AN: Thanks everyone for the reviews and comments.
Still don't own anything here
edited the first chapter to change Tevros name to Tevos like it should be, and corrected a scene describing Shepherd to be more primarch sized, which I am putting at about 12 feet or 3.5 meters since that little fact is a bit hard to nail down. I think that might be a bit short actually, the new Guilliman model is like twice the size of a space marine which would be around 16 feet or almost 5 meters which seems a little tall for mass effect, I don't know. Shepherd only like 10 years old now anyway so lets say he still growing.
big author note at the end about universe differences and some spoilers about the future of the fic, read at your own caution, but suffice to say, we are playing a bit fast and loose with the cannon here.
reviews and critiques are welcome
Chapter 1: The Giant in the Hold
Tali Zorah nar Rayya was doing her best to hold off her all but inevitable panic attack in the hold of a Batarian pirate ship. The young Quarian had set off on her pilgrimage to find something of true value for the Quarian migrant fleet a bit sooner than she probably should have. She was only just barely an adult and exploring the wider galaxy at her age was a little risky, but she was the daughter of an admiral, and a genius engineer in her own right. She was destined for greater things, so it was natural that she would have to take on greater challenges than most and accomplish more than the average Quarian was expected to. She had had a plan as well, to succeed beyond the wildest expectations of her father or anyone else, all without actually putting herself in too much danger.
Elysium had been a perfect place to start. The world was full of opportunity, and humans did not share all the biases against Quarians that other races had. With her skills it would've been easy enough to earn a good job in some repair or research company, helping humans adapt their home brewed tech to the galactic standard, and if her own innovations caught on with the efficiency obsessed humans she could get rather rich quite quickly. She would've returned to the fleet not just with a new and functioning ship to join the flotilla, but contacts in the SA tech industry who would know that if they wanted a job done right they would go to a Quarian to do it.
Then not more than a month after she had made planet fall, and just a week after she had started a job she was certain she could climb the ranks with, the Batarians went and attacked the planet and captured her as a slave.
This was a bit of a set back for her plans.
'Not an impossible set back' she scolded herself. The Batarians needed engineers the same as everyone else. She was certain to get a job repairing spaceships of some kind. She just had to bide her time, lure the Batarians into a false sense of security by acting subservient. Then she would need to disable her explosive slave collar, hijack an unguarded interplanetary ship that could be piloted by a single person, and make a run for nearest mass relay. That was all, and then she would be right back on track, with a new spaceship for her troubles. Yeah, this was doable.
Oh god she was going die. She was going to be sold to some Batarian pervert with a Quarian fetish, raped, and left to slowly die in an exposed suit while the sick monster jacked off to her dying moans. This was not how things were supposed to end! This was just so unfair! What was she going to do?!
"Hey bucket head!" A female voice called to Tali from a nearby cage. "Yeah chicken legs I'm talking to you, pay attention for a second will ya?"
Tali looked in the direction of voice as she pulled her mind away from her rapidly deteriorating mental state. The woman was covered in a camouflaged poncho that obscured most of her features. She seemed to be leaning against a very large pile of rags, or ponchos or something with the same splattering of green and brown colors. Oddly she seemed to be the only person in her cage. All the other cages were either full to the brim or completely empty.
"Yes?" Tali asked the girl hesitantly. "What do you want?"
"Is it true that you Quarians are some of the best hackers in the galaxy?" The girl inquired.
"What?" Tail asked rather confused about the sudden interrogation.
"That's what people always say about all you anemics." The girl explained in a voice both condescending and strangely earnest, like she actually thought she was complimenting Tail. "Give a bucket head your network password and you'll have all your bank accounts cleared out by the afternoon. So is that true? Are you a leet haxor?"
"I think we both might have better things to worry about than racial stereotypes." Tali deadpanned back to the girl, growing more than a little frustrated at the name calling.
"Hey no need to blow a gasket." The girl responded, but before she could continue the large pile of rags she was laying on suddenly shook her quite violently. It seemed there was someone under her. And now that Tali really looked at the pile, it seemed that there was some kind of human face half shrouded near the top of the pile. The girl glared at her apparent companion before rolling her eyes and continued.
"Look," The girl continued, her voice now a bit annoyed but less insulting, "What I mean to say is, if we could get you an omnitool or something, do you think you could do something about the bombs tied to everyone's necks?"
Were they actually planning some kind of escape attempt? That was insane! Even if they could break free of the cages, they were a dozen or so armed guards in the cargo hold alone. Maybe another two or three hundred in the ship, and no way to even hope of escaping without killing them all, hijacking the ship, and hoping they could get it through a mass relay before the other pirate ships in the fleet blew them all to pieces. Still though, Tali wasn't going to get out of here on her own, and maybe they did have a real plan about how to escape alive.
