A/N: I apologise for not uploading for a while. Basically, internet has taken far too long to set up, but I'm back!

Also, life as a Freshers Rep is both awesome and sucks. Got to go to a foam party... with barely any foam.

Day One Hundred. Nova Station, Argos Rho cluster

"Alright, this is the finalised plan for the mission. We're due to be starting Chastise three days from now, but the Normandy's leaving tonight. That means we have two days to finish getting ourselves and our gear ready." Naylor slid the four datapads he was carrying to the other members of his strike team, each accepting it as they sat around what could only be described as a picnic table set up in the Normandy's hangar bay. Around them were the other twenty members of the five other strike teams, sitting around in the free spaces in the hangar bay that was their temporary domain. Shepard had been inventive in how she accommodated the extra people on the Normandy – the reserve teams were given the bunks in the Crew Quarters, generally keeping to themselves over the past two days to avoid spreading the word to the other crew members about the upcoming raid, while the strike teams were given the hangar bay. Naylor, Tela, Collins and Hastings were camping out in James' former domain, the armoury, and had spent the past days working with the other teams to hone their equipment to the highest standard.

Tela in particular had been fascinated by the workings of Hastings' T-5V Battlesuit, the heavy mechanised armour being something totally unlike anything that the asari republics possessed and unlike anything the turians had considered making, despite their culture. The reason was simple – the asari didn't need anything like the battlesuit, and the turians loathed to put into production anything that cost them more than they could feasibly get out of it. But the Alliance knew that the battlesuit, with shields that could rival a Geth Prime's and its huge suite of combat systems could make a single soldier into a walking tank. Shepard took this to the extreme level, combining the battlesuit with her biotics and combat prowess and had turned it into a force that could take on Brutes and Atlases in single combat and win without a scratch.

For Hastings however, his battlesuit was far from the same breed of armour, but he combined the armour with the heaviest weapons in the Alliance's arsenal, the N7 Typhoon being his personal favourite. Along with the light machine gun Hastings carried along a Katana shotgun, a Cobra missile launcher and an M-920 Cain, the infamous 'portable nuke launcher' employed by the Alliance and favoured by its first Spectre. In the strike team he would fill the role of a heavy weapons expert, dealing quickly with the heavier Reaper units that they would inevitably face. Tela, as the only biotic would be the strike team's adept, crowd controlling the hordes of Reaper ground units with her abilities, while Collins, as an infiltrator, had the task of staying ahead of the team, scouting the route from landing zone to objective for concentrations of Reapers, for units with the resistance and for supplies if the need arose. Naylor, his role in the team was simple – be everywhere and lead.

"We're due to be landing outside the hamlet of Flaunden, about three miles from Amersham as the crow flies but five miles along the fastest paths and roads. It's a pretty rural area, so the Reapers shouldn't be out there in force. That said, the intelligence we have been receiving from Earth has been saying that the Reapers have been concentrating forces in the area, obviously with the intention to take out the CMA. It's a natural centre of resistance given the situation, and of course that's where we are due to find our friends from the N-school."

"If the Reapers are there in force, why not take the less obvious choice and go as the crow flies?"

"That's where knowledge of the ground comes into play Hastings. The direct route from Flaunden to Amersham will take us through the weir of the Chess River down at Latimer, which would take us a good half hour to cross in incredibly open terrain unless we were to divert and ford downstream or cross at the bridge in Latimer itself. Our other option would be to route through Chesham to the north east. While it would put us within easy range of potential Alliance and resistance support in the major towns but it more than double the distance we'd have to trouble."

"So we go through this Latimer and hope that we don't get ambushed by any of the larger Reapers while we're there. What then? And why aren't we landing in Amersham itself?"

"Once we get across the Chess we head parallel to the main roads until we get to the CMA perimeter, get our operatives and signal for extraction. We aren't landing in Amersham because it has a direct line of sight to a ground-to-air Hades Reaper in Harrow. Flaunden has the nice cover of a hill that we can sneak behind if we're clever."

"Ah." The Destroyer shut up as he mentally recalled his limited knowledge of the Home Counties, and the places that Hades variants of Reaper destroyers had been seen around London.

"How long before it goes SNAFU, Staff Lieutenant?"

"No idea, Collins. I say an hour. You?"

"Fifty says its half hour tops."

"I don't get you humans. You're betting on how long it would take for things to go wrong?" Naylor nodded back to the asari spectre. "Then I go half way and say forty five."

