Chapter 38 – Leaving Earth
John Kennedy Shepard
Spectre
Ex-Staff Commander of the Alliance Marines
Vancouver was on fire.
I remember being taught in school that a long time ago, Seavac used to be three separate cities. Portland in Oregon, Seattle in Washington, and Vancouver in British Columbia. Vancouver was even in a separate country back then, Canada and the United States weren't unified yet. Megatropolises, as some journalists liked to call them, weren't uncommon. There was the Dallas-Fort Worth in Texas, and London had practically engulfed most of the English south coast.
Some people thought this trend of mega cities was erasing our individual culture and uniqueness. I'd always disagree. I thought it was a wonderful symbol of how we'd grown together as a society, how we could remain united despite our differences while looking up at the stars.
But the stars were where the Reapers came from. And they were setting Vancouver ablaze.
The shining spires of the city were torn off and sent crashing to the ground several stories below, killing hundreds with each sickening thud. Smoke rose from the unchecked fires, flames that were left unattended by an emergency service with no clue of what to do in an attack of this magnitude. There were...screams. Cries of despair, of terror and disbelief. This was the 22nd Century. We had mastered our planet after so very nearly killing ourselves countless times in the past. Humanity had solved the problems of climate change and resource management and yes, even discrimination to a huge extent. With aliens around, who cared that the guy next to you was black or Jewish or gay?
But the Reapers had come. And suddenly, all of us realised that those whom we thought of as aliens were not so different after all. We were all united in powerlessness and insignificance next to the might of the Reapers.
Vancouver had hundreds and hundreds of years of proud history. It was a glittering jewel, a lovely place to live and to grow up and raise a family. It was a triumph of engineering and architecture, art and science, the very best of human ingenuity and skill. Millions of man hours and dollars and resources had been poured into transforming a forested patch of land beside the sea into a place where people could settle, billions more into maintaining it over the years.
But the Reapers...
They were smashing it all to bits in a matter of minutes. Firing their massive lasers indiscriminately, with no clear pattern or goal than wanton destruction. Facing absolutely no resistance as they slaughtered defenceless men, women and children. The Alliance always maintained one standing fleet in orbit around Earth, as well as another one guarding the Charon Relay. For the Reapers to be here now...both fleets never stood a chance.
I was a spacer kid. Always had been, always would be. I never felt right unless I was on board a ship, traveling through the stars. But part of what made it great was the knowledge there was always an Earth to come back to. When you were out in the black, eating synthesized food and breathing recycled air, what made it a little more bearable was the fact that there was a shining city on the hill somewhere far behind you, a blue and green place where you could always call home.
But the Reapers had forever shattered that illusion, that sense of security. Vancouver was on fire, and so was the rest of the world. I don't know if I would live to see it be made whole once more.
"Come on, Shepard! Williams is en route to the Normandy, they'll pick us up at the landing zone!"
Admiral Anderson had survived the blast that had taken out most of the Defence Committee. The room's exit was blocked by debris, so we'd crawled out of the floor-to-ceiling window that suddenly had a huge gaping hole in it and clambered onto the outer walls of the building. I'd stopped for a moment to look out over the Vancouver skyline. It might be...no, there wasn't a doubt in my mind that this would be the last time anyone would ever see it again.
"Oscar mike, soldier!" roared Anderson.
I broke out of my funk and started hustling. The wind roared around us, nearly knocking me off my feet. At this height, I'd be a little more than a fine mist when I hit the ground. I focused on Anderson in front of me. The old man had wonderful balance, for someone of his injury record and age. He was running flat out, not caring that one missed step would lead to certain death.
"Look out!"
A couple of drones buzzed right past us, only to get vaporised by a massive blast that had to come directly from a Reaper. Anderson shielded himself from the flying debris, then leapt up onto a higher platform. I followed him, trying not to draw back too far from the fire that had started and lose my balance.
"How do you stop something so powerful?!" yelled Anderson.
