A/N: We're obviously skipping ahead a few years. Shepard graduated from the ICT with flying colors as a Vanguard... because when you don't have any fear, scary situations simply become another weapon in your arsenal. If bloody close quarters battle isn't terrifying, what is?
This is probably the last "non-game" chapter for a while. Pretty much everything else from here on will be in context of the game, or very closely tied to it. Also, uh... this is going to be sort of brutal. Probably gratuitously so. I'm sorry in advance, as 'subtle' really isn't what I'm good at. Hopefully I'll get better.
Shepard stepped into the small conference room, surprised to find that it was already mostly filled. She'd always preferred to be early to meetings, both in the Reds and in her life in the military. It let her scope out the area, check exits, and keep an eye on the people that arrived after her. As an added benefit, many people saw it as professional to be slightly early – that it matched her natural proclivities was an extra advantage to her.
She scanned the room quickly, noting the sound-dampening environment, the faraday cage warning on the wall, and the discrete – but unavoidable – scanner positioned in the entry hall. Whatever got discussed in this room stayed in this room, and she wondered what sort of briefing this was supposed to be.
Whatever it was, it was likely to be interesting.
She took a seat near the door, off to the side. She never liked being in line of sight of a door. If someone stormed the room she was in, she liked not being the first target picked... but at the same time, she didn't like being trapped in the back of a room that people were suddenly trying to escape from. Her preference, if one was available, was a seat near the exit but not directly next to it.
She headed for one of the typical, mass-produced plastic desks near the left wall of the room while giving the occupants of the room a discrete study. They were men and women, all from different branches of service and of varying ranks. She was surprised to see a full general present at a briefing with a pair of lowly second lieutenants. As a freshly-promoted lieutenant commander, she fell roughly in the middle of the crowd.
This was definitely going to be an interesting briefing.
A quiet but piercing alarm behind her snapped her head around, and she looked over to see a full admiral rolling his eyes and taking an omni-tool projector out of his pocket before stuffing it in a tray by the door. Noticing her glance, he smiled at her. "Wear one so often, you forget about it sometimes," he said jokingly.
"As you say, sir," she replied politely as he walked toward the podium at the front of the room. What little conversation there had been among the members of the audience quieted respectfully as he stepped up and cleared his throat.
"Alright, ladies and gentlemen, the sooner we get rolling, the sooner we can be done," he announced to the room while the lights dimmed.
He cleared his throat, giving the room a quick once-over before speaking."I see we've got some new faces here," he said with a brief nod at Shepard and a few of the others. "We don't generally like to take fresh blood without a longer vetting period, but the sheer scale of this operation means we don't have much of a choice," he grimaced, and several members of the audience nodded sympathetically.
"With that in mind, let's get the usual warnings out of the way: This meeting never happened and speaking about anything you hear to anybody not in this room right now is grounds for all kinds of unpleasantries that we'd really rather avoid. If you're concerned over the legitimacy of this operation, I can get you written orders after the brief."
Well. It looks like "interesting" doesn't even begin to cover it.
"As you may be aware," he said in a dry tone, "A couple years ago, hegemony-backed batarian raiders attacked our colony at Elysium. SOP in cases like this is to locate the group that launched the attack and take them out to discourage this sort of activity. So far, it's worked well enough, but we've never had to deal with an attack this brazen or this large before. Luckily for us, the size of the raid means it's nearly impossible for them to go to ground, and we've tracked down where they launched from."
"Our target is a large subterranean batarian base on the moon of Torfan," he said, thumbing a projector to life and turning the lights in the room all the way off. "It's nominally an independent slaving operation, but a lot of Hegemony defensive emplacements and ships have 'found' their way into the slavers' hands."
The holographic moon expanded, zooming in on a large hive-like structure nestled into the side of a small hill on the northern half of the planetoid. The admiral, whose name Shepard still didn't know, pointed at the entrance.
"The goal of this operation is to send the batarians a message," he said. "If we just wanted it gone, we'd just pound the entrance from orbit and set up a picket to watch for anyone digging out. You're going to be going in on foot to clear the base, nominally in case there are any slaves inside that might be killed by an orbital bombardment. The true reason is because pretending we think there are slaves there makes the next part easier to pull off."
