The walls of the Normandy were a red, pulsing being. As Kaidan rushed down the hall, showers of hot sparks washed over his back, his head, his hands. A voice pushed against the roar. He couldn't hear the words it used.

Ahead, he glimpsed Shepard running toward crew quarters. The hall shook, swaying his vision violently askew. Flames erupted from a console ahead. Port side of the CIC. Burning heat everywhere. Something wet on his forehead. Later. His hands tore open the wall locker, grasping for the extinguisher.

A voice from everywhere. Moreau. "Critical systems failure. Abandon ship!"

Cold metal in his hands. Success. Kaidan opened fire on the inferno, engulfing the consoles, wall and floor, with smothering white foam. Another flame. Another. Another. Surrounded by hot, burning enemies. The lieutenant stayed. Have to keep the path clear to the pods.

Boots thundered past. Johnson. Chakwas. LeFou. Boots halted. Shepard. "Get them to the pods and get out of here."

Kaidan tossed the dead canister down. "Joker's still on the bridge."

"Damnit." The Commander ground her teeth and pushed off toward the bridge.

The lieutenant followed. Shepard whirled around, shoving her hands against his chest. "Get. Out. Now! I'll get Joker."

"I'm not leaving-"

"That's an order, Lieutenant!"

"Aye aye, ma'am." Kaidan turned. Shepard swept by behind him. Red walls rushed past. The pod opening appeared before him. Still someone out. The lieutenant shoved them in, barking. "Get inside, now!"

He stood at the threshold. One second. Two. The pod was at capacity. Three. Four. Kaidan moved inside. Five. He pushed the eject. The capsule screeched as it tore away. Falling. Falling. Then nothing. No crash into a friendly training pool. They were spinning in dead space.

Objects hurtled past the viewing window. Twisting cords, bulkhead fragments, black space. Automatically, the lieutenant checked the trajectory, checked for landing sites, checked for other pods. Too far. He took a tally of the crew. No major injuries. All seats filled. "If you haven't got your hard-suit. I'd strongly suggest you grab one from the storage under your seats now."

The blood that had been dripping down his forehead dried. All that was left was to sit and wait.

The first face Kaidan saw when the pod door popped belonged to a somber gunnery chief coated in splatters of read and white. Her armored hand hovered before him, bringing with it the rush of icy air. "Welcome to Alchera, LT." Despite his suit's regulation, he couldn't help shivering as grabbed her hand and he pushed himself out of the pod. "Sitrep?"

"The area is secured for now. Distress beacon has been activated. All pods accounted for. 21 crewmen dead or MIA - Pressly, Draven, Emerson, Tanaka, Tucks, Laflamme..." Her gaze drifted off into the open snow fields. "Shepard."

"Shepard?" He couldn't help himself. Concern rose like a knife through him, overriding the unease at Ash's assessment of their security as 'safe for now'.

"Pod 113 was the last to arrive. It... it only had Joker on it." The chief at wiped a layer of frost that was accumulating over the blood stains on her visor. She didn't meet his gaze.

The snow around Kaidan began to turn red as his eyes narrowed. "Where is he?"

"Woah, LT." Ash spread her hands over his chest-plate. "Thrashing him won't put her in that pod. It's not his fau-"

"Yes." Kaidan glowered. "It is."

The gunnery chief shifted back a step, her face falling as her eyes flickered off in the direction of a lone hard-suited figure. Between the snow and helmet visor, it was hard to tell if that soldier was indeed Lieutenant Moreau, but then again it entirely didn't matter if it was. They were all at fault somehow.

"Hey!" Kaidan called as he reached out to grip the other man's shoulder. "What happened up there?" Despite the cold, he could feel his blood burning.

The pilot wouldn't look up. "I'm such an idiot. I should have gone to the pods. By the time Shepard - she hauled my ass out, there wasn't time. Something blew. She... Man, I saw her get spaced. I kept pounding on the window like that would help." Joker broke off, reaching to pull at the brim of a ball cap that wasn't there. "Shit, man. She's still out there somewhere in the black."

"Out there?" Kaidan looked up, beyond the snow-laden sky toward the black he knew was there. "She could still be alive. Her suit must have had a few hours of oxygen, heat regulation..." The lieutenant clung to a sliver of hope as he began doing the math.

Moreau shook his head. "She's gone, man."

Gone. She couldn't be gone. The lieutenant looked to the gunnery chief, expressionless as his buoy of anger dropped out from under him. The chief looked to the pilot. There was a great hole between them where their commander should have been. The trio simply stood there, heads down, collecting snow. Gun shots peppered the silence then stopped.

Kaidan's eyes returned Ash. "How do we go on?" The words hung on his lips, coming out instead as, "Hostiles?"

"The geth detachment we were fighting was only an arm. We never found their base of operations." The chief returned his gaze with a will of tempered steel. "One step at a time."

Colors faded back into the world though they didn't seem quite real. "Sounds like they found you."

The chief nodded as she peered out in the direction of the shots. "Just a scout team. We've got forty-eight hours before pick-up gets here. I don't expect the flashlight-heads to wait that long for a full attack." Something seemed to change in Ash went on to detail the events before the pod landings. As though her purpose on this planet, her last orders from Shepard, anesthetized her to the pain. "The cold has been playing tricks with all our proximity readings so we're doing this manually."