"We hit it till it drops!" I yelled back.
"What with?"
"A fucking moon, if I could. Maybe the turians will think of something."
We leapt across a broken section of the walkway and kept moving. A Reaper in the distance turned and took aim at a cruise ship in the harbour lazily, almost insolently. The entire thing blew up and I swore in shock.
Anderson wasn't paying attention, he was trying to reach someone on his communicator.
"Lieutenant Commander, do you copy? I'm patching in Shepard."
There was a burst of static, and then I heard a voice that I knew so well.
" -in control of the Normandy. Lieutenant Vega's with me, but we're taking heavy fire!"
"That sounds bad," muttered Anderson, as Ashley's line was cut off. "We'd better – HUSKS!"
But I had already trained my pistol on them before Anderson finished his warning, and was drilling holes in them with the terrifying ease born of relentless practice. The glowing blue soulless mockery of human beings went down after I blew their heads off with repeated, pinpoint shots.
"Good, you haven't forgotten how to shoot," said Anderson, with some admiration.
I was breathing heavily, not from the run but from the sheer adrenaline rush of being in combat once more. Those husks were the first enemy I had faced in a long time, ever since I gave myself up to Hackett and the Alliance. It felt good to know I hadn't missed a step.
"Come on, we need to find a way out of here," I said. We had ran from the Alliance HQ onto the balcony of an apartment block. The entire floor was gutted and burned out by Reaper fire, and the door was jammed. Briefly wishing Tali was with me, that girl could hack anything in the known universe apart, I set my hands on the door edges and heaved them apart wide enough for Anderson to squeeze through.
But before I could follow, I heard something that made me stop and turn around. A sound that I've heard before on occasion, something that I would never want to hear again. It was a child, sobbing in despair. I looked around, forgetting Anderson for a moment. The sound seemed to be coming from a ventilation duct.
Sinking to my knees, I peered inside. "Hello? Anyone there?"
I kind of figured it was a kid, only a child would be small enough and dumb enough to figure that a ventilation duct would be a good place to hide during an emergency. But I wasn't expecting it to be the very same kid I had spent the last few months watching from my window in Alliance HQ.
The same brown hair, the same big, dark eyes, the same baggy hoodie and scuffed shoes. He looked utterly terrified.
"Hey," I said, in the calmest voice I could manage while the Reapers burned flesh and broke steel all around us. "Are you hurt?"
He backed away from me like some small wounded animal. "Everyone's dying!" he said, in a voice full of fear.
"Look, I can help you, but you need to trust me. Come on. Take my hand," I said, reaching mine out, trying to push away all the fear and doubt and the shock of seeing the Reapers burn Vancouver out of my mind. Strangely enough, it worked. Here was one lone boy who needed help, and I could give it to him. I could focus on a problem like that, and shut everything else out.
"You can't help me," he said, sounding resigned.
"Shepard! Over here!" It was Anderson, noticing my absence. My head had snapped towards the sound of his voice, but when I looked back into the duct, the boy was gone.
I backed away, suddenly unsure of my grip on reality. This could be another one of Morinth's tricks. But she hadn't spoken to me since the Bahak system. Trying not to think too hard about it, I dashed off after the admiral.
"This is a goddamn mess!" he yelled, shifting some rubble and twisted metal aside. He ducked under a broken piece of concrete, trying not to dislodge the thing and send it all crashing on our heads.
"Every minute those machines are here millions of people will die!"
"We've got to do what we can. Arm every human who can aim a gun. Get everyone into the fight. We owe it to our dead to make sure we survive."
"If only the Council had listened to us..."
"It's too late for that now."
"I thought we'd have more time," said Anderson, a bit more quietly, crawling through the ruined apartment. "Hackett thought we'd have more time. They hit us so fast."
"Hackett had every fleet on standby."
"And they still cut through all our defenses like a hot knife! We've never faced anything like this in our entire history."
A jutting metal spar snagged my trousers, ripping a small hole in it. But my clothes were the last thing on my mind.
