Citadel Tower Elevator

2055 Zulu

15 August 2183

Presidium, Citadel

It's hard for Kelsa to relax, knowing what she knows, now; the Citadel wasn't made by the protheans any more than the mass relays were. Instead, the very space station that lay at the heart of galactic society was made by the Reapers, just like the relays. And that means that the Citadel isn't so much a space station as a mausoleum, a testament to the cycles of extinction that've happened like clockwork every fifty thousand years as far back as anyone can imagine. Kelsa and her companions learnt all this back on Ilos; they were treated to a galactic history lesson from an ancient VI that the protheans left behind. The machine had just enough power to chronicle the closing days of that great empire and the drastic measures the protheans took to try and survive the all-encompassing apocalypse.

One of those efforts was the Conduit, which was a prothean-made mass relay, a one-way connection to the Citadel. The protheans discovered the station itself was a mass relay, and it pointed to the deep, dark space between the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies, where the Reapers lay waiting in between harvests. The plan was for a few thousand protheans to survive in stasis pods until the Reapers retreated to dark space, and then use the Conduit to take over the Citadel and alter its programming to keep the mass relay from opening and allowing the Reapers to spill forth from the abyss. The plan was sound, as far as it went, but the Reapers' cleansing of the galaxy took nearly three centuries. The VI had to take drastic measures to conserve power, so that by the time the Reapers retreated, only a dozen prothean scientists remained alive in their stasis pods. But those few scientists succeeded in sabotaging the connection between the Citadel and dark space; they were the only reason that Sovereign's signal to the Citadel didn't work, the reason Sovereign needed Saren to find the conduit.

Which he did about half an hour ago, before Kelsa or anyone on her team could lay eyes on him on Ilos. In the time between then and now, the ancient ship and the assembled might of the geth fleet had led a frontal assault on the Citadel while Saren and a few geth stormed the Presidium. Kelsa followed suit in the Mako, along with Liara and Wrex. Now her beloved tank is a smouldering wreck a couple of hundred feet below them while the party races up to the top of the Citadel Tower, to Saren, to the end of the road...until their elevator stops so abruptly that Kelsa's feet lift about twenty centimetres off the ground. Even Wrex stumbles, and he literally weighs nearly a tonne in his full suit of heavy armour.

Liara nimbly catches herself, but Kelsa's less graceful; the soldier goes down to one knee on landing. "Fuck," she hisses, out of annoyance rather than pain. "Looks like they know we're coming."

"How will we continue?" The asari asks, the slightest edge of panic bleeding into the bottom of her voice.

Kelsa pushes herself back onto her feet and looks out of the elevator's glass wall; the Citadel's five arms are slowly closing. That doesn't make the soldier feel any better. "We'll go outside," she decides, expanding her helmet and fixing it to her head. "Use your mag boots." When Liara and Wrex are both ready, Kelsa unships her shotgun and shatters the glass with a single pull of the well-worn trigger-all of the shards explode outward as the room's air is pulled into the vacuum. Years of training and combat mean that Kelsa has no problem reorienting when she climbs out of the hole and makes a floor out of what had been the tower wall. Wrex is similarly unfazed by the transition, but Liara stumbles. "Stay behind us," Kelsa counsels, closing ranks with the krogan. Walking's always clunky in mag boots, so they won't be able to dodge behind cover, but she and Wrex make a pretty good wall in their own right.

The trio only manages a few steps before Liara gasps. "By the goddess," she exclaims, in a tone oddly reminiscent of the last time Kelsa heard that phrase, though it was undercut with an edge of panic that had the soldier's eyes lifting from the path directly in front of her.

"Okay," Kelsa manages, when her heart climbs down from her throat. "Looking up was a mistake."

Wrex chuckles darkly from beside her. "Looks like the big squid's joining the party."