"I can crack an omnitool easily enough." Tali explained, it wouldn't hurt to play up her talents and bit, and more importantly convince these two not to just throw their lives away. "But it's not that easy. The collars will be on a closed circuit, only accessible from a few select omnitools or terminals. Get me access to one of them and I can get them all off. If you can figure out which one. And get to it before they blow your head off. And they moment they come off you can bet the captain of this ship will be alerted and probably vent the atmosphere in here to knock us all out."
"Could you hack the ship's systems to stop that? The whole venting atmosphere thing."
Tali's instinct was to say no and turn the pair's energy to a more possible means of escape, but she couldn't speak for a moment. She had locked eyes with the hidden face in the rags for just a second. Part of Tali's mind, the part that spent its free time figuring out how to disassemble any machine she came across, noted that the eyes were a little too far apart. As if the whole face had been stretched out a bit. Most of her mind couldn't think of anything though for that second. Those eyes held her. They judged her. Weighed her, like a master engineer getting a feel for a new tool. She wasn't sure how she matched up to those eyes, but she didn't want to come up short. She felt like she had just presented a machine she had made to her father, and was waiting for his approval or critique. The eyes released her as quickly as they had caught her.
Now Tali found herself thinking about the problem. Really thinking about it, and carefully, not rushing to any conclusion. She had not gotten a good look at the ship when she was brought in, but she had a decent guess as to the make and model from what she had seen of the interior. Ironically, the Migrant Fleet used many of the same old discarded ship designs that most Batarian pirates favored. The main frame shouldn't be that different from what she was used to, and its security would've been written by Batarians, who were not the best at keeping their ships in proper working order in the first place. She was confident she could get into the network. The question was could she write viruses on the fly good enough to crack the ship's VI security before the room depressurized. It would be close.
"Maybe." She finally answered.
"Maybe?!" The girl exclaimed, "We don't exactly have the luxury for maybes right now."
"Well I won't know till I'm in the network and see what I'm up against." Tali said defensively, "Push comes to shove we could just force the doors open. They're not going to vent the whole ship just to deal with us."
"That would sort of let all the guards outside come in to have a go at us though."
"Dealing with the guards is your problem, not mine. I'm your 'chicken legged leet haxor' you're the muscle here."
"Heh," The girl laughed, "No I'm the sexy heroine and the brains of this outfit."
"Could've fooled me." Tali interrupted
"Shut it." The girl quipped back glaring at Tali, as she thumbed back at her bed of rags. "The big guy here is the muscle. What do you think big guy? Can you make do with a maybe?"
"It's good enough." The rags responded in a voice deep and gravely enough to make the inside of Tali's lungs reverberate. After that the group fell silent. Time slipped past slowly, as the rag man seemed to wait for something to happen. His partner was less inclined to enjoy the silence though and eventually spoke up.
"I'm Jack by the way," the now named Jack suddenly clarified. "The big guy here is Shepherd."
"Tali Zorah nar Rayya," Tali responded, "do you two have an actual plan to escape?"
"Not exactly," Jack explained.
"Do you at least have an idea about how to escape? Besides doing the impossible I mean."
"Well again no. See the thing is, we haven't really been caught yet," The girl in the cage claimed with a perfectly straight face, "The current goal is actually to hijack the ship, and then see how things play out from there."
"I'm sorry what?" Tali asked in confusion.
"Quiet." The rags ordered in that almost impossibly deep voice. "Here comes our chance."
Their chance appeared to be a rather large red armored Krogan. Tali thought he was part of the Blood Pack, a Krogan mercenary band who took on the toughest jobs those with money could offer. The Batarian pirates had used squads of them to back up their attacks on Alliance military installations to keep the SA from defending their civilians while the slavers plied their trade. The Krogan's face was badly scared but still youthful looking somehow. He carried a rather large shotgun in one hand and a electrical prod in the other he was using to force the future slaves away from the bars. As he passed the pile of rags he jabbed it hard, after a moment or two the pile shifted back away from the bars with a grunt and a glare. The Krogan froze up for a moment as those eyes captured him as they had Tali. The Blood Pack member also took a half step away from the cage. But after that moment he grunted and turned to walk away.
Okeer, Krogan warlord, Blood Pack Battlemaster, rachni queen slayer, terror of the turians and despoiler of a dozen worlds, was board out of his skull. This was nothing new to him, after the 'rebellions' his radical views had seen him driven from Krogan society, and he had spent many a long year doing nothing of any real consequence as he scrounged together resources for his greater goal. Joining the Blood Pack had promised him a chance to actually fight from time to time again, but even during the rachni wars every battle had been followed by endless hours of drudgery and boredom.