"Sir, with all due respect, that's a deathtrap," one of the lieutenants interrupted. "Assaulting a fortified valley on foot, and then pushing in to a military bunker?" he shook his head skeptically, and several of the other soldiers in the room nodded agreement.
He leaned forward on the podium and met the wary gazes of the assembled soldiers one by one. "I understand your trepidation, but it's necessary," he said shortly.
"You see, we are going in to that base to clear it. Every batarian in that complex is a target. Slavers, soldiers... everyone dies. You will not be accepting the surrender of any batarians in that bunker," he reiterated for clarity. "We don't think there are any noncombatants there, but it's a possibility. If you come across any – spouses, children, merchants, slaves, whatever – use your best judgment." He stared around the room for a moment, letting the words sink in. "Remember: We're here to send a message. Anyone not in a cage here is associated directly with slaving, or at best is one step removed from it. The Systems Alliance does not tolerate slavers, and it does not tolerate attacks on its colonies. Got it?"
The room was silent.
Nodding slowly, he sighed and leaned back from the podium. "Good. The ground team is going in with helmet cams on. A copy of the footage will be released through by PsyOps through some back door channels to the batarian media. Under no circumstances are you to make a private copy of the footage, and all helmet cams are to be turned in to your QM for wiping before you step off the transports. It is absolutely essential that nobody knows this was sanctioned."
"Officially, the Alliance will deny it as a work of batarian computer image manipulation, and claim that the actual operation was a simple military sweep of a pirate raiding base where the occupants refused to surrender. Since they've disavowed any involvement," he said with a humorless grin, "they can't go after us too enthusiastically or risk accusations from the Alliance that they're supporting slave raids on our colonies."
He pushed another button, and the moon vanished to be replaced with a force layout. "That's the broad overview. Now, for the details. Commander Shepard, you'll be serving with Major Kyle and the eighth company for the ground team..."
An unfamiliar feeling swept through Commander Shepard. Slowly, at first, but persistent, and her eyes narrowed dangerously as she realized what it was: Anticipation.
She had spent the last eight years training, fighting, and fulfilling obligations to the Alliance military, but never before had she been given a task where she could truly let loose. She'd been forced to hide behind the mask of Commander L. Shepard, tough and responsible soldier, while Elle Shepard, ruthless and calculating biotic psychopath, sat bored.
Now, though... she was being given a task. Oh, it was nominally being handed to Commander Shepard, but she knew that the real reason she was here was because of what she'd originally been recruited for, not what she'd been required to pretend to be.
There would be consequences. People would call her names, she was sure. They'd probably throw an award or something at her for it. She didn't care. She was being let loose, finally let loose, on a complicated and difficult problem worthy of her full attention. The people didn't matter, except insofar as they provided another layer of complexity to the task set before her. Her mind whirled through countless details, listing potential problems to correct, cataloging the dangerous situations she would need to handle... yes, it was going to be interesting operation indeed.
She smiled to herself and focused on the details the admiral was giving her and the major, inwardly rubbing her hands together in glee as the briefing continued.
Shepard winced as she touched her face, glancing down at the blood slick on her fingers. That rocket had gotten far too close for comfort, and judging by the throbbing pulse she felt across her face every her heart beat she suspected she'd need more than just medi-gel soon.
That was soon, though. Now there was a group of armored batarians trying to crawl up her flank past one of the destroyed turrets. Trying to flush us from cover, she thought to herself. Not today.
Even after years of practice, she never quite got fully used to what her amplifier did to her abilities. When she was young, she'd learned to coordinate the random muscle spasms she'd used to deliver energy to the element zero nodules scattered throughout her body in a controlled enough manner to do more than glow faintly. With the amplifier, the same muscle memory caused a massive tingling sensation as the amplifier sent a pulse down her nervous system, changing what would have been a relatively small effect into a force that could tear tanks apart.
She didn't like the tingling it left behind afterward, or the coppery taste on her tongue... but those were minor effects, at least compared to what some of the earlier amplifiers did. The L2 implant that she'd narrowly avoided getting could leave you in crippling pain... or worse. A mouth full of pennies and an irritating tingle were minor inconveniences to work with when one could literally throw cars at people. The Hammond electrogravitational equivalency equation – the 22nd century version of E=mc^2 – spelled out exactly what she could do.
