Shepard raised the bottle to her lips, took a long pull, and immediately regretted it.
Warm beer was an abomination. A blight. An insult to alcoholic beverages everywhere. And yet Shepard, who generally had only the highest respect for beer, had been nursing the same bottle for better than an hour, letting the once ice-cold beverage go to lukewarm waste. After they'd finished their rounds of toasts, she just hadn't much felt like drinking the rest.
She glanced at the clock over the bar for the eighth time in the last fifteen minutes. Still not midnight. She told herself midnight was the minimum acceptable hour to leave, though she knew Alberts would still glare disapprovingly. Maybe she could slip away without Alberts seeing; the blonde hadn't left the dance floor in an hour, and was currently swaying back and forth in the arms of a man whose cheekbones were so chiseled Shepard could actually make them out from across the room, even in the near-dark. Excellent, as far as distractions went.
At one minute after midnight, Shepard hoisted herself to her feet, wobbling on her uncomfortable heels. She wanted combat boots; she wanted fatigues. She wanted her too-warm hair off the back of her neck. She wanted bed. Tomorrow she'd ask around, see if she couldn't pick up an extra shift. She didn't have another day of shopping in her. She definitely didn't have another night of not-drinking and not-dancing and definitely-not-watching-Alex-Smith-making-out-with -a-pretty-local-girl. That the girl was a redhead only added insult to already significant injury. Her gaze slipped to the other end of the bar, where Graves watched her with exactly the hurt feelings she'd anticipated. When he caught her eye, she was the first to look away.
She took a step toward the door and the world fell apart.
At first, she thought it was only the beer, though it had been a long time since a beer and a half had affected her at all, let alone inducing intoxication enough to send her sprawling on her ass. Then she thought maybe someone had put something into that beer, because a couple of drinks shouldn't have made the ground shake. A moment later, though, she realized the ringing in her ears didn't have anything to do with alcohol, and the smoke and ash in the air definitely wasn't an alcohol-induced hallucination. She scrambled to her feet, swaying on her stupid, impractical shoes.
The end of the bar where Graves and Kho had been sitting, the booth where Alex Smith had been making out with the redheaded local girl, the whole far side of the building was gone. Flattened. Cratered. Shepard knew she shouldn't have been able to see sky. She blinked, but the stars remained, blanketed by a fog of smoke. Her eyes burned, and a trickle of something warm ran down her right cheek; when she swiped it away, her hand came away stained with blood. Her shoes lasted less than a minute before she decided she'd take her chances with bare feet and kicked them off.
She only realized her hearing had been knocked out when it started to come back again, and the first thing she heard were the screams. She stumbled toward the place the dance floor had been, stopping to check pulses. Too few pulses. She found Jillian Smith crumpled under a fallen beam of lights. She didn't need to look for a pulse there; people didn't survive their brains being smashed in. Shepard swallowed her nausea. Later. Later. Triage now. Mourn later. Later.
With her hearing returning to normal, she heard the sound of other explosions, some distant, some near. Elysium was in the Verge, sure, but it was supposed to be safe. She choked on the memory of the night six years previous—blood and fire and blood and her parents and a kitchen knife stuck in an alien chest and yellow paint bubbling and peeling and skin bubbling and peeling and so much blood—and focused instead on the people she could help, the injuries she could treat. She wasn't that girl anymore. She wasn't that girl. She had resources. She had skills.
She wished she had medi-gel.
She wished she had a goddamned gun.
Alberts was alive when Shepard found her. Tears had made a ruin of the kohl, leaving dark tracks down cheeks that needed no blush to look pink now. The bright red lipstick she'd been wearing was now smeared all over the lips of the young man upon whom she was performing desperate and futile CPR. "Shepard!" Alberts cried, over-loud in the way that told Shepard the other woman's hearing wasn't normal either. "Take over the chest compressions."
Shepard shook her head. She'd triaged enough injured—and left enough corpses behind her—to know this man with his pretty cheekbones and full lips fell into the latter camp. "Alberts," she shouted back. "We have to go! We have to get out of here!"
"No way!" Alberts bent her head and blew another ineffectual breath into the dead man's lungs. When she lifted her face, fresh black streaks marred her cheeks. "No fucking way! We gotta help these people, Shep, we gotta save these people!"
Shepard grabbed her friend by the shoulders, shaking her once, hard. "Private Alberts, listen to me! Graves, Koh, both Smiths, Masaka? They're dead. We are under attack! Do you understand? We are Alliance Fucking Navy, and we have a responsibility to the living, not the dead. And that's a goddamned order, if you need it to be!"
