Chapter 6
You survived while all those around you fell, and now you alone are left to tell the tale.
The mass relay glows with ethereal light, and a frigate materializes in its circle out of nowhere. Heading to the fourth planet, it doesn't escape the attention of the electronic eyes and ears.
"Investigation team incoming." Fronsard scratches his chin with his usual gesture. "Who's our guest, Romero?"
As if it mattered. "SSV Ardens. Captain David Anderson."
Seeing the designation, he pauses, and Banes looks over his shoulder and whistles. "N7? Who would have thought that a couple of marines will draw such attention?"
Stravinski frowns. "N7 or not, I believe our precautions are sufficient. – Speaking of which, Romero, are you sure the network is disconnected?"
"Perfectly sure." It pained him a bit, but it had to be – the genius who constructed the network of lures, cameras and transmitters, conceived its destruction with an ease which required a single command. Even if any of the devices was ever found, their purpose would never be revealed; with the software from the meteostations erased, the connection would never be made; the base itself, shielded from scans, has gone black and could be discovered only if anyone knew where to look, which they don't…
And, were they to be discovered… there are precautions even for that. Classified operations tend to have their advantages.
The base has closed its many eyes and ears, and withdrew to itself, to digest what it has swallowed.
The lush greenery of the grassy plain, the pink and yellow of the eaten rock in the pass above the road.
The road. If it wasn't so easily visible from the distance, he would have lost direction long ago. Even so, walking straight is next to impossible: every now and then, Shepard finds himself straying… when he finds himself walking, that is.
More often than not, he finds himself on the ground, each and every time taking all his strength to get back on his feet again.
That strength which is quickly running out, drained by the heat and thirst and fever and pain.
Barely aware of his surroundings, Shepard mechanically trudges on, while he still can.
The change of vegetation goes unnoticed for some time; the occurrence of low bushes gets across only when he starts stumbling over them. Puzzled, he presses his palm against his forehead: the bushes have some meaning but he can't recall what it might be. When he stumbles again and drops to his knees, he tilts his head back to look up and realizes that the hills are right before him, their slopes rising very, very close. The sunlight tinges them golden; when he squints against the blazing disc, he is surprised to see it already going down.
Nearly there… but where?
Close to panic, Shepard scrambles to his feet and looks frantically for the pass, until he notices an excavated slope further to his right.
Only, the vegetation is thicker here: the grass is taller, nearly up to his knees, and those shrubs keep catching at his legs. There seems to be an almost continuous stripe of these, waist-high, just before him; in his state, pushing through there would be more straining than making a detour, and so he turns back to the plain.
The stripe of vegetation goes further and further, infringing on his route. Shepard staggers along it for a while, until an idea finally makes it through to his hazed brain: why are the bushes here like that?
The intuitive realization gives him the strength to push through.
There, trickling in a low bed, a tiny stream runs from the hills into the plain, to gradually soak into the sandy soil.
Water.
The stream is only a few centimetres deep here; the pebbles on the bottom are barely covered. Lying on the shore, Shepard plunges his face into the water. The stinging in the sores and burns feels almost like a blessing.
After a few gulps, he chokes on the sand and starts coughing. – Which is good for him, as he vaguely recalls, since he shouldn't be drinking too much too fast, though he is unsure why. He would much rather drown himself in the water, if there was enough to do it. But instead, he turns on his back and takes the water with his right hand to cool his face and head, letting it trickle from his fingers to his mouth every now and then.
It feels heavenly.
Wasn't I wearing a helmet?
Shepard doesn't recall removing it and doesn't see it anywhere around. Most probably, he took it off somewhere to cool himself and didn't remember to put it on again.
Screw the helmet.
Water. I have water.
He doesn't go any further but finds a spot to lie on the shore, close to the water, and awaits the inevitable coming of the night.