"Done deal." Naylor switched his datapad over to the next thing he had to brief the squad on. "Our charges are a squad of officers under a Lieutenant Scuito. She's Italian, so expect flamboyance." Ignoring Tela's shaking of her head in annoyance, Naylor carried on. "They were based at CMA before the Reapers invaded and have been leading the defence of the academy since then. Other than Scuito, our sole N7 to pick up, we have Martins, N6, Cant, N6, Smith, N5 and Murdoch, N5. Their dossiers are on your datapads, so you can memorise their appearance at your own convenience.

"Aside from the officers we're looking at extracting, we've been given some unofficial orders from Hackett to provide whatever assistance to the resistance as we think necessary. Given how things are going, I plan on helping them out by dropping off as many of our weapons as we can spare to the forces at CMA before we leave. Shepard's also planning on loading as many rifles as she can onto the extraction shuttles and sending them down to the surface for each team. We're talking a couple of crates of Vindicators, Avengers and even a few of the new Valkyries if we can."

"Vindicators?" Tela's head perked up as she heard the weapons that the squad were going to be taking down to Earth when they extracted.

"Yeah, Tela. Why?"

"Oh, nothing." In secret, Naylor knew of Tela's love of the M-15 – the turian battle rifle being a favourite for the Spectre. In recent months she had been fielding an asari-made assault rifle, the Neophyte, developed from the same extensive line as the Disciple and the Acolyte pistols. It was an aesthetically beautiful and comparatively powerful weapon, mixed with high accuracy and incredible portability, which made it a quick favourite amongst the better well-equipped asari commando units such as the Serrice and Armali Commando groups. But she still kept a soft spot for the old Vindicator, and Naylor had to agree – it was a very well-rounded weapon, and had been his chosen firearm before the Mattock.

"Right, if everything's finished, lunch's being served up in the mess hall. After that, we'll run over the terrain, plan our routes from LZ to objective and work out a secondary extraction zone."

Barely a minute after arriving on the crew deck and entering the mess hall, not even enough time to get in the queue for lunch, Naylor was quite literally dragged into Liara's office, the asari having something to show him that could only be dealt with in the secure confines of her office. Or so she said anyway. Liara had deemed it "too risky" to divulge the information she was about to reveal in the mess hall, given the presence of forty new crew members taking up every available seat, edge of table or any horizontal surface to sit down on while eating their meals. Instead, Naylor found himself in Liara's office trying to ignore his rumbling stomach as he waited for Liara to bring up what she had wanted to show him.

"As much as I know it is a biological reaction, would you please stop your stomach from distracting me from my work?"

"If you hadn't dragged me out of the mess hall before I had a chance to eat, that question wouldn't have been needed to be asked." Naylor laced his reply with barely veiled annoyance, angry at the fact that the meal that his stomach was in dire need of was barely a few metres in front of him, through the metal bulkhead that was the side wall to Liara's office. "Sorry, I'm just damn hungry."

"I understand. This should not take longer than a few minutes to bring up on the screens, but I think I can explain in the meantime. Peter, the Illium Defence Forces have been attacked by Reaper capital ships."

"What?" Naylor stood immediately, and was beckoned over by Liara who saw his movement out of the corner of her eyes. "I thought the Reapers were barely past the Titan Nebula and Sigurd's Cradle."

"Evidently our intelligence must be old, or wrong, but the facts are the facts. The Reapers are in the Crescent Nebula and are threatening a crucial supply route if they take Illium. Thankfully, they haven't. Yet."

"You say 'yet' as if you're not at all confident that the world will survive."

"Illium is the first world with predominantly asari defenders to have been attacked by the Reapers. We do not know whether the commandos and asari mercenaries stationed there could hold the Reapers off as well as the humans and turians have been seen to do. But there is another reason why I think that Illium will fall – when the Reapers arrived in the system, small volunteer units planted nuclear and warp bombs on the Reapers' transport ships, detonating them to deny the Reapers ground soldiers for their campaign. The Illium Defence Forces then focussed only on the transports that survived, not the Reaper capital ships themselves."

"Surely then the Reapers cannot take Illium as they have no soldiers to do so?"

"That is why I think the world will not survive. I did not say that it would fall. The Reapers cannot afford to waste time in Tasale – every day they waste there is another day that the Asari Republics can use to rally their fleets and prepare for the inevitable onslaught. Although I don't have much experience in these matters, I believe that Illium will be dealt with not by capturing it but by destroying its cities and annihilating its ecosystem." Liara shuddered as she revealed her hypothesis. Illium had been her home for two years, and for however much she hated living there it still retained a significance – were it not for the time she had spent on Illium, Liara often doubted whether she would have found the designs for the Crucible on Mars. There were other things that she wouldn't have been able to do, but that wasby far the most important of the things she had achieved as the Shadow Broker.