As if to punctuate her point, another rumbling explosion sounded in the distance. Toward base, Shepard thought. No. Past the base. Alberts began to protest, but Shepard shook her head, gesturing for silence. Past the screams, past the moans, past the sound of gunfire and military ordnance being brought to bear, she heard more shelling.
"Can't you hear it?" Shepard asked. "Listen! Can't you hear what they're doing?"
"I hear a fuck-ton of bombs going off while we sit here letting people die, Lieutenant."
But Shepard shook her head, ignoring the little jab of Alberts referring to rank—she'd started it, after all—and raising the interface of her omni-tool. Alberts looked even more garish in the orange light; it highlighted every haunted line and shadow. It didn't take long for Shepard to ascertain communications were down all over the place, but even without a commlink or extranet access she was able to bring up the local map she'd downloaded before landing, when she'd thought shore leave would involve a lot more wandering around and a lot less bombing. It showed a 3-D view of Illyria. A detailed 3-D view. The only thing the virtual city was missing was the people.
"Look," Shepard said, ignoring the sound of another nearby explosion, "look close. See this? This is us. And that's Alliance HQ." She pointed a line of dots heading toward the north side of the city. "That's the sound of shells. You ever read fairy tales, Alberts? It's Hansel and fucking Gretel. Breadcrumbs."
"But who?" Alberts protested. "And why?"
"It has to be the batarians," Shepard said, trying and mostly failing to keep the poison of distaste from her tone. "I'd stake every credit to my name on it being the batarians. They're pissed humanity's moved into the Verge; they're pissed we've been shitting on their slavery and piracy parade. But this… full-on assault? This isn't how pirates and slavers fight."
"Maybe if you get enough of them together…"
"Someone in Intelligence dropped the fucking ball if they managed to spring this kind of attack on Elysium without anyone knowing. Talk about getting caught with your damned pants down." Shepard grimaced. "Still. The Alliance has better people, with better training. Better weapons. Right now? All that goddamned training is saying one thing, right? What's your training saying, Alberts?"
"Head back to base, grab my gear, join the fucking fight and give the four-eyed bastards hell."
Shepard's lips twisted, bitter and unhappy, while half a dozen other scenarios played out in her head. None of them particularly good. All of them involved a lot of corpses. Human ones, mostly. "Exactly."
"So let's go. Let's do it."
"No," Shepard said. "We have to go the other way." She pointed out a nondescript little gate into the city on her three-dimensional map. It looked small and sad, mostly reserved for foot traffic, easy to ignore. Most people wouldn't give it a thought; Shepard only knew about it because she had a real knack for finding multiple escape routes. After Mindoir. After everything. Her instructors said it was a talent; Shepard knew it was actually scar tissue, but at least it was occasionally useful. "See that?"
"It's nothing," Alberts said. "Doesn't even look wide enough to drive a car through, let alone a military vehicle."
"Right," Shepard agreed. "It's like… it's like a service entrance. To the city. And they're going to flank from here. They're going to send a flood of assassins in behind us, and crush us between the expected force and the unexpected one." Shepard pinched her free hand like a crab's claw closing. "The Alliance can hold against one army, Alberts, but they won't be protecting their backs if they're worried about what's happening in front of them. And by the sound of those explosions, these hostiles are proving very, very distracting."
Somehow Alberts managed to look both baffled and horrified. The orange glow of the omni-tool didn't help. "How do you know that's what they're planning? How can you be sure?"
"Because," Shepard said grimly. "It's exactly what I would do, if I wanted to win against someone bigger, stronger, and better trained than me."
And because batarian slavers don't fight fair, kid. They wait until you're sleeping. They wait until everyone's safe and snug in their warm little houses. They burn the whole world down and hunt the young ones, the pretty ones, the useful ones when they have the nerve to run away. And you don't want to think about what happens to those kids, Alberts. There are some things worse than dying.
Shepard's hand closed into a tight fist.
"So… so we head back to base, let Commander Vale make the call, or, or—"
"No time. The commander might already be dead, or he might be headed with the rest of the unit toward what they think is the front. We're closer to the gate than we are to base; they might already be through by the time reinforcements arrive. If the Alliance even has reinforcements to spare." Shepard shook her head. "It's on us. It's a small gate, like you said. I think we can hold it."
Alberts' eyes widened. "Without guns? Without gear? Without reinforcements? It's… fuck, Shepard, it's suicide."