The soldier's seen Sovereign before, back on Eden Prime, but she hadn't known just what she was looking at back then. The hologram on Virmire didn't do the fucking thing justice; it's two clicks long, at least, and it's bearing down on the Citadel Tower with terrifying speed. Wrex's simple description is accurate, but not adequate; Sovereign looks like a many-legged sea creature writ large, an apex predator in its domain. A small squadron of Council ships look to harass the Reaper, but if it deigns to acknowledge one of them, it does so by means of a massive laser that cuts through the turian fighters like they're made of tinfoil. And it's getting closer to the tower, to Kelsa; if she didn't know better, the solder might swear she feels a certain tightness in the back of her molars. Shaking her head, Kelsa refocuses on the path in front of her. "Let's move," she grunts into her helmet's comm.

It isn't long before they run into some resistance, but it's nothing they didn't face on Ilos, or Virmire, or Noveria, or Feros. It's nothing Kelsa hasn't faced a thousand times since she was fourteen years old. Fourteen hundred ninety-seven, the soldier thinks to herself, and then she takes out a four-legged geth with a little help from Liara's biotics. Fourteen hundred ninety-eight. The fighting is a blessing, in its own way, since it focuses Kelsa's attention to a razor-thin edge that she uses to cut through the machines in front of her without worrying about the two-kilometre-long machine that's wrapping its metallic tentacles around the central spire of the Citadel. Kelsa and her confederates are spurred on by the long shadows cast by those tentacles, and after another push that sees Kelsa's shotgun whine from overheating, they make it to a ventilation shaft that leads directly to the Council Chambers. Once the last of the geth have been dealt with and they seal the airlock, Kelsa tears off her helmet and deactivates her boots, and she spares a glance to her two alien companions. All of them have their own reasons for being here, over and above stopping the Reapers. "This is where Saren was headed," Kelsa points out. "He's in the next room. We ready to end this?"

Once Liara's face is free of her helmet, there's no sense of hesitation in her expression. "Absolutely," the asari insists. Kelsa can't blame her for wanting revenge; but for Saren Arterius, her mother would still be alive.

So would Kaidan, Kelsa tells herself, and her lips twist into a grimace. She glances to Wrex, stewing over a lost cure to the death sentence of his people, a cure that would have been worse than the disease if Kaidan hadn't died to see it destroyed. The krogan gives her a measured nod, which she returns, before readying her cooled-down shotgun once more. "Let's get to it, then."

There aren't any geth waiting for them in the atrium, but Kelsa's still cautious, zigzagging along the path and up the flights of stairs that have twice before taken her to see the Council in session. The high platform is empty when Kelsa reaches the final landing, but the lower precipice has a single supplicant, a turian with its back turned to the intruders, working feverishly at a haptic console. Kelsa stops short halfway down the walkway, a good leap back from some tasteful boulders that can provide her and her team some cover when the bastard realises he's not alone anymore. Saren. Even if she didn't know he'd preceded her through the Conduit, she'd still be able to recognise him, even from behind; his silver-white armour is dirty and bloodstained, the same he wore on Virmire, and it doesn't look like he's taken it off since then. It takes a heartbeat for Kelsa to understand why; the left-hand side's been torn away, from Saren's shoulder to his waist. The turian's left arm is gone, too, replaced with a synthetic limb that looks like it was cut off of a prime-class geth. A series of tubes coils around his flank, and Kelsa has to revise her earlier estimate...it looks like half a geth is waiting for them in the Council Chambers, after all.

Her finger itches as she raises her shotgun, but even though every instinct she's cultivated over her life is screaming at her to pull the trigger and put an end to Saren Arterius, Kelsa hesitates. "Step back from the console," she commands. "I'll give you this one chance to do the right thing."

Saren twists around with a hissing snarl, his pistol in his left hand, the cybernetic one, and he gets three shots off before Kelsa can blink. Her shields flicker, and this time she listens to her instincts, diving into the nook behind that boulder with Liara at her side. Wrex holds his ground and returns fire for a second before he tucks himself behind the rock on the other side of the pathway. "You surprise me, Shepard," the turian snarls, evidently unfazed by the krogan's shot. "In my experience, the only things humans excel at are death and defeat in the face of their betters."