The humans had put up a pretty decent fight, despite being caught unprepared and badly outnumbered. The fight had been finished quickly and the Batarians had retreated before any real soldiers came to put them down. So now Okeer scrolled through the data on his omnitool, marking the names of the surviving Krogan and their exploits for future reference and tracking. The Blood Pack were, by most Krogan standards, a truly detestable lot. Fighting for money and stims, instead of clan and glory. But Okeer cared little for that. The important fact was that they were still out in the galaxy fighting and facing the worst the Citadel and the Terminus had to offer. If a Krogan could live through that, and live for a long time, then his genes might actually be worth something, he might bring Okeer one step closer to completing his true goal.
Okeer was roused from his study by an odd sound that echoed through the cargo hold. It was half a growl, half a whimper, with a chittering undercurrent like some kind of insect. It was a fair approximation of a thresher rat's warning cry. The thresher rat was a scavenger from the Krogan homeworld of Tuchanka, that would often flee from any danger that it faced while screaming a warning nearby rats of the danger. Thus this cry was often imitated by Krogan youths to imply that another Krogan was running away from a challenge he lacked the courage to face on his own.
In off itself it was not that odd a thing to here amongst a bunch of bord Blood Pack members who were often young and dumb enough to start fights when they should be guarding and intimidating the slaves into submission. But it had not come from the Blood Pack. It had come from a man sitting in a pile of dull rags, in a cage in about the middle of the hold. And it had come just after that man had been electrocuted by a passing member of the Blood Pack. Okeer was impressed that any human even knew what a thresher rat was, muchless how to imitate one, or the effect it might have on a young Krogan with something to prove. It was still a unbelievably stupid thing to do that would get the man pounded into a pile of mush. Should be entertaining to watch.
When the young Krogan in question heard that cry he did something of a double take at the rag man. He was stunned at first, no doubt for the same reason that Okeer was. The young Krogan's silence quickly gave way to rage though. The lad would never have taken that from one of his peers, or even from a full battlemaster, no way he was going to take that from some human slave.
"You got something to say to me slave?" The Krogan demanded slamming into the bars of the cage.
"Nothing that could be worse than looking at your face coward," The rag man replied, his voice was deep and gruff, patronizing and condescending, a judgemental father who knew he would soon have to put his son is his place. "Going around shocking wretched slaves, safely locked behind bars from you. So much for Krogan pride."
"Big words for a man taken without a fight." The Krogan retorted as he began to pace around the cage like a predator.
"I might be worried if you were a proper Krogan fighting for a mate back home," The man declared rushing down the path to destruction. Maybe he thought being killed by the Krogan would be less terrible than being a Batarian slave. Okeer could respect that, the desire to die with his boots on. Honor was good, living to fight on and help your people was better.
"Instead," The man continued pouring oil on the flame, "Your just some jumped Batarian lap dog attacking undefended planets for a quick pay out. Can't blame you for giving up on that dream though, I can't imagine the poor humpless girl desperate enough to give you a shot at her."
"Say that to my face human!" The Krogan shouted as he slammed himself against the cage door. "Come out here, and let me show you what a real Krogan can do!"
"I see no reason to trounce you just so your boss can blow my head off." The rag man declined pointing to his throat with a rather large finger. "Take off this collar and I'll give you a fight to write any legend about."
"Okeer!" The Krogan shouted towards the front of the hold, where Okeer lounged with a few more Blood Pack members and a few Batarians. "Do me a favor and release this slave for me! I need to teach him some manners!"
"Garn," Okeer called back, "If one human can goad you so easily, maybe I should have you stand there and take his barbs till you learn to control yourself for once. On the other hand this trip is as boring as a Salarian poetry slam, so I guess this could be a little fun to watch."
"Okeer!" One of the Batarians yelled at the Krogan, "Your paycheck, as well as mine is riding on these slaves getting to Torfan in one piece! I won't have you brutes breaking the merchandise!"
"Oh lighten up," Okeer retorted, "The slaves have to learn sooner or later not to talk back to their betters. What cage is that Garn?"
"415." Garn answered, "He's the only male in there so it should be easy enough find the right collar."
Okeer looked puzzled at that, and after glaring at his omnitool for a moment he spoke again. "There are no prisoners listed in 415. What's going-"
Before he could finish that thought, there was brief flash of light followed by a resounding crash. Okeer recognized the blue after trail ripping out of the cage of a biotic charge. The rag man had used a mass effect field to create a tunnel of massless space through which he could launch himself at the Krogan with mind blowing speed. Normally such a power was used to quickly close the distance for shotgun attacks or to outflank entrenched enemies. Most people wouldn't dare use such a power on a krogan, since it left the attacker within easy reach for the krogan to snap them in half. Most people wouldn't have tried to charge through the cage's steel door as well as the krogan on the other side. Most people weren't that massive though.
