[NOTE: The following passage succeeded the epilogue of the controversial tome Final Monograph: Transcriptions of an Augury. Its inclusion had originally been attached as a plaintext file, indicating that its addition might never have intended to accompany the final draft of the larger work.]
"…Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come."
From Sailing to Byzantium
William Butler Yeats
Normandy
Deck 2 - CIC
The deck shuddered angrily as Sam and Korridon stumbled out of the elevator—both men had to grasp onto the side rails of the hallway to support themselves while they toted their weapons at the same time. The Normandy's interior grav fields were going haywire as periodic surges of acceleration shunted through the nullifier void, shaking the entire spaceframe. The two men awkwardly clung upon the support bars which ran parallel to the ground, rimming the circumference of the CIC. They made large, lunging steps as they staggered forward, their fists clenched so tight upon the rails that their knuckles were cracking in agony.
Throughout their traversal, they kept their heads on a swivel for any lingering Dark Horizon troops left on board. To their confusion, there seemed to be no members of the enemy crew on this part of the ship, a fact that was quickly explained when Korridon caught a flashing graphic near the base of the ship's galaxy map—a blinking red series was displaying the number of main escape pods left on the deck below them, which was a big, fat "0".
There was no reason to be assuaged. Having less people to fight was always a relief, but Korridon was wary if there was cause to celebrate just yet. There always seemed to be a catch whenever things just started to go their way.
They made it to the lengthy neck of the ship that led to the cockpit up front, which was barred to them by a tightly locked door. There were no handholds here to keep balance—Sam and Korridon had to widen their stances considerably as they traversed the narrow pathway while they kept themselves somewhat low in case another surging burst of turbulence would sweep them off their feet and knock them into the trenches of tech consoles on either side of the walkway.
Gathering at the door, they paused for a moment to catch their breath and give their aching calves some respite.
Sam lifted his machinepistol into the air and nudged the barrel towards the door controls. "Think you can hack the door node from here?"
Korridon tilted his head. "Why would I hack it? It's only soft-locked." To prove his point, the turian simply reached out a finger and brushed the number pad of the holopanel. Immediately, the glowing red image turned into a searing green.
"Well, now I look like a dumbass," Sam said gamely as he shook his head. "Still, door-locks on the outside? Whose bright idea was that?"
"Strictly speaking, I think that configuration was deemed a safety measure to allow captains—"
"Rhetorical," Sam snapped, his brow flexing into quite the grouchy visage. "I don't think that now is the best time to launch into a lecture on ship safety systems." He took a step back and levelled his pistol at the door, the controls to open it now brimming upon his omni-tool. "You want high or low?"
Now it was Korridon's turn to level an incredulous look. "I'm several inches taller than you. Why wouldn't I go high?"
Sam rolled his eyes. "Whatever," he said. They had wasted enough time by dawdling at the entrance to the cockpit anyway. "Opening in three… two…"
The doors hissed open and Korridon and Sam quickly jumped through the opening in the bulkhead. A wide swath of golden projections brimming from the central console greeted them—a smorgasbord of sensors and battle data. Beyond that, past the canopy, the ghastly echoes of distant explosions from the still-churning battle furrowed and popped near the lobed curvature of Rema. The men used their weapons to scan the room, but there was no one in the cockpit save for the lone pilot at the helm. A helmeted head peeked out from behind the central seat, body language of the merc jolting as they realized they had company of a most unwelcome sort that had come to join them.
Sam now trained his machinepistol upon the back of the seat. "Fun's over, Iceman," he called out. "Put this thing on cruise control and slowly stand with your hands up."
The pilot made a distinct noise that sounded like "uh." Apparently, he was trying to remember the correct protocol when surrendering a ship to the enemy. In the background, the instrument panels bleeped away, having instantly been forgotten.
"Sometime today, sweetheart," Sam barked as he waggled his sidearm in an upwards motion.
Complying for the moment, the pilot slowly rose as he acquiesced to Sam's demands. The helmeted trooper minutely studied his new captors, somewhat intrigued at the rather irregular look of the human and turian that were training weapons upon him.
In a movement so brief that it could almost be imperceptible, the pilot then took a swift glance down before he came to his senses and snapped his head back into position. But it was no use, because Korridon and Sam had caught on to what the pilot was looking at—the pistol strapped at his holster.
Sam shook his head as he now gripped his machinepistol with two hands. "Don't even think about it," he warned. "Take that fuckin' thing out—slowly—and step to the side away from where you toss it, yeah?"
Caught, the pilot now began to take more agonized looks at the weapon at his side and back to the men. Obviously formulating some sort of plan. A blind man could tell that there was already an inclination in the captive to rebel as soon as possible. Slowly, he reached down to pry the weapon loose, but with a noticeable twitch in his fingers.
"Don't do it, asshole!" Sam said again, a little more loudly, though it was with the tone of a chiding parent providing their final ultimatum. "Don't do it!"
A more reasonable person might have actually complied with the medic's frantic demands, but the pilot sensed some kind of weakness within Sam. Or, at least he thought he did. Clearly surrender was dishonorable or unallowed in some fashion for the pilot, whether by some self-inflicted sense of chivalry or from a decreed mandate to avoid being taken captive at all costs, for he froze his hand right above the grip of his pistol for a few seconds, like he was back in the romanticized days of gunslingers and dramatic showdowns.
Then, cobra-quick, the pilot shot down and grabbed the weapon and was halfway through unholstering it when Sam unleashed a sharp three-round automatic burst. Blood exploded from the man's chest, some of it bursting out from his back and misting one of the quarter-window panels near the front. The pilot's armor clanged when the body hit the ground, the culprit weapon skidding away to rest in the shadow of the empty copilot's seat.
"God damn it!" Sam bemoaned as he lowered his smoking pistol. He stamped his foot. "The one time I actually try not to kill someone and this happens! Just had to have come face-to-face with a fuckin' Rambo-wannabe."
"He had two weapons drawn on him," Korridon said as he shoved the body across the floor with a foot, Sam's referencing completely going over his head. "So why did he try to take us?"
"Probably watched one too many movies," Sam savagely quipped as he stepped forward and reached out to touch the controls. "That's about the only explanation I can come up with."
Sam cycled through the menus of the ship until he found a map of the local sector. He booted it up onto the three-dimensional digital plinth that had been housed in the leftmost armrest of the pilot's seat. A lone yellow dot—the Normandy—sat idling in empty space between Rema's sun and the planet, while a collection of noble blue and evil crimson markers dotted the ring of the orbital battlefield. The colors were reversed, with the Congregation labelled as the red contacts on the enemy's tactical channels. To Sam and Korridon's relief, the red dots were now outnumbering the blues on the screens, as the Radius' allies were either defecting or being destroyed outright by the defending force's rallying charge. Shockwaves from overloading drive cores rippled across the Radius fleet, crumpling their hulls and pulverizing their fighters.
The Normandy was so far removed from the action, if the map was being read correctly, that there was no immediate danger from anyone firing upon it. With luck, perhaps the Radius had no idea that the ship had been seized at all.
"Holy shit," Sam quietly murmured as he abandoned the hologram and walked up to the window, the one not frosted by blood from the man he had just shot. "We're actually doing it."
The view outside only gaped into the eternal darkness, which was broken by the errant explosion off in the distance and the searing curve of sunlight disappearing behind Rema as the Normandy's path now took it in orbit around the planet. Tender eruptions looked like moonlit campfires all lonesome in a cold desert, distant and frozen. Too far for individual detail to be perceived upon the warring ships. But out there, the Radius fleet was slowly being destroyed. Somewhere in that blackness, Radius ships were bleeding flames as oxygen leaked from their stores. Radiation formed violent clouds as errant drive cores ignited or were otherwise exposed from the combined fusillade. Metal and flesh tumbled freely in that silent maelstrom, the detritus forming a brutal graveyard upon which a sturdy foundation could not be set.
