This Machine Kills
Shepard.
Time had gotten away from him again. He'd been surprised when he finally counted the months that had passed since he'd seen the headlines splashed across the vidscreens: Commander Shepard surrenders the Normandy, a vessel associated with Cerberus. Commander Shepard taken into custody. Demands for extradition from the Batarian Hegemony, all of which were thankfully ignored. But the accusation couldn't be ignored- hundreds of thousands dead. An entire system obliterated by an exploding relay. The numbing shock of the revelation seemed fresh again after all those months of festering in the back of his head. Who was the person who'd come back from Cerberus?
There was always too much to do, too many pressures always moving him forward and preventing him from dwelling on any of it. Or maybe they were convenient excuses not to. Until today, just minutes ago, when he'd passed within a few feet of Commander Shepard. The closest he'd been to her since that terrible day on Horizon. It all came rushing back as he'd searched for the person he thought he knew in that grim-faced spectre in Anderson's wake. The scars were almost completely gone now, just a light tracing along her jaw. But the gaze she'd laid on him held only a guarded wariness that made his heart sink.
The door ahead of him opened out onto the window-lined promenade that linked the various buildings of Alliance Centcom, Earth Western Division. The cloudless afternoon did nothing to brighten Kaidan's mood as he paced out into the splash of sunlight, shadowed by Lieutenant Vega's heavy footfalls. The whole building buzzed with a nameless tension. He'd been in the military long enough to recognize the signs that something was gravely wrong, but no one was saying it outright yet. Given the amount of disruptive activity, there were only a few things it could be, and of those...
Kaidan froze in mid-thought.
There was a squeak of boots behind him as Lieutenant Vega stopped. "Major?"
As far as Kaidan knew the lieutenant had been assigned to guarding Shepard. He'd trailed along after Kaidan, perhaps out of simple curiosity, while they both waited for the Committee meeting to finish. The other people on the promenade continued to walk and talk, many stopped by the railing to exchange words. Every face was tense, hands gesticulating, eyes darting around. A few people saluted him as they hurried past. But no one else seemed to have heard anything strange.
The first might have been his imagination, but it came again, almost too faint to be called a sound. More of a feeling transmitted up through the structure beneath Kaidan's feet. A vertiginous, half-formed memory crawled up his back, made every hair stand on end. Before he could really think about why, he was leafing through his omni-tool for his brother's call ID.
Vega escalated his inquiry to a cough. "Sir?"
There was only one time in his life he'd heard anything close to that distant subsonic howl- back before they'd known anything at all about this madness. On Eden Prime. His comm pinged.
An irritated voice answered. "Kaid, what-"
Kaidan could hardly believe his own words even as he said them. "Andres, shut up and listen to me. Get Sari and the kids and get out of the city. Now."
The line was silent for an overlong moment. "What?"
"Go out to Uncle Ivan's orchard or something, just get out. Don't wait. Do it now."
"Look, what's going on? Sari is at a conference at UGV and-"
The line exploded into a vicious screech, making Kaidan jump, then went dead. He swore, heart in his throat, and re-dialed Andres' ID. The line pinged a few times, then cut to an automated message apologizing for technical difficulties. Vega was looking at him, face limned in confusion but beset with a creeping realization.
Shouting erupted from the far side of the promenade. For a moment the world seemed to tilt at an awkward angle before Kaidan realized what was tilting was the top of the distant Metro Commerce Tower, just visible over the heads of the people by the railing. The shouting intensified, sprouting screams as more people rushed to watch. The tower dropped out of view, trailing a cloak of smoke and flinders. Vega was swearing, his voice joining the shocked outburst all around them. A bright red line of fire lanced through the blue sky then vanished, leaving a shimmering after-image.
The crash of the tower hitting the ground came as a vibration that rippled through the promenade, rattling the windows in their frames. An alarm klaxon blared from a nearby archway. The building's VI started listing off scramble orders.
Too fast.