Shepard got to her feet, trying and failing to send a message to HQ. "Maybe. I won't order you to come with me, Alberts, but I know where I'm going."
Shepard made it three steps before Alberts fell in line at her side.
#
Even before she opened her eyes, she knew she was in a hospital. They had a smell. They had a taste, like metal at the back of her throat, that made her swallow again and again even though swallowing brought no relief. The air was too dry, like hospital air. Hospitals definitely had a sound, beeps and whirrs chittering away like aliens speaking languages her universal translator was hopeless to translate. This room, while definitely belonging to a hospital, was quieter. Instead of wheezing, moaning, moping roommates, only the sound of her own breath, her own monitors, her own heartbeat kept her company.
She found the relative silence oddly unsettling. If she were in the military hospital, she'd never have been given a private room. Private rooms were for the wealthy, the powerful; private rooms were for the girl her foster parents had wanted her to be. She swallowed again, harder, but the bitter hospital taste only grew stronger. She fought the urge to gag.
She didn't remember getting here. She remembered the explosion. She vaguely remembered Commander Kildare trying to tell her she was safe.
She remembered not believing him.
Had she—had she shot someone?
Had someone shot her?
Eyes still closed, she wiggled her feet beneath the blankets and found them swathed in bandages. To be expected, really, after running halfway across Illyria in bare feet. At least they were both still attached. Again she had to swallow the urge to vomit. Later. Later.
Isn't it later now?
She wriggled her fingers next, and found them all responsive. Good sign. Her neck was stiff when she rolled it from side to side, but otherwise undamaged. That she could hear the various murmuring machines meant her hearing had come back.
On a deep breath, she cracked her eyes open. Her own face looked back at her, and that breath caught. One of the machines started beeping at a more rapid pace. On the silent vidscreen opposite her bed, her face hovered next to the right of a serious-faced reporter. It was the formal shot they'd taken after she made 2nd Lieutenant; they must've pilfered it from the Alliance files. She looked a little proud, a little shell-shocked, a lot out of her depth.
Although many mysteries about the attack on Elysium remain, sources unanimously agree the victory hinged on the efforts of a Systems Alliance Marine visiting the city of Illyria on leave, Lieutenant—
She closed her eyes again, counting to a hundred slowly and willing her heartbeat to calm the fuck down.It wasn't better in the dark behind her eyelids; she kept seeing the rain of burning meteors, she kept hearing Alberts crying, kept seeing teenaged Lily with her trembling hands clenched around a gun it looked all wrong for her to be carrying. Shepard's hands closed at her sides, blunt nails digging into the soft sheets. Too soft. Sheets in a military hospital wouldn't have been so soft. Sources unanimously agree. She'd held on until the last possible minute, the last possible second, waiting for rescue, waiting for reinforcements, hoping she wouldn't have to pin all the city's hopes on a bomb held together with hope and prayers and her own by-no-means-certain technical ability when it came to explosives.
Even though she knew she was safe—white walls, white room, low murmur of white noise—the memory stirred the same old terror, only this time instead of seeing a knife sticking out of her father's chest, Shepard saw two pieces of Emma Alberts flying in different directions amidst a hail of molten debris. She saw her own hands shaking as they typed the detonation code into her omni-tool, buying Lieutenant Brunet as much time as possible to evacuate the civilians. The batarian tilting his head at her, baring his neck in insult. That goddamned batarian's face—
The sound of the door whooshing open stopped the panicking spiral, replacing screams with brisk footsteps and the smell of smoke with antiseptic hand lotion and the faint scent of shampoo.
Her damned picture was still on the vidscreen as her eyes slid past.
She calmed as the nurse approached, at least enough to take three good breaths without the hiccup of panic arresting them at the apex. Shepard didn't need to see the woman's identification to know exactly who she was. Even with her hair pulled up in a bun, the dark eyes and the shape of the face were unmistakably similar to Lily's. "I can help," the girl said, so earnest, so damned brave. "My mom's a nurse." Shepard's lips tried to curve into a smile, but she winced when the dry skin cracked and began to bleed. Swallowing past the dryness, the memory of panic, she tried and failed to lever herself into a more upright position.
"Whoa," the nurse said, crossing the room at a jog and settling a gentle hand against Shepard's shoulder. "That's quite enough of that." She smiled when Shepard reluctantly subsided, settling into her pillow. "Better. You're safe. A little beat up, but safe. Take a deep breath, Lieutenant; the doctor's on his way."
