A/N: The Citadel has been under Reaper control for a little under 60 hours when the fleets arrive.
"You need to rest and replenish. You keep getting shot when your biotics die out."
"Yeah, and you need to stop getting stabbed with a fucking sword to dodge out of fighting."
"That will never get old, will it?"
"No. And what is this swill? I can't drink…this!"
"I am sorry, your men assured me it was the best they could find. Now, stay still!"
"Arh! …Give me tha—"
The door closed behind Bailey with a hydraulic hiss. His boots made alternate clomping and dragging sounds as he painfully moved past the two batarians guarding the door and toward the squat staircase leading to the tunnel connecting this squalid shelter complex to the last of the structures they had set up for defense. The wounds in his side and hip made him cringe on every one of the three steps he had to take, and he idly wondered whether it would really lead to the complete undoing of his tattered moral fabric if he were to send someone in his stead the next time.
The noise of thousands of people trying to move and talk very quietly assaulted his ears from the other hallway leading to the tunnel, and followed his shuffling far into it. They had chosen this place more out of necessity than anything else—although he had to admit, it was very good for the purpose until the enemy would finally break through and the shelter became a dead end with nowhere to run. The rats claimed it had been the headquarters of the 6th Ward gang, something he had no trouble believing. Hidden behind this tunnel, unreachable from the surface, and with a few rather well-appointed rooms adjoining an enormous warehouse, it would have made an excellent temporary storage for whatever it was the 6th Ward was peddling at the moment.
Last he had dared to enter the squalor that used to be the warehouse, he had estimated that the population huddled up within was close to fifty thousand. Little to no food, no sanitation, no water since yesterday…the few doctors and nurses they had were guessing anywhere up to a hundred people dying every hour, with not even a place to remove the bodies to. Racial tensions were running high, and despite their best efforts to keep the antisocial segment of the Citadel's criminal underbelly out of there, fights were breaking out constantly. Bailey had what seemed like days ago instructed the Blue Suns, tasked to maintain order in the shelter, to simply shoot the troublemakers rather than risk a full-scale riot breaking out. Despite himself, he had felt an ephemeral surge of…something like hope for the survival of civil society when the Suns had actually been reluctant to follow the order. The only bit of good news—and it was only good in the most cynical way—was that in the last ten hours they had only seen a handful of new people arrive from the outside.
Coming up to their final checkpoint on the other side of the tunnel, their 'last stand' in the words of some literary fucker who hadn't been among the standing, he stopped to bum some water off a terribly young salarian doing his shift in guard. The commander—surely former commander, after this—tried to eke out a few more minutes of rest and relief from massaging his side back to life by pretending to inspect the pitiful barricade of crates, barrels, and molded plastic. By the looks on the faces of the dozen or so guards grimly surveying the corridors opening up in front of them, they knew just as well as he did that the only scenario where the flimsy structure would be of any use would be if saviors were charging in seconds behind the attackers.
With a cough and a perfunctory mumble about staying strong, Bailey handed back the water bottle and started toward the left and their farthest outpost. His vague ghost of a thought, an instinct to return to the post and prepare for another fruitless patrol to gauge enemy movements and to try locate survivors all but evaporated as a low, short rumble shook the floor under his feet, and momentarily lifted him off the floor before normal gravity returned. They were used to explosions rocking the structures around them, but this time Bailey had already turned around and started running toward the right-hand corridor and shouting for the guards to stay at their posts even before his comm link crackled.
{Commander, Trestia, now!}
{On my way, Kolyat!} shouted Bailey in response, trusting the young drell to know well enough to get off the comms immediately. Icy fingers of pain started scraping up and down his side as he ran like he hadn't run in 20 years.
Pushing his way through the pain and the burning in his lungs, Bailey was aiming straight for the tightly guarded elevator at the outpost at the end of the hallway. This stronghold was in the storage and maintenance levels of the Trestia Tower, a full-service apartment building for the affluent of Tayseri Ward. Its security measures were impressive enough that the relative prominence of the structure had been deemed an acceptable risk in trade for the vantage it offered.
