The Road To Normandy

"Hi, I'm Emily Wong, and welcome back to this very exclusive interview with Sarah Shepard, former Alliance Marine and now, if rumors are to be believed, the most senior field agent for Special Tactics and Reconaissance, colloquially known as Spectres throughout the galaxy. When we left off before the break, you were about to tell us about Elysium. So, Sarah... What's the scoop?"

With a sad smile, Sarah Shepard began to talk.

First, I should give a bit of context to why I was there.

Part of being mentored by Steven, as part of his staff... well, when he was posted to a ship, or a planet, wherever, if it wasn't combat, he's expected to take his staff with him, including me. And I'd been to Elysium several times in the year I'd spent on his staff. He didn't want the spacer life for his kids, and his wife didn't much like living on ships either, so they lived on a planet. They lived on Elysium. And everytime he took time off to visit them, I went with. Officially it was because A, he's mentoring me, and B, as part of his staff I could keep him abreast of any situ- What? What?

Oh. right. Wait... thinking on that, there is no way to say it without that sounding dirty to your dirty dirty perverted mind.

Anyway, yeah, there was that. So I got to know them. Mary is a lovely woman, although that wasn't my first impression. She didn't realise that I was a woman for a start, so there were... well yes there were accusations of a certain kind flying around. Then she got to know me the only way she could with me.

We went to a nightclub and she tried to set me up with some guys... it didn't work out, but we had fun.

So yeah. After transferring from his staff, I managed to wrangle trips to Elysium for pretty much every vacation since then... well until the Batarians attacked.

As Special Forces, and due my rank, one of the prividledge I had that had nothing to do with Steven was that I could carry certain advanced communications devices that dont route through local extranet channels. That and the Alliance had learned something from Mindoir, so when the attack began, I sent out a distress signal immediately.

That I ha... er... access local military resources to see just how big the attack was, and attached that data, is probably the reason for the sheer size of the Alliance response. And a good thing too, the attack consisted of about ten times the forces that attacked Mindoir.

Knowing what I did... I did everything I could to rally a guerilla force. Not exactly something the Alliance condones, but they also can't protest it. Not when the core of it were the local police forces, and various... ah... combat trained personnel, including a lot of turians.

Elysium is well known for having a population that is only half human, the other half consisting of aliens - asari, salarians, even a sizable number of quarians and Turians. And I knew about Turian social-military doctrine, so any and every turian I met I... uh... volunteered. Which was not a bad decision, given that not only did I not loose a single one of them, but also that not one of us were killed in action.

I... It took the alliance three days to mount a counter-attack/rescue. And in those three days... it was a lot worse than Mindoir. I saw... I saw a lot of bad things. The Pirates and Slavers attacked with a ferocity I'd never really seen even on Mindoir. They destroyed buildings outright, landed large numbers of people and literally occupied the various cities. I wasn't the only one organizing resistance, but I was... I was the most successful. And I was only there to visit Mary and the kids, irony, huh? I tried to get them to join me but...

But... But Mary... she...

The Kids were at school when it began, and she insisted on getting them. But the school was too far, and one of the first things the Batarians did was somehow disable all the skycars... it was too far on foot.

So she left anyway.

During the clean up... Steven activated a tracking chip she'd had surgically implanted. He had the codes to remote activate it, we... we found her. Her throat was... it looked like she'd been attacked by large varren... her clothes were torn and...

Anyway the kids were fine, as soon as the staff at the school received the alert, pretty quickly too, they got everyone to safety. Jacob and Sam were in the group kept safe by one of my guerilla units lead by a Turian, Nihlus Kryik.

Name sounds familiar doesn't it? We met six... seven years later on the Normandy. That Nihlus Kryik.

That's when the council began to review me for entry into the Spectres. Their review period can be quite long.

But they considered me too young then. I was only 22.

Steven wasn't the same since then. The kids left Elysium... even with Nilhus keeping them safe... I think they saw something. Loosing their mom was hard on them too. So they decided to live with their dad on Arcturus Station. He wasn't going to let them move to colonies in the Traverse or the Skyllian Verge, which is pretty much the only places we were allowed to colonise as they weren't technically under council law. And Steven knew from me what Earth was like, he didn't want them to turn into human supremacists or something.

There's a phrase he once used, and he originally just meant me, but he's come to include them too. War makes soldiers of us. We either Die, or We Fight and then Die.

For six Months, I did all I could to stay out of the spotlight. Ha, 'the soldier who rallied a nation' is one title I heard used. I punched the guy out who tried chatting me up after thinking he was complimenting me with that. The alliance tried to make me a poster gal, of course, but I wasn't having any of it. I'd been warning them for years that something like this was due. As I'd learned after Elysium, it was something that was going to plague my career. The Curse of Cassandra... to know something will come and yet not be believed or listened to. I refused to do any interview they ordered, and got away with it as thankfully such situations are covered for in the rule book. and they weren't about to court-martial me for refusing those sorts of orders even if the rule book didn't cover it. And in those six months, they kept me off active duty. Stuck behind a desk. I hated every second of it.

