Free Peoples Autonomous Zone - Horizon - Iera System
[I am welcomed by a group of human women from the Free Horizon Army who bring me to an empty schoolhouse. They are very welcoming, and quickly quash any of the scary holovids about the terrorists of Horizon. I shake hands with a woman by the name of Rada Nguyen, a short statured woman with a lot of spirit. She is one of a few survivors of the Sanctuary Massacre, a gruesome event where Cerebus committed several atrocities, killing thousands of people. Looking around Horizon today, with its lush greenery and normal civilian life it is easy to forget what once happened here. Rada waves off the other women so we may speak alone, it is now that I see the cheerful face drop slightly.]
Were you originally from Horizon?
Born and raised, you know before the Collector raid I always thought life here was boring. I was the stereotypical colony brat, bored, convinced everyone but me was a hick, I was gonna be someone and the hell with anyone who thought otherwise. I definitely didn't pay attention to the news, I was 16 and the only thing I wanted to listen to was Dramaxeens - full blast. [Laughing], I remember being so mad when my mom said I was 100% absolutely not allowed to go to Omega. I heard about a band, Expel 10? I was going to save up, see them, drink a lot of booze and get in a fight, maybe kiss a dancer...you know? Live life? Yeah, I was a stupid kid.
When did you first know about the disappearing colonists?
To be frank, when they showed up at the doorstep. News doesn't exactly spread fast out here, QECs(1) may as well have been science fiction for us, but even still there was no warning.
There is reports that the Alliance sent out officers to the colonies to increase readiness
Yeah, pretty sure we had one on Horizon, no clue who, and not like it did any good. I don't blame the Alliance for that, no one could be prepared for that but to the survivors it did enforce a certain belief in the Alliance, that we don't matter and we're alone out here. Colonists were ripe for a lot of extremist rhetoric(2), I fell for some of it.
Those of us who survived that attack were saved by Cerberus. Not the Alliance. Didn't take a genius to see how that PR worked for them, pro human organization defends human settlements when the Alliance and the council refuses to and has a dead war hero resurrected like goddamn Jesus Christ. I don't know what the hell Shepard was thinking signing up with those fascists but at the time I knew I thought they were goddamn heroes. They even pumped money into our colony, built medical facilities, homes, schools...everything.
No one had concerns about Cerberus buying up all the property?
I don't think anyone was paying attention, on the outside it was just some random paramilitary contractor(3) and there were a million of them out in the colonies. Maybe people knew it was Cerberus but even if we knew? No, we had bigger problems, and honesty most people don't follow the news that closely. We didn't know, maybe Cerberus was a force for good at one point, I don't know.
I know now of course that the property they bought up became a series of laboratories and uh-
[Rada who until now has been very surprisingly upbeat referring to the past begins to become more soft spoken and reaches for a tissue. I give her a moment and pour some water so we can continue]
Sorry, where were we.
Sanctuary.
Right. So the Alpha Relay happens. I don't care how politically naive you are, we all remember that. I mean no one knew what it meant but fuck, billions of Batarians gone in a flash. As a colonist there is a dark part of me that was like glad you know? Like some sort of blood feud was quenched. Some people even celebrated - can you imagine? Like in the streets parties,that was too much for me, was the beginning of my self reflection on a lot of what I believed.
Of course I didn't have a lot of time until the Reapers showed up. They ignored Horizon for a while, focusing first on Palavan. I tell you that I never thought I would see the Turians so utterly destroyed like that. When I saw that, I knew that we weren't going to win. You know?
It was a few weeks after that, that we started getting flyers for Sanctuary. And it was right here on Horizon. At first I didn't see the point, so far the Reapers strangely had avoided the place which did give it an air of safety. Obviously it must be safe, the Reapers are leaving it alone. Didn't stop people from all over the place from showing up though, they were desperate. Had Asari, Salarian, Turian, Humans, from every system just a non stop, never ending stream of people, and so many kids, so many kids. [Rada sighs, holding her glass to her head]. Eventually something happened, Reapers started showing up on Horizon, like someone pinged the map. Not a lot, and they never got too close to Sanctuary but it was enough to spook me and my mom to go.
Inside it looked like your standard waiting room, almost like an airport. I had nothing but a backpack, a toothbrush and a vintage paperback book of some trashy Asari romance that I found. It was surprisingly orderly, someone took down my details, name, vitals, medical history, and the big one - no comms. I assumed it was a basic check up, and they said that they needed my details in case other family or friends also showed up, and the no comms made sense, we could be leaving a breadcrumb trail to the Reapers. I trusted them.
When did you become suspicious?