Behind them, the doors suddenly slid open again. Korridon immediately whipped around and Sam also mimicked the turian's actions, albeit lethargically. Both relaxed as Roahn stepped into the cockpit, her armored frame battered and blood-soaked, her sehni slightly askew and frayed, but she was alive and walking.
Korridon headed over to her, hands reaching out to touch the bloodied areas first, but Roahn waved a hand, already anticipating the coming question. "It isn't mine," her voice was soft.
His voice dipped cautiously. "And… Skye?"
Roahn stared off into nothingness for a moment before producing a distant nod. "It's done."
The turian released a slow breath, eyes darting back and forth, not knowing where to look. He almost asked Roahn if she was feeling any better, but clamped down on his tongue before the thought could take voice. There was a special sort of sadness that seemed to inhabit the quarian, the kind that only arose in the presence of a distinct loss. For it was the price of revenge—the burned brambles that had been lit had finally crumbled away, leaving only a void in its place. There was no happiness to be gleaned here, only confusion and a little more pain.
Sam cleared his throat as he stepped forward, his hands running against the headrest of the pilot's chair. "Then…" he cleared his throat, "…the ship is yours, Roahn. It's a bit of a homecoming for you, I'd reckon."
Indeed, Roahn figured, for the ramifications were overt. She walked forward to trace the contours of the seat as Sam stepped aside, knowing her father had stood over Joker's shoulder at this very spot many a time. Perhaps her mother had been in this same room with him for a lot of those moments, watching him direct this ship with such precision and grace as if were a musical instrument. Her hands gripped the edge of the empty chair and she uttered a pale sigh, her heartbeat strengthening and filling the void with its burning howl. Golden firelight from the displays wrapped around her visor, overtaking the glimmer of her eyes. Screens of the disintegrating battle flared on separate views, demonstrating the last of the carnage as it flared its last pitiful gasps before her.
A Shepard upon the bridge once more, Roahn could only watch as the final battle of the Tranquil War crumbled to pieces as Radius ships flickered and flashed into nothingness, blown apart by missile hails or railgun barrages. The marble clouds of Rema seared into view as the wan rays of the sun wrapped around the curvature of the world, bringing a new dawn upon the terrible quietus. Shattered bits of starship rained down upon the planet in burning streaks, creating a hellish rain to blister down upon what had been forged by time and luck.
Up in her perch, Roahn simply watched it all.
Rema
Groundside
The bipedal walker toppled straight into the dirt, belching flames and sending up dark brown waves of encrusted earth as it skidded head-first several dozen meters. A hole from a high-velocity round had bored straight through the drone machine, exiting to expose a neat circular tunnel that glimmered with the scintillations of agonized sparks.
The drone had been the last Dark Horizon piece of armor to fall on the ground. All of the other mechs and tanks painted in the colors of the PMCs lay strewn across the battlefield, disseminated by the forceful volley of explosions, charred and smoking. Their operators had suffered similar fates—they had been deposited across the ground, their bodies twisted and broken, the previous shine from their polished armor now scuffed away from the sand and salt to form a matte veil splattered with blood.
The heat-warbled plain swam underneath the agonizing sun. The veil of smoke finally began to lift, exposing a flat expanse speckled with death and debris. The corpses stood out as black blots upon the valley of salt, the stains from their life having left their bodies only widening their shapes. Beyond, the city of New Sura continued to impassively stand, though a few trickling spires of ash still marked its tender wounds.
The remaining stragglers of the PMC soldiers now sat in the shadow of a downed turian spider-walker, out of the blazing sun, their hands at the backs of their uncovered heads. Their faces were dusty, many of them bleeding. They stared morosely at the ground while a guard of krogan warriors stood watch over them, their bulbous and reptilian eyes gazing without remorse upon their captives. Interspersed with the krogan were the breathless but giddy Congregation troops, who would occasionally take groups of ten captive privateers with them to assembled transports that would give them a lift to the city to be held in a makeshift but humane detention camp. The defeated mercenaries trundled across the desert, hardly speaking to each other, completely downtrodden as they shuffled amongst the remains of their friends, nothing but their loss pounding them over the head.
The lingering Dark Horizon troopers had been completely gobsmacked when the tide of the battle had abruptly turned in favor of the Congregation. None of them could have imagined at how rapidly everything proceeded to fall apart. One moment they were firing at shadowshapes in a dust storm, the next that storm had been completely obliterated, fallen still upon the advent of a monstrous surge of krogan. Every single krogan had suddenly turned upon them all! They had torn into the multitude of platoons with their brutal weapons, ripping the mercs apart limb from limb and filling the dusty trenches with the thick trickle of spilled blood. Flak and the flint of hot metalsparks had filled the air and savagely deconstructed the privateers through the use of high-speed projectiles, devastating the front lines in minutes. The commanders of the Radius forces had been incredulous—had Hund gone insane? What had he been thinking, turning turncoat just when they seemed to have victory in their grasp?
The answer had been demonstrated to them seconds later, for a gray-armored krogan heading a newly charging column and holding what appeared to be a stout scimitar as he led the pack, violently bellowing for all krogan to rise against the Radius and to fight under not just storied warlords of old like Urdnot Wrex and Bakara, but even the newly-christened Commander Shepard. That same krogan was now standing atop the only rock formation for miles, bloodied sword clenched in a tight fist, as he surveyed the procession before him like a watchful statue. Dust devils spiraled behind him, kicking up white clouds. To the prisoners that looked upon Urdnot Grunt with their fearful reverence, they did not need to question what had happened to Hund. The krogan apparently had a new overlord now.
The revolt of the krogan had a cascading effect on the entire battle. Congregation forces, emboldened at their new reinforcements, had charged the Dark Horizon lines and had battered themselves upon their foes with abandon, far too close for the mercs' rearward forces to fire upon the opposing side. The Congregation, as it turned out, did not need firepower to win the day. All they needed was the will.
The remnants of their victory lay unabashed for anyone to contradict. The crumpled and scarred field held the imparted poster of the last massacre in the galaxy, a violent tableau upon which every body served as a monument unto itself stretching as far as the eye could see. Flies buzzed in dark clouds. Scavenger birds circled in fleets overhead. The distant mountains turned to liquid through the veinous heat waves.
And Grunt stood atop it all, taking in the scene.
His breath was labored, still recovering from Hund's fight, but the deep pains his body had accumulated sank beneath the surface, to be absorbed into the ever-constant war raging within him. The high of battle continued to radiate, giving him life.
He took another breath. Then another one.
Normandy
"Well, shit," Sam said as he leaned over the pilot's chair, his face decidedly morose.
Roahn looked away from the window, a swath of cosmic gas turning the side of her head a ghostly shade of purple. "What?"
"Got an old friend wanting to reacquaint themselves—and he's the only visitor that I can think of who's worse than a Mormon process server who dabbles as a knife salesman in their spare time," Sam gestured to the holomap, which was currently focused on a rather large icon breaking away from the main group. "Was it too much to have hoped to have seen the last of this asshole?"
Even from afar, Roahn could already see what the man was referring to. Ministry, apparently having previously retreated to its safe haven of the orbital battle after getting its ass handed to it back on Rema, had now seemed to pick up that something was amiss with the Normandy. It had wheeled about, no longer concerned with carving through any more enemy ships, though it was abandoning the thinned Dark Horizon ships to their fate. It now zoomed off into empty space, now heading on a direct course towards them, the last of the Radius becoming destroyed just behind it. A superimposed timer indicated that they still had fifteen minutes until the Reaper would be getting into firing range, but that was of little comfort to the group upon the bridge.
A victim, evidentially, of Aleph's last command.
"It's coming for the Monolith," Roahn said, looking down as if her gaze could pierce through the different levels and come upon the dark cargo that plaintively stood in the middle of the lower bay.
"Or," Sam said, "it's coming to blow us all up."
"It wouldn't do that," Korridon shook his head, but even he did not seem sure. "Not with the Monolith still on board."