The man was a giant. Three meters tall at the very least, maybe even four. He towered over the cages and all the humans in them, like a full grown man standing next to little children. Honestly he made the krogan he had pinned between his cage's torn off doors and the bars of the next cage over, look miniscule. How the hell had the Batarians managed to catch something like that? Unless they hadn't. Okeer noticed that the man had no collar on his neck. That was not a good sign. Well things were getting interesting now at least.
As Tali, Okeer and everyone in the whole room, except for Jack, struggled to process just what had just happened, Shepherd grabbed the cage door he had torn off to get at the krogan and then casually threw it back over his shoulder towards three Batarians on a cat walk over looking the cargo hold. All three fell to the ground, knocked from the gantry by the passing missile, their shields broken, their bodies twisted into mangled heaps by the force of the hit. Then the Giant grabbed the stunned krogan and threw him over head down the corridor of cages into a another pair of Batarians smashing them beneath the krogan's bulk. In a few passing seconds the giant had disabled half the guards in the cargo hold.
"Don't just stand there shoot him!" Okeer ordered, as he snapped free from his stupor, shoving past the Batarian commander towards the giant as he and his Blood Pack readied their weapons.
The Giant smirked and took off to the side, putting the valuable cargo of slaves between the pirates and their enemy. The Batarians and Blood Pack hesitated to kill their pay day, as Shepherd closed in on another pair of pirates. Before either Batarian could react, Shepherd's arms snapped out and caved in both their chests, crushing shields and armor as the giant tore past them.
Behind him, another seven Batarians rushed over from the other side of the room trying to hunt Shepherd down. Jack appeared behind them, having left her cage in the confusion of Shepherd's assault. Before any of the Batarians noticed her, she had created a singularity in their midsts, dragging all six into the center of the sudden gravity vortex, draining their shields and shredding their armor. Jack then casually detonated the vortex with a simple biotic pull to destabilize it, throwing the Batarians into the neighboring cages as waves of dark energy pulsed out of the collapsed mini black hole. Not all of them were dead, but Jack had no problem taking their guns and throwing them to the people in the cages on either side of them.
Two of the Krogan charged towards the approaching giant as behind them the last Batarians still seemed paralyzed with fear. Their claymore shotguns roared as they blasted at Shepherd, but the shots slammed against a biotic barrier surrounding the giant without effect. The guns went silent as their inner mechanism tried desperately to cycle the heat and prepare another shot. They had no time though. Shepherd balanced on a heel and snapped two kicks into both the krogan's skulls. The stunned Blood Pack fell to their knees and took another pair of knees to their temples as the giant walked passed their unconscious forms.
Okeer cried his challenge to the monster before him and formed his own singularity in the path of the advancing primarch. Shepherd leaned into the vortex of gravity before jumping into the air and twisting up and over the vortex. Just as he reached the far side of the singularity in a parody of an orbit, Jack detonated it with a biotic throw and launched Shepherd through the air towards his last few targets. He twisted as he fell and came down in a spinning kick, scything through the assembled pirates. Okeer growled and ducked under the flying primarch as the paralyzed Batarians were smashed into the ground, their bodies twisted and broken by the strike.
Shepherd landed easily and spun around, snapping another kick at Okeer, who again ducked and dodged to the side. As he passed, Okeer brought his modified claymore to bear and fired off two point black shots as his assailant. The first caught Shepherd in the chest, stripping away the last of his barrier and driving a few pellets into his stomach. But Shepherd was already on the move. He avoided the second blast, grabbed the overheated shotgun and pulled it from Okeer's grasp.
Okeer threw himself forward to get within the primarch's reach, holding his arms close to his chest he threw two quick jabs at the human, who pulled back to avoid them. Shepherd spun another kick at the old krogan, who twisted, ducked and slid under the blow. Okeer rushed forward, shoulder checked the giant and threw him back into one of the cages. Shepherd bounced back quickly sending three quick jabs at Okeer, who again seemed to slip down and under the giant's strikes, swinging his head around from the side as he dodged, Okeer brought his fist up hard into Shepherd's kidney in a wild swipe.
Shepherd again gave ground to pull out of Okeer's range, his eyes wild with passion and excitement at the sight of the old Krogan's determination and skill. As he came back his feet seemed to stumble over the bodies of one of the fallen Batarians. Okeer smiled at the weakness and surged forward, but Shepherd managed to hook a foot under the Batarian and he snap kicked the corpse at the Krogan warlord. Again Okeer ducked and twisted around the body flying at him, but now his movement was committed, and as his head came up past the dead Batarian, his face came to meet Shepherd's swinging fist.
It had been more than a few centuries since Okeer was last forced to see stars dance before his eyes, as his head was snapped back. He tried to get his feet back under him to dodge what he knew what would follow, but it was no good, he had been partially lifted off the ground and he had no traction. The second fist came round from the other side and Okeer was left fighting to see anything at all, as he mind threatened to black out. He felt Shepherd grab one of his arms, followed by the cold numbness of a stasis field covering it, and then nothing but searing pain from that elbow down, before at last he blessedly passed out.
