Chapter 35
Life has been surprisingly on the northern side of shitty lately. I mean yeah, two of my closest friends and my pilot did go behind my back and spy on me a while ago; and having to let those scientists die to stop that batarian piece of shit on X57 sucked a whole lotta dick, but other than that, things have been pretty damn okay. A week of shooting things and talking to the other members of my ground team seems to be bringing me back to an even keel. Plus it's kinda cool watching Ashley and Liara start to actually spend time together outside of missions. Something still seems a little off with those two, but I'm not gonna try to figure out what. They're women, and therefore incomprehensible. Unless maybe it's unresolved sexual tension, in which case I want in! Ugh, I need to get laid. Maybe one of them would like to resolve their tension with – No. Down boy. Think about something else . . . Tali! And Garrus and Joker. Grrr. I just don't know what to do about the trio of fuckups. I still wanna be pissed off at them, but that damn reasonable side of me keeps saying it wasn't that bad, and I should let it go. Oh good, someone's knocking on my door. Guess I don't get a chance to argue with myself after all. "It's open!"
The imposing figure of Urdnot Wrex stood in the entrance to Shepard's cabin. "Wrex! Good to see you. Whatcha need?"
"I noticed that we were in Argos Rho, Shepard."
Shepard grinned wryly. "Ah, ya picked up on that, didja? I guess that's not surprising, considering you were right there next to me squishing the rachni on that space station. What was it called? Depot 23 or something like that? Did it bring back memories, Wrex?"
The krogan's only response was to continue to level Shepard with a glare that would terrify an entire turian fleet. Shepard just chuckled, and continued speaking. "I see you're not to be deterred. Well don't worry; we're on the way to Tuntau now. If that profiteer is on that planet, we'll find him. I assume you want to come with me?"
Wrex just gave a grunt of assent.
"Right then." Shepard couldn't hold in a small grin. Wrex is so fucking hilarious to talk to. Well, talk at may be more accurate. I swear he's the quietest person I've ever met. Maybe after we track down his family's armor he'll be open to a bit more social interaction with me and the rest of the crew. But I gotta find the armor first. "So you, me, and Kaidan will head on down to Tuntau – which I noticed is yet another planet that is cold as balls, by the way – and we'll see if we can't find this Tonn Actus guy and beat the location of your family armor outta him. Speaking of beatings. Joker!" Shepard turned his face to the sensor/speaker combination that connected to the shipwide intercom.
"You rang?" Joker's voice came out of the ceiling.
"ETA to Tuntau?" Shepard's tone was clipped, barely inflecting the end of the sentence upwards in order to indicate his question.
"Fifty-five minutes, Commander."
"That will be all, Helmsman." With that said, Shepard turned back to Wrex. "Any problems with dropping in the Mako in fifty-five minutes with me and Kaidan?"
"No." Was the krogan's monosyllabic response.
"Alrighty then. You wanna hang out here and trade war stories 'til then? I know you told me about your dad, and that job with Saren you abandoned, and that fight with the asari chick, Aleena, but that can't be all. I know you've been in more battles than that."
Wrex moved forward and sat down in the chair opposite Shepard, but otherwise gave no indication that he'd decided to share any more of himself than he already had. After a brief silence, he spoke. "And you, Shepard?"
"Come again?" Shepard asked, a look of mild confusion on his face.
"I've told you three stories. You haven't told me any."
"Oh." Huh. I guess he's right. Come to think of it, I'm usually the listener not the talker with everybody. Wonder why that is? I'll have to think on that later, because I've got a krogan giving me a "thoughtful" look, and I've gotta take advantage. "You're right, Wrex. So how about we make a deal: from now on, we go tit for tat on stories. Sound good to you?"
"Yes. Now tell me about Elysium."
"Whoa there Wrex, I let you pick your own stories, so what makes you think you get to tell me what I share with you? And why am I going first?"
"You owe me." The krogan's eyes seemed to glint with suppressed mirth.
If I didn't know better, I'd almost think Wrex is taking the piss outta me. "If I tell you the about Elysium, we're square. And you tell me how you got that massive scar on your face and headplate."
Wrex stared Shepard down, and the human didn't flinch. At length, the massive krogan acquiesced. "Fine. Now talk."