The medic was plainly unconvinced. "That fucking thing is probably tougher than it looks. And the Reaper probably knows that. It could probably disintegrate this entire ship, if it wanted to, and the Monolith would still be fine. Hell, that's probably how it plans to retrieve it, anyway. Just crack the Normandy open and pick free the morsel it wants as if we're an entrée at a Maryland crab shack."
"Can you shut up with your metaphors?!" Roahn knocked her prosthetic fist against the back of the pilot's chair. "But you're right. Guess there's nothing for it. We have to destroy the Monolith," she growled. "I don't care how but it gets done right now."
Korridon lidded his eyes upward in thought for a quick second. "That plan might not work anymore. I rigged the thing with the plastic explosives but I was assuming that we'd be able to get to a minimum safe distance while the Normandy was still planetside. Blow it up now and it'll rip a hole through the hull. Might even irreparably damage the ship in the process."
"So, we take one of the escape pods," Sam jerked a thumb towards the interlinked exit where the stout cockpit lifeboat awaited. "Remote detonate it when we clear the blast zone?"
Roahn shook her head at that. "We can't be sure the plastic explosives can even scratch the Monolith. If we take the escape pod and detonate but they explosives fail or it somehow survives the explosion, then we'll have no way to get back to the Normandy. We'll have lost our chance."
The three stood in the menacing silence. In the background, the Normandy's timer chimed an alert that Ministry was ten minutes out from getting into firing range.
"I may have an idea," Korridon's head perked up.
"We're listening," Roahn said.
"It's bold and maybe a little stupid, but I can't see any other—"
"Just spit it out, man!" Sam barked.
The turian glared at the human before he wheeled back to face Roahn. "Rema's sun," he said urgently. "At full tilt—not FTL—this ship can reach it in less than twenty minutes. The convection zone is hot enough to melt any substance ever known down to a stream of plasma before it could even hit the tachocline. Not even something like the Monolith could survive and, even if it did—which is impossible—it would be irretrievable to anyone."
"You're suggesting we launch the Monolith into the sun?" Roahn spoke lowly, certain she had not misheard him.
But the turian was not finished.
"We don't have the time to rig it for a launch. We're going to have to send the Normandy in. The whole damn ship."
That dense silence returned, a dim thrum embedding into their eardrums. The skeins of light from the data screens twinkled in golden solitude, searing around the edges of Roahn as she looked hollowly upon Korridon.
"You want to destroy it," she uttered. "Destroy the Normandy."
"You realize what you just said?" Sam asked, his voice quiet and serious, all humor forgotten.
"I'm not an idiot," Korridon spoke slowly. "I know what this means. Destroying the most famous ship in all of history is not something that I'm taking lightly. But we have no other choice. The Monolith needs to be taken off the board and we don't have time to wait around or try to tackle this strategically. Aleph needs to be stopped. Ministry needs to be stopped. And if we destroy the Monolith, we at least take Ministry out—it was brought here by the thing so its power has to be tied to it."
"You think," Sam corrected.
"If you have another option, you'd better start talking."
The sun, as if intrigued at being mentioned, chose that moment to peek through the glazed canopy, sending vivid bolts of red light streaming into the cabin, turning everything the color of blood.
Roahn let her weight sag against the pilot's seat only slightly. There had been no time for her to form any memories with this ship. It had been such a steadfast vessel that had been at her father's command. Her parents had begun their relationship on board the Normandy. It had been present for every major campaign in the Reaper War. And now they were about to toss it into a sun like it was nothing more than a piece of space junk. She would have loved nothing more than to spend a day on board, roaming the halls at her own pace, trying to imagine the bustling crew and the shadowed imprints of their parents hard at work at their stations. In another life, the Normandy should have stayed in a museum, destined to have been the center of admiration for millions. Now, it was about to receive the only suitable funeral a ship like it could hope for: a warrior's pyre.
"There's no more time," Roahn said. "And there is no other way."
Korridon's and Sam's faces, each half alight from the hellglow out the window, just looked at Roahn with gazes that approximated sadness but a resigned acceptance. They also understood the terrible decision they had decided to live with. Korridon seemed exhausted and about to keel over. Sam ran a hand through his beard, as if struggling to think of any rebuttal and failing miserably.
She could only take their silence as their confirmation.
Giving them each a little nod, Roahn turned around and seated herself in the pilot's chair. The seat automatically molded itself to her contours—even her lower legs now had a little room to maneuver. She raised her arms and let the variable display come to her, which now threatened to overwhelm her with its sudden rush of discombobulated symbols and gauges. Ignoring the digital onslaught, Roahn's nimble fingers danced across the haptic displays and swiped through several screens until she found the function she was looking for. But as her eyes widened to comprehend what the ship was telling her, she slammed a fist so hard onto the chair's armrest that she broke it in half.
"I can't believe it," she hissed. "Autopilot's non-functional."
Korridon's eyes scrunched together. "You're telling us that it's been broken since Serannua? All that time and they never fixed it?"
Roahn gestured to the screens, which were now filled to the brim with angrily flashing red symbols. "Apparently."
The timer chimed once more. Ministry was now five minutes out.
"Right," Roahn said as she stood from the chair. "New plan. We're abandoning ship."
"What?" Korridon gaped.
"The hell are you talking about?!" Sam asked.
"I'm charting a new course," Roahn said, impervious to her crew's protests as she walked over to the copilot's terminal and brought up the planetary map. "We can't just drive this thing into the sun with all three of us on board. We're going to have to steer this back to the battle, hide it in the debris field, then ditch. Hopefully, we can make it back to the surface and find a frigate big enough to tow the Normandy once this all blows over."
"Roahn," Sam said as he walked forward, hands tipped upward, "there's no guarantee we'll make it back. If we abandon ship, we may very well lose this chance. The Reaper will get the Monolith back. We won't have changed anything."
The quarian whirled and for the first time, Sam flinched backwards, now having the full force of Roahn's fury honed onto him. He now understood what made this woman the true Commander Shepard, for her very gaze was the embodiment of cold and sharpened glass. It was so intense that he began to gape, his breath even hitching.
"I'm not choosing that thing over you. Over any of you. If I can get us all back, then it doesn't matter if I haven't changed anything. What matters is that you'll still be alive."
She then suddenly whipped around, finger already pointing at Korridon, who had just begun his barest utterance of a sentence before Roahn had killed it while it was still in the process of exiting his throat.
"And don't you dare take his side, either!" she snarled. "I'm not losing anyone else at any cost, Korr! If we make it back, I save all of us."
"But if we make it there," Korridon now nudged his head in the direction of the window, towards the blazing star, "we save everyone."
"No," Roahn shook her head emotionally. "No, we can't. We need to guide the ship the whole way—Ministry'll just try to hack it without a pilot at the helm. We can't ditch if we continue that plan. I'm so sorry, Korr. I truly am, but I just—"
There was an abrupt sizzling noise and a furl of blue electricity, like the deconstructing of a shield, crackled at Roahn's back. Energy billowed into Roahn's body and cradled her organs for not even a split-second, halting everything in place for that amount of time: her breathing, her heart, her thoughts. A searing scar split into her mind—she saw stars.
The quarian's eyes widened behind her visor and she pitched forward with a soft cry. Korridon quickly knelt down to catch her, but Roahn's legs had gone completely limp. Kneeling, he held the boneless woman in his arms, momentarily dumbstruck, until he finally came to his senses and looked up to find Sam standing over him, an active shock stick—a thin collapsible baton made out of a silver alloy with a polymer handgrip—humming in the human's clenched hand.
"What have you done?!" the turian howled. "Have you gone mad?!"
Eerily calm, the medic slowly shook his head as he raised his arm to point the baton towards Korridon's face.
"She's going to be fine. It'll only last for a minute. Come on, get up. Up, up, up."
Sam waggled his weapon, which Korridon now realized he must have scrounged off the dead pilot when no one was looking, and found himself complying with the medic's directive. Roahn's arms clung around the turian's neck, groaning into his chest. Korridon held the woman close as he rose, arms encircling her, instinctively protecting her.