"Here's your miracle bucket head." Jack called to Tali, snapping her out of her stupor as she threw her Okeer's severed arm contained in a stasis field complete with omnitool undamaged and running. The omnitools main components were hardwired into the armor itself, and required a DNA key to open. Since the omnitool thought the stasis field encapsulated arm was still attached to Okeer, Tali easily opened it and prepared to transfer it to her own biosignature.
"If you could hurry it up with the whole freeing people and hacking the ship thing." Jack continued as she used her biotics to start pulling cage doors open and freeing the people trapped within. "That would be good. I don't think any of them thought to send out a security alert, but their omnitools probably monitor their life signs. So the captain of this ship will just have been alerted to their deaths, so right now he'll be checking the security cam footage to find out how that happened. And once he pulls his jaw off the floor at the sight of what Shepherd just did, he will probably start venting the air in here, or just popping people's heads."
"I've got the collars isolated already, they'll be off soon." Tali assured her while she tapped away at the golden holographic display. "Also, how the hell did he managed to do all that? I've never seen anything move that fast before, not even geth primes are that agile and powerful."
"Well mostly he just runs about and punches people." Jack replied, freeing more people and gathering the discarded weapons of Shepherd's victims as she went. "For most people that wouldn't work I know, but most people aren't Shepherd."
With that Jack abandoned the Quarian and made her way over to the giant in question. Most of the people who were out of their cages were now working to free the others. Soon enough the whole mass of some six or seven hundred people would be free. Shepherd himself was pulling steel bars free from the cages and using them to tie up the Krogan Blood Pack.
"They're still alive?" Jack questioned in disbelief. "How?"
"A very durable species, Krogans." Shepherd answered in a much too neutral tone.
"You pulled your punches." Jack surmised, very much aware of what Shepherd could do after spending the previous night hunting teams of Batarian special forces. She looked the giant over as well and noticed a rather large crimson stain near his gut.
"You've been shot." She observed. "You pulled your punches and got shot."
"The battlemaster was a bit quicker than expected I admit." Shepherd explained.
"Do you have any idea what your mother is going to do to me when she learns I let you get shot?" Jack demanded.
"No worse than what she's already going to do to us both for running off like this." Shepherd countered. "The wound's already closed anyway, and none of these guys are going to bother us any further. So everything's good."
"Your scheming something aren't you?" Jack accused.
"Of course I am," Shepherd admitted, "But nothing divergent from the original plan. You know what we have to do."
"Yeah I know." Jack accepted.
"Good to know you're still with me." Shepherd said with a easy smile. "What's our haul?"
"17 assault rifles," Jack said listing off the captured weapons. "Fifteen Terminators and a pair of Avengers, plus four shotguns, all claymores, and a wide variety of pistols and submachine guns."
"You would think they would have more men guarding this hold." Shepherd mused, "Six hundred people could've torn the handful of defenders they have here to pieces with their bare hands."
"Yes they could've. After the broke out of their cages," Jack countered, "While they charged down the narrow aisles all while taking automatic fire from every side as that battlemaster pops their heads off in whole swaths. These people are scared civilians Shepherd, not hardened soldiers. Even if they the gall to try something like that, they wouldn't have the nerve to carry it through."
"Yes," Shepherd said as he rose up to his full height and captured the attention of the entire room. "We will have to change all that."
"Everyone listen up!" Shepherd bellowed, startling several with the depth of his voice, "My name is Shepherd, I am a super soldier that was secretly being studied by the Alliance on Elysium and I am here to make sure you all get home safe and sound."
All true, probably anyway, Jack never bought into the idea that Shepherd might be some new race of alien, and no one would make a designer baby that could spit acid, unless they really hated their wives. It might have sounded to some like he had been made by the SA and sent to rescue them, which was not true, but no one was going to question Shepherd. No one ever questioned Shepherd, even the military and research staff back at the base.
"Unfortunately there are a little over three hundred pirates on this ship," Shepherd explained sounding a little disappointed, "And they all want to stop me from doing that. Now while I would love to just single handedly and heroically kill everyone of them myself and send us all home. If they should come back here while I cleaning house and recapture all of you, that would put me in a real bind."
It was probably his size, Jack thought to herself. Even Elcor and Krogan didn't come up to more than Shepherd's pelvis. So people spent a conversation with him straining their necks to look up into his face while the little monkey part of their brains that grew up on the african savanna is screaming at them not to make the elephant angry. Monkeys will fight lions if they think they can win, or at least get away with it. But an elephant will just step on them and be done with it. That kind of information gets passed on down the evolutionary line.