"I can't even comprehend something like that. Annihilating an entire world and its inhabitants because they can't take it by force and kill its inhabitants? That's just barbaric."

"But we cannot rule it out. The Reapers may very well be overextending themselves at the moment. A lot of the evidence we have seen recently suggest that the Reapers do not have any reserves left, and the work that the Council, the Council races and I have done to prepare the Terminus Systems means that the Reapers are having to divert dozens of ships and transports to destroy or capture every world now rather than just blasting them into submission and sending a few husks to force a surrender. Although I do not like it, the inhabitants of the Terminus Systems are buying Council space time with their lives."

"You still have a conscience, Liara."

"What is that supposed to mean?" The asari turned, staring down at the Lieutenant, who was now sitting nonchalantly in one of the office's chairs.

"It means that you can still feel bad about stuff like this. Listen, compared to how long Shepard has known you, I know I've barely even met you, but I wouldn't like to see you getting obsessed with being the Shadow Broker."

Liara slowly closed her eyes, summoning the strength to say what she was going to say. "Shepard said the same thing on Illium when I was trying to find the Shadow Broker. It got worse after that."

"All the more reason then to stop yourself from becoming the thing you replaced." An awkward and painful silence stretched out for a few second, prompting Naylor to at least say something lest he feel the need to just walk out of the office and turn his attention back to his lack of sustenance. "What about the southern arm of the Reaper assault? Have they progressed any further than Palaven yet?"

"There have been some attacks into salarian space, yes, but the Reapers seem to have been concentrating on recuperating from their losses on Palaven following the krogan's offensive. Overall control of space around Palaven seems to be switching between both sides every two or three days now, but the turians seem to have been finding ways of getting the upper hand against the Reapers. New tactics, new plans, new strategies."

"And a certain information broker is well placed to see this information sent as far and wide as possible, right?" Liara smiled slightly, but as she turned her head back to her console, that smile disappeared.

"I would love to say yes, but my agents within the hierarchy are being killed faster than I can position new ones. I will try and lobby the Primarchs with as many of my higher ranking agents to streamline the dissemination of those tactics, but it will take some time."

"Liara, if there is anyone who can do this, it is you." The asari slumped her shoulders, but when Naylor stood up and placed a hand there she almost leant into the touch, ignoring how intimate what she was about to do was to rest a cheek against the top of his hand.

"Thank you."

"For what?"

"For trusting me in all this. I don't think that I could be doing this without you."

"Oh, I think you would still be going."

"Okay, I don't think I could be doing this as well without you. We make a good team."

"If you say so. You're the expert."

Day One Hundred and Two. Hydra System, Argos Rho cluster

"SSV Normandy, this is SSV Hamburg. Squadron Seven is currently moving into position on your flanks. The SSV Nashville and the SSV Leipzig are forming up at your three o'clock; the SSV Hamburg, SSV Agincourt and the SSV Cannae are forming up at your eight o'clock. Please confirm?"

"SSV Hamburg, this is the SSV Normandy. We see the escort and are proceeding to the mass relay. Hold formation and prepare for relay transit."

"Copy Normandy. All ships are holding station."

Joker turned in his seat to regard Shepard's armoured form standing behind his pilot's chair, the Spectre standing with arms crossed in her T-5V Battlesuit. Every crewmember on the Normandy was at his or her station, and the CIC was a bustle of noise as the section chiefs listed off their stations' readouts and reported the readiness of particular sections of the ship. Importantly for Shepard, there were no reported problems with the Normandy's cyclonic kinetic barriers, its engineering department or its hangar bay, meaning that the ship was protected, its stealth systems could be readied at a moment's notice and Cortez's three shuttles could take off and deliver the strike teams as soon as the Normandy was in orbit over Earth. Everything was going according to plan, and the Normandy's escort into the Arcturus Stream, led by the SSV Hamburg, was on time and in position.

Squadron Seven, a part of the First Fleet, had volunteered for the task of escorting the Normandy to Arcturus, the only route available for the Normandy to get into the Sol System via the Charon relay. The Reapers were not expected to be making any attempts at attacking the Normandy while the ship was in transit, but the escorts were there just as a precaution. As soon as the Normandy hit the relay to the Sol system, Squadron Seven would peel away and make for Nova Station as fast as possible, joining the cover force planned for Operation Goodwood. Until then, Commander Shepard, so used to working on her own, was relishing the chance to command her very own flotilla of ships.

"Joker, how long until we reach the relay?"

"About five minutes, Commander. No sign of Reapers yet."

"We should be good until we make the first relay jump. What's our route?"

