The city burned, fire lighting up the night sky.
I stood in the shuttle, returning to the Normandy, watching as all the destruction fell upon the small city.
Really, the citizens never stood a chance. They had been attacked on two different fronts, by two different armies. First, there were the Reapers. The massive robotic starships had descended on the the unsuspecting people not hours ago, while Shepard and I were still on the ground. They came down from the heavens, and brought with them only death and destruction, as they always did.
But no one had seen Cerberus coming.
They had been a lot quieter than the Reapers. Of course they had: Reapers have no use for stealth. The Cerberus operatives had to infiltrate a high level Alliance building, for one reason or another, and Shepard and I were called by Hackett to move in and stop them.
We had no real say in the matter. Shepard might have been the only real hope the galaxy had for survival, but she was still an Alliance soldier. She still had to take orders from her superiors. And as far as everyone was concerned, Hackett was the only person with a higher rank than the Commander.
Not like it mattered anyway. Shepard would have gone to stop those Cerberus troops, whether or not Hackett dictated it to be done.
So Shepard and I had to make our way across half the war torn city, fighting all manner of nasty Reaper forces, just so we could get to the Cerberus troops, so we could put ourselves in even more danger.
But it was worth it. To us, at least.
When we had gotten to the Alliance building, we had expected to find at least some sort of resistance, someone trying to fend off the Cerberus forces. But when those entrance doors opened, and we were the only ones getting shot at, we quickly realised the futility of the situation.
There was no help to be found here. They were all out there, in the city, fighting the hopeless battle against the Reapers.
It had taken Shepard and I some time, and many close calls, but we eventually got to the central computer room, where the data Cerberus was after would most likely be found. True enough, there were Cerberus operatives on all the computers available, trying to find the data they were after, whatever it may have been.
After an intense firefight, the largest computer started to blink with a light blue light. Eventually, the blinking ceased, and the holo-image of the Illusive Man stood before us.
That was never anything new. Harper had always liked to indulge his melodrama, so long as it never actually hindered with his mission. Hell, most of the time it benefitted him to monologue like he did. The whole incident on Mars came to mind.
We eventually got him to divulge enough info that told us he had planted a bomb somewhere else in the city, and that Shepard had the choice of either letting Cerberus have the data and disarming the bomb, or stopping the data transfer, but letting innocent people die from the explosion.
Shepard didn't have much time to make the decision, and she knew it. While her thoughts raced behind her eyes, the sounds of people fighting and dying to the Reapers played in the background. I think it was that that motivated her choice.
Or maybe it was never a real choice for her to begin with.
Whatever the case, Shepard told me to follow her, and we went after the bomb. It was inevitable, but we found out quickly how the Illusive Man was lying.
The explosion was probably the size of an HE artillery shell from WW2. It wasn't big in comparison to some of the others flying around, but it was strategically placed. A Cerberus mole had planted the thing right in the munitions storage of the Alliance's FOB. The bomb itself wasn't big, from what I heard, but it blew up a lot of other bombs and explosives around it. No one survived.
Shepard, as you could assume, was pissed. We made our way back to the Alliance building, only to find that all traces of Cerberus troops, besides the corpses of those we went through, were gone. They had picked up shop and left with the data they needed, destroying the cities only real chance at surviving the Reaper onslaught.
It was that, I think, that tipped both Shepard and I off to the fact that maybe the Illusive Man wasn't at the helm of his ship, as they say.
We had tried to get in contact with any other form of resistance that the city had, but we were only met with static. Simply put, the city was gone before it even had a real chance.
Hackett then gave us a call, saying something about getting off-world, that we were vital to the survival of the galaxy, that we were sadly more important than any of the civilians that were caught in the crossfire. It fell on deaf ears, though. Shepard and I were simply too tired to care.
So Hackett sent a shuttle to pick us up, and that's where I looked out onto the destruction that had be wrought on the city in a matter of minutes. Shepard rested her head on my shoulder, silent tears running down her face. The stress of the war finally catching up to her, after so many worlds lost, and so many missions completed. She refused to make a noise, though: she hated it when people saw her cry. I pretended that I didn't notice.
We watched the city burn, fire lighting up the night sky.
And we sighed, knowing that this was simply one of many cities that would fall before the end of the war.