Staff Lieutenant Kaidan Alenko watched the combat medics load the blood soaked woman onto a life support gurney and wondered if she'd live.

Hell, he thought turning his attention back to the now quiet battlefield as the shuttle with the wounded lifted off, he wondered how any of them had lived. His team was still counting dead bodies and the number was already past the three digit mark.

"Guess the Butcher of Torfan lives up to her name." He muttered with a shake of his head.

"I can think of at least four folks who're damn glad of it, too." A slow drawl answered him.

Kaidan turned and gave a respectful nod to the blood and soot smeared soldier addressing him. "Staff Lieutenant Kaidan Alenko, SSV Normandy. You look like you could use either a medic or a drink."

"I wouldn't mind a drink delivered by a fine lookin' woman in one of them old time nurse's uniforms. Covers both needs well enough." A laugh scraped from vocal cords that Kaidan knew were worn from shouting orders in the middle of battle, but the other soldier didn't seem to feel any pain. "Staff Lieutenant Xander Roac. I'm the Butcher's TWIC." The last was said without irony. "You stabilized her before the SOCMs arrived. You've got my gratitude."

"How many did you lose?" Kaidan asked with sympathy as the other man moved alongside him. Without a word he handed the battle weary man a bottle of supplement enriched water taken from the medical pouch at his feet.

"More'n half. We started with twelve, including the Commander." Roac glanced toward the sky at the fading view of the shuttle that had lifted off and then toward the pack of medics still caring for the wounded. "Four of us still walking. Commander'll make it five if she lives."

"She'd burned her biotics out pretty bad." Kaidan said in a cautious tone. "There could be some residual…"

"First round of RPGs hit the front of our mako and wiped the shields out. Second round killed Giovanni and Alonzo on impact. Unlucky bastards were in the front, Alonzo driving, Giovanni on navigation. Impact concussion force had our vehicle airborne and spinning while we were strapped in the belly still trying to make sense of what the hell was going on." Roac took a long, deep drink of the nutrient rich water. "Mid spin, Shepard goes blue and stops the spinning. Nothing she can do about gravity pulling us down, though, so she builds a barrier about us. We touched down like a baby bein' put in its crib for a nap. Half of us were still trying to get out of our harnesses when she blew open the hatch and engaged the enemy."

Kaidan's gaze left the soldier as he looked to the shattered remains of what had been a mako only hours before. "By herself?"

Another discordant laugh. "Commander don't know what the hell rear guard is." He said and finished off the bottle. "Got another?"

Kaidan handed over his entire ration pack without hesitation. "Early numbers say you were ambushed by at least a hundred batarians."

"Fucking Alliance Intelligence." Roac spat the words. "This was supposed to be a regular scouting trip. No hostiles. Those mental amoebas couldn't find their own asses sitting down without getting it wrong."

"I hear that." Kaidan agreed with feeling. "This feels like you were targeted, too. The aliens knew who and what they were after."

"More'n a hundred four-eyes after a single squad?" Roac snorted bobbing his head up and down. "Hell, yeah, they knew Shepard was in our mako when they attacked. Morons should'a known a hundred weren't nearly enough, too. Not to kill her." He spat on the ground, blood and water from his mouth soaking the soil.

Laughing softly, Kaidan shook his head. "They do seem to have a piss-poor track record in regards to her."

Roac glanced over at him. "You got no idea." He said with the heavy voice of someone who knew. "The Commander'll live. She's too damn bitchy to die."

Taken at face value, the words were an insult, Kaidan mused, studying the other soldier. It was the heavy respect, the almost reverence in his voice that had Kaidan pausing, considering. "You don't blame her for the attack?"

Roac's laugh shouted across the field of dead and decaying, drawing smiles from his fellow survivors and looks of outrage from those who'd shown up almost too late to make a difference. "Batarians just sent over a hundred soldiers after her and she's still breathin'. Hell no, I don't blame her. Anybody who can piss off an entire species of slavers that well must be doin' somethin' right."

"What's she like to serve under?" Kaidan asked the question innocently enough but the sharp eyed look from the other man made him wonder if he'd given something away.

"A soldier'd be damned lucky to serve under Lieutenant Commander Rache Shepard." Roac said in the tones of a true believer. "If the dead lying here could speak, those that she did her best to protect and who fell anyway, they'd say the same damn thing."

Covered in blood, his armor battered and singed with the firefight, his very stance a testimony of the words spoken, Roac was a convincing picture.

"Let's get you back to the Normandy, Roac." Kaidan finally said, leery of accidentally revealing anything else. "You have wounds that need looking after."

"Why are you here?" Roac didn't move, his pale grey eyes demanding. "No way a rescue team could have been dispatched and arrived as quickly as you did."

Kaidan sighed and decided it wasn't a secret even if protocol said the information should come from someone else. "We didn't know you were under fire until we arrived, Roac. We were here to pick up Commander Shepard. She's been transferred to the SSV Normandy under the command of Captain David Anderson."

For the first time Roac looked a bit beaten and a bit sad. "Well, shit." He said quietly.

"Come on, we'll get you cleaned up and rested."


She could smell antiseptics in canned air. Muted voices spoke near but too low for her to make out what was being said. Her hands could feel the slight rise of bed guards on either side of her, a cool almost plastic feel that spoke volumes about where she was.

Rache opened her eyes and stared at the metal gray ceiling of a starship's med bay.

Where was Roac?

The immediate thought had her twisting her head about, searching, dismissing the white covered uniforms of the medical personnel without a thought.

Where was her team? Shit, had they died? She thought she could remember a voice telling her that some of them had survived, but what if it was a lie…

"Commander Shepard." The well modulated voice tried to gain her attention but Rache was having none of it. "You need to lay still, Commander."