"Sam—" Korridon tried to say, but the human cut him off.
"Argument's over," Sam said, his voice low but his eyes clear. "It's done. Had to do something, you know?" He waved his free hand in the direction of the escape pod. "Take it. You heard the lady—someone needs to guide this thing in."
Eyes finding the gaping door that led to salvation just to his left, something in Korridon tore his gaze away from the threshold, keeping him centered back on Sam. He now understood, but something rooted his feet to the ground.
Realizing how he was tormenting the man, Sam just provided a lopsided smirk, but did not lower his weapon. "Hell, Korridon. If you think I'm going to start sobbing my guts out to you right now, you're hopelessly deluded. You think I don't know what I'm signing up for?" He leaned forward. "This is right."
Multiple denials screamed in the turian's head. He wanted to shout in Sam's face, to tell this stupid human to put down his shock stick, to beg him to think of another way. But he couldn't because there were no other options.
"It wasn't your choice," he could only say.
"If you think about it, I never really had all that many. Now, get in the goddamned pod or I'm going to stick this into your neck and drag the two of you on board myself."
He could have lunged forward and batted the baton away. Perhaps slapped some sense back into Sam in the process. He could have done one out of a dozen different things and he would have a good chance at putting the three of them back onto equal ground.
But when Korridon looked closer at Sam, he saw that the cynical front the man usually kept erected through a screen of gallows humor had all but faded away. What was left was a tender nervousness—Sam seemed unsure of himself in some fashion. But there was a deep longing etched upon his face, silent pleas bursting from his eyes, hammering his intent home over and over again. The man wanted this.
Knowing that he would regret this for a lifetime, Korridon turned towards the pod, Roahn still in his arms, and started to walk over it. Feeling was slowly starting to trickle back into Roahn's limbs—he could feel her start to struggle against him. She kept on whispering "No, no", but Korridon deafened himself to her pleas. He carried her past the door, the low red darkness encompassing them both. Korridon had to bend down slightly to clear the ceiling.
Roahn weakly reached out, past Korridon, her head positioned over the turian's shoulder as she looked back upon Sam. Her hand hung empty in midair. But the human, now standing in the doorway, simply touched a control and a gridded blue barrier flared between them, sending a sapphire filter washing over him.
Muscles aching, Roahn managed to break from Korridon's grip and splayed herself against the shield. She beat uselessly at the barrier, continuing to whisper her denial.
Sam walked forward and placed his hand flat across the shield after he clipped the baton to his belt. The façade cracked and he smiled warmly upon Roahn, all fear forgotten, both joy and pain leaping in his eyes. Even though she was armored, he still eclipsed her, a banded outline of light from the outside edging around his head. She also reached out, her three fingers pressing against the shield where Sam's hand still rested on the opposite side.
"I would have given anything to save you," Roahn whispered.
Sam nodded. A slow blink. "I know."
She tried again. "Please come with us."
"Not this time. I got what I wanted out of all this. It's only fair I pay a little of it back." He then looked away for a moment, expression distant. A frigid smile grazed his lips. "He said it was going to be a trip of a lifetime. Garrus, I mean. Such an asshole. He's going to laugh when he realizes just how right he was."
"Sam, just drop the fucking shield and get in this fucking pod!" Roahn screamed, her hands beating on the digital barrier once again, desperate to regain the human's attention.
"Hey," Sam said so sternly that for a moment Roahn was reminded of her father. She froze in place, eyes wide and trembling. "Hey," he said again, his attention now returned to her. "You're better than I am. All of you are. I was only along for the ride. Can't say I would have wanted it any other way." His jaw opened and closed, as if he was about to say more, but couldn't find the words. He shook his head, perhaps amused at the turn of events. Roahn clung to the shielded door as she hopelessly watched the human, praying that he would come to his senses and drop the boundary. They would find a way through this together. They always had.
But Sam's eyes flicked in her direction once more. This time, the connection seemed to stretch for an eternity. Sam was the one to break it, as he then looked over Roahn's shoulder.
"Take care of her, son," he murmured.
Right then, Roahn knew exactly what Sam was going to do right before he did it, right before she felt Korridon's hands at her shoulders, right before the floor uncomfortably jolted just underneath her feet.
"NOOOO!" she screamed as the door to the pod finally slammed shut with a heavy metallic drumming sound, and with a flood of pyrotechnics, the last of the Normandy's escape pods rocketed away, spinning down towards the pale curve of the planet below.
The throbbing sunlight illuminated a frantic chase, silent in the vacuum. Far beyond the mazes of antifighter barrages, the obliterating flames surging from sublight drives, the starburst eruptions that acted as miniature stars, and the searing hails of flaming debris as they hit the atmosphere of the planet, the Normandy pushed on through space, all four of its engines blazing a glorious purple. In hot pursuit, the planetoid-sized Ministry frantically sped on after its quarry, light-scatter already frizzing from its multiple quasimatter emitters. The Reaper was just barely grazing the edge of being in range of the Normandy—heedless, it proceeded to fire upon the ship anyway, with the searing hum of energy deathly quiet as the beams split the area between the two vessels. Most of the bursts, a throbbing red cored with a blinding white, missed the Reaper's target entirely. A couple of the blasts did hit, but they were just near-scrapes, the shields around the Normandy flickering angrily.
There were no obstacles impeding the Normandy's path. No flak to evade or nets of antimatter beams to avoid. Its final destination loomed before it, growing bigger by the second. A blinding core of pure fusion. Ministry now ramped up the speed of its attacks, rapidly expending its batteries and focusing all its power into its weapons systems. But it was not enough. It was still too far out to hit the Normandy. But it was gaining, slowly but surely.
No communications had left the Normandy in the five minutes since its last escape pod had been jettisoned. But, finally breaking the silence, a short conversation from the man that was currently at the helm of the frigate soon made its way to the ragged and regrouped portions of the Congregation fleet. "Going to need a little help from you guys in the next few moments," the man had said. A final request, one that had not been provided lightly. "It'll work," the pilot had assured. "Trust me. Just got to break this bastard's defenses first, is all. Then, it's all yours."
Whether or not they believed him was another story. What convinced them to act was the man's sincerity—throughout the entire day, they had not heard such a person as confident as this one. There had been no doubt in their voice, no offers that suggested supposition.
He made it seem like this was the only logical choice.
Soon thereafter, seven new contacts lit up the void as multiple nuclear missiles raced out of their launching tubes and immediately whipped on course, their introduction causing all sensors boards in the local area to suddenly become ablaze. The missiles did not have a short trip in mind and the relative freedom of their trajectory made it an easy affair for their preprogrammed target locks to hone in on the massive black inox vessel that was departing in the direction of the sun.
Ministry.
"Well done, guys," Sam said after he had cut the connection. He leaned back in his seat, only making bare adjustments to the Normandy's trajectory. He may have not been a qualified pilot, but he knew his way around a ship's software to at least steer the damn thing. It was easy keeping a ship steady once already in motion. Easier than starting from null velocity, at least. Through the viewport, he could see the occasional red stroke of the Reaper's beams sear past the hull, but he was not concerned by the onrushing machine at his rear. The glass was polarizing more and more as the sun began to fill the view—Sam ended up closing the shudders to rid himself of the distraction.
His eyes flicked over to the timer that had now been reset to his destination—just a little under five minutes to go. One of the lower screens was already reporting temperatures rising into the high ranges. Silent alerts were starting to flash on the consoles. Sam disregarded them all.
He heavily sighed, fingers tapping a soft tattoo upon the armrests of his chair. There was no tremble that ran through him. No final wit to burgeon among him. He sat there, burning half a minute of silence. The ship started to rumble as it entered the sun's gravity envelope. The human chewed his lip and raised an arm, his hand momentarily bunching into a fist before he typed in a quick code onto the digital keypad next to him.
The image of a windswept quarian popped up onto the tiny holoprojector to his left. The woman turned, looking at her own tool, a hand keeping her wayward sehni from flying off her helmet. "Sam?" she asked. "Love, is that you?"