"When we get to the Normandy, what's the next step?"
"We need to get to the Citadel," said Anderson. "Convince the Council to send us help."
"The Citadel? The fight's right here!"
"It'll be everywhere soon enough. You said it yourself, the Reapers will blow up the whole galaxy if we don't stop them. The Council has to help us, it's in their own self-interest."
We had reached the very edge of the apartment floor. The only way to get to safer ground was to shimmy along a narrow ledge. The bad news was that there was a long, dark drop in front of us if we lost our balance. I had never had a good head for heights, and my heart sank when I saw there was no other option. But it was the only way to get back to my ship.
"You sure they'll see sense, even now?" I said, carefully shuffling my feet sideways.
"You were a Council Spectre. We've got a seat. That has to count for something."
There was an ominous boom somewhere we couldn't see, and the resulting shockwave nearly knocked me off the ledge and out of the game for good. Luckily Anderson had pretty good reflexes for an old man, and hauled me back up.
"Thanks," I said, my heart racing. "I owe you one."
"More than one," said Anderson, his humour masking his relief.
I felt sunshine on my face after reaching the end of the ledge, Vancouver Bay was in sight. So were the capital class Reaper ships hovering above it. Each one looked as massive as Sovereign was. Anderson wasn't deterred, however. After one burning look, he took off in the direction of the landing zone.
"Lieutenant Commander!" he said, hailing Ashley. "We're en route to the LZ, ETA 3 minutes. What's your situation?"
"We've made it to the Normandy, but we're still taking heavy fire. We're holding out the best we can – oh God!" said Ash, sounding horrified. "That dreadnought, the Reapers are going to blow it out of the sky!"
Anderson eyes widened. "That's Stanislaw's ship. He wouldn't leave his lines unless...unless Fourth Fleet is gone," he whispered, seemingly to himself.
"L-C? Ashley!" I yelled. But there was no reply.
"They're in trouble. We'd better...LOOK OUT!"
The imposing dreadnought that I now recognised as the flagship of the Fourth Fleet was lit up bright red for a second as three Reapers trained their main guns on it. A flash of light so bright it burned through my closed eyes, and an almighty explosion as every hand on deck lost their lives in an instant.
The explosion rocked the precarious, half-ruined platform which we were standing on, sending us tumbling almost into the bay. We must have fell five stories, I hit the ground and felt a rib crack, sending a bright flare of pain lancing through my side.
"Jesus!" I hissed, doubling over in agony.
Anderson either didn't have the time or didn't care, he was too busy trying to contact Ashley.
"Williams, we are going to re-route! Williams, do you copy?"
But all we heard was static.
"Damnit," swore Anderson. Now then he noticed my distress. "Alright, Commander?"
"Nothing...I can't handle," I grunted, trying not to breathe too hard. Or at all.
Anderson quickly went back to business. "We need to get to a transmitter or something that will punch through this signal jam. Without the Normandy, we're not getting out of here alive."
I looked around the bay. The Reapers were looming over us, firing their guns and flattening the Vancouver skyline. I had a brief flashback to when I was a kid, spending hours carefully building a castle out of blocks and smashing the whole thing to bits in seconds. Flaming wreckage littered the landscape, their smoking hulls marking their final resting place. But it did give me an idea.
"We can get to one of those downed ships," I said. "Use their distress beacon and modify it so that the Normandy recognises us."
"How are we going to do that?"
"Let me do it," I said, thinking of something EDI had taught me a long time ago. How to encode a distress signal so that she, and only she could recognise it. Even here, even now, and even with Anderson, a man I trusted with my life, I wasn't quite ready to give up the secret of EDI's existence as an illegal AI just yet. I owed Anderson, a debt that perhaps could never be truly repaid. I knew he'd lay down his life for me, and vice versa. But when you got right down to it, Anderson wasn't part of my crew. EDI was. And above all else, I was the captain of the Normandy. Everything else came after that fact.