"We are using the Hydra-One relay to jump to the Horse Head Nebula, Commander, and then Pax-Gamma to the Arcturus Stream. ETA to the Sol System is twelve hours twenty minutes, Earth in eighteen hours. We should not encounter any Reaper forces until we arrive in the Arcturus Stream, although there are Reaper scouts in the Horse Head Nebula that could be in action around the relays."

"Cheers EDI. Have the shuttles prepared for immediate launch as soon as we make the Sol system. Joker, you have the bridge." The Spectre walked from her post in the bridge and made her way back to the commander's podium in the CIC, monitoring the progress of the Normandy on the holographic projection of the galaxy map, enlarged to show only the parts of the galaxy that they would be travelling through. By her terminal, however, was a turian, one of the members of the reserve team, a Lieutenant Maridus. He had been picked as the unofficial leader of the reserve group by the others, given his position as a former member of the Turian Blackwatch and a platoon commander in the 26th Armiger Legion. Shepard trusted the turian to be succeed if his team was needed to go into action.

"Commander, I have a suggestion."

"Go ahead Lieutenant."

"Commander, we're all here to see the strike teams succeed, right? At the moment, they're sleeping rough in the hangar bay. Given that we've got eighteen hours until we get to Earth, why don't we give the reserve team the hangar bay and give the strike team the crew quarters?"

"So they get a decent night's sleep before a suicide mission. I hadn't thought of that. Give them the word." Maridus headed back towards the elevator, leaving Shepard to take her place at the commander's podium. Traynor was standing beside her at her station, ready to assist the commander if she was needed to. But Shepard could see that Traynor was nervous, and clearly tense about the upcoming mission. "Traynor, you play chess, right?"

"Yes, Commander! How did you find out about that?"

"Liara told me. I hear you had an interesting game with our resident archaeologist?"

"Yeah. Apparently Liara has never played before. I doubt that entirely."

"How badly did you lose?"

"I didn't. Well, I won when we did a best of three, but she pulled Fool's Mate on me on the first game. Fool's Mate!"

"I don't know what that is." Shepard's monotonous, deadpan delivery sent Traynor into a fit of laughter, getting a few stares from those in the CIC that couldn't hear their conversation by the galaxy map. "Okay, I do know what it is, and that's embarrassing. My crew should be doing better than that. How did you fall into a Fool's Mate?"

"Overconfidence on my part. I only realised my mistake when I saw Liara's face light up on my second move. Five seconds later, I had lost by Fool's Mate."

"You poor specialist, Traynor. Tell you what, how about actually giving you a chance to beat me convincingly?"

"Okay, uh, how about when we return from Earth?"

"Sounds good. We'll do battle in the port observation lounge then." Traynor smiled, turning back to her console as the Normandy ground onwards through the vast expanse of space before the mass relay. In a few minutes time, the Normandy would be hurtled from the Argos Rho cluster of stars into the Horse Head Nebula at a speed of thousands of light years a second, far faster than its top speed of five thousand times the speed of light. And Shepard was confident that her crew would be successful in the mission that they would be launching when they reached their ultimate destination.

Day One Hundred and Three. Sol system, Local Cluster.

The Normandy exploded out from FTL into the Sol system, her crew immediately activating the ship's steal systems, cyclonic barriers and EDI's electronic warfare suites. The advances that the Alliance had made in masking the ship's signature when the vessel exited FTL paid of massively – by the time that the Reapers detected that resembled anything remotely like an exit from FTL, the Normandy was half way across the system and in the clear.

Joker and EDI skilfully manoeuvred the Normandy around the patrolling Reaper destroyers that kept the system strictly in Reaper control. In the CIC, technicians kept watchful eyes on the temperature of the heat sinks that were integral to the Normandy's stealth systems, which were slowly creeping up higher and higher.

Shepard, Cortez, his two fellow pilots and the six strike team leaders were standing around a holographic display of Earth, the six target locations highlighted on the surface as the hologram slowly rotated around on an invisible axis. Orbit around Earth was still a half hour away, the Normandy slowly and safely traversing the space between Mars and Earth, but preparations were already afoot for the first of the deployments of the strike teams into Earth's atmosphere.

"Khan, you're launching Team Star into Moscow. Cortez, you're launching Team Slip into London. Ores, you're launching Team Jaune to Mont Louis. We're going to be following the sunset on this operation, so the launches will be spaced irregularly. However, we think that we can get our teams into position far easier in this way. If you cannot land your teams at your normal landing zones due to Reaper presence, or are attacked by Reaper airborne forces on the route back, your orders are to find a place to land and hook up with the resistance. Do not return to the Normandy if you are discovered or attacked.

