Derelict Landing Strip
0200 Zulu
18 June 2186
Vancouver, UNAS, Terra, Sol
"Goddamn, it's good to see you, Kelsa," Anderson buffaloes, pumping her hand in both of his. They ain't even off the tarmac yet, but he's here, and in Alliance blues. "You look damn good, too. Few months off was just what you needed."
He isn't wrong, at least not on the face of it; she hasn't looked better since she tore herself off Miranda's table. Most of the scars she got since then have healed over, barely more than spiderwebs on her flesh, and all those hours of nothing but talking and upside-down pushups-though fewer wall pushups than Shiana probably would have liked-have her more cut than she's ever been. But the asari steps in to correct the man. "Kelsa's treatment was hardly a vacation," she insists, "and it has not concluded. She is at liberty only because I have been convinced that her recovery will not be impeded by returning to service; that service must be tempered with my presence if it is to remain acceptable."
The older man nods, finally giving up Kelsa's wrist. "Understood, Doctor T'Naptos. I'll take good care of her."
Shiana lays a hand on the other woman's shoulder, giving her a tight smile. "We'll take good care of you, Kelsa," she allows.
The soldier shrugs, looking around the old landing strip. It's innocuous, pitted concrete wreathed with a rusted fence, a dilapidated hangar in the distance. "No reporters?"
Anderson shakes his head, turning and leading them to a nondescript car. "Priority alpha zero," he relays. "As far as they know, you're still awaiting court martial at an undisclosed location."
Kelsa hesitates when they reach the vehicle, sharing a glance with her counsellor. Shiana gives a subtle nod, and both of them pile into the back, leaving Vega and Anderson to take the front. "Why the bracelets in transit, then?" She wonders, when they're lifting into the air. "Plausible deniability?" It's what she figured, back on the shuttle, but there's no reason not to make sure now.
"Exactly, Shepard," the admiral admits. "Not everyone in the brass was on board with bringing you in from the cold. If you'd attempted to escape before touchdown, those assholes could say you were still a prisoner and not be lying."
"What's different now?"
He looks over his shoulder at her, almost like he can't believe the question. "Now your ass is mine, soldier," he tells her. "And I forbid you from killing us and taking over this skycar. Is that understood?"
Unable to help herself, Kelsa sits up straighter, squaring her shoulders. "Yes, sir," she echoes.
"Good." Anderson turns forward again, acknowledging Vega for the first time since returning his introductory salute. "She didn't give you any trouble, did she, lieutenant?"
"No, sir," Vega replies. "No trouble at all."
"He's still alive, isn't he?" Kelsa grunts, grinning at the man in the rearview mirror. She can't see a single trace of red in her own reflection, and when the boy meets her eyes, he grins back, almost like she's funny. Almost like she's human.
But she knows what she is.
"I want you to get a good night's sleep, Kelsa," Anderson says. "Top brass want you ready at 0800 to give a report on the Reapers."
She glances down at her plain black shirt and cargo pants, the same uniform she was wearing when she got locked up in Siberia. The only stitches of clothing to her name. "They gonna issue me some blues, then?"
"Right now they're a little too busy for that," the admiral says, with a cautious glance at the car's other occupants. "I'll brief you later on, in private. No offense, you two."
A stab of fear tickles across the back of Kelsa's neck. She opens her mouth to tell him it's a bad idea, to tell him that any classified information is dangerous in her head. Before she can tell him anything, though, Shiana speaks up. "I do not believe that is in her best interests," she says, with a subtle glance to the soldier beside her.
"How you figure that, Doctor?"
"Because she will be at pains to share such stressful information with me, and that would put her at odds with multiple articles of the Alliance Code of Military Justice," the asari elaborates. "I doubt the tribunal would look favourably upon such a breach of confidence-and with an alien, no less."
Anderson's eyes marrow as he throws a glance over his shoulder. "Who said anything about..."
Shiana only smiles her secret smile, and Kelsa hunkers back into her bucket seat. "0800," she repeats, lidding her eyes. "I'll be there."