Sam slowly breathed out, the effort feeling like it took fifty pounds from his body. He reached out, palm up, as if he could cup the image of the quarian in his hand. "Nya," he managed to utter without stumbling over his own voice. "I'm so glad you're safe."
The quarian froze, sensing something was amiss. His tone was off. He seemed… calm. "Sam… what… where are you?"
I have to break her heart now, Sam realized. For the last time.
"My dear Nya," Sam whispered to his wife, his heart now feeling like it was about to burst from his chest, every beat producing a wrenching ache. A strangled sensation closed over his throat. He was still smiling, but his eyes were tortured and glazed with tears. "I'm… I'm so sorry. I… don't think I'm going to make it home with you."
There was a hideous pause in which nothing was uttered. That split-second of denial in which there was an attempt to escape from the unfathomable truth. Then Nya rapidly shook her head, never taking her eyes off her husband's face.
"No," she barely breathed. The truth had not landed—the shock still resonated. "No, no, no. Wh-What are you saying? Sam? Sam, you can't—"
"Honey, listen," Sam closed his eyes, but spoke firmly while trying to ignore the ticking timer out in the corner of his vision. "I only have a few minutes. I'm going to do something that… that I know you would never have wanted me to do. I'm on the Normandy right now—well, I'm flying the Normandy, to be honest." A crooked grin came to his face, a lingering bit of braggadocio. "The… uh, the device that killed all of the people on the Citadel… it's in the cargo bay of this ship. I've set in a course for the sun and…" Sam fumbled his words and sighed again. "There was no other way. And that Reaper is on my ass right now. I can't turn back. Only way out is…" He made a pointing gesture with his index finger.
"Sam—"
"Nya, if I don't do this, the Reaper slaughters everyone. It'll kill you and our daughter. My life for yours—that's always how it was going to be. I just… I had to see you one last time. To say goodbye."
On the holoprojector, Nya fell to her knees, hands clutched at her chest. Sam almost stood from his seat, momentarily forgetting that he could not just walk over to the woman and help her up like he always had done. In the lifetime they had shared together, it had always felt like she was the piece that had been missing from him for so long. Everything that pained her, he felt too.
"Nya," Sam said, "please talk to me. I need to hear your voice."
Buried in pain, Nya raised her head. Even from such a distance, Sam could picture the woman's sobbing face clearly in his mind, even with that helmet in the way.
But, driven by a fresh surge of strength, Nya stood back up, her breathing ragged. Yet she stared at Sam with a fresh gaze, steeled by that feral power.
"Sam. My Sam. You wouldn't have chosen this if you knew it wouldn't save your family."
"I made a mess of many things in my life, Nya," Sam's tearful grin broke to unveil his teeth. "But you… you were the best thing that ever happened to me. I'm so sorry that I have to do this to you. I wanted to grow old with you. See Taylor get married. Become a grandfather. I'm… just know how awful I feel that I have to leave you when that is the last thing I want."
Nya positioned herself closer to the lens. "No. You are a good man. You have been nothing short of perfect for me. I will always be proud of you, my love. My wonderful husband."
Sam wryly chuckled and dipped his head, a few tears escaping him and dripping onto his lap. He then pressed his fingers to his lips and held it out in the direction of the holoprojector. Just beyond, the timer ticked over to less than a minute. More and more temperature warnings were being added to the diaspora of blinking lights.
"In the next life, then. I love you, Nya."
"I love you, Sam."
"Tell our daughter how much her father loves her. You both have made me so happy."
"I will."
A new text box then began flashing over multiple screens, reading "WARNING: CRITICAL EXTERIOR TEMPERATURE" and repeating the message endlessly, a desperate plea for its pilot to reverse their fatal course.
Sam absorbed the warning with a stone face, noting that the timer had just ticked down to thirty seconds.
"And the end comes forth," he murmured, too quiet for even Nya to hear. He then looked upon his wife. "I don't want you to watch this. Thank you for everything, Nya. Goodbye."
"Sam, wait—" Nya started to say, but her image disappeared right as Sam cut the connection. He unleashed a painful breath and sagged down in his chair, an empty hole feeling like it had been ripped into him. Tears continued to stain his eyes—he wiped them away and cleared his throat. He then stiffened his spine and sat up straight in the chair, peering through raw eyes, but feeling utterly clearheaded and content. His thoughts were of his family and only of his family, while the forgotten timer heedlessly ticked down to its destiny.
His breath was no longer shuddering. There was no more fear. Sam closed his eyes, remembering those cold nights on the beach at Santa Cruz, his daughter playing in the sand in her suit. The dimly-lit dusks of his wife curled up next to him in their bed. Their gentle smiles, the warmth of their embraces. Good memories.
And then, even as the Normandy finally dove into the empyrean plain of fire, the light eclipsing it to forever erase its shadows from existence, Sam's smile never left him. There had been an instant when the ship existed as a simple black dot amidst the curling waves of scarlet plasma.
Then it was gone. Erased by the light.
The very instant that the Normandy had disappeared into Rema's sun, a change had immediately place in Ministry. The Reaper stopped accelerating and simply floated as a deadweight object, its legs helplessly flailing about like it was an overturned crab. Red magma bolts imprisoned the massive vessel, chains of lightning ensnaring and making it a cosmic prisoner. It became listless, unfocused. As though as it had lost purpose.
The Reaper was powerless.
The arc of Ministry's trajectory, in its haste to chase the Normandy, had brought it too close to the sun and now it was starting to get pulled in as well. But Ministry had far greater things to worry about, if it even had the capacity to worry anymore. For the multitude of missiles from the Congregation cruisers were still on course, having never broken from their target. They sped on forth, brilliant blue glares emitting from their boosters, a momentary constellation that heralded a destruction of their own power.
The missiles finally reached the Reaper as it continued to writhe in its tormented sprawl. Their proximity sensors all triggered simultaneously and a tiny sun flared into existence next to the massive one that brought life to the sector. Rema was soon host to a binary system as the combined nuclear detonation flared a white sphere hundreds of miles wide, so bright that the change in illumination could be detected all the way on the planet's surface. But as the radiation-scatter faded into cooling atoms and heat-soaked shrapnel, the chunks of the now broken Reaper kept on tumbling, having survived the eruption. But they were not destined for a cold dark grave of the infinite abyss—Rema's sun still had an influence on them. The pieces of Ministry hurled end-over-end, a ripped-apart hulk that continued to harbor confused and dying thoughts, and was propelled into the sun, powerfully shunted from the explosion that had so grievously maimed it.
With a final, weak bellow, the last Reaper fell into the open arms of the sun, cradled by a nexus of life that took it away from the cosmos that it had once terrorized.
Roahn sat in a daze, riveted upon the sight out from the escape pod's porthole, her hands plastered to either side of the opening. Her visor, as polarized as it could be, had filed the sun down to a flat gray disc. She vaguely recalled her own scream as the Normandy had dropped beyond all sight and had continued until its transponder beacon had winked off for good on her tool. She had silenced her vocabulator to only let the sound of her own frightful roar fill her head, battering her skull until the noise became a piercing wail. Her limbs quaked heavily as she writhed against the door in a fluctuation of suffering. The inclination to broadcast openly came to her, for her to endlessly call out to Sam, requesting a return response.
But she knew in the cold logic of her brain that there was no point. Sam was gone. Stupid, brave man that he was. It was so in character for even this act of charity to rile her up in some fashion.
Her prosthetic fingers scraped at the door of the lifepod. No more would she be subject to the man's droll quips, his sarcastic but unbreakable presence. There had been no time to think of any of that. And now he was gone. Dead and gone… but because of what he had done, generations would remember his name for it.
Ministry was no longer on the scopes either. She had seen what had happened when the Normandy had disappeared into the cosmic inferno—which was definitive proof that the Monolith had been destroyed as well. In one fell stroke, Sam had depleted Aleph of his two greatest weapons. His army had been reduced to a shell, and all of his subordinates were either dead or captured.