Losing his footing rounding a corner sent Bailey crashing into the opposing wall and the shock of the impact hitting his side momentarily stole his control over that side of his body, tumbling him sprawling on the floor. Coughing and spitting as he pushed himself up, he wryly noted to himself that at least he had gotten the attention of the guards ahead without having to try to yell through his tortured gasping at full run.
"Ele…vator!" he weakly shouted even as he tried to accelerate back into a run. The guards, to their credit, seemed to both recognize and understand him, two starting toward the larger space beyond to call the elevator and one hung back to wait for Bailey. The turian staying behind looked even older than Bailey felt but he held his post until the human went past and then sprinted to catch up after verifying nothing was following.
"What is it, Commander? Do we need to contact someone?"
For a moment, Bailey considered having the turian call the shelter complex, but then thought better of it. The last thing they needed, if something was indeed happening, was giving away their position and losing everything now. Even Kolyat's call had been risky. Bailey simply shook his head and ran the last few hundred meters to the elevator, nearly diving as he slumped on the floor and rolled onto his back to spend the next minute taking heaving, ragged gulps of air.
He had almost managed to calm his breathing down to merely gasping when the elevator stopped at the unremarkable floor they had chosen for their surveillance, far below the tower's grandiose outdoor atrium which would have offered a much better view, but also significantly higher chances of exposure.
Bailey exited the elevator at half-stagger, and turned toward the silhouette he saw painted against one window with its hands and face pressed to the glass like a child in a zoo. As his gaze focused past Kolyat's shape, the commander's legs took control of their own movement and carried him to the windows. This side of Trestia was facing toward the Presidium, and Bailey stared right past the ring, not really even registering the fact that the arms were opening because of the backdrop it was opening against—
"Earth. It's Earth," he breathed, fogging up the glass his nose was pressed against.
"You're bleeding, Commander."
Bailey turned toward the drell, confused. They had both been captivated by the silent carnage outside, the dance of lasers and the multicolored flashes of torpedoes and explosions all around them. With the Citadel having opened fully, like a flower into a full bloom instead of the slightly parted petals of a budding plant, the Wards were bombarded by fire from both sides missing its mark, and not a few ships had crashed into the surface buildings, drawing deep gashes into their city, spilling gases and debris out of the containment field like blood from a wound.
Zakera had already been an empty, burnt husk; a reminder of Bailey's failure and dereliction of duty, and the sight of which was reason he despised coming up to the Tower. As an enormous blazing Reaper craft skidded across the farther end of it, rending from the city a swath half a kilometer wide before tumbling off somewhere beyond, his only consolation was Kolyat's assurance that they had managed to evacuate most of the remaining population along with the unconscious commander before incinerating the Ward in the hopes of slowing down the husks.
The mostly human-populated Ward had been a lost cause to begin with. The Reapers had immediately concentrated most of their forces there, wanting to capture as many humans alive as possible. The other Wards, so far as Bailey had been able to piece together from the tales of survivors, had been hit with smaller forces whose only intent had been to destroy everything in their way. All station-wide communications had been cut almost instantly, and in Zakera C-Sec had relied on the help of the few mercenary groups and even some of the bigger criminal gangs to try to locate secure places to funnel people to, a task made slightly easier by the secret ways the duct rats knew to be accessible when the Wards were closed. The Citadel being as vast as it was, it would likely have taken the Reapers weeks to destroy the entire population, so it had seemed sensible to get humans out and dispersed into the other Wards. Bailey had been injured some hours earlier but by Kolyat's retelling the decision to destroy Zakera, its connections to the other Wards, and as many Reaper thralls as they could along with it had been made when the enemy forces had been close to discovering the conduits between the Wards. How much destruction and how many human and alien victims had actually been caused was unclear but, as far as anyone could tell, the Ward was completely cut off from the rest of the Citadel.
"Commander?"
Kolyat's voice returned Bailey to the present, the drell's sounds finally parsing into words in his brain. Bailey glanced down at his side to find it entirely coated in dark, thick blood, the copper stench assaulting him when he started accepting input from his senses again.