Shepard chuckled again. Gods above, I love Wrex. In a totally platonic, bro-ish way. "Fine. So I was on Elysium with a buddy of mine from basic. In the Alliance, after you finish basic training, you can choose to pursue one of three specializations. To learn to be what the Alliance calls a 'vanguard,' a front line specialist adept at using biotics and heavy or close quarters weapons to carve a path through the enemy, usually takes about 18 months. It takes about two years of extra training to become the second specialization, a 'sentinel.' Sentinels use biotics and tech together, which requires some heavy modification to their omni-tools and their biotic implants, since otherwise the two don't play well together. To learn the last specialization, 'infiltrators,' is supposed to take about 28 months. We use stealth when we need to, but we're also good at force application and maximization."
Shepard took a quick drink of water. "Right, back to the story. I had gone for infiltrator training, obviously, and made it my goal to finish it before my buddy got back from his first deployment. He was stationed with Sixth Fleet, who're usually patrolling the Exodus Cluster, 'showing force' and all that bullshit. I ended up finishing training about two weeks before Brian, that was my buddy's name, got back. We were both gonna have about two weeks of leave together, so we agreed to meet up on Elysium for some R 'n' R. We met up in Illyria, Elysium's capital, as planned, found a cheap hotel room we could split since neither of us wanted to have anything to do with the Alliance for a few days, and life was good. For less than a fucking week, anyway."
Shepard hesitated before continuing his tale. Christ, I haven't told anybody about what happened on Elysium since the Alliance investigators in the aftermath. And here I am about to spill my guts to Wrex the imperturbable. I guess if I've gotta talk about it it's better to do so with somebody who can probably understand. Out of everybody else on this boat, Wrex probably has the most experience with this kinda shit, so I suppose he's a good choice. Besides, if I want them all to trust me I've gotta give a little something back, right?
"So. Five days into our glorious two weeks of leave, the warning klaxons start going off, which means an attack is imminent. Being the idiots that we were, Brian and I headed for the nearest Alliance posting, to see if there was something we could do to help. When we got there, we managed to get far enough in to hear what was going on. The early reports were that an entire fleet of pirate ships had just popped up in system, and were attacking the Alliance ships in orbit. At that time, there was only a three-frigate flotilla in orbit around the planet; I know the Agincourt was there, and I think the other two frigates were the El Alamein and the Kursk. The local brass was going nuts over the fact that apparently the entire pirate population of the Terminus System had decided to attack Elysium. While the frigates were doing their best to wipe out as many of the pirates as possible, a bunch of the enemy ships broke off and made for the planet. Only about five of them made it through the air defenses at first, but one of those was a freighter that was packed to the gills with pirates. Or so we thought.
It turns out that it wasn't just pirates we had to deal with; there were a whole bunch of batarians there who wanted a chance to kill some humans. As soon as the ships landed, enemies just started pouring out of them. A few minutes later, another wave of pirates landed, and then another. I think they managed to get about forty or fifty ships down to the ground, throughout the course of the battle. At this point, Illyria was in chaos. People were running around screaming and yelling, and just generally panicking. So the highest Alliance officer should have been a Lieutenant Commander, but he was laid up in the infirmary. Therefore, the next guy up was a Lieutenant. Jameson, I think his name was. He took charge as soon as he saw the pirates and batarians heading for the city, and started dispatching soldiers to get as many civilians as possible into defensible locations. Within a half hour, we had the streets cleared of people and had some basic defensive points set up. I had requisitioned a sniper rifle and a pistol from the armory and made a nest on top of the capitol building, which was the tallest building in the city. From my vantage point, I could see the first waves of invaders running into our picket lines. As soon as first contact was initiated, I just started laying waste to anything that had four eyes. Probably had a dozen kills within ten minutes of the start of fighting."
Shepard took a deep breath. "And that was when things really started going to hell. I saw a group of batarians wipe out the Alliance team at one of the places we had crammed a bunch of civilians into. I think it was a warehouse of some kind, no windows and pretty sturdy. I immediately radioed in to the LT and told him I was going to rescue some civilians. He said ok, and told me to just bring them back to the capitol building with me. I grabbed Brian on the way out and together we headed for the warehouse. The batarians weren't doing a very good job of watching all the approach points, so we were able to get pretty close before they noticed us. As soon as it looked like we were losing the element of surprise, me and Brian opened up. I was using a pistol, he had an AR, and we were doing a halfway-decent job. We had cleared the street and were about to check the building when another pair of batarians came around the corner. I can only guess that they heard the fighting and thought it sounded like fun or something. One of 'em had a rocket launcher, the other one had a shotgun. I engaged the guy with the shotgun with my pistol, and managed to put him down pretty quickly. Brian took on the dude with the rocket launcher, and opened fire. Unfortunately that batarian was one of the few who had armor with a built-in shield generator. He was probably one of their squad or platoon leaders or something. Anyway, before Brian could punch through the shields and then the armor, the guy got off one missile. It ended up hitting pretty close to Brian, but we were standing near enough to each other that I was thrown down by the blast as well. It took me a bit to pull myself together, but when I did, I saw Brian laying against the side of the building, crumpled into a limp pile.