Those are turian words, words Saren might have told Anderson on their long-ago mission that saw Anderson's Spectre candidacy dissolve to dust...but the words lack any note of turian venom. In that half-second before she hit cover, Kelsa caught a glimpse of Saren's face; since Virmire, the turian's lost more than an arm. Those eyes aren't dead anymore, but they're backlit with an artificial blue glow, a glow that seeps through Saren's mandibles and teeth as well. When he speaks, he even sounds half-geth. Ice prickles at Kelsa's gut, but she's gotta stay focused; she hasn't run this far just to stumble at the last jump. "As soon as I find somebody better than me," she growls, "I'll letcha know."

Stone chips fly off of the top of Kelsa's boulder, the first of Saren's response, but when he speaks up again, Kelsa can tell that he isn't any closer. "You must think yourself so high and mighty," he rasps, a metallic edge to his voice. "So far above the garbage of the galaxy that their petty lives needn't concern you."

"You don't know a goddamned thing about me," the soldier barks, and she peeks out from her boulder just long enough to send a shotgun shell at the turian's chest. She hears the fragments crackle against his shield as she tucks herself back into her nook. "I ain't the one that's trying to kill everybody."

"And you are a fool if you truly believe that is my design," Saren insists, without returning fire this time. There's just a little more meat in his growl, now. "You have seen in the prism of your mind what the Reapers are capable of...what they will wreak upon the galaxy, as they have done so often before," he exclaims. "That is because each civilisation rejects what they offer; each cycle, the galaxy rises beyond itself, and must be violently cast down before the poison spreads to infect the whole of the Universe."

Kelsa's lips twist into a grimace. "What the fuck are you talking about?" His words unsettle something deep in the soldier's memory, a shadow of a life she gave up before she could count to twenty-one. "You sound like a motherfucking preacher."

"And why should that not be so?" The turian demands; he sounds like he's a step closer, but he does not fire until Wrex tries to take a shot, and when the krogan's ducking again, Saren continues. "Every culture in the galaxy has a version of the same truth; they are made in the image of the gods, but they cannot accept this, and so they are brought to ruin by their creators. Can you not see the parallels, Shepard?"

Wrex takes his own turn to talk instead of shooting, for once. "I can see you're about a salarian short of a decent frog-leg soup," he chuckles, giving Kelsa a scarred smirk from across the gap.

The joke's almost enough to get Kelsa's lips to twisting, if her guts weren't already doing the job. "Can't you hear yourself, Arterius?" She asks, according the man a respect she hasn't felt for him since he killed her friend. "You're indoctrinated! Sovereign's just getting you to do what it wants!"

Saren snarls. "It wants peace," he insists. "That is what the Reapers have always wanted, but no civilisation has ever given them the chance to bestow it upon the galaxy. No," he barks, "it's you that cannot see the truth; you would stand and fight, a twig in the face of a tidal wave, and you would have us all drown under its weight than learn to live in peace."

Okay, the soldier tells herself. Letting him live was a mistake. "If you want peace so bad," she offers him, "then prove it. Let's stand and talk about this like adults." As if adults don't shoot each other in the back all the time.

The crazy fuck takes a couple of seconds to consider, but then he decides to be reasonable. "Very well," Saren says. "Stand, and you and I may discuss terms."

Your funeral, Kelsa thinks, but she motions to her companions to stay put before she hauls herself to her feet. She's got her shotgun checked against her body, ready to point and shoot at a heartbeat's notice but not directly pointed at the man. For his part, he's moved his pistol to his right hand, the meat-and-bone one...almost like he doesn't trust the machine to make good on their agreement. "Just listen to what you're trying to say, Arterius," Kelsa repeats, grimacing. "How many cycles have gone by, how many systems have been scoured clean already? And you're telling me that they all had to be completely wiped out, that nobody wanted to surrender? Ever?"

Saren's blue-lit eyes twinkle. "All...all rejected the peace the Reapers offered," he insists. "All showed themselves unworthy of existence." The metal edge is back in his tone.