Feverishly, Kaidan tried Andres' ID again. He hardly heard the same dead note, the robotic voice relaying an apology as he watched first one then another column of black smoke plume into the sky. The people on the promenade ahead of him looked at each other in mounting panic, mouths open and eyes wide. Omni-tools were flaring to life, grabbing pictures and video, tuning into news networks, calling out, as he was, to family.
The sound rolled over them, drowning out the confused babble, descending among them like a wave of flame washing through a dry pine forest, consuming all in its path. It rattled in Kaidan's ribcage, thrumming his skull against his clenched jaw. Vega pressed the heel of his hand to his temple, grimacing. Plugging his ears was pointless- the noise penetrated everything. Several people bolted, shoving past them, scattering back into the illusory safety of the building.
Alone in the growing pandemonium, Kaidan caught the Lieutenant's eye, the only steady gaze in the crowd. The bear of a man was a break against the crashing waves of people.
"It's them, isn't it?" Vega shouted over the noise.
Them.
Kaidan nodded. He thought but didn't say that there was only one entity in the entire galaxy that could generate that sound. That could in one complex note speak with the resounding voice of a trillion trillion dead. He tried to shift his mind into forward gear. The noise and crowd washed over him. Galvanized by adrenaline, the shifting pieces clicked into place in his head. No wonder he'd been yanked out of his morning muster meeting. No wonder Shepard had materialized out of who-knew-where to be called before the Committee. The Alliance was already scrambling.
The shouting crescendoed and wove into a unified shriek of dismay. Something blotted out the sun. Kaidan looked around to see first one and then a second and third set of gargantuan blue-black metal legs descending from above, out in the sky past the promenade. The buzzing howl pitched sharply upward, a tone that presaged only one thing. Both he and Vega backed instinctively into the support pillar, bracing themselves.
An earsplitting crash shook the building, nearly throwing Kaidan to the floor. Above, an entire pane of glass leapt free from its housing and pirouetted to the floor, coming apart in a cascade of tempered fragments that rained off Kaidan's raised arms. The warning klaxon snapped into a full-blast evacuation siren as smoke and dust billowed from the entrance to their left. Answering crashes and shouts from within rattled off the litany of the floor above coming down in pieces. The entrance back into the building that lead to the Committee chambers was completely blocked with debris.
Kaidan summoned his best field officer's bellow and started barking orders at the reeling personnel around him. Many were office, technical and logistics staff who probably hadn't held a gun since Basic, much less been on the front lines of a war. People for whom the apex of excitement in their lives was the tedium of a yearly fire drill.
That awful sound roared again, mercifully a bit further away this time, but the building shook again, raining more glass and debris down from above. In his head, a sickening parallel marched in time to the cadence of panic- in his mind's eye he could see the Normandy SR-1 burning all around him, feel the tremor of the ship getting hit. Hear the sound of that terrible weapon cleaving through the hull.
Shepard was somewhere up there.
Shuttles. The hangar bay. His gear, and transport. But to where? "Lieutenant! Was the Normandy still in drydock?"
"Last I heard!" Vega shouted back. "But I'd take bets she's not anymore!"
Anderson would head for the Normandy, if he was still alive. The ship was being refitted for him. Kaidan had been scheduled to be assigned there with the best of his biotics special forces unit... a team that was still at Fort Nashen, half a continent away.
Kaidan kept his feet moving, kept ordering and pushing toward emergency stairs. Lieutenant Vega kept pace with him, bodily picking people up off the ground and getting them moving. First one, then another squad of armored marines appeared, moving people along evacuation lines. Kaidan wasn't particularly heartened to see their rifles were drawn. A ground assault? He waved to Vega to follow him, leaving the rest of the evacuees behind and making for the hangar bay at a dead run.
His comm crackled to life. "This is Admiral Anderson. Report in, anyone!"
"Admiral!" Kaidan answered. "You're alive!"
"Major Alenko, is that you? What's your status?"
"Getting to a transport!"
"I can't raise the Normandy. You'll have to contact them. We'll meet you at the landing zone. Anderson out."
The line went dead before he could ask about Shepard. Kaidan cursed. There should have been more time. How were they already past the orbital defences? Luna?