The admiral looked at me sideways. Perhaps he was remembering that I had managed to score among the lowest in the entire cohort in my signals and communications class during my time at the Academy. But he'd learned to trust me.
"Lead the way, then."
Dodging chunks of burning shrapnel and energy blasts from on high, Anderson and I had reached a crashed police gunship, a small two-seater craft. Like all other Earth cities, Seavac had little in the way of actual defences. Everyone looked to the fleets for their protection.
My bruised rib won out over Anderson's age, and he'd reached the vehicle first.
"Anyone make it?" I called, knowing the answer before I asked the question. Anderson shook his head.
"Both dead. But the distress beacon looks intact."
I pulled myself over to it and began interfacing the system with my omni-tool. When I was sure Anderson's back was turned, looking out for danger, I keyed in the code that EDI had shown me, praying it would work.
x
Bridge
The Normandy
x
During flight training, a common simulation was escaping one of Earth's spaceports while under attack from an invasion force. There were a couple of big differences between that and what was happening at the moment, however. First of all, the programmers had coded turian ships as the 'enemy', and batarian ships in a later patch. While tough, they weren't a fleet of hundred foot tall Reapers who could tear down a skyscraper as easily as krogan could club a baby seal.
Second of all, the objective of the training sim was to escape the spaceport, taking as little damage as possible. Nobody had said anything about weaving in and out, trying to avoid both civilian craft and Reaper blasts, and hanging around waiting for the ship's captain to make himself visible.
"DAMNIT!" yelled Ashley, whacking her communicator. Absolutely nothing happened. "I lost their signal!"
"We can't just leave the Commander down there," said Vega immediately. Joker had never seen Vega in his life, but he found himself agreeing with the big marine. He did have one question however.
"How the hell are we going to find Shepard in this unholy mess?" he asked. "I have my hands full trying not to get us blasted out of the sky!"
"Flight Lieutenant Moreau, there is something which should be brought to your attention," said EDI. In deference to their new guests, her stilted speech and formal manner was to help her disguise as nothing more than another VI.
"What is it, EDI?"
"I am picking up a unique distress signal. I believe it is coming from Captain Shepard." A real VI would have recognised that Shepard had been discharged, and therefore referred to solely as the Normandy's captain. EDI was playing her part well.
"You sure?"
"Yes, Flight Lieutenant."
"What's their location?" asked Ashley.
"The signal is coming from a downed gunship near the harbour. ETA five minutes, assuming Mr Moreau does not get us vaporised in the meantime."
Ashley gave the glowing blue orb that represented the ship's AI an odd look, but then turned to Joker.
"Can you get us there?"
"Yes," said Joker shortly.
"Alright, let's go! We need to pick up John and Anderson and haul ass!"
"Aye aye, Lieutenant Commander."
x
Vancouver Bay
Earth
x
"Is that signal still working?" called Anderson over his shoulder.
"Yes sir."
"Grab a weapon and come up here. I've got bunch of incoming, twelve o'clock!"
I took up a position next to Anderson and squinted in the direction he indicated. My first thought was husks, like the ones we had fought off earlier. But they looked different. Definitely bigger. And much more dangerous. They kinda looked like what you'd get if you fused two husks together. I knew it wasn't beyond the Reapers to actually do what other people only had nightmares about.
"What the hell are those things?"
"Looks like the Reapers aren't content to simply burn Earth to the ground with orbital bombardment," said Anderson grimly. "If they're sending in ground troops, they must have a reason."
"Harvesting us," I said, feeling sick to my stomach. "Making more Reapers."
"Just like what you saw in the Collector Base. They're going to take every man woman and child on this planet and turned them into one of their own."
"Like hell they are," I said, mentally marking out a line of fire with a fallen metal strut. Anything beyond that, I would ignore while anything that went past it would be shot with immediate effect.
"Still wish you were pushing pencils, Admiral?"