The batarian had his back to me, and was chortling at Brian's attempts to move. I was still struggling to get up without attracting his attention, so there wasn't much I could do about it. Nonetheless, when that bastard pulled a pistol and aimed it at Brian, I got a shot of adrenaline from somewhere. I wasn't gonna let that cocksucker execute my best friend! So I threw myself to my feet, pulled my knife, and dove at him. Me hitting him full in the back made his shot go high, missing Brian. I didn't have that problem with my knife, and hit the fucker dead-on. It ripped through his neck, only leaving his head attached to his shoulders by a piece of skin and tissue that was maybe two inches thick. The sudden effort of killing him to save Brian threw me for a loop, so I pretty much collapsed right on top of his body. I managed to crawl over to Brian and activated a quick medical program to see what I could do to help him. The report came back as practically all red in the torso, which meant heavy internal bleeding. Just looking at that scan, I knew there was no way I was gonna be able to fix him, even if I had mountains of medi-gel at my disposal. So I just sat there and held him while he died, which didn't take more than a minute or two."
Shepard rubbed his forehead, trying to drive away the images of Brian's bloody and battered body. After another quick sip of water, he had cleared his mind enough to finish the story. "After Brian died, I kinda lost it. I ran inside, yelled at the civilians to follow me, and then led them back to the capitol building. Then I heard over the radio that the LT had been killed when the batarians and pirates attacked the Alliance HQ en masse. After some discussion, I found out that I was now the highest-ranking Alliance officer present. As such, I got operational command. I ordered all the Alliance soldiers to fall back and create a perimeter on and in the buildings around the capitol building, and gave a weapon to every civilian who wanted one and directed them to take up position looking out the capitol's windows. I told everybody that they were fully weapons free, and to kill as many of the sons of bitches as they could. Then I took my sniper rifle up to the roof and started laying waste to anything that moved within my scope. At one point they broke a small hole in our perimeter by blowing up half of a building and trying to run through the rubble. Luckily, the rubble slowed them down enough for me to put down the first six of the little pricks who tried to make it across, and that delayed any further attempts to punch through long enough for me to shuffle some reinforcements over that way and plug up the hole.
Four hours later or so, the frigates had managed to drive off the last of the pirates after destroying over 80% of their ships. At that point, they were able to land some marines to come in and help break the siege. Within an hour, the pirates and batarians had been squeezed into a thin cordon between my men and the new troops, and we absolutely decimated them. A few survived to be pumped for information and tried, but I'd estimate 97% casualties for their forces on the ground. Between civilians and Alliance, we lost about 200. The only Alliance left from the original Elysium detachment were a half dozen medical corpsmen, an ensign who had been manning the main radio transmitter, and two lance corporals. The marines from space had only had one KIA and another man wounded. Probably three-quarters of our dead were civilians. But in the end, we won and the bad guys lost, so I guess things didn't turn out too bad. Right after the Blitz the Alliance approached me about the ICT program, and my career took off from there. They also gave me the Star of Terra for my part in the battle. Something about taking command of a desperate situation, holding the line, and killing a whole lotta bad guys by myself made me 'worthy.' Fucking bullshit, but it's not like I had a say in the matter. I was just doing my job, and taking a little too much pleasure in killing those gods-forsaken bastards."
"How many?" Wrex asked.
Shepard didn't need to ask for clarification. "Without a helmet-cam, the exact number is impossible to know. Alliance investigators put the conservative number at a smidge over three hundred. One quarter of the invading force. Some investigators think the percentage could be as high as a third, but that doesn't feel right. If they had bothered to ask me, I'da said around 325, plus or minus a dozen."
When Shepard finished speaking, he looked across at Wrex. The big krogan peered back across the table with an inscrutable expression. Eventually, Joker's voice broke the silence.
"Uh, Commander? Tuntau in fifteen minutes."
Shepard didn't bother to reply to the pilot; instead, he stood up and motioned for Wrex to precede him out of the cabin. Wrex stood up, and spoke. "I understand." His piece said, the krogan turned and walked out of the cabin.
As Shepard made to catch up to his krogan comrade, he pondered Wrex's words. I suppose he does. We're just two peas cut outta the same cloth, aren't we?