Fighting their way through the press of people, the two of them finally made it to the hangar bay section. He heard his name shouted and turned to see a dark-skinned man waving at him. Kaidan recognized the face- it had been among those in the retrofit crew roster he'd been seen for the Normandy. As they approached, the man saluted and waved at them to follow him.
"Lieutenant Cortez, sir! Just got a page from Lieutenant Moreau. They, uh, liberated the Normandy from drydock-"
"We need to get on board!" Kaidan said.
"Aye sir!" Cortez waved toward the entrance. "The Kodiak on the end, Four-oh-three! Just waiting for Tarell and Jensen to report, they're on their way down."
"They've got as long as it takes me to get my gear." Kaidan turned and jogged to the back wall of the bay, where rows of lockers, weapon racks and crates lined the walls. Both marines and support staff were pulling guns off the wall and struggling into hardsuits while officers barked at them to move faster. He had to shoulder his way past a few soldiers, but Kaidan finally located the case stamped with his name, the one he'd been carting around with him ever since coming to Earth. He hiked it over his shoulder and made for the Kodiak.
Lieutenant Vega was waving a pair of uniformed crew into the ship as Kaidan approached.
"Major! Any word on Shepard's twenty?" Vega called.
"Got to be with Anderson," Kaidan said, hoping he was right. He wasn't sure. There had been a time he wouldn't have believed someone like Shepard could just be killed, but that belief had died over Alchera.
Maybe it was a mercy that he had no time to think about it. Cortez was already in the pilot's seat hurriedly running preflight procedures as they piled into the shuttle. Kaidan secured his load, then came up behind him.
"Are we ready to go, Cortez?"
"Trying to get clearance but I can't get through to the tower!"
"Just go when you can, we can't afford to wait around!"
"What the hell are those?" Cortez exclaimed.
Kaidan followed his pointed finger to see humanoid shapes scrambling up over the edge of the open hangar bay entrance. Pinpricks of sickly blue light were scattered along their dark bodies, and their heads cocked at an unnatural lolling angle as they shuffled to their feet and advanced.
"Husks," Kaidan answered. Already? "Reaper shock troops. Get us out of here, Cortez!"
"Reaper- Shit! Aye, sir!"
The Kodiak lifted into the air, and Kaidan grabbed one of the grips overhead to steady himself. "I don't suppose you can give them a parting gift, Lieutenant?"
"That's the plan," Cortez answered grimly, hands playing over the controls.
The Kodiak's nose swung around, its mounted guns thumped, each impact blowing holes in the advancing creatures, scattering limbs and stringy viscera. As the marines at the end of the bay opened fire, Cortez maneuvered the shuttle up and out into the city.
What was left of Kaidan's brittle hope crumbled. Sovereign, one Reaper alone, had cost the fleets of all Citadel species dearly. And now there were easily a dozen of those monstrous black shapes darkening the sky, unperturbed by the blistering explosions peppering their hides as swarms of Alliance fighters buzzed around them. Red lances of energy etched too-bright lines across his vision, slicing ships in half with heartwrenching ease. Above, faint smoky contrails traced lines down to earth, the last signs of objects dropping out of orbit. The destruction stretched from horizon to horizon.
Run, Andres... get out. Please.
The madness spread with such speed that even the Normandy didn't feel safe. Flickers of news reports told the same story all over the world. There were so many of them. Kaidan wondered where he'd let himself believe, or perhaps hope, that beings of such power could only exist in small numbers. That when they finally came, surely they could be pushed back with the combined might of the Alliance fleet. Now, after having seen the destruction from the sky, and only narrowly escaping themselves, all of that seemed like foolishness.
The list of 'I should haves' swiftly became an intrusive background drone joining his litany of fears and threatening to overwhelm his calm. No time to find his family, his friends, or even the commando teams he'd been training the last few months. Communications had been devastated so badly that even getting through to other Alliance vessels was difficult at best. The Reapers had done a horribly effective job of disrupting any kind of effective counter-attack, and now Alliance forces were scrambling every which way and being cut down one by one.
