The Normandy was suddenly there, hovering with her cargo bay door already opened.
"We've got a minute!" Dr. Chawkas' voice cut flatly across the strange ringing in Alenko's ears.
"Up! Up you get!" Shepard's voice sounded so distant but he knew her words were meant for him, that the vertigo was resultant of her getting him to his feet and his own involuntary response to such aid. "Javik! ...damn…you're wrecked."
"Your eyes do not lie."
Alenko opened his eyes—why had they been closed?—in time to see himself careening clumsily into the waiting arms of Normandy crewmen, Sophie the mech-dog streaking out of the cargo bay and onto the run-up.
More crewmen hurried forward at a sprint, grabbing as many of the wounded as they could and dragging them back to the ship.
"The Reykjavik and a small unit of geth fighters are buying us time to evacuate, but not much! Thirty seconds was the estimate for Harbinger to notice a problem—" Dr. Chakwas jabbered. "—others following suit might buy more!"
He felt it as a shake more than anything else. It was that sound the Reapers made, that their lasers made when fired, except it was in his head on loop…
The Reykjavik. That meant Robbins intended to distract Harbinger by slamming the Reykjavik into it, knowing full well the Reaper would destroy the thing long before it could do any damage. But to destroy the threat it would have to look away from Hammer One and the run-up to the beam.
Band saw.
"Robbins!" Shepard's voice clawed through his head in the bitterest kind of agony: that of helplessness.
It was happening again and she couldn't stop it; she stood there, watching as family was cut down while she survived.
She bit her lip for a minute, her eyes suddenly large and vulnerable. Then a shutter closed behind them. There was no rage. There was no fear. There was nothing but preprogrammed orders running in the back of her mind. She was not unlike a dreadnought on a collision vector herself. Either she made it…or she didn't.
"Shepard, don't do it," he gasped, his voice sounding thin and strange.
"And fifteen seconds for it to deal with the distraction." Dr. Chawkas said, her voice thin.
"Then go." Shepard stepped back off the cargobay doors. "Go. Get out of here."
Dr. Chakwas nodded. "Let's go!"
"Shepard! Jalissa, don't do it!" Alenko shouted. There had to be a way, there had to be another way…this was suicide. If they were all going to die anyway—and they obviously were—why couldn't she just…
He wasn't close enough to touch her when he reached for her.
She'd move out of reach, on purpose.
Shepard watched him as she backed away, her eyes brilliant in her pale face, taking in his face as though she knew it would be the last time she ever saw him. This was what she wanted to carry with her because she couldn't not finish what she'd started.
He could hear the seconds counting down. The pain was almost too much: if the Reapers hadn't interfered he would have had years with her, decades. Now all he had were seconds…
…and suddenly he was out of seconds.
"I love you." The words themselves were lost in the ambient cacophony of sound, but he could read the words clearly enough, as though time had slowed down just so he could catch what might be her last words. Her lips curved and formed each word so carefully, twisting the sentiment around her tongue and teeth before sending it to him. They were her last words—no, could be her last words, he couldn't give up on her yet—and she weighed them so carefully.
And then she was gone, turning sharply as she flung herself away from the one thing that had a chance at weakening her resolve. And she ran at a full sprint towards the white pillar of light…
The doors to the cargo bay closed—robbing him of the sight of her retreating figure, of the thin sound of her rallying call to anyone left standing—and the Normandy peeled away.
"Brace-brace-brace!" Joker shouted over the comm. The ship lurched drunkenly, sending Alenko and the crewmen supporting his unbalanced weight to the ground. "EDI, are you okay?"
"I am fine. Harbinger…has returned attention to Hammer—"
Alenko closed his eyes. He wanted to scream but the sound stayed locked somewhere near his lungs. Hot tears burned as he tried not to curl up. No, he realized, he tried to curl up because beyond the pain in his heart there was pain in his body. Had he lost events?
"Hang in there, Major," Dr. Chakwas said. "Crack his shell, get him out of that thing."
"Yes ma'am."
It was the final, painful confirmation that he was as unable to help Shepard now as he had been the day she died. He'd been making a getaway while she made her one-way run to do what she thought was necessary.
"Shepard!" the voice belonged to Vega. So, he'd been thrown onto this space-worthy meat wagon, too. "Don't you die on me, Lola! Don't you dare!" the agony in the young marine's shout mingled with a sharp scream of pain from someone else, curses and imprecations against the Reapers as those within reach, those deemed too injured to finish the job hurled abuse and agony into the air.
Alenko shook off the crewmen trying to get through his armor—no wonder he hurt, he realized as he fell back. He tried to remember what had happened…he remembered a laser, like on Tuchanka. They'd been shot by a Reaper—Harbinger, she called it, the one that had such an unnatural preoccupation with Shepard.
He didn't remember, though…
Something must have happened, he'd been knocked over the head or knocked down by debris. His armor was pockmarked by it, chunks of stone or whatever stuck into the heavy plates.