"Sit down and get those clothes off, I have some medi-gel somewhere," Kolyat ordered calmly, prompting Bailey to do as he was told with the help of the two younger guardsmen while the drell rummaged around the pouches in his armor until supplied two pouches by the elderly turian.
"How is he?" Kolyat inquired almost casually as he carefully applied the gel on the crudely stitched wounds, many of which had been undone by the commander's exertion with seeping slick blood smearing his skin almost to his navel and dirty white bone peeking through gaping, ragged skin across more than one rib.
"Fine," grunted the commander through gritted teeth, "he was making himself useful by patching up the queen bitch. Again."
Whatever Kolyat's reply might have been was forgotten when the wave of purple struck them.
All five blinked at each other for a moment when it passed, unsure of what had happened, fervently hoping that they were not about to be disintegrated or worse. With a few seconds gone by, the older turian decided to take the risk of opening his mouth. "Commander, I think now it's time to call them."
Bailey tapped on his omni with a nod at the veteran, leaning forward with Kolyat returned to finishing wrapping him up with some microgauze.
By the excited twitching of the turian's mandibles and the grins spreading on three other faces, Bailey guessed that they were hearing the same thing in their aurals as he was. The celebration was about as raucous as a sleep-deprived and wounded rag-tag bunch of warriors could muster—until enormous explosions destroyed the Presidium and briefly showered the Wards with debris before they themselves tore free from the ring, cascading explosions, implosions, and decompression now actually audible throughout the vastness of the Tayseri Ward.
{Excuses. Just haul your turkey ass up here soon as you can,} said Jack by way of good-bye and flicked the channel back to the side, opting to look over the data from the fleets for any mention of the kids instead. Trudging over another pile of crumbled tiles and stone, careful to not slip on the fine ash covering everything, she slurped the rest of her juice pack and tossed the crumpled foil at the back of Vega's head.
"Slower, asshole, your legs are too long," she kindly instructed the marine who, admittedly, was very handy for making way through a crowd.
The two had decided to head for the safe zone almost as soon as the quarian shuttle had taken off, with even Ulyanov—after a little coaxing and a lot of shouting—walking by himself, albeit under Molina's watchful eyes. Despite the decreased threat they'd kept Rivers marching last with Jack and her biotics' reserves pretty much wiped out, too, but only once had they been beset by a group of husks, the gray shapes barely visible in the rapidly fading light but offering little resistance when lit up by the two marines bookending their tired parade.
Despite the enormous casualty estimates the ground command's feed displayed, they had entered the safe zone to find it packed tight with soldiers from a myriad of forces, not only Hammer, trying to organize and find their way back into their units. The troops were all injured to some degree nearly to the last man, woman, or asari, although these were mostly the lucky ones who felt well enough to stand and walk. The more seriously wounded and those tending to them had been ordered to be transported to sector 34, centered on what used to be a vast park and zoo and provided slightly better facilities for shuttles to start lifting the wounded away from the battlefield to wherever the command could find space. The biotics took their leave and went in search of their own units.
The command post area was nearly indistinguishable from the rest of the ruined landscape, the dark of night obscuring whatever distinctive features the husks of buildings may still have had. Lights flooded the few blocks a little brighter, and some enterprising souls had found the time to set up holo projectors with instructions to the crannies the various disparate groups had claimed for themselves, and the joint command center a little further east, nearby the thickest concentration of temporary antennae.
Flicking back to their channel, Jack checked Liara's location parameters. Pushing past Vega, it took her a few minutes to find the right pile of rubble to climb up to the second-floor window that led her to a room occupied by at least ten HI screens and a familiar figure painted an unfamiliar green by the yellowish glow of the monitors.
"Goddamn, lady, you don't dick around," said Jack with an appreciative whistle. "How the hell did you get all this shit up here already?"
"Jack," Liara almost whispered, turning her head toward the woman clambering in through the window. "It seems that having the temporary rank of a general is quite…handy. I have managed to secure adequate resources to properly monitor events as soon as I get connected to all the necessary feeds."