The night is a mosaic of confused perceptions. There are moments where he shudders vigorously, followed by the feeling of immense heat. There are whiles of lucidity, when he can see the stars above him acutely bright, the two moons of Akuze shedding light of pale and dark gold, so close in the clear air that he might touch them if he reached his hand. The next moment, his feverish brain conjures images of familiar people and places which seem even more than real, and he is unable to distinguish if they are there or not.
Deni in her red bikini, running along the beach towards the sun, which rises from the ground with a deep, ultrasonic growling, and she keeps running, running, laughing, until the bikini flows down her hips in blood and only her eyes, winking provocatively, remain untouched in the mashed pulp.
No. No.
Toshio, with his impish smile, raises his head of repulsive chicken yellow from the chessboard: you're screwed, Shepard.
Screwed screwed screwed screwed.
Lyuba smashes the table with her biotics, sending it into the middle of the brawling men, and yells orders with a voice that defies her face of a porcelain doll; the voice which easily carries above the gunfire, and Deni holds up the shimmering blue barrier, her features contorted with the strain, while he is dragging Lyuba to safety and Toshio, calm and concentrated, is fending off another wave of batarian mercs: It's up to you now, Shepard!
No, no, I failed, can't do a thing now, can't… can't…
Mom looks at him disapprovingly as she is holding a glass jug of water which she is carrying away, out of his reach. Wait, he wants to say but no sound passes through his throat, don't go…I can't go to you any more, I'm so tired, I need… I need… rest…
Rest.
Tarasov paces the deck nervously and is acutely aware that he is pacing, which he normally never does, but cannot help it: he has to do something. Anita DuBois by the comm, on the other hand, stands like carved from dark wood, and the sight of her makes his nervousness even more palpable.
Down there, on Akuze, the investigation team is examining the sites, and he can't do a thing.
Fifty-one. Fifty MIA, one KIA so far. Massacred by some beasts no-one has seen before.
Or rather, no human has seen before. As soon as Tarasov's report stirred the mud, it was very quickly revealed that the beasts, these thresher maws, were known to the other Citadel races, only no-one ever bothered to give a warning.
And if they did, it never made it to those responsible for issuing the decree to open Akuze for settlement.
Thinking of all those unnecessary deaths, Anderson feels a surge of anger: some white-collar rat didn't bother to pass the information on, and all those guys died here.
With his lips pressed, he looks at sealed the plastic bag, hiding the maimed remains which the DNA scan confirmed as those of Corporal Yelena Denisova. The recent rain washed away the soil which previously must have been hiding her body from sight, but it also obscured any other possible clues which might have been there, including her dogtags.
"Nothing, sir. Shall I search a broader perimeter?"
Anderson looks around: the burrowed area is tens of metres in diameter, and though he would much like to recover the dogtags, the search would take hours. There have been no sightings of the threshers so far, but he's not going to take any unnecessary risks. "No, Aleco, you can pack your scanner; just mark the coordinates. We have to take a look at the other sites, and at the colony."
Leaving for the shuttle, he looks around one last time, thinking about the footage from Warsaw's shuttle, showing the beast in action, bursting from the ground furiously. The heavy gun on his back suddenly seems inadequate.
He doubts they would find a thing elsewhere: from what he has read about the threshers, they rarely leave any remains… or survivors.
The shuttle takes off abruptly and heads south.
The empty medigel packages and the removed battle visor, made from plastic and hidden under a layer of mud, never appear on the scanners.
The warm, sweet-smelling grass under his face. Peace. Quiet. A good place for a shoreleave.
Only, Yela is taking too long with those cold drinks she promised to fetch.
And he is too hot, lying in the sun. He should move elsewhere. He should go. Now. Go.
Where to?
His senses are strangely dulled, and he feels confused. Where should he go? He's on a shoreleave. He doesn't have to go anywhere if he doesn't want to, especially if he isn't feeling well. Actually, he can't go anywhere. He's too weak to go. Too… too…
Some urge which he does not fully understand makes him attempt to raise his head. Oww… the headache… It's a terrible hangover, no wonder he is so thirsty. Where are those drinks, Yela?