It was a couple weeks later, I noticed that some people would be asked to visit the doctor, and said they needed a more thorough medical scan. Not everyone returned from those scans, and when you asked questions they would evade or say they were sick and were being kept for observation. I was still in a trusting stage, why wouldn't I be - we were safe here, and we weren't safe outside. But it left a lingering doubt in my mind. It was around this time that Sanctuary was being overwhelmed by refugees, they didn't even have enough room to process them, they had temporary tents outside. That's when things got weird.
How so?
Well, one of the perks of working for Sanctuary was eventually you'd get a spot inside too. A lot of them were super excited for that. But the thing was, I didn't meet a single Sanctuary worker inside. A lot wasn't adding up for me. My mom was also getting pretty weirded out, we were colony folk we don't come programmed to trust state officials, governments, militaries, you know? And those of us from Horizon who survived the Collector attack just had a ...feeling.
What kind of feeling?
It's really hard to explain it, just this voice that told me that bad things were coming and I needed to get out. Problem was I didn't know if the bad thing was the Reapers outside, or the bad things were from inside. Still, inside most people kept calm for the most part. There were some people who couldn't deal though, I don't know if they had the same feeling as me, or if they were victims of what was going on. There was a guy Terry, he had a whole breakdown inside one night after dinner. He was convinced that Sanctuary was attempting to control his mind, he broke a bathroom mirror and slit his wrists. I just remember seeing bloody footprints from the staff. They took his body, and no one spoke of it. Maybe he was lucky, but it was then that I knew I had to leave. Of course by then, there was no leaving. I read a report on the extranet that apparently they were experimenting on controlling the Reapers(4), sounds like straight up bullshit. You can't control those things, they certainly couldn't because whatever they did was like sending out an all you can eat sign out front. So outside was filled with reapers trying to get out, and inside was something.
By the time the Reapers were trying to get in, anyone who was pretending to be calm stopped pretending. I don't know if you've ever seen what it looks like when you have hundreds of people trapped in a closed space.
No
Well any pretense of civil conduct goes out the metaphorical window, you know? The staff couldn't keep order, there were some literal shots fired. That didn't calm things down you can imagine, but it did cause us to scatter. It didn't take us long to realize that the staff eventually were just gone. Then there was just screaming, at first I thought it was everyone else because there was so much screaming, and crying. But that screaming was different.
Did you know what it was?
Until then I had never seen a Reaper up close, and the images I saw were those human skeleton things(5), and the ships. I never saw the...other ones. I was hiding in a pantry with some other people when we heard it. Something in me just told me to run. I grabbed my mom's hand and we just ran down the hallway, no idea where we were going. I think we managed to find a pharmacy, somehow all the doors were unlocked. My mom had the idea that we could hide in the cupboards.
[Raya sighs, putting her glass down, and rubs her face.]
I don't know. I don't know if I can continue right now. Can we talk about something else?
Of course, I imagine it is very hard to relive that.
I'm sorry, it's just every time I close my eyes at night I still see that place, I still hear that place, and I just can't. But there is something I can show you.
[Raya finishes her glass of water, and leads me to a field. About half a kilometre out stands a large monument, a large grey pillar.]
We built that, a few months after the battle on Earth, when we uh, won. The Alliance bombed the shit out of what remained of Sanctuary, but left us behind. So I didn't want to remember that place, but I did want to remember us. That's for us, that monument. That's for my mom. People send us names, even if they didn't die here, it doesn't remember - this monument is for all of us, so we etch in the name. That's what I want people to see. We survived. I want us to thrive, the old world might be destroyed but we can rebuild it.
[The Free Horizon Army is still in diplomatic talks with the Citadel Council for rights to self determination. The FHA has gained sympathy across colony worlds, including many Krogen who share common desires for self-determination. The Human Citadel representative Alaa Abu Hamza has admitted to his limited support for some of the "moderate" factions of the FHA which included medical aid, and limited financial aid. The Free Peoples Autonomous Zone promises decentralised self-organisation, voluntary association, cooperation and the sharing of resources, that people have the power to make radical social claim that the FHA is a terrorist organization responsible for acts of violence on the Citadel, Earth and Systems Alliance bases.]
1 - Quantum Entanglement Communications, allows instantaneous communication over any distance without reliance on the network of comm buoys
2 - Extremist groups such as Terra Firma, a human supremacist group and political party began originally out in the colonies over concerns that Earth was being ignored for alien concerns.
3 - The company listed as the owner of the facility that became Sanctuary is listed as Biogen Industries, there is no other information listed under this company leading some to believe the real company behind the purchase was Cerberus.
4 - Currently The Systems Alliance will not confirm or deny the type of research that was being done by Cerberus Scientists and to date the only reports that have been released have been done so unofficially on sites such as truLeaks.
5 - Also referred to as Husks by Systems Alliance soldiers