"You don't say," deadpanned Jack, turning her gaze toward Vega, who had ungracefully gotten through the window after tasking Rivers and Molina to take Ulyanov to the evac sector and to report in after having eaten.
"You can go play with your friends now," offered Jack, giving Vega a dismissive wave and a long look before turning to walk over to Liara. "Or stay here with us, I don't give a fuck."
The asari looked positively haggard when Jack got close, her normally bright sky blue skin waxy and pallid, and tinted a bruised grey. Her eyes were sunken, and an impressive gash went up from her cheek all the way to the end of one of her fringes. Another one seemed to be missing a few centimeters, the ugly wound hastily patched with some medi-gel.
"Oh my, you look terrible, Jack! Are you all right?" Liara asked looking up at Jack with a genuine expression of concern, causing the human woman to burst out into a ragged laughter.
Liara was still looking at her with slight puzzlement when Vega cleared his throat and interjected, "Dr. T'Soni, with respect, you yourself look like…you could use some food," he finished lamely.
"Yeah, Blue, you look like hell," supplied Jack, wiping a smudgy tear off her dust-caked eyelashes. She had to admit that she probably had seen better days herself, scraped everywhere, scorched in several places, and maybe nursing a broken rib and a broken arm. "Listen, we all need some grub…let's go see what these pompous fucks have hidden away from the people who actually did the fighting."
"I—I cannot go now," the asari mumbled. "I finally found a connection to to the turian fleets, and I have unsteady connections between all the other main units except for the rachni because I still cannot understand their speech, nor find a working translation upgrade, and Shiala isn't here as far as I could tell from my scans, but I was able to at least divert some assistance over to Garrus so that he could get himself detached and come here to see if we can find some ships. We must try to get all these wounded transported and all their names and the names of the…the dead, and when I keep monitoring the channels myself, I can optimize the filtering algorithms with very few VI resources, like the message from your Rodriguez that I would not have had the VI capacity for, and that's the kind of information that I want to find so that I can get everyone updated while trying to get the military comms routing and signaling to free up some bandwidth—"
"Hey, hey…" Jack grunted, awkwardly placing a hand on Liara's shoulder. "Come now. Did you say Rodriguez was still kicking? Thank fuck for small miracles. I thought that girl would get herself killed for sure. What was the message about?"
"Oh! I'm sorry, I was not thinking… She was trying to get a hold of—" Liara started, only to be interrupted by a holoprojection blinking into existence on one of the HIs in front of them.
Jack could only stare for a moment, before her mouth started working. "Shepard?"
"No…or yes…no," Liara muttered quietly, with a hint of alarm in her voice. "Admiral Shepard?"
When the woman spoke, Jack started noticing the differences too. Even beyond the slightly hazy quality of the projection, the woman's voice was a little higher, her face a little rounder, her lips fuller and skin a little darker. Real eyes, not cybernetic.
"Yes, Liara. I'm glad I found you!" exclaimed Hannah. "She's fine."
"S—she is alive?" gasped the asari, shrinking in her chair as if she had been deflated of all energy in an instant.
"Huh…goddamn," Jack muttered, squeezing Liara's shoulder. Behind, Vega barked a triumphant laughter.
Lifting her chin, a smile fighting to break free, Liara started scrambling for her various HIs and talking to herself almost as much as to Hannah, "Wh— How is she? How can I— Where are you? How can I get there? I can— There's a shuttle that I am sure I can—"
"Liara! Liara," the admiral said in soothingly, "listen. She's sedated right now, and will be for a few days. She needs some patching up but she's not going to go and die on us. She's fine. Okay?
"It's going to be hard getting off the planet right now, and I don't want you to do anything stupid trying. I'm going with her, and we're flying straight over to meet the hospital ships. I'm having our shuttle's ID and the flight plan sent to you. I will call you again when we get there, and we can figure out how to get you up too. Okay?"
"I—", started Liara, only to be interrupted by Jack poking her head in front of the camera. "Got it. We'll keep Blue grounded and let the others know Shepard's OK."
"Good. I must go. I will call again in three hours. Aethyta may call earlier," said the miniature Hannah Shepard before disconnecting.