"If you are attacked while you still have your teams on your shuttles, your orders are to hit the deck and try and evade your pursuers and return to your normal LZ. If you aren't able to do that, then eject using the grav-chutes in your shuttle and proceed to the ground as quickly as you can."

"Commander, if we lose a shuttle, will there be any changes to the pick-up schedule?" Ores' question was the one that all of those assembled knew had to be asked, but none of them wanted to lest it bring bad luck down on those involved.

"If we haven't lost strike teams, then no. Our pickups are scheduled to take place with the use of one or two shuttles, so we should be fine. If we lose all the shuttles, then the teams will be notified and the Normandy will extract from the Sol system. Hopefully it won't come to that, but I'm sure you could find a nice spot for a picnic and wait for the war to end if it does." A chorus of nervous laughter rippled around those involved, and Shepard cracked a smile at her own joke. "If there are any more questions, just ask. And good luck. We'll probably need it."

The team leaders all left the holographic display, Naylor heading back to the area where his team were finishing their final checks on their armour and their weapons. Tela and Collins were strapping the many weapons to the hardpoints on the back of Hastings' T-5V battlesuit. The M-920 Cain took pride of place in the centre, its normal yellow and black design given a gunmetal grey coat of paint to make it less visible, while his Katana and Cobra launcher were being attached below and to the left of the Cain respectively. His Typhoon was currently sitting down on the nearby weapons bench, and the Devastator would be taking it into battle with him. Tela's weapons, her Neophyte assault rifle and a "back up" Vindicator, were already attached to the hardpoints on the back of her armour, while Collins' Viper sniper rifle and her M-11 Suppressor sat beside the Typhoon, waiting to be collected by the infiltrator.

As Naylor approached, the three turned mid-work to regard the Staff Lieutenant as he reached their little home from home in the hangar bay. Tela turned around as he approached, leaving Collins to suddenly bear the full weight of the Katana she was attaching to Hastings' armour.

"We're good to go."

"Goddess, we're really doing this?"

"Yeah. No more sitting about. We're in Cortez' shuttle, second on the launch schedule."

"Then we better finish. Your weapons are all prepared, disruptor ammo loaded and sights zeroed in." Tela handed Naylor his weapons, an M-96 Mattock and an N7 Eagle heavy pistol, and Naylor could see the blue casing around the ammunition block in the middle of the two weapons. Quickly latching the Mattock to Naylor's back, Tela then unfolded the pistol and passed it to the lieutenant, who stored it, unfolded for a quicker draw, on his right hip. "Lieutenant Vega is currently getting us another box of thermal clips. Apparently someone can't have enough of them." She nodded her head towards Hastings, who was finally ready and helping Collins attach her weapons to the hardpoints on the infiltrator's armour.

"Have you seen the number of weapons I'm carrying?"

"Yeah. That doesn't merit taking like a thousand thermal clips." Tela was right – the plastic clips on Hastings' waist, the outside and inside of his arms and the bandoliers around his chest were stuffed with the small red cylinders to the point that one would think that they were part of the colour scheme of the armour. Vega, however, arrived soon after with a new container full of both the metal blocks that rounds would be fabricated from and thermal clips, and on Naylor's suggestion all four took more ammunition to be used in case their current blocks ran out of shots as well as thermal clips in the case of everyone bar Hastings.

A few final glances to the assembled faces in the hangar bay, mostly the off-duty staff, the reserve strike team and Shepard's ground team and Naylor led his squad out towards Cortez' shuttle, sitting powered down behind Khan's shuttle in the maintenance bay. Cortez was standing beside the door, waving them inside as the Kodiak in front began spooling up engines to their maximum power, Zaitsev's squad already onboard and ready to launch. Shepard ran up to the shuttle just before Naylor got in, planting a hand on his shoulder and turning him around on the spot.

"Lieutenant, I'd, uh, like to say I'm wishing you the best of luck."

"You're making it sound as if we're on a suicide mission. You'd know a thing or two about that, am I right?"

"Pretty much. Listen, stay safe out there. You're a damn good guy and I didn't, still don't want you down there but hey ho. Any last words?"

"Yeah, if I don't make it, just keep doing what you got me to do and keep an eye out for Liara. She'll exhaust herself if someone doesn't pick up the workload."

Shepard smiled, knowing what the Lieutenant didn't know or wasn't picking up on – that though she denied it and tried ever so hard to cover it up, Liara felt a strong friendship with the Lieutenant that she worked alongside and was tearing herself up about not being able to help all of the teams in the best way possible, her network on Earth smashed to pieces by the war. "Got it. Anything else?"

"I'm not that religious, but what the hell – pray."