as James Vega. He had dragon tattoos spiraling around his torso and down his arms, and he had a metal dragon mask over his face. He was obviously the leader of this rally, and the gang members began to congregate around him.
Shepard, having found her destination, passed back behind the warehouses to give herself a concealed place to ascend to the rooftop. A quick burst of biotics threw her up to the roof, and she crawled to the edge of the roof and readied herself for a long wait.
It was another hour before the square filled up, and Shepard's hips were sore from lying prone behind her rifle for so long. But she didn't move, still waiting for the masked man to speak. The heads up display inside her helmet gave her an audio feed from the man, but for the last hour all she had heard was silence and the occasional forceful exhale.
The waiting was getting to her. Hours of sneaking followed by an hour of waiting was really getting on her nerves. That wasn't to say she couldn't handle it. Not at all. She didn't master every specialization the N-school offered just to quit after a few hours of boredom. That didn't mean she liked it, though.
Shepard was really a Vanguard at heart. She reveled in the savagery of gun, omniblade, and biotics in close combat, and she craved its rhythm and focus. Where other biotics had to be trained to use the basic Pull and Warp techniques, Shepard had figured out a rudimentary Biotic Charge before she even got her amp.
Once she got her L3 amp, however, she was found to have one of the highest biotic potentials ever recorded; so much so that she spiked higher than an L2 biotic as an L3. The military, who gave her the amp in the first place, pressed her to train for the Adept specialization, so Shepard completed it in record time, finding the normal battlefield control techniques to be simple applications of her power. In an unprecedented move she then sequentially enlisted and completed the Vanguard and Sentinel specializations.
After completing all of these before she turned 21, She was invited to the Villa, colloquially known as N-school. She was the youngest to ever be invited to the program, yet she still passed with flying colors, so she returned. After again setting records in training to become an N2, she took a "break" and decided to complete a couple of special forces missions before testing for N3. She always returned with nothing less to say than "mission accomplished," and thus was sent to investigate the colony of Akuze.
On Akuze Shepard was broken. The colony had recently gone dark for unknown reasons, and Shepard and her team were sent in to investigate. Upon reaching the emergency beacon, they were ambushed by a pair of thresher maws, giant burrowing worms that spit acid at range and will eat people by burrowing the ground out from underneath their feet. After a day and a half of endlessly fighting to escape and seeing her friends and squadmates crushed, eaten, and dissolved in front of her, Shepard was extracted as the only survivor. The loss of her team was a huge blow. She had spent so long being nothing but the best and always facing success that she had almost begun to believe her own hype. She was a prodigy. She was invincible. But she was not, and in her own arrogance she had gotten her whole team killed.
With this in mind, Shepard took indefinite leave of the military and decided on a sabbatical on the colony planet Elysium. After a year and a half of self-destructive thoughts and long nights at various bars, the universe decided that it wasn't done with her. The Skyllian Blitz, a massive raid by a number of batarian pirate bands, hit Elysium and Shepard was again thrown onto the front lines. But instead of despairing at her misfortune, Shepard found a new reason to fight. She was the last line of defense between a mob of batarian slavers and the defenseless civilians of the city.
Fighting with only her biotics and whatever weapons she could pull from the bodies of her enemies, Shepard made herself a threat that the slavers couldn't ignore. While the small local garrison and the militia held off the front lines of slavers and the civilians hurried into bunkers, Shepard threw herself at the batarians' chosen landing zones. Telekinetically crashing dropships into each other and eviscerating any batarian to get their boots on the ground, Shepard gave the people enough time to reach defensible positions. Then she drew back and joined them. What followed was what was once called Shepard's crowning achievement.
The "Lioness of Elysium," as the locals called her, led ten marines and a handful of brave militiamen in holding off hundreds of batarians and their gunships for five and a half hours, when the Alliance Navy arrived with reinforcements. When the bodies left behind and the missing persons were counted, the colony had lost eleven marines out of a garrison of twenty, fifty-seven civilians out of a colony of twenty-three thousand, and Shepard and her group had six hundred and twenty-one confirmed kills, plus unmatched body parts to approximately another eighty bodies.
Though she felt guilty about the few she couldn't save, Shepard recognized that she had saved many more than anyone, even she, had a right to hope for. With her head on straight and new determination in her eyes Shepard headed back to the Villa. For her twenty-fifth birthday she was recognized as the youngest and most accomplished N7 graduate ever, holding almost half of the program's records.
Believing she could still become better, Shepard requested and received special dispensation to train her biotics for two years on Thessia with an Asari teacher. While there she caught the eye of a Justicar who was without a current project and agreed to teach her, with the condition that during her apprenticeship Shepard lived by their Code. Shepard agreed and spent those two years travelling around Asari space with her mentor, returning to the Alliance with a level of biotic power and control that had never been seen in their species.
With all these accomplishments she had already begun being held up as the greatest of humanity, and her later accomplishments, not to mention her Spectre career, only further heightened her fame. Yet here, in this backwards city, all her unmatched determination was being put to task keeping her from going ahead and shooting this man.
It was now well past dusk, and though the square was now almost full every man and woman down there was silent. All gazes were on the metal-masked man on the makeshift stage in the center, yet still he didn't speak. Finally the situation began to change.
At a not from the man, who was obviously their leader, a small group of lackeys pulled open one of the crates and began handing out antique guns and knives all the way down to baseball bats out to the gang members around them. Those who had brought their own quietly passed the weapons on to those behind them, and soon every person in the square brandished various mismatched weaponry.
Just as the leader raised his hand and all of the gang members turned back to him Shepard heard the soft noises of someone clambering up the fire escape on the side of the building opposite where she herself jumped up. Shepard quickly flexed that phantom muscle that activated her tactical cloak and turned to look at where the ladder led onto the roof.
The person who clambered up was the strangest looking thing Shepard had seen in a long time. At first Shepard thought it might be a rachni drone, but the mass of hair that quickly followed the girl's head proved otherwise. The girl who scuttled up onto the roof wore a complex costume that invoked imagery of insects and arachnids, with carapace armoring over vital areas and a mask that was all orange eyes and mandibles. A greyish brown weave covered the rest of her body, and her hands were even covered with clawed carapace gauntlets. Shepard didn't know what would possess a teenager to wear such ridiculous clothing but she had to admit that the craftsmanship was superb. Aside from husks it might have been the creepiest looking human she had ever seen.
Still lying motionless and unseen, Shepard watched as the girl crouched down a few feet away and peeked over at the gang members below. She could hear the leader speaking, but dared not look away from the most immediate threat.
"… the children, just shoot. Doesn't matter your aim, just shoot. You see one lying on the ground? Shoot the little bitch twice more to be sure. We give them no chances to be clever or lucky, understand?"
The small gasp Shepard heard from the girl mirrored her own feelings on the matter, but it didn't change a whole lot. Shepard had surmised from the words she overheard from the gang members earlier that night that something along these lines was going to happen. The fact that the targets were kids only made her decisions more clear. She was no longer playing police. She would solve this problem by exercising the most final authority of a Spectre.