Yela…Yelochka, dyevochka, so sorry…
The memory of her crushed body stands out vividly, breaking through the haze of the fever. The next moment, he is unsure if that ever happened, but the urge to stand up and go returns renewed. As he raises his head again, the pass is right there, floating before his eyes.
With effort, he manages to sit up: his movements are uncoordinated and the ground is unstable, as if in an earthquake. That makes his headache worse, and with a soundless moan, he raises his hands to his temples. The left arm, from the fingertips to the shoulder, responds with pain. It is a sore sight; a mess of red swollen flesh, cracked scabs and yellow puss.
I must get to the comm, or I am screwed.
Screwed. You were right, Toshio, I'm screwed.
Not quite yet, though. Don't play galactic chess with Shepard, Shepard always pulls a trick out of his sleeve, always knows where his pieces are and how to use them best.
Where my pieces are…
Clumsily, he gropes for the dogtags, barely noticing when the chain tears the scab. Clutching the platelets in his palm, he looks at the pass. So close… and then along the road, good, solid even road…
He crawls to the water, drinks and washes his face. After that, he rests on the shore for a while, mildly surprised how exhausting the movement was. Taking one last drink, he gets up: it's not as difficult as he feared but feels as if he were drunk, and a new wave of headache nearly knocks him down. Staggering, he catches at the bushes to secure himself; then, very, very slowly, like in a dream, he starts walking.
The hard, even surface of the road keeps falling and raising under his feet. His legs feel stiff and bending the knees is accompanied by pangs of pain, his head is at the point of bursting; it's nearly impossible to walk like that. He tries to stay in the middle of the road but every now and then, he stumbles at its edge, nearly falling over into the ditch.
Only, he has to go. Has to walk. Keep walking. Very important.
Go, Shepard. Have to go. Have to get to the comm, to call. To call…the ship.
The ship. Warsaw. Toshio's there. Yelena. Have to call them. From there.
There. That nice place. On Terra Nova. We're going for dinner. Mom's coming along. Must behave. No pranks, Tosh. You always look good, Deni. Don't worry. I only have to… have to… have to call…
Losing balance, he stumbles again and slides into the ditch, yelping as his body hits the ground. Where's the road?
In panic fear, he crawls blindly until, by chance, he realizes that the surface under his body is hard and even again. The mild slope curves in the last bend, the colony units stand out in the sunlight. Hypnotized by the sight, Shepard somehow stands up and moves forward.
There. There. Wait for me, I just have to do this. Finish this. I'm almost there…
Carrying out the job a dead man has done before them is uncompelling, and the futility does not sit well with Anderson. Searching the housing units of the Selenya colony brings no more clues than it did when Shepard's men did the task; there was no oversight, no fault. The data copied from the colony's servers will take days to assess, which can be done on the Ardens, but Anderson feels in his gut that they won't yield a thing.
No signs of thresher activity behind the hills, only in the plains, yet all the colonists were gone without a trace... and the marines had no idea what they were going into.
All in all, a huge pile of steaming shit.
Only, it's rather annoying to smell the stink but not be able to tell where it comes from.
Did I miss the part how thresher could organize? Or is this another piece of information our Citadel friends didn't bother to drop our way?
Frustrated, Anderson kicks at a stone. Being clueless is as bad as being helpless.
Akuze's sun still hangs above the western horizon, drawing long the shadows of men and buildings. They have gathered every single log, every single personal PDA, for analysis, gathered DNA samples to exclude the possibility of a covert enemy intrusion, done every single thing Anderson can think of – merely for the sake of dutifulness, since he knows they won't find a thing.
The intuition which tells him there is more than meets the eye remains annoyingly silent instead of telling him where he should look, or what for.
The annoyance is distracting, constantly drawing his mind to the more or less possible scenarios of what could have happened, and so he notices an entirely new factor only when Lieutenant Roscoe gasps: "Captain..."