Alliance Western Terrestrial Command
0100 Zulu
19 June 2186
Vancouver, UNAS, Terra, Sol
Rain spits against the naked windows of the hallway that look out over the bay, giving anyone inside a glorious view of the water and rugged mountains, and giving anyone hiding out in the city a clean shot at any gawkers inside it. Stupid. They should be meeting in a bunker somewhere, maybe even off-world, instead of this indefensible hunk of glass and rebar. After a moment's pause, she feels the asari's fingers brush her shoulder, separated from her flesh only by that same thin, black shirt. "Are you ready?"
Kelsa takes one last look at the tranquil inlet. "Yeah," she gruffs, turning away from the window and falling into step with her fellows. Vega takes up the rear, stoic but not surly, while Anderson forms their grim-faced vanguard. They march down the hall to a security checkpoint. It's glass, too, guarded by two bored-looking corporals in dress blues with holstered sidearms. Four point two seconds to neutralisation. The soldier blinks the thought away, along with her annoyance at how easily they wave through a four-bar with an alien and a fugitive. The frustration dissolves when she follows Anderson's clipped nod to a ghost from before Alchera; she looks a world apart from the sidelined woman on Horizon. "Alright, Lieutenant," Anderson calls in greeting.
The new stripes on her shoulders make them look broader. "Admiral," she returns, crisply saluting. Not sparing a glance over his shoulder, where Kelsa came up short. "They're waiting on you inside."
Anderson nods, sparing a glance back at their entourage. "You make sure Vega doesn't get lost, now," he cautions Shiana, as a not-so-subtle reminder that she won't be allowed into the tribunal to hold Kelsa's hand.
"I will offer your lieutenants any guidance they might require," she replies, offering her dimpled smile to the other humans. "So long as you keep my friend in one piece."
"I'll do that," the admiral vows, and he nods for Kelsa to follow him. She locks eyes with Ashley for half a heartbeat, but the younger woman glances away, and Kelsa's momentum takes her past the new lieutenant in the next breath.
"So," Shiana says, "you know Kelsa?"
"I used to," Kelsa hears Ashley reply, before the soldier steps through a doorway that takes Ashley and the other two beyond even her bionic hearing.
The room beyond the antechamber is too big, too exposed. Two technicians monitoring comm feeds, two hard-suited guards with standard-issue rifles, and three admirals sitting behind a desk on the dais in the centre of the room. One woman, two men. Three seconds to overpower the guards, two more for the comms. Five for the brass. She doesn't belong here, in this place of long walls and soft targets; it's boring how easy it would be to just kill them all, and that, as much as anything else, is what's keeping these people alive. When she takes a second look at the admirals, she only recognises one by sight. "Mikhailovich," she calls, glancing at the bars on his shoulders. "Looks like you made out alright."
The man pulls a face like a wounded lion. "You will address us as admirals, soldier," he blusters, "or we'll have you in chains the next time we see you."
Kelsa arches a brow, looking from one admiral to another, and finally to the guards, who stand just a little taller. She feels her cheeks tighten with her smile. "Let me clear up some things before we get started," she says, offering something of an olive branch. "I'm only here because David Anderson asked me. I'm not your soldier anymore, and I don't take any orders from you. I'm here to tell you about the Reapers; if that's not good enough for you, I'm gonna leave...and if I do, you'd make me very happy if you tried to stop me." Her grin grows half-feral, showing her teeth, still too white from her resurrection at Miranda's hands. The naked flashes of fear on the guards' faces is almost as sweet as the twitch across Mikhailovich's mug. "Now, are we talking or not?"
The female admiral clears her throat. "The situation is dire, Shepard. We're losing contact with all of our colonies beyond the Sol relay, even worse than the height of the Collector threat. Nobody's heard from the batarian homeworld in more than a week, also."
"Nobody knows what the hell's going on," the other admiral cuts in, the one that isn't Mikhailovich.
"That's a fuckin' lie," Kelsa grunts, rolling her eyes as she steps into the middle of the room. "Six months ago I stopped the Reapers from hitting the oldest relay by blowing it up with an asteroid. The closest relay to that one just happens to be the Harsa relay," she points out. "It don't take a fucking admiral to figure out what happened to the batarians."