When does it end? Roahn thought as the grip her fingers exuded slowly softened. Why must her victories come tinged with the sour notes of defeat? Why couldn't Sam be here to see this?
With a sniffle, Roahn staggered back to her feet, raising the polarization on her visor as she finally looked away from the blinding sun. She sat in one of the unoccupied chairs, across from Korridon, who was finishing up with a quick call.
"The Vakarian's three minutes out," he said as he leaned forward, his hands folded together. "They've got our signal and will be picking us up."
"Fine," she said hollowly.
"The crew was all evac'd on board. Kasumi's the only one relatively uninjured, per Sagan's report."
More weights to hang upon her neck. Her bones felt like glass, her skull feeling like it was going to burst apart as a headache began to burgeon just behind her forehead.
Roahn waited for more from Korridon, but it seemed like the turian had finished. She fixated a glance at him, wondering if he was going to say anything about Sam, but realized that his face was a paralytic mask of distress. His mandibles were twitching in an uneven tempo and his eyes were now focused upon the ground. His hands shook harrowingly, as though an arthritic agony had infiltrated his joints. Roahn thought about reaching out and touching the man's knee, but for some reason could not muster the strength.
She wanted to say something. To wax something venerable about Sam's passing. To make his memory all the more meaningful. She would have done it, had a pinpoint knob of what felt like blinding energy not overtaken her thoughts and caused an unimaginable pain to sear every single one of her nerves.
She had felt this raw power before. There was no forgetting the sensation. But… it was impossible.
Roahn shrieked, a raucous buzzing in her ears, a strong wobble entirely blurring out her vision. She heard Korridon call her name—he was moving out of his seat in slow motion. A painful lurch infiltrated her throat. It felt as if she was about to throw up. In her fugue, she toppled out of her chair and onto the floor of the lifepod—Korridon's hands were grasping her, trying to shake her out of her state. But Roahn curled into a fetal position, numb to all forms of contact.
Except to the voice that now exuded into her very head.
"You think you have altered the path that had been laid before you, when all along, you have merely continued along its boundary. Or did you truly believe that you could disrupt my work? Does it despair you, to know that you are just as much a harbinger of the Tranquility as I have been?"
NONONONONO! Roahn thought. Laying sideways, she began to unknowingly beat the side of her helmeted head roughly upon the ground. Banging out an alarming rhythm. NO! The Monolith's gone! He shouldn't be able to hurt me! This isn't happening! This isn't happening! THIS ISN'T HAPPENING!
But the voice continued to filter through clearly, with none of the trademark rasp of being carried over radio waves or even a smooth QED signal. Just pure, unfiltered malice. "You have succeeded in convincing others to die for your ambitions. But they are all dying for the lie that you have perpetrated. You have yet to understand. It is time I showed you. I now extend to you, a chariot, Roahn'Shepard. You will know how to find me. I will be waiting."
Roahn was almost catatonic, her head now tapping so fast against the floor it was becoming a steady drumbeat. Almost as if she was going into a seizure. She was convulsing so hard that Korridon had to physically haul the quarian's head into his lap, to prevent her from hurting herself.
The one thing that was endlessly repeating in Roahn's mind was: How? She had severed her implant connection. The Monolith was destroyed. There was no way it was physically possible for Aleph to have a connection to her anymore. Yet she had heard his voice, just as if he had been whispering into her ear. Had he… let her believe she had cut herself off from him? Lulled herself into a false sense of security?
Why? Why go to all that trouble? Why was he doing this to her?
But as soon as the last syllable was snuffed into silence, it was all over.
The very instant that Aleph's voice vanished, cut off like it had evaporated in the middle of a dry room, the immobilizing force seeped from her body, restoring control back to her. A flood of agony throbbed in one trembling beat, but smoothed out into a fuzzy and simmering background glow. Groggily, she lifted her head from Korridon's lap and got upon her knees. The turian's hands were gently cupping her head. She lifted her eyes to look up at him from where she knelt, her soul trembling with pain.
"He still has it," she said, voice dripping with emotion. Her eyes started to well with tears again. Had Sam's sacrifice all been for nothing? "We didn't even faze him. He can still hurt me."
Korridon absorbed this thoughtfully, but even he wilted a little. "He wants you to think that way, Roahn. Aleph's just lost all of his forces in one fell swoop. Why wouldn't he try to get into your head?"
"Because… he knows it'll work."
"Then I guess we'll just have to kill him. It's the only way all this ends."
"I know," Roahn said as she got to her feet, her movements slow in case any hasty maneuvers could bring up fresh slews of pain. Past the tiny viewport, she could see the blinking navlights upon the Vakarian as the sleek frigate moved in on an approach vector, angling its airlock to line up with the pod's door. "There was never going to be an alternative. He's not going to stop." The lifepod seemed to open up around her, letting her sink within a void of her own quietus. She spoke again to lift the veil. "But do you know what frightens me the most?"
Korridon's hands encircled hers. "That he ends up killing you?"
Roahn barely shook her head. "That nothing I did ever mattered at all."
Vakarian
Sagan and Kasumi were waiting at the airlock door when it opened, allowing Roahn and Korridon to stumble from the chamber. The human woman's outfit was still splattered with dirt and blood—the only individual who was still pristine was Sagan, who had not been present at all for the ground campaign. The jewel-like glow from the multiple sensors at the cockpit radiated a lovely light, almost delicate that slid along the contours of the armored individuals standing within the ribbed corridor.
"We have a problem," Roahn said upon exiting the lifepod, voice raw. "I don't know how, but the Monolith is still active."
Kasumi jerked in surprise. "That can't be. Everyone saw on their scopes—it was on the Normandy, wasn't it? It couldn't have survived being thrown into the star. Nothing could."
"I can't explain it," was Roahn's honest reply. "Maybe it was another one of Aleph's tricks. Maybe we just destroyed one of his facsimiles. Maybe he transferred its power to another vessel. I… I just don't know." She then faced Sagan. "Can we track the energy readout Aleph made with his last pulse? He has to be close by."
The intricate lens configuration of Sagan's head scythed once in a synthetic "blink."
"Sensors have picked up no simultaneous anomalies upon all wavelength bands," Sagan replied, confused. "Forensic analysis of Aleph's initial attack recovered residual traces of elevated antimatter particles. There have been no further examples that have been recorded since that time."
"He managed to communicate with me just minutes ago," Roahn emphasized. "If it's not the Monolith, then what is he using?"
"Unknown," Sagan said, still dutifully responding to even the most rhetorical of questions. "Antimatter anomalies have not surfaced for the duration of the battle. But two-point-two minutes ago, a new contact came up on the Vakarian's sensors. It had been previously positioned behind the star and only now came into range."
A new contact. "Aleph?"
"Inconclusive. But the profile is… familiar."
"How familiar?"
The geth, for a second, seemed like it was about to explain its analysis to Roahn right then and there, but quickly decided that another method of confirmation would provide sufficient education. Sagan dutifully walked towards the cockpit, the quizzical quarian at his heels, and right up to the canopy. The armored shudders parted and the filtered rays of Rema's star blinded Roahn for a quick second before the glass quickly darkened. The geth raised a hand and tapped at the canopy—a round magnifier tool popped into view. Sagan centered the new lens right upon the star.
He stepped aside so that Roahn could see. She walked up and nearly pressed her visor against the thick glass.
With the focus of the magnifier already honed in upon its target, there was no mistaking what Sagan wanted Roahn to see. At first, she thought it was a trick. A play of the light. Or even an irregularly shaped sunspot, blotted upon the churning and writing surface of the sun.