Anderson laughed. "I know the world's gone to hell...but I'd be lying if I said I didn't miss the fieldwork."
The shambling horrors may have been bigger than husks, and they took more punishment, but they went down in a hail of fire just the same. Anderson was that rare entity, a flag rank officer who had considerable experience in the front lines, and who hadn't neglected his marksmanship when the time came for him to be stationed behind a desk. He was matching me, shot for shot, and we were keeping the monster husks away. But we were also running out of ammo.
"I wish we'd stuck to the old weapon design," I said, after blowing off two of my target's three heads.
"The heat sink sidearms? Never liked them myself. I grew up on ammo clips. Never felt right waiting for your weapon to 'cool down'. It's a gun, not a damn cup of tea."
The things were actually firing back at us, although they didn't appear to be carrying any weapons. In fact their gun seemed to be grafted on to an arm. With husks you could take up a steady firing position, knowing you had a few seconds before they could even touch you. But these things could shoot back.
"Duck!"
"Thanks."
I peered around the fallen chunk of office building that served as my makeshift barricade, and saw something revolting. The monster husk I had shot was eating the dead body of another one. Even as I watched, chitinous armour began to form around its limbs and torso, almost spontaneously.
"Christ they're eating each other," I muttered. I didn't want to think what would happen if they came across a group of unarmed civilians.
Anderson took a shot, and then ducked back down. "John, tell me I'm not seeing things. Take a good look at their heads before you blow it off."
I did as he asked, and saw what he must have seen as well. "Four eyes? You don't think..."
"This was top-secret, but Khar'shan went dark a few weeks ago. I'm talking absolutely zero communication, no sigint whatsoever. The brass were up in arms, thinking it was the start of an invasion."
"It was the start of a damn invasion," I snarled. "But not by the batarians. Although it looks like they made it to Earth all the same."
I felt like throwing up. Even though I had cause to hate the batarians, no one deserved what must have happened to them. No matter how isolationist Khar'shan was, their immediate reaction had to be to seek help. The fact that they didn't meant that their entire Hegemony had been dismantled, quickly and clinically, in a matter of weeks.
But empires rose and empires fell. Very rarely did the conqueror stitch together the dead bodies of his victims to use as shock troops in his next campaign of conquest. I hoped the batarians were dead, animated by the foul Reaper science I didn't and refused to understand. I didn't want to think about them still alive in the shambling horrors somewhere, screaming with a mouth that didn't belong to them any longer.
As I continued to shoot more of those cannibals, I was struck by a frightening thought. If Earth fell, they would do exactly the same to us.
My gun fired dry, and I snapped in the last clip. Anderson had changed his style of shooting too, he wasn't firing steadily but picking his shots. He had to be running low as well. If we ran out...one old admiral and one injured marine wouldn't last long against the horde of cannibals.
Sixteen rounds...eleven...six...one...
I sent my last bullet directly into the face of an oncoming cannibal and instinctively moved back a couple of steps. But there wasn't a way out, just a pile of rubble. I thought of Jack, and how she was always, always at my back in times like these, of the many times when I thought I was done for good and she would pull out an absolute rabbit from her hat and save the day with a stunning display of biotic power.
"Sweetheart, I wish to God you were here with me," I said to myself, charging up my omni-tool. It could be used to create a hard light construct that functioned pretty much like a spiked glove. I could maybe take out two or three of the cannibals without it before dying.
And then...a miracle. A sound that I had spent half my career hoping against hope to hear. The roar of an engine and rushing wind that represented hope, that I could stare death in the face and say 'Not today'.
The Normandy.
It streaked high above us, launching a couple of missiles. They impacted perfectly on target, blowing up the ravening horde of cannibals.
"The cavalry's here, gentlemen!" yelled Joker in my ear, sounding like he always did, cocky and carefree.
"About damn time!" said Anderson.
The Normandy wheeled around and came in for a landing. Its sleek white black and white hull glinted in the sunlight off Vancouver Bay. Right then and there, she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. And she was all mine.