And yet despite it all, his heart had done a little staccato dance when Anderson had called and said that he was with Shepard, and both in need of pickup.
It should have come as no surprise to Kaidan that any vessel with Normandy painted on the hull would have a pilot named Joker firmly planted in the pilot's chair. Nor that said pilot would sneer at the notion of rescuing Anderson and Shepard with a shuttle, and instead elect to fly a full-size frigate into downtown Vancouver in the middle of a pitched point-blank battle. The sudden insanity had a burst of such familiarity that a spark ignited somewhere deep down.
There had to be a way. Hadn't they proven that before?
His head was swimming in a confused babble of conflicting thoughts by the time Shepard left Anderson behind and came jogging up the ramp, bruised and scraped but otherwise unharmed.
"Joker, we're clear! Move!" Kaidan ordered.
"Roger!"
The deck under his feet shifted, the ship spinning along the edge of the inertial dampers. The smoking vista of the city sailed past as the ramp cycled shut, flaring the sunlight across the spars of the city before sealing with a thud. There was a sepulchral finality to the sound, slicing off the Reaper's howling calls, the buzz of their weapons, and the shriek of shattering metal. The bright afternoon of the first day of the apocalypse descended into the cool, clean familiarity of a cargo bay.
"Joker, is that you?" Shepard asked, walking into the bay, taking in the docked Kodiak, materials and weapon benches. Vega was coming to meet them.
"In the flesh!" Joker answered. "Major, we got a damn lot of noise out here! Lahore's gone down, Agincourt taking heavy fire, requesting backup!"
Agincourt was over the spaceport. Just one... "Clear the combat zone," Kaidan said. Every word burned. I could just... give them more time. But the finality of Anderson's last orders was clear. "Engage the stealth system." He let the assault rifle hang loosely in his grip. It felt useless.
"Roger."
"What's going on?" Vega demanded.
"Anderson wants us to get to the Citadel, get help for the fight," Shepard said.
"Bullshit! He wouldn't order us to leave!"
"We don't have a choice," she shot back, "without help, this war is already over."
"Forget it. Drop me off someplace, 'cause I'm not leaving."
"Enough," Kaidan said. "I heard Anderson. He's right. We... have to go." The last three words forced themselves out despite his mind shouting against every syllable.
"We're getting killed out there! And we're sitting in one of the most advanced ships in the fleet! We can't just turn tail and-"
"Damn it, Lieutenant," Kaidan flared, "my family is down there! Don't talk to me about what it means if we leave!"
He saw Shepard wince and close her eyes for a moment. Vega's jaw worked in soundless frustration, then he threw his arms up and turned away, pacing a circle like an agitated grizzly.
Joker's voice cut into the comms again. "We're clearing the combat zone. Orders?"
Kaidan looked at Shepard, then cleared his tightening throat. "Anderson gave the orders to you, Shepard, not me."
"You're the ranking officer on this ship, Major," she said, not meeting his gaze.
Never had the statement of his rank felt more like an indictment. Something out of synch with reality. "This is your ship and your mission. It always has been." And all I want to do is go back there. I would give anything.
"Is anyone on this crew even going to trust my command?" Shepard folded her arms tightly. "I just spent six months being labeled as an unstable rogue asset, and that's only if you want to be polite about it. A mass-murdering nutjob."
"Commander," Vega cut in, jabbing an outstretched finger in the direction of the ramp, "everything you've been warning us about for the past three years just blew through our curtain wall like it wasn't there. Anyone who still thinks you're loco should get shown the airlock."
"It's not that simple, Vega."
"Incoming emergency transmission from Admiral Hackett," Joker announced.
The three of them looked at each other, then Kaidan strode over to the modification bench and popped up the holoscreen. "Patch it through."
Hackett's scarred face appeared, the image stuttering with interference.
"... Shepard?"
"Commander Shepard is on board, sir," Kaidan said.
Shepard stepped up beside Kaidan and saluted the screen. If the admiral noticed, he didn't respond. The image froze, then shivered back to life.