"As if the Butcher of Torfan would give a damn about them," Mikhailovich scoffs.
"I don't," she concedes. "Just like you didn't give a fuck about the Reapers until a week ago."
Anderson speaks up for the first time, from behind her. "Now that isn't true, Shepard. Hackett and I've been pushing hard to shore up our defences, but the truth is, we don't have any idea what's coming."
"And that's where you come in," the woman in the high chair comments. "We're praying you might give us some insight into our foe before we engage with them."
Kelsa blinks, and in that infinitesimal moment of darkness she sees a galaxy on fire, every cultured planet being scoured clean of life by a race of enormous, unstoppable machines. "You never stopped using the relays and haven't blown up the Citadel," she observes, confirming the guess by the tribunal's reaction. "Which means we've already lost. If the Reapers haven't taken control of it yet, that's only because they think they can take us more easily without it, now that they don't need it to travel from dark space. I'd bet some scouts are already in system, scouting." She shakes her head, grimacing against the sour pit of anger and fear in her stomach. "It probably would've been better to let me die in Siberia than drag me all the way back here."
Mikhailovich looks scandalised. "We haven't registered any unusual relay activity in this system," he says. There's no way-"
"The Reapers built the mass relays!" Kelsa barks. "They built the Citadel. They've been harvesting organic life for longer than Earth's had multi-celled life on it, and they're really good at it by now. The protheans put up a decent fight, but in the end it wasn't even hard for the Reapers. Just inconvenient."
"You're saying there's no chance of victory?"
"I'm saying our technology doesn't have shit on what the protheans had," Kelsa barks. "And I don't think we'll make it very inconvenient for them, when it's all settled out."
"So...what do we do?" The woman demands, like she still has any options. "What's our best plan?"
"You die well," she tells them all. "Or badly; I guess it doesn't really make a difference."
They look like dogs, waiting for her to throw them a gristly bone, and they start growling when it looks like they aren't gonna get it. "Die well," Mikhailovich barks. "You really want to be put on trial, don't you? Why don't you-"
"Why didn't you listen to me after Aratoht?" Kelsa demands, marching toward the desk. "After Alchera, or after Eden Prime? What the fuck did you expect me to say, that I got a magic Reaper killer shoved up my ass just waiting for your signal?" She rolls her shoulders, taking care not to clench and roll her fists, even though she really wants to. "I've only ever been good at killing people. You'll need me for that. As for everything else...you're on your own."
"What?" The middle admiral blusters. "You're just going to abandon your duty to the Alliance? To the Earth?"
"I don't give any more of a fuck about the Earth than I did about Aratoht," she gruffs, and her words are true enough, even if they sound like treason. "Every single person you've ever met is going to die screaming. You had a chance to help that, maybe keep it from happening, but you fucking blew it. That ain't on me; it's on you. So don't come to me with your dicks in your hands hoping I'm gonna pull this one out for you; there's a war on our doorstep that's not gonna stop until everything you know is burned to ashes. I'm gonna die fighting it," she says, without a trace of her earlier grin. "You aren't getting any better than that."
Before the three suits can register more of their ire, the two comms officers get real excited about a tripped alarm. "We've just lost contact with Luna!" The junior officer shouts, breathless.
"The Moon?" Anderson gasps from half a dozen steps behind Kelsa. "They couldn't be that close already."
The soldier closes her eyes, hearing the dying screams of the protheans, the ones she first heard on Eden Prime. The beacon's message has never been clearer to her, never more pressing. Behind her eyelids, she sees the machines descending upon of a hundred worlds, come to begin their harvest. She feels the thrumming call in her chest before she hears the head-splitting claxon, like a million petrol engines revving up at once, relayed through the room's monitor from some god-forsaken city where they're landing first; an Alliance capitol by the desperate Galactic being yelled over the sounds of combat, Moscow or Sao Paulo or London. They've got more than enough sky squids to hit them all. When she opens her eyes and sees the sleek black tentacles sinking through the grey clouds, she feels her lips twist in a smile. "They're here," she breathes, her sigh taking months-years-of tension with it. "Finally."