Kelsa shakes her head. "Those are Sovereign's words, Arterius," she tells him. "I saw him, back on Virmire...and there he told me the truth, that the Reapers are coming to harvest us, and there isn't anything we can do to stop them."

"That is why we must prove ourselves useful!" Saren's hand twitches, but he doesn't lift his gun, not yet. "There will be a place for us in the coming order, if only we submit to them!"

Let go, comes an echo from a forgotten dream, an echo that sounds too much like Liara. You must let go. "No!" Kelsa snaps, feeling a winter chill dance across her shoulders and another tingle in her teeth. "Anderson told me about you," she cajoles the turian, resisting the urge to throw a glance back over her shoulder to where the asari sits hunched behind the stone. "He told me you were strong and proud, that you didn't let anything keep you from what you needed to get done." She shakes her head again, more slowly this time. "But look at you...you're pathetic. You've already given up."

The turian's metal-tinged mandibles twitch, betraying some tiny spark of turianity left inside the bastard. "I'm doing what's best for the galaxy," he hisses. "Think of the trillions of lives that hang in the balance; all of those living, and the great multitude yet to be born!" He points at her with his metal hand. "You can see naught but war and strife, where there need only be order. We can live in peace, if only we can accept it."

Kelsa's grimace deepens, and her nostrils flare with the force of her sniff. "That's a goddamned lie," she spits. "But even if it was true, it wouldn't change my answer," she tells the turian. "I'd rather see the whole galaxy drown fighting than be slaves to the Reapers...and the Saren Arterius I've heard about would say the same fucking thing, if he was here right now, instead of a mouthpiece for the enemy."

"That is not your decision," Saren protests, but he doesn't sound so certain. There's a glimmer of light in those eyes that doesn't come from some cybernetic implants.

"It ain't yours, either," Kelsa shoots back, her grimace curving into a jagged smirk. "But here we are, gambling with the lives of all those trillions you talked about. We've both made our choices in the past that have cost innocent people their lives, but here we are." Her trigger finger tenses up subtly, but she doesn't swing her shotgun out quite yet. "You're right, Saren," she admits. "I don't know anything about peace, or about surrender. My whole life I've learned that the first thing doesn't exist and the second thing will only get you killed." Her smirk fades and she draws up to her full height, as unimpressive as that might be. "Can you look me in the eye and honestly tell me you've ever learnt any different?"

Saren's eyes narrow, but he doesn't blink. "I…" He chokes, and his cybernetic hand balls into a fist. "I…" He repeats, louder, meatier. And then his face goes slack, but when he talks, he sounds like Kelsa remembers hearing in this very room, when he appeared as a hologram. "Thank you, Shepard," he says, and before Kelsa can react, the turian brings his pistol up to his own jaw. Those eyes go dead one more time, just an instant before the bullet opens the top of Saren's skull in a spray of brown bone and blue, bloody brain matter.

The body collapses into a heap on the walkway; Kelsa's lungs burn before she remembers to take a breath, and another few seconds pass before her ear crackles with Joker's half-panicked voice. "Commander, I don't know what you did," the pilot tells them, "but the geth out here are acting like we just stomped on their dog or something. There any way you can get the Citadel's arms open?"

"I'll see what I can do," Kelsa answers, shaking off her shock and stepping over the fresh corpse that she can't claim direct credit for. "Looks like this console's some kinda control panel," she says, when she draws near. The symbols on the haptic interface are unfamiliar at first, but the computer must read her implants, because the console begins displaying the Alliance's galactic script after a second's delay. It takes another thirty for Kelsa to find the command to open the Citadel back up.

"Oh, shit," a voice calls over the comms, but it isn't Joker's. The voice belongs to Admiral Hackett, the commander of the Fifth Fleet. "Commander Shepard, we've got a situation developing out here."

Kelsa's mouth is already a desert, but she manages to cough up a reply. "Status, sir?"

