Shepard's first look at Rannoch nearly took her breath away…so much so that she felt truly guilty for not bringing Tali along after all. But the mission was simple and, according to Legion, would benefit from a smaller team. Otherwise, the large team would just be standing around doing nothing, or attracting unwanted attention. So in order to render the geth fighter squadrons inert, Legion suggested Liara for her biotics, and Alenko because of his medical and technical backgrounds.

Not that Legion anticipated injury (she asked him point blank when she saw Alenko's worried expression), but the medical and technical backgrounds would be welcome later, when assuring everyone that Shepard experienced no ill effects. Legion had been cagey about how, exactly, they were going to stop the geth fighters. Shepard suspected it was simply 'cagey in present company.' With Raan and Tali in the room, and without having worked with most of the ground team before, she could understand Legion's hesitation.

But it was a beautiful world, and Shepard sincerely hoped there would be time for Tali to walk around it, for her to enjoy the views and the sweeping vistas.

Although there was nothing like it on Mindoir, she knew there were similar places on Earth. It was arid, but not quite 'a desert.' In her mind, deserts were sandy, barren expanses with wandering dunes and very little else. Here, massive formations of native rock, reddish-brown sandstone, whittled by the wind rose everywhere. The sky overhead was a brilliant cacophony of royal purple, flaming magenta, and burnished gold, with hints of green near one horizon. Scrub brushes, tough grasses, and hardy trees cropped up here and there. Small animals skittered and hopped along the ground, or swooped softly through the air.

Tali's voice threaded through her mind, something about the quarian people being part of the pollination cycle for Rannoch's plants—though, as Legion pointed out, Tali hadn't used 'Rannoch,' she'd simply called it the Homeworld. Well, apparently quarians weren't the only pollinators. Thank goodness.

What surprised her most was the lack of meaningful impact from the geth. Geth didn't need scenic views, didn't need clean air or water, didn't require aesthetic qualities in their living environments. But there were very few geth structures on the surface; she vaguely remembered legion mentioning that the geth preferred to live on stations around the planet, rather than on it. Nevertheless, she had expected a 'geth world' to be more or less one unending server room. Which was silly, she thought vaguely, with the hints Legion had dropped about the geth not being connected enough with each other.

Dimly, in her memory, Legion's voice stirred. We hold their world of origin, but we are only caretakers for it.

"It's beautiful," Liara observed, glancing around.

"It's not what I was expecting either," Shepard admitted. "Legion told me, once, that the geth were caretakers. That they treated it like the Alliance treats Arlington, Rookwood, and Tyne Cot." Now that she was here, she wondered what kind of 'cleanup' had been necessary after the Morning War. Legion mentioned cleanup teams as the only really significant geht presence on Rannoch.

So why had she expected an unending server room again…?

"Oh," Alenko said, as if this answered a lot of questions…and raised even more.

"What are those?" Liara asked.

"They're cemeteries," Shepard answered gently. "Military cemeteries."

"Williams and Shepard are both buried at New Arlington," Alenko observed.

"O'Connor has a memorial at New Tyne Cot." Then, Shepard blinked at him, really processing what he said. "Am I?"

"Well, you've got a headstone there, where your ashes would have been interred," he added hastily, as if worried that hearing where she 'was buried' might be distressing to her. "You've got one on Mindoir, too. Two, actually."

"…do I?" She had never really considered where her empty casket might actually be…not the least because it was morbid to do so. As military personnel, she knew she was entitled to a burial in a military cemetery, but hadn't concerned herself with which one.

"Yeah. Near the Shepard homestead. With the rest of your family. It's a little plot off on its own." Alenko gave her a half smile. "It's a nice place. Sunny, and quiet. They've got another one in Central City, but I didn't really stop to look…and the Shepard Memorial Plaza on Elysium."

Shepard shook her head slowly. "It is so weird to think about all the places I've been buried." Plus, her empty casket which would have been released into space. Well, empty except for Bear. Poor Bear, she thought nonsensically, cutting off the thought before completing it 'all alone in space.'

Shepard, not feeling particularly distressed in spite of the morbid topic, shrugged. A quick glance revealed the topic did unsettle her teammates, so she let it drop. Strangely enough, considering her many final resting places made her feel strangely alive, aware of how complex an organism she was…mechanical bits notwithstanding. "Well, let's hurry up and get to the rendezvous point."

"So, what'll it be? Blowing up the servers and fighting off the ground troops?" Alenko asked.

"I know about as much as you do right now," Shepard answered honestly. "I don't think Legion wanted to talk in front of the Admiralty Board."

"Or us," Liara put in astutely. "People who had never worked with it—him." She corrected herself more because Shepard of Shepard's consistent use of 'he' and 'him' when referring to the geth.

"Can you blame him?" Shepard asked.

"Just…just let us feel cautious," Alenko sighed, frowning.

Shepard nodded, understanding the caution but regretting it. The geth weren't monsters under normal conditions; they'd simply been painted that way for two hundred years, then had a splinter group make the rest look bad.

History was full of scenarios like that involving organics. It was beginning to look to her as if synthetics—contrary to what the Reapers spouted—shared the flawed nature of their creators enough to unwittingly emulate patterns from organic history.

-L-

Author's Note: Having sat down to check where some of the graveyards Legion mentioned were, I found myself aware that with two hundred odd years between me writing and the story happening, major historic graveyards would fill up eventually (assuming that some of them are still accepting burials). So I was forced to establish the "new" set of graveyards, which right now are different zones on the same planet (colloquially, most people don't use the 'new' part of the name—like New Arlington—because no one at this point is buried at the original Arlington, and no one probably has been for some time). I imagine a world that is not quite right for mass colonization, but which still supports life well enough for visitors to come remember their loved ones, and where the Alliance can keep their fallen all in one place (generally speaking). So it's probably wet and chilly, with an astoundingly short growing season, and perhaps something in the soil that would require a lot of remediation before it could be cultivated in large tracts—it's just easier and more cost-effective to colonize elsewhere and keep the dead there. Minor detail, but I thought it needed a word of explanation.