Finally, Steven managed to swing me a posting, but not Special Forces. Regular marine duty, leading a squad of fifty marines on regular patrols.

Eight months of it... and then my squad got the call that Akuze had gone silent. I got the call because they feared it was another slaver attack.

It wasn't.

You've heard of thresher maws, right? Council races were warning us about them, but as a race, we didn't believe it, the thinking was that it was propaganda to slow down our reach into space.

Yeah well, I learned first hand, not only are they not a myth, but they're incredibly dangerous, and nigh-impossible to take down.

That was the first time I got my hands on a Nuke.

You got that right.

I spent three weeks alone there, with nothing but a thresher maw hunting me down for most of it. I had to learn an entire new way of movement to stay undetected, the damn things have sonar as one of their exceptional senses. I raided the devastated colony, and found their power generator. And thanked the gods for the tech school courses.

Rigged up a Nuke, set the timer and put it in the kind of casing starships use - had to scrape it off our non-functional dropship. Then lured the maw and managed to entice it to eat the damn thing... then set off another bit of bait miles out.

Radiation poisoning is a terrible way to die, and I was almost a goner when A passing carrier picked up my weak distress call through the fallout.

And wouldn't you know it, but it was commanded by the one person who hadn't contacted me since asking me how I was from supposedly learning my dad died. My mother.

Seeing her daughter on deaths door... particular from standing in the detonation zone of a Nuke and somehow bloody well surviving it... once I was healed up and everything a year later, and banging on the doors to return to duty, she was there to finally show motherly concern.

Too right I didn't take it.

When I returned to duty, there was a lot of curfuffle, as Steven would say, I was to be the only living human to be awarded a particular award. Oh, it got awarded to many people in earths' equivalents who survived detonation but died from the radiation fallout during world war three. But that was the first nuke to be detonated not in war since we got the technology to fight radiation poisoning at those levels. Every other time we've used them since gaining that tech, was always on enemies. I'm a special case. Basically it's a badge to say 'I survived a nuclear bomb, how awesome am I, now excuse me I need to go back to being dead.'

Oh, they kept the whole nuke thing quiet, and had to keep the medal quiet too. But fact is, I should have died. And I didn't. Is it any wonder that even years later, Cerberus were curious about me?

See, I didn't know it at the time, but they were responsible for the whole thing.

Skip to about two months after I'd recovered... and the Alliance finally got into the swing of counter-attacking Pirates and Slavers. The Blitz had ruined several colonies permanently, and although many attacked rebuilt, well... the Alliance reputation was hurt bad by the whole thing. Everyone, including myself, wanted payback.

At the time, The Alliance had... maybe fifty carriers? Oh, there were the Big Six, each about the same or larger than even the Destiny Ascension, but only two were complete then, the other four were in the last year of construction. But the Alliance Navy has about six size classes of Carriers, from heavy cruiser sized Fast Carriers, through to two-thirds size of Destiny Ascension Fleet Carriers. Fleet disposition what is is, the carriers are not built for long-term occupation like the ocean going carriers of the twentieth century. No, these bad boys are considered hangers, maintanence facilities, and engines, with a few token weapons, relying on escorting ships and onboard fighter squadrons for defence. The smallest ships were packed with two hundred fighters. Even frigates and Cruisers had their hangers modified to carry their own squadrons of fighters - twenty or so to the cruisers.

And for the ground side of things, the Marines had our own fleet of Marine Carrier ships - same as the Navy's fighter carriers but with dropships instead. In the lead up, I was promoted to Lieutenant Commander, and given command of about three thousand marines.

While the Air Force and Navies got most/half of their recruits from EArth, the Marines get theirs from the colonies, understanding that for the ground pounders defending their homes is a big motivation. So imagine. Three thousand blood-thirsty marines seeking payback for their friends and families being taken or killed?

Not one of my people hadn't lost someone.

I lost people. And I had seen the pirates and slavers do too much to take any other course of action.

They called me the Butcher of Torfan, because I killed even those who surrendered. But the difference, between me, my people, and them? We didn't rape them. We didn't torture them. We didn't tear their throats out and left them to bleed on the floor. We didn't aim for the gut, where they would die slow, painfully. We did what we were trained to do. We Kill. Efficiently. A shot to the heart or a shot to the head. One Shot. Quick. Clean. More than they deserved. So really, Who's the butcher?"

"... I... We'll... We'll Be... back... after a break..."