"Shepard... sustained heavy losses. Force was overwhelming... there's no way we can beat them conventionally..."
"Anderson's already ordered us to the Citadel, to talk to the Council," she replied.
"First I need you... iance outpost on Mars... ore we lose control of the system… been researching the Prothean Archives with Dr. T'Soni. … found a way to stop the Reapers... only way to stop them... in contact soon. Hackett out."
The image froze again, then cut out completely. The modification interface returned.
"Mars?" Vega said dubiously, cutting the sudden silence.
"Liara." Shepard mused. "If she's there then it must be something important. Important enough to leave her... other job."
Kaidan opened his omni tool and entered a series of commands. The writhing in his gut increased as he put the last one through, signing away the last remotely reasonable chance he had of going looking for his family. The special hell of being responsible. The ship VI pinged in response, officially transferring command to Shepard.
"That's two admirals giving you the order," he said, dropping his arms. "I think that overrides my authority. It's your ship, Commander."
Shepard eyed Kaidan narrowly for a moment. It felt like a physical force crawling across him, a nervous tingle along his back. For almost a year now, Shepard had been a half-remembered phantom existing somewhere out there in the black. Schrodinger's person, at once real and not real. Now the box had been opened, the wave collapsed, and she was here, a presence that seemed to electrify the air with sparks and flashes of painful familiarity.
She touched her comms. "Joker, set course for Mars. All possible speed."
"Roger that," came the answer. "Nice to have you back, Commander."
She smirked.
"Lieutenant," Kaidan said, "it's not going to take us long to get to Mars. We need to find Commander Shepard some equipment."
Vega's face split into a grim smile. "Cortez told me Anderson left a couple of care packages on board just in case. They're somewhere in here."
"Find them."
"On it."
Kaidan waited for him to move away before turning to face Shepard. "Maybe a better question in all this is if you can trust the crew. The Alliance."
She exhaled, closing her eyes for a moment. When she opened them again, the light from the back of the cargo bay glinted in the artificial retinas.
"Do you know what those clowns in the Committee said? They looked at me like a bunch of gaping fish and said 'what do we do?'" A cold fury danced in her voice. "Now, when the Reapers are in our living room. They couldn't have asked me that six bloody months ago? A year?"
"What would you have told them?"
"Anything! Do anything except grope blindly in the dark for their own asses! Step up readiness drills. Training. Harden comm networks. Speed up distribution of QE comms. Build more ships, step up recruitment. Talk to the other species! Make a plan!"
"Some of that has been going on."
"And yet there was no plan. No talks. Was I it? Keep the weapon on ice for a while, poke and prod me with tests, then when the Reapers are standing on our toes, hope I'll crap out a solution?" She threw up her hands.
Kaidan shook his head. "Hackett must have been working on something, but..."
"Bunch of idiots," she rasped. "I bought them time in blood. I warned them. Gave them every scrap of data from the Collector mission. So many people dying, and now we have to run."
A thick silence stretched out, broken only by the thud of a crate, then another hitting the ground and the grunts of the marine moving them. Time bought in blood... the destruction of an entire star system. The intersection between the Shepard he'd known on the SR-1 and the one now standing before him didn't seem to line up. Or he didn't want them to. There had to have been another way. The Shepard he'd known would have looked for another way. There had to be something else.
"And... us?" Kaidan said quietly.
He could see Shepard's eyes tracking Vega across the room. "I know you'll do your job, and do it well," she said curtly. "That isn't a question."
He wet his lips. "Kye-"
"Do not call me that," she snarled, each word a distinct blade. She opened her mouth to continue, then snapped it shut again. The muscles around her jaw pulsed with poorly repressed agitation. "You broke my heart, Kaidan, not my trust," she said, soft and hard. "But that doesn't matter. Not anymore. I don't matter."