"So the best thing we can all do right now," Shepherd continued as if everything was a simple as it could conceivably be, "Is get you all armed to the teeth with as many guns, shields and armor as we can. Now lucky for us the armory is not to far from where we are right now. So we just to clear a path from here to there, and get everyone nice and well armed. And once you all are safe we can take the ship easily enough."
The crowd accepted his words as gospel. They looked nervous, fearful and desperate. Shepherd's easy confidence was infectious though, and now there was a glint of hope in their eyes. They were all on the verge of collapsing into despair just a few minutes before as they considered a possible future as slaves to the Batarians, but now they had a fighting chance. He stood before them like a vengeful father defending his family. There was something easily comforting in that and the obedience such a relationship commanded. 'Do what daddy tells you and everything will turn out all right.'
"Now," Shepherd said with a brief clap of his hands and with a smile on his face "Do we have any alliance military personnel or police officers in here?"
A few hands went up around the crowd and six men and women advanced to stand before the giant. One man was injured, a bandage holding medi-gel on his leg. He had probably been overpowered during the fighting at one of the military installations. The others were unscathed, probably taken while visiting their families at home.
"Anyone here a hunting enthusiast?" Shepherd called out gathering more men to his side. "Any gun nuts with a lot of shooting range experience? Any farmers?"
"Farmers?" Someone in the crowd asked, "I'm one but I don't know what good I can do."
"You've chased off coyotes and other preds from your farm though right?" Shepherd reasoned, beckoning the man forwards with a wave of his hand and an easy smile. "Same thing here really, only the coyotes actually do a few good things for society, so you won't even need to feel bad about shooting the pirates."
All told he now had about fifty or sixty people around him. Shepherd handed two of the rifles and three of the smgs to the uninjured Alliance military. The injured man got one of the claymores and a suggestion to use it while prone to try and control the recoil. Shepherd himself took Okeer's modified claymore, he gave Jack a third and his farmer friend the last. The rest of the rifles he handed over to the hunters, and the rest of the pistols and smgs were handed as they could be. Luckily most of the gun nuts and hunters knew each other and quickly recommended which of them were the best shots and the most athletic. Shepherd made sure Tali got a tempest, though she barely noticed as she was still wrapped up in the omnitool. Jack doubted she even noticed she had somehow been dragged up to the front of the room with everyone else.
"You sure using the civies is a good idea chief?" A marine from the alliance asked, "I'm sure with us holding down things here you could do your thing well enough."
Jack didn't doubt that. Heck she could probably keep everyone here safe herself while Shepherd went berserk on the pirates. But rescuing these people wasn't the real mission here. The real mission was to rescue everyone. Shepherd needed soldiers to pull that one off, and he would have to make them now.
"I'm a firm believer in overkill marine." Shepherd counterd, "We've got the manpower to take the ship easily enough, we just need the firepower. Tali how's hacking coming?"
"Making steady progress." Tali explained, still with her helmet turned down to her omnitool, "The captain has sealed us in here and has diverted the life support system away from us. I've connected our air vents to the adjoining rooms so we're still getting a steady flow of air, if in a round about matter. He hasn't noticed the work around yet. He also hasn't declared a general alert of the ship yet which is odd."
"He won't want the rest of the ship to know how badly things have gone here." Jack interjected, "Pirate captains live by reputation, he can't let his own men know their payday is in jeopardy or else they might start thinking they can do his job better. He'll be sending a small, loyal and skilled band to mop up things after we've run out of air."
"I love it when people underestimate me." Shepherd declared with a look of bliss on his face. "Makes things so much easier."
He turned to the soldiers, face now hardened like stone, those granite eyes of his holding theirs like a vice. "If they break in here and get these people back in those collars this whole thing will have failed badly. Your the best men we have. You will hold the line. You will show these pirate scum what real fighters can do. You WILL get everyone here back home safe and sound."
The soldiers snapped to attention, guns held at the ready, eyes full of cold fury. The attack at Elysium had taken them all by surprise. They had been taken without a fight. They had failed to protect their people, their families, their honor and their pride. But now orders had come down from on high. The stakes were high, but the victory would be greater still. They would not fail.
"I'll take everyone else with a gun," Shepherd resumed turning to the crowd at large, "We will take that armory and hold the ground in between, but that's just the beginning. We need to organize and prepare. Everyone else, start fortifying this room, strip the guards of their armor and omnitool, make barricades against the doors. Use the Krogan for that, we can't use their armor anyway. Then start organizing everyone else. Find out what people can do. Get anyone with a background in computer security on those terminals to start hacking. Get anyone with a medical background making bandages and collecting medi-gel. Get everyone else old enough to hold a gun familiar with their use.
"Once we've secured the way to the armory I'll send runners with some better guns back here. Then we start moving teams of people over to the armory and get them armed and organized into fire teams. And I mean everyone, this is not the time to think of civilian or age or anything else. We are fighting for survival and freedom. If you want to get through this alive, then you have to reach out and seize that life with your own hands. Your lives are in your hands, and we will all make it through this together.