"Let's go!"
I took off, ignoring the pain in my chest, running up concrete and twisted steel and taking a flying leap, landing perfectly on the loading ramp. Ashley was there to grab my hand and pull me up, her long black hair whipping around in the wind.
"Welcome back, John," she said. Our faces were inches away from each other.
"Thanks Ash," I said quietly. But she heard, and she smiled. I smiled back and turned around.
"Come on Admiral, let's go!"
Anderson was hanging back. Looking at the expression on his face, I realised with a sinking heart that he wasn't going to accompany me.
"I'm not going," he shouted, above the roar of the Normandy's engines.
"Why not?!"
Anderson tilted his head to the side, where we could see an emergency evac shuttle zip past with a bunch of civilians on board. "I can't leave Earth behind. Alliance Command is shot to hell, and if there isn't some kind of command structure in place, the planet's going to descend into total anarchy. Those people need someone to guide them."
"Why do you have to be that guy?" I yelled. "Get on board!"
"There's no one else," he said, and I knew he was right.
"Let me stay instead," I said, almost begging, ignoring Ashley's gasp of surprise.
"You have a job to do elsewhere," said Anderson. "We can't win this on our own, you know that. We're going to need every species out there, and everything they own that can fly. The entire galaxy just got conscripted for the fight of their lives. Talk to the Council. Convince them of what they need to do."
"What if they don't listen?"
"Then make them listen!" yelled Anderson. "Now go, and that's an order!"
"I don't take orders from you any more, remember?" I said, knowing it was hopeless, knowing in my heart that this would be the last time I would see the greatest mentor I ever had.
Anderson reached into his pocket, and tossed me something. I caught it in one hand. It was my Alliance-issue dogtags, the same ones I was given on my first day at the Academy, the same ones that were hanging around my neck when I went through the N7 training and held off the Skyllian Blitz and fought Saren, the ones that were taken from me when I came back to Earth.
"Consider yourself reinstated...Commander!"
He tossed me something else, and I caught it too. It was my Star of Terra award. I had given it back to Anderson when the Alliance first discharged me. They didn't want me, didn't need me then. But now I knew it was time to come back.
"And that's a reminder that you've been through worse shit and survived!"
"I'll be back for you," I promised. "And I'll bring every fucking fleet in the galaxy with me." I saluted the admiral. "Easy day, sir."
He smiled, and saluted back. "You too, John."
I radioed Joker to take off, and as the ship lifted off and began to rise, I kept my eyes fixed on the figure in the dark dress blues, already moving towards the next target, the next mission. The biggest one of all, to lead a global wide resistance against the apocalypse itself.
Tall order for any man. But the admiral wasn't just another man.
Joker began to take off, and I saw more evac shuttles swooping in to pick up panicking civilians. Then incredibly, I saw the young boy with the big hoodie jacket and brown hair. How the heck had he made it from the ventilation duct from several stories up to the harbour below? It didn't seem possible.
He looked at me, even though I was so far away, and I felt a chill go down my spine.
Then he climbed up into the shuttle, which took off. Go, I urged them on. Get out of here. Find shelter. Find safety.
Then, the Reaper. Looming behind. Taking aim.
Blasting the shuttles apart.
The flaming wreckage crashing into the bay. No one could have survived that. No one.
The loading ramp snapped shut, as we prepared to leave Earth's atmosphere. The Normandy shot past clouds, satellites, and things that looked like burning meteors, hurtling towards Earth. That was all that was left of Fourth Fleet, with her Admiral dead before my eyes.
Ash laid a hand on my arm. She knew what I was thinking, that it would be useless to ask how I was. Instead all she said was "We'll come back. We'll come back and end this."
I held her hand, grateful for her support right then. I knew we were over. But we also had history. No matter what, Ash was still my friend, and one of the closest I ever had. And more importantly? She was part of my crew.
"We will. And nothing's going to stand in my way when we do."