Swirling around to the direction the Lieutenant points, he is momentarily speechless himself, noting a figure slowly staggering among the housing units as if the man didn't see where he was going – which he probably doesn't, Anderson realizes, as soon as he takes in the details.
A badly damaged hardsuit, barely recognizable as the military issue. Festering wounds on the arm and cheek, deep sunk eyes in taut, sunburnt face, lips blackened with dried blood... more dead than alive.
"Oh, God," Roscoe mutters, and Anderson can only echo the thought. Oh my God... one of Tarasov's marines. After four days...
They both rush forward.
It seems the man doesn't realize their presence, too intent on maintaining the slow groggy walk. He doesn't respond when addressed, and so Anderson tries again: "It's alright, soldier. You've done it, you're safe."
The man stops at that, recognition finally reaching those glazed eyes. For a moment, he sways, looking at them, and then, as if something snapped, falls over.
Anderson and Roscoe reach out their hands to prevent him from falling, alerting the team medic even as they are gently lowering the survivor on the ground.
"Unbelievable," Roscoe whispers, as if he didn't want to wake the man. "I'd never have thought, after what we saw... Who is he?"
Hypnotized, Anderson watches the too many dogtags on the chain around the man's neck: he knows he has found those of Yelena Denisova even before actually touching them. Awoken by Roscoe's question, he checks the platelets: "Lieutenant Connor Shepard."
One by one, the recordings of the hidden cameras are scrutinised and analysed; notable sequences are marked for further processing. It's a demanding task, examining one and the same sequence from various angles, and the infra-red ones are a pain in the ass. It is up to Romero, of course, to transfer these into a normal spectre – a tedious, routine job, which he hates, and the result never looks really good.
Romero gets up from the console for a moment to stretch his back. Glimpsing over Wayne's shoulder a footage of a marine who got a full hit of the thresher's acid, he nods in acknowledgement. "Awesome."
"Nothing really spectacular." Stravinski's voice is no more emotional than usually. "We have seen this before in sufficient numbers. Here," she plays a sequence of the thresher crushing the military vehicle under its body, "is a sample of behaviour we haven't recorded previously." She plays the sequence again, more slowly. "See? She recoils to multiply the effect of her mass."
Romero is about to return to his chair when the console designed for following transmissions lights up: the investigation team wants to chat, huh?
Listening to the transmission, though, he feels his jaw drop, as does everybody else's.
"He lives? That Shepard? How's that possible?" Banes expresses the general shock.
Romero stares at the screen, blinking in disbelief.
"You claimed there were no survivors!" Wayne's voice sounds whiny, as if he already felt the hand of justice grabbing him by the collar.
Don't shit yourself, doctor. Romero has little doubt that should it ever come to that, the doctor would gladly testify against them all to cover his arse. I hope Julianna has this covered, as well.
"No reason to fuss." For once, Romero is glad for Stravinski's cold reasoning. "All the electronics he had on him was damaged, so our scans didn't pick him, as simple as that. It's a pity, because we could have detained him for future use if we had known, but as it is, no real damage happened. He survived, but doesn't know a thing.
"Doesn't know, doesn't tell," Carl Fronsard quips in with a smirk. "Either way, let us wave bye-bye to Lieutenant Shepard's military career. Being the only one to survive when his entire unit went down… uh-oh."
Romero is not so sure of that; with the Alliance military, dishonourable discharge is equally possible as a medal of honour, but it doesn't really matter. Once the fuss over Akuze is over, they will finish the evaluation of their research and remove the last tracks that they have ever been here. One Shepard does not make a difference, just like Toombs, whose body will never be found once his usefulness expires. He smiles and raises his can of non-alcoholic beer in a toast to Fronsard. "As you say. Lieutenant Shepard is no-one of importance."
Awaiting the arrival of the shuttle, Tarasov stares through the shatterproof pane into the cargo bay, with the greater part of the off-duty crew shuffling right behind him: the news of the investigation team's finding spread all over the ship like wildfire.
In expectant silence, they watch the shuttle enter the cargo bay, and as soon as the air pressure is renewed, they quietly line up along the entrance; Anita DuBois separately and ahead of them all.