"Jack you've got things here?" Shepherd concluded turning to his old friend away from the crowd.
"You know it." Jack answered with a smirk. "No one's getting in here while I have anything to say about it."
"Tali you're with me." Shepherd ordered, actually getting the quarian to snap her head up.
"What?" Tail stammered in confusion. "But I can do my work from here just fine. And do it much better while not getting shot at."
"Might need you hack things on the way there. Can't afford to slow things down with runners and delayed communications." Shepherd stated as he turned away from everyone and walked over to the wall of the room. The walls were all covered in heavy sheets of steel riveted in place. Shepherd drove his fingers forward into the seems between two pieces, hooked his fingers under the metal sheet and pulled it from the wall, exposing the wiring and plumbing between it and the wall to the corridor beyond. Then he drove two bars of iron from one of the cages through the center of the wall panel and into one of the doors on the side of the hold making a kind of handal for the thing. Then he pulled up, out of its grooves in the floor and off of the machinery holding it in place. The pair of Batarian guards on the other side could only stare in wonder as the door they were guarding was ripped open and then used to smash them both to the side like ragdolls.
"You won't really have to worry about being shot at anyway." Shepherd reassured her as he turned back to the crowd now sporting a three meter tall, one and a half meters wide, and four centimeter thick steel shield, that now glowed purple with a biotic barrier running around it.
"The pirates won't be able to stop themselves from desperately trying to stop the shotgun wielding wall from slowly walking towards them." Shepherd explained with a smile. "Now follow me people, to glory and freedom!"
AN: just to clarify a small matter brought up by one reviewer. This story is taking place in a AU where the Mass Effect and Warhammer galaxies are one in the same. Earth is not Terra, but it was settled in a system almost identical to that of Sol, which happened more often than you might think, and when the age of strife broke out it was knocked back to bronze age level tech and had to climb back up from nothing, following actual human history easily enough from the bronze age collapse onward.
The citadel races have never encountered any of the warhammer races, other than mankind and them only recently. The Asari first began exploring the galaxy with mass effect technology, which was unaffected by the lingering warp storms that isolated the various warhammer races, only about 2500 years ago, about half way into the age of strife. Since the citadel races only settle near the mass relays and space is a really big place, even now that the age of strife has ended and warp travel is possible once more, no one has managed to stumble into them quite yet. Since the citadel races don't travel through the warp they rarely mutate and have almost no psychers, like the Tau in 40k, and so demons don't really care about them and mostly leave citadel society alone. So citadel history has proceed just as it did in the games without much change.
Meanwhile the Emperor made the primarchs, lost them, and has launched the great crusade to reunite them. Time is weird with warp travel and there is no telling just how long Shepherd was in the warp for, but it will still be another century at least till the horus heresy breaks out. And the
Emperor will no doubt soon be very confused about how the psychic signal of one of his sons which had been steady on a single planet for about a decade, is now jumping about nearly from one side of the galaxy to the other, almost instantly and without ever entering the warp. He might need Magnus's help to track this one down.
Now you may be wondering how come citadel planets haven't been ravaged by warp storms and demon invasions like everyone else's were, while Nurgle and Slaanesh had their big slap fight? How do the Reapers play into all this? Wouldn't the Reapers have tried to wipe out the Orks and Eldar? How can Chaos even be a thing if the Reapers have been cleansing the galaxy every 50k years or so? I have answers to these questions, but they're tied into a slightly different origin story for the Reapers which kind of constitutes spoilers for the future. But it also probably won't come up for a rather long time, if I ever even get to it. I won't lie to you readers, I have only ever finished one story on this site, and I was slightly insane at the time i did that so odds are this might get abandoned, but probably not for a while yet. So for what it's worth spoilers below read at your own peril. I will delete this part of the AN if we ever get to the part where this information comes up naturally in the story.
SPOILERS: The Leviathan, the race that made the Reapers were creations of the Old Ones back during the war in heaven. Basically the Leviathans were used to transport krork and Eldar armies to assault Necron worlds that had been cut off from the warp and webway by the Doleman Gates. Their indoctrination powers were given to them to suppress their krork passengers for safe transport. But when the Old Ones began to lose control of the krorks this indoctrination proved less effective and several Leviathan were killed by their own passengers before they could reach their targets. So the Leviathan created the Reapers to do their jobs for them. They gave the Reapers souls from dead Leviathans, or just created artificial souls for them contained inside a system similar to the Eldar's infinity circuits, located at the heart of the Reapers. These souls allowed the Reapers to resist being hacked and taken over by the mechanical necrons, and meant that if the Reapers lost control of their Krork passengers they could eject their souls, self destruct their bodies, and then have new bodies made for their souls with zero consequences.