Shepard breathed.
"Good. Very good. How about another just like that?"
Shepard breathed. Then she croaked, "You're Lily's mom." She cringed at the sound of her own voice; it was almost as alien to her ears as the language the machines spoke.
The nurse chuckled. "I do go by other names. Katie's the most common. Katie Keane. Though I am, in fact, Lily's mom. And very proud of it."
"She…" Shepard coughed, frowned, took another determined swallow, and said, "She looks just like you."
"And she speaks very highly of you." A ghost of distress flitted behind the other woman's eyes, so swift Shepard almost missed it.
As Katie reached to adjust something on one of the chirping machines, Shepard touched her forearm lightly. Katie's skin felt very warm under her cold fingertips. "Sorry," Shepard said. "I should've—she wanted to help. But I should've sent her away."
"She wouldn't have thanked you for it," Katie said, smiling softly. It was, Shepard realized, the look of a mother realizing that somehow her baby had grown up without her permission. Or certainly without her being ready for it. Had her own mother even had a chance to wear that look? Strange, to think of it now. Shepard told herself the burn in her eyes was due to the brightness of the light, and focused instead on what Katie was saying. "She says she's going to join the Alliance when she's old enough."
"Oh," Shepard said. "I—sorry. I feel like I should apologize for that, too."
Katie laughed and shook her head. "Only a little of the blame falls on you." Her bright expression sobered. "Her father… he served. And was lost to pirates. Happens more than it should, out here. Her grandfather fought in the First Contact War, near the end of his career. You're only the latest hero in her eyes to wear that uniform." She checked the various blinking, beeping monitors. "Better. Give me another of those big breaths." When Shepard obliged, Katie tilted a wry smile her way and added, "Granted, you're the first to treat her like it's a uniform she might be worthy of one day."
"She is. No question. But I'm… I'm not a hero."
Katie's expression shifted toward the dubious, and against her better judgement, Shepard's gaze slipped past the nurse back to the vidscreen. At least her picture was gone, though only because they'd shifted to a live report; Shepard recognized the facade of Alliance HQ, even as smudged with smoke and pockmarked with damage as it was. A reporter spoke earnestly with an officer she didn't recognize. The closed captioning said he'd been aboard the Agincourt. She squinted, and then winced again, because the uniform didn't lie: he was a rear admiral. The Alliance must be up to their damned eyeballs in fallout if they were getting admirals to control this story's spin.
The sinking feeling wasn't entirely due to hospitalization or hunger or post traumatic stress.
They kept showing her picture.
Sources unanimously agree.
"You want me to turn the sound up?" Katie asked.
"No!" It came out too sharp, too high-pitched. It gave too much away. Shepard grimaced. "I'd like you to turn it off completely, if you don't mind."
"Turning it off won't change what they're saying about you," Katie warned, not without sympathy, though she did switch off the vidscreen. The blank black eye glared at Shepard, disapproving. It accused her of cowardice. She ignored it. "My daughter's not the only one who thinks you're a hero."
"I'm just a soldier," Shepard insisted. Her stiff neck protested as she shook her head. "I was just doing my job."
"Well, soldier, you and I both know it's better to have all the information available." She tilted her head. "Otherwise they'll be able to ambush you."
Shepard pursed her dry lips. At least they weren't bleeding anymore. The faint metallic taste of blood lingered on her tongue. "I… take your point. Maybe…"
"On with no sound?"
Shepard hesitated, but nodded all the same. The vidscreen flickered back to life. They were still talking to the rear admiral. He had an excellent 'this is very serious, but we have it all under control' expression. Shepard wondered if that was the real reason they'd chosen him as the face to deal with the fallout.
She didn't want to think about the other faces they were assigning roles to. Sources unanimously agree…
"I'll be back in a minute with some ice chips for that throat. The doctor'll be in right away." Katie paused at the threshold, her hand hovering just above the door's panel. "You ever heard that quote about heroes, Lieutenant Shepard? It goes something like a hero's not braver than an ordinary man. He—or she—is just brave five minutes longer." The dark eyes were serious, so serious, and bright with unshed tears. "Thank you, Lieutenant—for my sake, for my daughter's—for hanging on that five minutes more."
The door swished shut before Shepard found words.
"I wanted some goddamned revenge," Shepard said into the silent room, while the vidscreen flashed her photo again. "Alberts was a hero."
The silent kind. The kind that didn't get mentioned on the newsvids. The kind whose medals were all posthumous.