Willing to follow her example, Kaidan's eyes drifted along the perimeter the ground team had set up around the escape pods. The south and west were nothing but a single rock face rising beyond his line of vision. Wrex and what looked like Tali were positioned along the east behind a large chunk of what used to be part of the Mess Hall. A group of men and woman he couldn't recognize through the icy flakes held steady across the line from there. He didn't see Garrus at first until a glint of a sniper's scope along the ledge where the Mako had landed caught his eye. Unlike the rest, the turian wasn't watching the great open fields, his sights were focused on the walls. Despite the arranged fortification, there was still a hole in the line. "We've got the north end then."

"Yes, sir. We set up alternating shift changes of about six hours to give the suits time to recharge though Garrus has been out there for twelve now. Pods 107 through 110 have been converted to temporary med bays by Doctor Chakwas, 95 and 108 aren't functional, and all the rest in the area stand as relief bunkers."

The lieutenant nodded and headed down toward the north end of the perimeter where scattered cargo crates awaited him. Joker didn't follow.

"Multiple contacts. Eleven, twelve, and one o'clock!" The transmission from the east team was distorted in Kaidan's ear, but the message was clear. Ahead dark shapes began to emerge in the blankets of white. Squinting, he could count more of them than his combat scanner told them there were. The lieutenant's arm protested as he reached for his pistol. It had been four hours since the initial contact.

Keeping his eyes on the field Kaidan replied to his team, "Looks like six troopers at eleven, five at one. Two armatures in the middle. Be on the look out for any drones or hoppers. They'll be almost invisible in this mess." A ball of crackling blue energy scorched the air over his head. "And watch those siege pulses."

Once they were in range of the perimeter, the armatures bunkered down in the snow drifts, leaving only their dangerous heads visible. The set of troopers advanced from both sides as one unit. Firing began on both sides before either was in accurate range. Then the troopers stopped.

Beside Kaidan, Ash muttered a stream of curses as she tossed a heat sink out. The small cartridge melted its way down into the snow, joining a host of others. "They're just playing with us." She jammed a new sink in, growling as she took aim once more. "Come over here, you walking refrigerators!"

An increasing buzz heralded the arrival of two drones overhead. Kaidan momentarily abandoned his pistol as he wreathed himself in dark energy. Spinning around to match their movement, he thrust his hand outward, increasing the gravity around them before flinging the two flying discs back toward their own front line on a low trajectory.

They exploded against two of the troopers as two shots from the ledge above felled two more. The lieutenant was just taking aim at one of the armature heads when all of the white around him blossomed into a bitter, sparkling orange, outlined in red. The crushing boom that followed shook several large chunks of debris down from the cliffs.

A voice crackled to life in his ear. "Crew of the SSV Normandy, this is Captain Scheherade of the SSV Einstein. Those tin cans giving you some trouble?"

For that single moment, the smile that plastered itself over Kaidan's face was pure relief. "Not anymore, sir. Appreciate the assist. Staff Lieutenant Alenko out."

"We'll be landing two klicks east of your position in twenty. Come on over when you're done playing with the rest of those robots gone wild. Scheherade out."

With the armatures out of the way, the Normandy team made quick work of the few remaining troopers that head been ahead of the blast. As the crew pulled up their makeshift camp and headed for the extraction point, something still plagued the lieutenant about the assault. These geth hadn't acted like the raider forces he'd encountered before. They were more like a swarm of bees guarding their hive. He couldn't quite place together what it meant-

"You Alenko?" A gruff older man with a scar tracing just outside his left eye towered over the lieutenant from the top of the boarding stairs.

Kaidan nodded. "Yes, sir."

"Fine work out there. Sorry to hear about your commander. Had been looking forward to meeting the Hero of the Citadel myself, but not like this." He shook his head. "Damn shame."

Kaidan worked for a moment to speak around his clenched jaw. "This is Shepard we're talking about. She could still be out there."

Scheherade leaned down. "You know what the chances of that are, son? We've got the report from your gunnery chief. Spaced six hours ago. Even the best suits-" He shook his head as he read the lieutenant's face. "We'll run a few laps of the area, keep the scans open..." With a sigh, the captain turned and vanished into his ship. The lieutenant didn't have to be told to follow.

Hours later, alone in a borrowed sleeper pod, Kaidan's mind was too occupied to allow his body to rest. A mental vid of Shepard played over and over. Diligent searching hadn't turned up anything - wouldn't find anything. The woman he loved was dead and they couldn't even find her corpse to bury.

Kaidan's shoulders shuddered as the sob that would no longer be denied wracked his body. None of the regulations mattered then. None of the battlefield successes. All he could think of were things he hadn't done with Shepard. There was so much he would do if he could just see her again...

Fin.

Author's Note: Well, that's all folks. So many thanks to the sage Sinvraal and everyone else who took the time to tell me what they thought of my story. I do plan on a sequel that follows Kaidan through ME2 so check the profile for updates on when Surviving Shepard might be out if you're interested. Otherwise, thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed the ride as much as I did.

- V