Author's Note

With the release of the "Arrival" DLC and the spoilers for Mass Effect 3, "Torchbearers" is now being officially abandoned. My muse had already left me high and dry for the past months, and now the actual arrival of the Reapers and the upcoming Reaper War is going to go in directions entirely different from what I'd had sketched out for the storyline.

While I normally don't demand strict canon-compliance from either myself or fics I am reading, I'd wanted my continuation to be 'plausible from canon', as opposed to 'wildly AU from canon', and now my intended plotline has been overtaken by canon events and rendered obsolete.

If, and I mean if, Mass Effect 3 turns out to have a plotline that I can fit fairly seamlessly into what I've already established for 'Torchbearers', then I might restart the story. However, I don't think the odds of that are anything to write home about.

In conclusion, I will apologize again to my readers for letting them down, and spoil the Chekhov's Gun I'd foreshadowed but left unfired for the past several chapters.

The people in the shuttle that got away? The one that Cerberus thought Thane had stolen, but in fact he hadn't?

Tali and Legion. Who had gotten back to the Normandy just before the Collector station was destroyed via a separate route, entered the ship through one of the holes torn in the lower hull rather than the airlock, and were smuggled back to humanspace with EDI's cooperation in the one part of the ship where all of Cerberus' monitoring devices had been removed; Mordin's lab. (Which, you might recall, canonically has a secret passage connecting it to both EDI's AI core and the engineering lower deck.)

That was, however, my limit for 'people reported killed off who in fact hadn't been'; Mordin, Garrus, Jack, and Shepard were still dead.

Again, I'm sorry I couldn't finish this.