When the war in heaven came to its close and the enslavers began rampaging through out the galaxy, the Leviathan realized the true scope and threat of the warp. As they tried to come up with a solution to this problem, the Reapers came up with their own. Kill every soul bearing thing in the galaxy to reset the warp. So the Reapers converted most of the remaining Leviathan into Reapers and then spread the enslaver swarms across the galaxy to kill everything. The Reapers then left the galaxy so that their own souls wouldn't interfere with the warp resetting.
When they came back 50 thousand years later to check on how things were going, they found that they Eldar and Krorks had survived the enslavers. New life was beginning to evolve in the galaxy. And the warp had gotten even worse as the souls of all the people killed by the enslavers had filled the warp with hatred and loss. Unsure of what to do next, the Reapers contacted the Eldar, whom they had been allies with in the past, shared their concerns about the warp with them and tried to come up with a plan.
The Eldar also knew how dangerous the warp could be, and by this point had created their race of gods to suppress the warp and keep their own psychic power from further poisoning it. They were taking steps to trick the Krorks into doing the same, but with all the new races evolving and fighting each other the most the eldar could do was keep things from getting worse. They suggested that the Reapers should wipe out the younger races, but not by just killing them. Instead they should convert their souls into new Reapers, that way all the murdered souls don't pour into the warp and continue to corrupt it. If the Reapers periodically did this, than the warp should gradually weaken to the point where the Eldar gods could change it back into the more peaceful realm of souls. So the Reapers built the mass relays, planted examples of mass effect technology throughout the galaxy and periodically swept through it to wipe out developing civilizations lured into a dead end tech path that could never pose a threat to the Reapers or the Eldar.
The plan might even have worked. If the Eldar had kept their end of the bargain and tried to cure the warp. But the warp posed no threat to them and having the Reapers clean house every sixty thousand years or so saved them from having to do it themselves. Plus, without enemies other than themselves and the Eldar to fight, the Krorks slowly devolved into the modern Orks, not as dangerous, still impossible to completely wipe out though. So for millions of years the Reapers bravely and heroically fought against the growth of Chaos while doing their best to save the souls of the galaxy before they were lost to the predators of the warp. While the Eldar sat around making art, culture and enjoying the greatest civilization in the history of the galaxy content in the knowledge they had turned a noble race of machines into an over glorified pest control service.
The last Reaper cleansing wiped out the Protheans about ten thousand years or so before the birth of the Emperor. The Reapers foresaw humanity's eventual growth to the stars and so planted some 'prothean' ruins on mars and stuck a mass relay in orbit around pluto. But they failed to notice the gradual degradation of Eldar culture or the C'tan sleeping on mars. The Void Dragon, though slumbering was not yet fully suppressed by the Emperor, and didn't take kindly to a piece of 'Old One' tech being placed on its doormat. So the mars facility and the mass relay were both invaded by the Void Dragon's programming and were completely gutted of their power. The Void Dragon's corruption spread across the relay network, slowly but effectively, destroying many installations and allowing many races to develop free of their influence. But then the Emperor suppressed the Dragon and most of the network escaped unscathed.
When the age of terra began mankind discovered both the mars installation and the dead relay in charon, but only as inert and inactive ruins. No database of 'prothean' tech, no element zero, no means to leave the Sol system for another 13 thousand years or so when warp travel was finally perfected.
Meanwhile, the Eldar turned to a culture of hedonism and debauchery. Their gods lost power, the warp gained strength so that the first three chaos gods gained sentience. Including Tzeentch the god of innovation, technology and progress, who was riding high off the Eldar building the greatest civilization ever, allowing him to greatly accelerate the progress of technology. Especially for humans who were also guided by the Emperor.
So the age of technology happened, many races spread through the galaxy without mass effect. Humanity eventually found other relays and Reaper databases, but by that point mankind was used for flying the massive ships used for warp travel, which were simply to big for the network to handal. So mass effect was mostly ignored, to the point that after the Men of Iron uprisings the new STCs don't contain any mention of element zero or its many strange uses.
Then Slaanesh was born, the Eldar were almost wiped out, the Eye of Terror is now a thing and the galaxy was plunged into five thousand years of conflict and isolation. Luckily for the citadel races the mass relays contain some necron tech to suppress the warp around them. This was to limit the damaged the soul bearing races could inflict on the warp as they spread through the galaxy but before the Reapers came to kill them all. So the home worlds of the citadel races were only ever hit by warp storms near the beginning of the age of strife when papa Nurgle was still showing Slaanesh the back side of his pimp hand. They have ancient legends of demons and monsters invading their worlds, but no one really believes them.
So yeah you can probably imagine just how much Sovereign is freaking out at the thought of how out of control things have gotten.
I hope that clarifies things. If you have any questions about this, feel free to PM me for more.
Thanks for reading and reviewing.