"The Destiny Ascension is under heavy geth fire," Hackett informs her. "The geth are concentrating their force on the Citadel Fleet's capital ship...where the Citadel Council is currently in residence."

Oh, shit. "I'm not sure what I can do, sir," the soldier says, looking up through the chamber's windowed ceiling. She can barely see anything beyond Sovereign's shadow, but it looks like the station's arms are slowly creaking open.

"You can make a judgment call," the admiral clips. "I've got a squadron in position to engage and save the Ascension, but I'm told that the Reaper ship is inside the Citadel; we're not gonna be able to save the Council without sacrificing a lot of our own ships, and we might need them to beat Sovereign when those arms come fully open."

Kelsa's stomach turns. "You're the admiral, Admiral," she points out, almost laughing. "Ain't that your job?"

"I'm an Alliance admiral," Hackett rebutts. "You're a Council Spectre, and you've seen what we're up against first-hand. Whatever your decision, make it fast, Shepard."

The Spectre swallows her frustration with a pointed glance at Sovereign's enormous underbelly. What's three, she muses, against trillions? "Hold those ships back, sir," Kelsa forces out. "Keep 'em fresh for the final attack."

Hackett's answer is a heartbeat in coming. "Understood, Commander. Hackett out."

"Kelsa," Liara breathes, from beside her, that voice so much like the splinter of memory that Kelsa spins around; it's only at the last second that the soldier pulls her shotgun up and lets the shot off straight up into the air. For her part, Liara hardly flinches, but a bit of biotic energy dissipates from her closed fist. "Are you certain that was wise?"

"I'm certain that it's done," Kelsa drawls, unable to look directly at the asari. "And I'm certain that those Alliance lives are better spent trying to kill Sovereign than trying to save the Council."

Liara nods. "I believe your convictions are just," she says, sounding too goddamned reasonable. "But some will see it as self-serving."

"We can all argue about it tomorrow, assuming we live that long," Kelsa growls. "Now shut up before I try to shoot at you again."

Wrex grunts, from behind her. "Sorry to interrupt all this sweet talk," he grunts, "but we've got a problem."

Kelsa heaves a sigh, her head dipping down...bowed, but not broken. "What is it?"

"Looks like Saren survived his little lobotomy," the krogan observes.

A surge of adrenaline cuts through Kelsa's fatigue, and when she twirls around, there's just a blue bloodstain where the turian's body should be. "Goddammit," she yells, just as her comms get flooded with the fruits of her earlier choice; the Destiny Ascension is sending out some desperate hails for relief over all channels, and the Alliance is as silent as the black void in response. Kelsa closes her eyes against the wash of static that cuts into the feed before it goes silent again. "Find him," she hisses. "And then kill him."

The search takes them beneath the walkway, to a facsimile of a pleasant little park that only the most important members of galactic society have ever seen in fifty thousand years. Wrex was wrong; the thing they find isn't Saren anymore. Instead it's all machine, all Sovereign, with glowing red eyes and a long, metal neck. It's fast, too, able to leap from roof to wall as fast as Kelsa can swing her gun...but when you've got a Spectre and a krogan shooting at you, backed up by a capable biotic, jumping around can only take you so far. Saren's revenant ends with much less dignity than the turian himself, a second death of a hundred bullets, until there's nothing left to piece together. Even after the body's a mess of twisted metal, Kelsa keeps shooting, and when her shotgun whines in protest she takes to kicking and punching, expelling her grief and frustration on the mangled remains. It doesn't feel like victory, no matter how hard she hits the dead flesh and circuitry. It doesn't feel like victory when Wrex pulls her back from the pulp; it doesn't feel like victory when the Fifth Fleet closes in on Sovereign above them and concentrates their fire until the giant space squid explodes. It doesn't feel like victory when Kelsa pulls herself out from under a pile of rubble.

It feels like a good fucking start, though.

Author's note: Thanks so much to everyone who's reading along, especially everybody who leaves a review! I always appreciate hearing feedback. And I've also gotta thank my excellent beta-reader, clafount, for being awesome!