The poor bastards on the dais are too busy looking at the carnage on the screen to notice the death descending behind them; Kelsa feels a small flicker of guilt for not warning them, but it dies just a few seconds before they do. The flash of red from the Reaper is mesmerising, and Kelsa's eyes can almost follow it as it smashes through the window and digs a crater into the floor. The resulting explosion hurtles the high desk across the room, and Kelsa turns her head, tracking the charred hunk of steel and dead flesh as it twists in slow motion over her head. Anderson dives away, taking a century to land, and time seems to contract to a point just before the desk hits the far wall. When it does, something snaps inside Kelsa, and she lurches sideways into a run, toward the gaping hole in the side of the building. There is no fear, no doubt, no instinct for survival.
She knows what she is.
Anderson's bellow of anguish trails her as she sprints for that giant gash, but she has no answer, no words to explain what she's doing; all she knows is that she can breathe, maybe for the first time since Miranda woke her up, and she knows what she is. And, as she jumps out into the open air and sees the Reapers coming down through the clouds for the first time, coming to scour the galaxy of all intelligent life, she knows what she's for.
She's for killing as many of those squid fuckers as she can before her luck runs out.
She free-falls for almost a hundred metres, whipping out her omni-blades as she goes, and she cuts into the surface of the bay as fast as a normal human would from a skydive. Luckily for her, all that extra mass is from Miranda's upgrades, which keep her flesh and bones from breaking in the water. In the two minutes it takes her to drag herself out of the bay, her world has changed. The fragile lie of peace is gone for good and all; the Reapers are here, in the skies and on the ground, and people are already dying. Fireballs streak across the sky, and when they hit the ground, twisted cyborg footsoldiers erupt from the craters. Human and batarian husks, troops made on dragons' teeth from living victims, turned from their petty, pointless lives into something great, something pure.
Something beautiful.
And if there's one thing Kelsa has truly excelled at in her life, it's destroying beautiful things. She doesn't make an exception for the Reaper troops. In their phosphorescent eyes she sees Saren staring at her; she sees Liara, resigned but still fighting, in her in way. She sees Jay, looking so peaceful in that Michigan winter. They all die a dozen times over as Kelsa makes her way across the docks, in full view of two full-size Reapers at least as big as Sovereign, neither of whom pay her the slightest bit of attention while she carves up anything that gets within her reach. In the black blood of the husks, she sees herself, her real self, no matter what the doctors say. Especially Doctor T'Soni.
Eventually, when it becomes clear that the Reapers in the air aren't going to cauterise her with their lasers, Kelsa fights her way to a small knot of Alliance marines, putting up a fight from an ersatz bunker made by a knot of scaffolding from a collapse. They're smart enough not to shoot at her when they see her cut through a batarian freak, and she jumps into their waterlogged cover without waiting for permission. She doesn't say anything as she catches her breath, but she nods, grateful for the small rest afforded by their covering fire.
The jarhead in charge takes the motion as an invitation. "Reigns," he announces. "Lieutenant 2nd Class. This is Chief Wilkes and Corporal Treng." He nods to the man and woman under his command.
"That's nice," Kelsa huffs, disengaging her omni-blades and wiping some sweat from her eyes.
"You're obviously no civ," Treng observes, as she unloads her assault rifle on another batarian. When it falls, there's a brief lull in the offensive, while its fellows rush over to its side. After a second, it becomes clear that they're eating it, and stripping off its armour to integrate with their own. "Goddamned cannibals," Treng spits, taking the chance to catch a breath or two, herself.
"Who are you?" Wilkes wonders, when it's his turn to take cover. "And why don't you have a gun?"
"Hard to get ahold of one from a psych unit," the fugitive replies, ignoring his first question. "Even a Russian one." She peeks over the edge of the scaffold and counts six of the cannibals left, strengthened by at least that many already dead. "Cover me," she tells the soldiers, before they can badger her any more, and without waiting for an answer, she vaults herself onto the path and zig-zags to the nest. These cannibals have stolen rifles, which makes things interesting, at least for thirty seconds or so. She takes them apart with hardly a scratch, using her omni-blades and her head, and she doesn't wait to see how the soldiers behind her are going to use this chance. It doesn't really matter; all of them are going to die in this war.