Tarasov can see emotions, but no cheers sound as Doctor Alim gets out of the shuttle, followed by two more members of the medical staff, carrying out the litter.
Shepard is a sore sight: from what Tarasov can see under the oxygen mask, he wouldn't have recognized him. Unwittingly, he glances at DuBois whose face has frozen in an expression of pain: though no-one else does, her consciousness apparently holds her responsible for Shepard's four-day ordeal.
Consciousness, the harshest judge of all.
The crew step back, to let the Doctor and his patient pass to the medbay, and then disperse at Tarasov's order. Only then he turns to the last passenger of the shuttle, who has bid his time to exit. "Captain."
"Why so formal?" Anderson hasn't changed much, except for the wrinkles in the corners of his eyes. "Tarasov. Glad to see you face to face, though I would have preferred happier circumstances."
"You have brought at least one of them home," Tarasov says softly. "That's one more than I had believed. Good enough for me." Looking in the direction of the medbay, he lowers his voice even more: "If he pulls through."
"He will." Anderson speaks also softly, but with conviction. "He didn't make it all the way back to die on you now. A remarkable feat, really." He puts his hand in his pocket. "Gotta something else for you. We found Denisova' dogtags – he had them on him. Like this." A quick alongside glance. "His girlfriend?"
Tarasov slowly reaches for the platelets on a single chain, with the image of Denisova's sparkling eyes and provocatively swaying hips before his eyes. "Only a close friend. They were… a tightly knit bunch, the lot of them."
"I see. It must have been really tough for him – and gonna be."
Tarasov sighs. Not just for him, Anderson, not just for him.
Though the relief of having better news for Hannah Shepard than he supposed is not a small one.
Back in his small cabin on the Ardens, Anderson tosses his jacket on the chair and slumps on the bed, boots and all.
Sure, Admiral, but of course, Admiral, as you command, Admiral.
I can't seriously believe this happened.
"Captain. You have confirmed Captain Tarasov's report and verified the existence of those… threshers… on Akuze. There is no more you can do now. The decree which opened Akuze for settlement has been revoked, and there will be taken precautions to prevent such tragedies in the future"
"Sir. I've checked all the reports of the initial exploration of Akuze, there is not a single mention of the threshers. As a result, over a hundred people died. Someone has to bear responsibility for this."
Zhao's holo briefly looks aside. "That investigation will run through different channels, Captain. Your mission is finished."
"That's not what you told me when you sent me here, Sir."
"That's what I'm telling you now, Captain."
"Excuse me, but – "
"That's an order, Captain."
"Sir."
Is it just me, or are you trying to cover up for something, sir?
And, do you honestly believe that it will not out, sooner or later?
Anderson returns in his thoughts to the young Lieutenant, barely breathing, yet holding onto life with that immense will which has brought him through that all.
If no-one else, he will demand answers… and Anderson feels that eventually, he might even get them. Not now, not even tomorrow, but one day.
One day, someone will be held accountable.
The end
Credits:
To Reyavie, for betaing and support. When your beta starts hating on you villain after the first two paragraphs, you know you're doing it right.
To Thanwen, for plunging once again into a franchise she never played and providing invaluable medical advice - no, Shepard, she wasn't giving me ideas, she was holding me back - alright, alright, the cold cramps... well, look at it this way. She mentioned the cramps and I picked it up. I enquired if you could realistically walk with cracked ribs, and she said you wouldn't. Perhaps you would like to trade - the cramps for - No? I somehow knew you wouldn't. Now be a good character and stop talking back.
To The DreadWolf and Wyl, for patiently explaining things military to someone whose sole military experience is playing ME. Every blunder in this area goes to me being too dumb to ask.
To the guys from the ME wiki, who pointed out lore errors.
To everyone who has read, reviewed, faved and alerted.
And finally, to Corporal Toombs, for considerably improving the genetic pool of humanity by ridding it of several repulsive specimen.