But then the dark shadow shifted. An object silhouetted against the sun. It was massive. A ship? No, a station. Dozens of kilometers long. Had it been sitting in this system the whole time, waiting for the right moment to be revealed? It had to be one of the largest manmade structures ever conceived, if this was—
Roahn reared back as the outline of the station then rotated. Bright scintillations flared around the five thick arms that protruded from a central ring, taking on the shape of a pentagram from a certain angle. The superstructure was elegant, dramatic, and as Sagan had said, familiar. She had seen this station in person before. Many times. It was only the most important spaceborne object ever made in the galaxy. It was the labyrinthian home of the society she knew today, the skeleton key of the previous cycle's taskmasters. It was a place as welcoming to outsiders as it was inhospitable to its inhabitants.
The Citadel.
"A chariot," Roahn whispered to herself, her prosthetic hand scraping along the canopy, her eyes fine shards. "Bastard."
The Citadel
The hypnagogic sequence of strobing lights nearly set off a queasy reaction in Roahn as the elevator shot the four of them—herself, Korridon, Sagan, and Kasumi—through the bowels of the station down to the massive ring of the Presidium. No one spoke on the way up, even though the strained silence was pressing upon all of them, an inclination to say even a solitary syllable. But after a few minutes, they were all spat out as the elevator reached its destination and a thick wall of illumination burst out to greet them.
In reflex, Roahn raised a hand as she stepped out from the lift. Her boots treaded onto a finely polished metal walkway. Details soon surged into focus. The artificial glint of projected clouds upon the curved ceiling. The uncontrolled sprawl of vegetation crawling out of their planters, spilling off the sides of the trapezoidal ledges that rimmed the metallic crevasse. Fountains upon the sculpted lakes continually spewing clear streams of water. Apart from the unchecked growth of the plants, the entire Presidium seemed normal. The only thing out of place was the lack of any people at all.
It was completely abandoned here.
Altogether, Roahn realized she had no idea what she should have expected. Even when the Vakarian had docked and her team had made their way through the lower levels of the wards to reach C-Sec Academy, which was their closest ticket to reaching the Presidium, they had not run across any living being to mark their path. Roahn had somewhat prepared herself for the fact that she would most likely be walking into rooms filled with corpses, the casualties of Aleph's conquest to rot where they had abruptly fallen. But there had been nothing. No sign of any of the victims or of the previous inhabitants. It was as if someone had cleanly wiped their existence away, reduced them to ashes so fine that they had broken apart into a nearly invisible stream with the barest gesture from their conqueror.
She had read the stories from the war. How the devastation from Sovereign's first foray onto the Citadel as well as the capture of the station by the entirety of the Reaper forces had brought complete devastation upon the superstructure. There had been tens of thousands of pictures from that time—snapshots of the damage: piles of burning bodies, shattered windows from blown-out storefronts, violent stains of blood from soldiers and civilians ripped apart by the Reapers' thralls, thousands of fires vomiting smoke into the thin air to create a slick, dark haze over the eternal cityscape. But there was none of that, this time around. Coming on approach to the station, the Vakarian had picked up no signs of obvious damage to the towering arms or to the critical systems that made the structure livable. There were no fires, no signs of the dead, nothing. The station simply had the smell of space about it, which was like burning electronics, but apart from that anomaly the presentation of the Citadel had been practically unchanged.
Roahn's stomach churned as she tried to imagine what all those people here had gone through. Just several million beings, dead in an instant. Now probably taken away to be put in the station's incinerators by the keepers, as those dutiful aphid-like creatures had a proclivity to eliminate any and all rubbish they tended to come across. What was a body to them, if not a piece of trash? The thought filled Roahn's head with dread.
She wondered if the path she had treaded through the Citadel had been across where a body had once lain. Trying desperately to push such things from her mind, she took a deep breath and carried on, towards the bridge that led across the sharp-edged lake.
Even though they could have sprinted across the Presidium, Roahn and her squad proceeded at a tender pace, the noise of their boot soles drowned out by the distant gurgling of the water features among the green-choked structures. They had no way of knowing if straggling hit squads were lying in wait, a final ambush prepared in advance to either slow or stop them in their tracks.
They proceeded past the cavernous markets and the empty presidios. They passed by darkened stores, many of the wares still sitting plaintively in their windowed positions. Some disused piping had burst in a few places, creating running streams across the ground. The rot of abandonment had not even set in yet. The station could be populated tomorrow and life would carry on as normally as it had been before. Infrastructure sans vita.
Roahn held up a fist and everyone knelt near a sequence of benches. She opened up her omni-tool to consult her map. She then pointed in the direction of a brightly lit corridor. "Elevator to Citadel Tower's that way. Everyone make one last check of your ammo. We're about to finally see this thing through."
An end to the nightmare. No more would she watch her friends die, to hold their broken bodies in her arms. Tonight, it would all end.
"A query," Sagan said. "Aleph no doubt recognizes the significance of using the tower as a location to stage an encounter. Is it possible that he would sidestep such expectations, considering the obvious goal?"
Roahn considered that for a moment before disagreeing. "Aleph can be subtle when he wants to, but knows when his methods require a more unmistakable approach. He's always wanted an audience, right? He wouldn't want to delay the inevitable by having us run around the station for a month. If he's going to be anywhere on the Citadel," she stabbed upwards with a finger, "he's going to be there."
A tight smile gripped Kasumi and she provided the commander with a confident nod. "Sounds reasonable to me. All right, Shep. Lead the way."
A long staircase acted as the final obstacle to the elevator down below. The four of them piled into the lift and Roahn flipped the switch. There was a slight thrum as the elevator's magnetic rails shot them upwards, but otherwise there were no other indicators that they were moving.
Roahn refused to let herself get complacent. She had learned from her father the last time he had tried infiltrating the Citadel Tower the first time it had been subject to a hostile takeover in his lifetime—the power had been cut by Saren and Shepard and her mother had been forced to magnetically latch onto the side of the spire, firing at geth drones and gunships all the while until they reached an entrance hatch. She kept a tight grip on her rifle, just in case she needed to blast out a window.
But the entirety of their journey passed by without any issues and soon the doors parted once again to allow them to step off upon the top floor. Roahn knew the entire layout of this room from memory. A tall chasm of dark metal led to a series of staircases that opened up into a wide, gardened anteroom. Circles of dead grass encompassed similarly sorry looking trees, the remains of their leaves all deposited in irregular swaths from the branches they had fallen off of. A tall window at the back of the room let the immediate sunlight jump in, making it seem like the dead trees had caught fire.
"Get ready," Roahn said in a hushed tone as she brought the stock of her weapon up to her shoulder. Medi-gel had eased the injuries she had received from her fight with the Haxan, but there was still the slight hitch in her gait when she walked.
"Right behind you," Korridon said, his rifle in a similar position.
Multiple staircases led up to the outcropped platform at the end, the segment of the walkway that would normally face the members of the Citadel Council. The squad maneuvered their way up them all, keeping their guns trained upon every shadowed corner, as if there were some demons that had yet to be unleashed hiding within them.
The pathway then straightened out, now lined by two rows of stout, cylindrical objects. Roahn led the way as she passed between them. But, right when she was about to walk past the last two, the tops of them soon burst open with an energetic blue light. Roahn jumped, finger on the trigger and ready to blast the things apart, but stayed her hand just in time. The massive hologram emitters, completely harmless, then spat an image each that flanked both sides of the column that led to the final staircase.
Roahn took a step back, her arms lowering as she gazed at the towering three-dimensional forms. "What… the hell?"
Embroidered in poses of cosmic elegance and strength, the slowly rotating figures of John Shepard and Tali'Shepard surveyed the Council chambers like ever-watchful guards. In their digital plinths, they looked as powerful and as wonderous as they had been in life. Shepard was depicted with his N7 armor on, both hands on a rifle, as he stared outward, towards the unknown beyond. Tali was shown gripping a pistol, one hand on her hip as she remained by her husband's side. The adornments glared above the beings that looked up at them from below, remaining locked in their statuesque poses.
And at the feet of the holograms, sets of dates glimmered in sans-serif golden lettering. Headstone dates. Documenting the span of their lives. The length of time they had lived as legends. There was no other labelling—for who in this galaxy would not be able to recognize the anointed pair that had been assembled for them right here?