Another half an hour passes before Kelsa finds another foxhole, but this one's only manned by corpses. She's about to move on when the radio crackles.
"Shepard," it yells, and the voice is too raw to be a hallucination from the Reapers, too hard to be anything other than Ashley Williams barking into a microphone. "Commander Shepard, please respond!"
With one last glance at the Sovereign-sized Reapers still raining death from the skies, Kelsa rolls into the corpse-strewn divot and snatches up the radio. "That'd better be you, Ash, or I'm gonna start shooting at sky-squids," she gruffs, grabbing a rifle out of a dead man's hands.
"Oh, thank God," the newly-minted LC responds over the crackling radio. "Admiral Anderson gave me the sitrep and commanded me to take charge of the Normandy. We're just about ready to head OOS-what's your twenty?"
Kelsa scans the skies for a good landmark, and she catches a glorious one. "About a klick northeast of the big fucker, forty-four degrees up from the SSV Beringer," she says, just before a laser cuts the Beringer in half. "Make it fast if you want to get out of here in one piece, Williams."
"Aye aye, ma'am," the radio crackles at her, and Kelsa stays put, taking potshots at cannibals and husks while she waits for extraction. Now that the initial shock of the invasion is beginning to ebb, Kelsa finds that she wants to live; she's still sure that she's going to die fighting, but maybe her time horizon is a little longer than an afternoon. Even so, it doesn't fall beneath her notice that the Reapers aren't focusing the due attention on her, or the Normandy, when it comes to fetch her, and she can't shake the feeling that that's not a coincidence. Williams greets her in the cargo bay after she jumps onto the open lip of the door. "It's good to see you, Commander," she says, her smile tight but genuine, so unlike the expression she wore on Horizon. "Glad to have you aboard."
Kelsa rolls her shoulders as she looks out on the bay, crawling with monsters large and small. One less monster down there now. "Where's Anderson?" She wonders, looking back at the woman in front of her.
Ashley grimaces. "Down there," she admits. "He ordered me to find you if I could, and bug out either way, but he...he's gonna stay here to fight."
From the corner of her eye, through the sliver of the cargo bay door, Kelsa sees one of the mid-sized Reaper bugs chew through a pair of transports carrying civilians. "Can't blame him," she grunts, shaking her head. "So, are you in charge of this boat, Ash?"
"Not anymore," the LC sighs, with a hint of relieved laughter. She tosses something that Kelsa catches by instinct, and as the fugitive examines it, Ashley explains. "You're hereby reinstated to active Alliance service in the rank of Staff Commander, on order of Admiral Anderson, ordered to take command of the SSV Normandy SR-2."
Kelsa grips her dog tags as she steps further into the cargo bay, surprised to see Shiana and Vega nursing wounds by a Kodiak transport. The asari pulls herself to her feet and limps closer. Her eyes flicker over Kelsa's torn clothes and bloody scratches, and she frowns fretfully. "Is this something you desire, Kelsa?"
The question weighs more than it seems to, and Kelsa's grip trembles around her dog tags. She could crush them, kill Williams and Vega, and take the Normandy out into some backwater so remote the Reapers would never find her. But then she'd be out of people to kill, and there wouldn't be much point in that. "Yes," she gruffs, relaxing her hold on her tags and slipping them around her neck.
Shiana nods, still concerned, but she doesn't protest. Ashley sidles up next to her, more clearly relieved. "Orders?"
"Let's get the hell off this rock," she judges. "See if we can make contact with Alliance Command; set course for the Citadel, just in case we can't." The hub isn't so much a space station as a coffin, but all the right people are there, and Kelsa knows that's where the brass will send her, anyway.
"Aye aye," Joker answers, over the comm. It relieves her more than she would've thought that the pilot's still at the helm. Even with his steady hand, the floor pitches underneath their feet from the sharp angle that he takes, and by some miracle or sinister design, they make it out of atmosphere without getting shot down. It doesn't sit right with her, but if it means she can live one more day to kill Reapers, she'll take it.