No one was important enough for her to pay attention to until she found her team. She didn't care what rank they had, what authority. Until she knew her team was safe…

"Commander, I must insist that you lay back down."

Rache shoved the hands away, forcing legs that trembled with weakness to slide from the bed.

"At ease, Commander Shepard." A very familiar voice gave the order as a large someone literally picked her legs back up and placed them on the bed once more.

"Captain Anderson?" The name was a question and held the echo of a dozen more as her head lolled to the side and she tried to focus. "My team?"

A rumbling mumble answered her but she couldn't understand the words, couldn't make sense of the reassuring vowels and consonants that she should have known immediately. Blackness crashed over her and she willingly sank deep.


Kaidan very deliberately didn't look at the unconscious woman on the far bed as he entered the Normandy's med bay, reserving his attention instead for the white haired medical officer seated at the desk just inside.

"Dr Chakwas."

A pleased smile covered the older woman's lips as she turned to him. "Lieutenant Alenko. How are you today?"

"Running a bit of a headache, Doctor." He said and had the bonus of it not being a lie, just a convenient excuse. "I'd rather try and head it off before it becomes something worse."

"Anyone else and I'd think they were simply coming to gawk at the Butcher of Torfan." Dr Chakwas teased rising from her desk.

He couldn't care less about the Butcher of Torfan, Kaidan thought as he followed her motioned directions to sit on a nearby examination table. He was more interested in the woman who'd thought burning her brain out an acceptable price to pay to save the members of her unit. "Have you been getting a lot of that lately, Doctor?"

A warm laugh like the bubble of molten honey rose from the white haired woman. "Corporal Jenkins has been in here five times with everything from a pinched muscle in his back to a stubbed toe he feared might be broken. I told him that unless he was bleeding he wasn't to bother me again until the Commander was up and able to take care of herself."

Kaidan chuckled. "Obviously I need to give him more to do. An overhaul of the shuttle might keep him out of your hair for a couple of hours at least." He blatantly ignored the voice in his head sneering the word 'hypocrite' at him. "How is the Commander, anyway?"

Chakwas flashed a light in his eyes making him wince back wondering why the hell the first thing any medically trained person always did for one of his headaches was blind him.

"Doing much better than expected. Her wounds are healed and you just missed me removing the tube that was feeding her intravenously to restore some of the mass she lost using her biotics." Chakwas motioned to the bed where the other woman lay and Kaidan blinked trying to see through the spots. "Right now her body has simply shut down, too exhausted to continue. Once she's rested she'll wake up."

Kaidan grimaced at the red marks from the tube and the tape securing it that he saw around Shepard's mouth. "I hated being force fed." He said as Chakwas began prepping an injection hypo next to him. He barely contained the shudder old memories of some of the more unpleasant training schedules at Brain Camp had left him with.

"Fortunately the Commander was unconscious for most of her session." Chakwas applied the tip of the injector to his neck and pressed the button. "A mild anesthetic for the headache. Your blood sugar levels are lower than I'd like and I have a sudden interest in making sure you're eating enough calories a day. How's your diet regimen?"

Kaidan answered that and several other follow up questions deciding that the unplanned checkup was a small price to pay for a closer look at the Butcher laying in the bed and appeasing his curiosity.

"She's an L3, isn't she, Doctor?" He asked with just a hint of curiosity.

Fortunately Chakwas didn't seem to find anything strange about his interest in another biotic. "Yes, her records say she came later to her biotics than you did. She was a teenager when they manifested and was implanted with the newer model." The doctor picked up a nearby file and began scrolling through the report. "The curious thing is that she spikes just higher than you with her L3 implant. Usually the L3s are weaker than the L2s."

Strong, Kaidan mused looking at the sleeping figure. That was a word he was beginning to think suited her very well. "A good thing, too, since she seems determined to pick fights with every batarian she comes across."

Chakwas didn't return the humor he was trying for. "As one of the few survivors of Mindoir, I can see why she does." The words were sad.

"Mindoir?" He'd heard that name before, something…some tragedy…

"Batarian slavers attacked the colony. Most of the population was either taken or killed. The Commander was a teenager at the time and lost her entire family. She was one of the few still mobile when Alliance rescue fleets arrived." Respectful empathy carried heavy in the older woman's voice. "I can't imagine anyone living through that horror and not hating batarians with a passion."

Kaidan let his gaze fall to the patient on the bed once more. "I guess that puts Torfan in a new light."

"You mean the Butcher?" Doctor Chakwas wasn't quite crass enough to roll her eyes, but she did shake her head slightly in dismissal of the nickname. "After Commander Shepard's actions at Torfan, batarian slave raids on human colonies became all but unheard of. She may have earned the nomenclature of 'The Butcher of Torfan', but the colonies who no longer had to worry about being attacked in the night earned a good deal of peace. I rather think the price was worth it."

He watched Doctor Chakwas for a moment, his expression thoughtful before returning to the sleeping woman. "I wonder if the Commander thinks the same thing."

"When she wakes up, you can ask her." Chakwas said with a shrug as if the answer meant little enough to her.

Kaidan studied the sleeping figure a moment longer. Given the upper brass figures from both the Alliance and the Citadel's Human Embassy who'd been tossing that woman's name around for the last week he didn't think she'd be spending much time with the rest of the grunts on the Normandy.

"Thanks, Doctor Chakwas. I'll see you later." He left the med bay with a determined step.

Besides, if experience had taught him anything it was that a strong vibrant woman like the Lieutenant Commander wouldn't even notice him.