"What? That's absurd-"
She cut him off with an irritated wave. "That's not what I mean... I..." She used her fingers to crown her head with a pair of horns. "The totem matters. Commander Shepard matters. The propaganda poster." She dropped her arms back to her sides. "I went back to the Alliance because I had to take responsibility for what I'd done. But I also..." she sighed. "It was the one chance I had for... To be back somewhere, anywhere, that I belonged. That I wanted to be. Or maybe it was because I had nowhere else. I don't even know. None of it matters now."
"Yes it does," Kaidan insisted, weak though it felt. His thoughts kept shifting, scattering away from any attempt to form a coherent train. "We can sort this out-"
Shepard stepped toward him, fixing her eyes on his, boring into him. "I tried to hate you," she said between her teeth, barely loud enough to carry the short distance separating them. "I tried with every fiber of my being. It would have made everything so much easier. Clear. But every time I tried, I thought about what it would have been like if it had been the other way around. Can you imagine how I would have reacted if you'd shown up after two years wearing that logo?"
Hate. "I... Maybe," he managed. His heart pounded in his ears.
"I know you can. And when it comes time to make that choice again, and it will happen, what I trust is that you'll be the man I know you are."
"Found it!" Vega called out.
"And just like Horizon," Shepard said, "you'll be right to do it." She painted on a humorless smile, more of a grimace. "This machine kills Reapers." She spun on her heel and crossed toward Vega, who dumped the crate on the modification bench and opened it.
Kaidan trailed along behind them, the gun in his hand suddenly weighing a hundred kilos. Shepard pulled a helmet out of the crate and turned it over in her hands, running a thumb over the N7 logo emblazoned on the reinforcing band. It looked unmarked by any use.
"Refit or new?" she asked.
"Stripped and refit, I think," Vega said. "They, uh, probably didn't want to leave any Cerberus programming in there."
"Fine by me. Amp?"
Curiosity prickled at Kaidan through the veil of gloom. What had become of her biotics after Cerberus' tampering was a matter of some debate, a debate made up mostly of rumors and third-hand reports that ventured into truly wild territory. Vega fished out a small case and put it on the table.
Shepard made an irritated noise in her throat. "Where's my Serrice?"
He shrugged. "Sorry, Shepard. I don't know."
"They better not be expecting me to save the galaxy on a half-power rig."
Half-power? Kaidan frowned. The case on the table was stamped with a Sirta logo. It wasn't an asari amp, but whatever model was inside was certainly not a standard-issue L3 Aldrin.
She picked it up and scowled at the specs written on the side, then put it back down. "Damn it. Well, nothing to be done about it right now. Let's hope they haven't made it to Mars yet."
"The hell is this?" Vega withdrew a strange bulbous contraption made of a dun silver metal and wrapped in a few strips of red tape.
"Looks like... geth tech," said Kaidan.
Shepard's eyebrows went up, and she reached out and took it from the skeptical-looking lieutenant. When she touched something along the length, it unfolded with a soft hiss, popping the taped seals. A grip and a trio of snub-nosed barrels emerged from the smooth cowling.
"Geth make shotguns?" Vega said dubiously.
"I didn't think I'd see this again." A small smile quirked Shepard's mouth as she hefted the weapon, sighting down the length. "A friend made it for me."
The brief swell of real warmth that colored her voice was a knife in Kaidan's gut. There was a flash of the person he remembered, from a time when a smile like that might have been meant for him.
It seemed like a very long time ago.
"Surprised they left it," Vega continued blithely, "practically took the place down to the deckplates after you brought her in."
Shepard swallowed, the warmth vanishing. "Yeah. You two better suit up." She put the gun back down and proceeded to strip off the outer jacket of her fatigues.
Kaidan turned on his heel and marched doggedly toward the Kodiak, where his own armor and weapons were still sitting in their crate. As of today, arguably everything he owned in the world. And gone with everything else was any sense of normalcy, that there was a home to go back to, a line of retreat. Maybe it was true, too, that Shepard herself was no longer recognizable.
He set his teeth and began pulling armor pieces out, letting habit and training take over. Shoving everything down as best he could, he fixed Mars in mind, the thin hope of Hackett's words. A next step. A weapon. A target.
Anything but dwell on what was lost.