"They're monuments," Korridon murmured. "Like graves."
"No," Roahn snarled. "They're just markers. Cenotaphs. Aleph is mocking us."
Kasumi looked to the as-of-yet unlit emitters they had passed. "He's created more. He's building some kind of mausoleum here."
"He thinks he's the one who's benevolent enough to honor them?! No. I'm the only one who can do that!"
Roahn walked to the projector that uplifted her father. Korridon saw what she was going to do and called out, "No, wait!"
But the quarian did not listen. She slammed the stock of her rifle square upon the circular glass of the emitter, cracking it, and sending glass flying. Delicate and triangular pieces of the mirror-like lens whipped into the air, searing so close to Roahn's body. The image of Shepard spasmed once before winking out. Roahn then turned to do the same to her mother's emitter as well and soon both were left in smoking, crumpled heaps, glass lying about their remains in wicked hemispheres.
Standing in between her handiwork, Roahn panted savagely. She then glanced upward, towards the final staircase. Are you trying to atone, Aleph? Attempting to find forgiveness for yourself? You won't get it. I can only grant you that, now. And when this is over, there will be no cenotaph to even mark your existence.
"Let's go," she just rasped, her thoughts a raging storm cloud.
They climbed up to reach the Council's audience chamber. The walkway simply terminated over a glass-walled garden, which contained an ancient tree taken from the oldest asari forest.
Yet there was another surprise waiting for them upon the edge of the platform. The walkway was not empty, but Aleph was not the one waiting for them. It was something else entirely.
A swirling mass of blue clouds with spirals of electricity radiating along its terminal lines seemed to float in place. A tear in reality and all conceptual believability, so it seemed. The clouds made a ring shape that blurred the boundary from where it existed in real-space. In the center of the tear, a dim pulse of pearl-blue wafted. A neutron-star glow. The light emitted forth was cold, and did not seem to illuminate any objects near it beyond a three-foot radius. Despite the frozen storm trapped within the vortex, the rip seemed incredibly stable, as its base outline did not waver or otherwise undulate. It remained as it was, a permeable boundary.
"Sagan?" Roahn whispered.
"Analyzing," the geth said behind her. "The field is a composite structure that appears to be primarily tachyonic. The opening has been stabilized from the nullification of the annihilation-factor between matter and antimatter. The mass of the field is inconclusive—presence of imaginary particles is one such possibility."
"Imaginary mass?" Korridon sounded incredulous. "Impossible. There's only one type of energy we know of that involves imaginary mass and that's what's found in the core of a mass relay."
Korridon seemed to realize what he just said and now all four of them were looking upon the rip in spacetime, uncertain as to what they were observing.
"We know the Monolith was capable of unimaginable things," Kasumi considered. "Who's to say it could not possibly create anything like this?"
"To clarify," Sagan jutted in, "the two scenarios are not completely congruent to one another. A mass relay's core contains a significant amount of element zero to fuel the spacetime corridor with its partner relay. There are only trace amounts of eezo found in this anomaly, but they are merely the byproduct of this established reaction, not the primary fuel. The presence of antimatter in the reaction suggests that Aleph had utilized the Monolith long before our arrival to open the anomaly and suppress it within a state of constant FTL."
Korridon tenderly took a step forward. "Where do you think it leads?"
Roahn already knew the answer to that question.
"To him."
The tempest beckoned, a rippling whisper sweeping from the calmed gales within. Torments of churning energy swirled and rolled, bare flashes of light revealing an endless tunnel at erratic intervals. A synthetic groan seemed to escape the object, like a gigantic plate of metal quickly being rent.
The future, once so far away, seemed to rush forward at ramming speed. Roahn felt her body throb, the remnants of the medi-gel knitting her bruised and cracked body back together as quickly as it could. The inside of her visor felt humid, even though the conditioners were tasked to capacity. With a slow series of motions, she smoothly stowed her rifle upon her back, her lungs feeling strained and a sensation of congestion clogging her head.
"Wait," Kasumi then said, her tool raised. "We've got incoming."
She was right, because out the window, past the spacetime tear, several shuttlecraft suddenly swooped from the light of the sun, their dotted outlines quickly sprouting wings as they came closer to the station. They shot on by the towering opening to the Council chambers, but it was clear from the caustic burn of control thrusters at the front of the craft that they were angling in to land close by. Quick reflections scarred white pulses upon the chamber, but they cleared enough for the squad to see the Dark Horizon symbol etched upon the sides of the ships.
"Reinforcements," Korridon sighed. He then turned back towards the entrance corridor back down those series of stairs, rifle at the ready. "We'll hold them off, Roahn. Go find him."
Blood thudded in Roahn's temples as she tenderly grasped his forearm. "I'm not going to beg for the right to do this alone."
"You won't have to. I know what you want, Roahn. Besides, my jaw still remembers what it feels like to disagree with you."
Roahn laughed, the reaction altogether unexpected and freeing. Light seemed to simmer in her eyes and she felt more at home in that moment.
"You bosh'tet. I'm coming back, you know."
Now it was Korridon's turn to chuckle. "You'd better. It'll be awful lonely around here without you."
Her heartbeat felt amplified as she stepped into the turian's stance. She wrapped one arm around Korridon's waist and let the other trail up to the back of his head (she had to stand on her tiptoes in order to do this). Gently, she pulled him into her, and the turian's forehead gently rested upon her visor as his own arms completed the embrace. They breathed as one, felt each other's racing pulse, and let their nervous shakes subside as they forcibly drowned everything that surrounded them out into a blurred backdrop. Here, even if it was only for a few seconds, they were free from fear. Free from pain.
Now, Roahn was complete.
When they broke apart, she felt rejuvenated, a winged raptor residing in her chest. She took two steps backwards, her eyes never leaving her friends.
There was Sagan, a few omni-drones already engaged and orbiting his golden armor, the pieces of an auto-turret in his hands. The geth gave his Creator a slow but precise nod.
There was Kasumi, calibrating her personal cloaking device, checking that her submachine guns were filled to the brim with thermal clips. A soft smile came to her lips and she supplied Roahn with an equally graceful bow.
And there was Korridon, who had said all he could say, his hands returning to his rifle once again. He mouthed something to Roahn, whose HUD automatically translated as a single line of text in front of her eyes. Just as quietly, she repeated the phrase to him—her vocabulator blinked, but no words escaped. The turian seemed to soften, nonetheless, and a flow of relief subsided within his bones.
She turned around to face the vortex, but looked over her shoulder one last time.
"Thank you," she said to all of them, even the ones who were not present.
Roahn walked up to the dark undertow, a shadowed portal to some netherworld. More electronic drumfire echoed as a ragged assault on the ears. She now stood inches away, feeling a slight surge of hesitancy. The chance of this going horribly wrong was not lost on her, but she had thrown away caution long ago.
She raised a hand and, after a deep breath, reached out and touched the rippling anomaly. Her fingers met resistance like she was passing through a slightly gelatinous barrier. There was the sting of static electricity that zipped up her arm.
She could not remember stepping inside.
A/N: Alas, poor Sam. I knew him well.
Truthfully, prior to even creating Cenotaph, I had toyed with the idea of killing Sam off in his own series, The Quantum Error, that preceded this one. However, I could not figure out a way to make that actually work, so I never ended up utilizing the idea... until now. Sam was one of my favorite characters that I've ever written, mostly because I enjoyed depicting someone with quite the acerbic attitude to act as a foil for the main characters. I am sad to send him off, but looking back at his arc, I'm very happy at how he ended up.
Playlist:
Autopilot Error / Roahn Zapped / Sam Wrests Control
"No Longer the Hunted"
James Horner
Apocalypto (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Sam+Nya / Departure
"The Ballad of Londinium (Bonus Track)"
Daniel Pemberton
King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Final Goodbyes / Enter the Void
"V Has Come To"
Ludvig Forssell
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (Original Video Game Soundtrack)