The batarian squad trying to flank her tenuous position was flung against the ruins of the turret they had been trying to sneak by. One of them, a tall one in nicer looking armor, died instantly – a piece of torn armor on the gun nearly sliced him in half as he flew past the edge of the emplacement. The other two were less fortunate: When Shepard saw that the impact hadn't immediately killed them, she had followed up the straightforward push with a far more insidious power.
The Warp class of techniques – there was a fancy asari name for them that she'd learned in ICT, but it escaped her at the moment – were designed to take down shields quickly and weaken structures. When used on unshielded flesh, the effects were... dramatic was the polite way to put it. The two surviving soldiers found themselves the center of a rapidly shifting set of intense gravitational fields a few centimeters apart. They were literally torn to pieces as their bones cracked, connective tissues snapped, and blood seeped through their pores in random directions. One died mercifully quickly, his brain pulped into goo against the inside of his own skull.
The other one, whose head hadn't quite been in range of the full effect, had a more gruesome end: He died of asphyxiation, gurgling as his lungs and heart were twisted a full hundred and eighty degrees around inside his chest cavity.
Shepard huffed and spat on the ground. She really didn't like the taste of pennies.
Not many of them had survived to reach the entrance to the bunker.
She and Major Kyle had started the assault with a full company consisting of two hundred and fifty soldiers split into five platoons of fifty soldiers. Of that entire force, she had only sixty three able-bodied men and women with her, and some of them – herself included – were walking wounded. Fortunately for the people she'd had to leave behind, the moon had an atmosphere. It wasn't breathable, consisting mostly of heavy noble gasses, but it was dense enough to prevent suit ruptures from being immediately lethal.
They all reacted differently to what had happened, Shepard noticed. Some were grim-faced and serious, putting any consideration of what had happened out of their minds until after the battle was done. She liked those people. She could rely on them, count on them to do their duties, to react predictably. Fortunately for her, most of the soldiers she had left fell into this category.
Others had shut down, going into a kind of shock. They starred off into space, or worse, back along the corpse-strewn approach that had led to the bunker door. Some of them wouldn't stop crying. They were harder to deal with, but could handle simple tasks. Others still had broken down completely. Major Kyle hadn't taken the death of his last platoon member well, and when he'd seen the trail of bodies behind them, some still moaning into the dense air... he'd just collapsed. No amount of cajoling or threats had gotten him moving again, so Shepard had taken command of the ground team.
Some seemed sharpened by what had happened, almost wild. That worried Shepard. Not for the mission; because she knew what the purpose of this attack was, even if they didn't. No, they worried her because she didn't know how much of their mind was left. Crazed, grief-stricken people with guns was never a recipe for a smooth operation.
Near the entry to the bunker, a dying batarian groaned. She stood wearily, walking over and shooting him once in the head before turning back to the survivors of their assault. "So," she asked, her voice hoarse, "anyone still have their shaped charges?"
An ebony-skinned woman nodded tiredly and dragged herself to her feet. "Yes, ma'am," she said as she limped forward. "But if we blow this door, anyone without a mask is gonna choke," she said with a frown.
Shepard shook her head. "If they had any slaves left in there, they'd already be trying to use them as bargaining chips," she said. "Plant the charges."
The demolitions expert nodded slowly. "Aye aye, ma'am. Hell of a thing, losing all those people for nothing," she said, jerking her head toward the road up with a bitter laugh.
"Hey," Shepard said, gripping the woman's shoulder. "Not for nothing," she said with a reassuring nod.
The woman gave a weak smile. "I guess we woulda felt pretty bad if we'd blown it from orbit and they'd had people from Elysium there, huh," she said.
Well, if our own troops think it's a rescue mission, the batarians probably will, Shepard thought with a mental note to leave her out front on guard duty when the real part of the job took place.
She surveyed her remaining forces again, her mind flitting through numerous scenarios. Taking the bunker was likely to cost almost all of them their lives, but the window for assaulting this base wasn't a big one – too long, and the moon's quick rotation would require that she fall back to the transports or take refuge in the bunker during the "day" to prevent baking.
Option one: We call it here and pull back. We don't get the PR win of taking the base, and the mission's scrubbed. The batarians reinforce the area, and the Alliance's entire colony defensive policy weakens. She winced. She'd prefer to avoid an open war with the batarians, as large wars weren't conducive to long life.
Option two: We shell the place. We don't get the PR win, but the policy stays intact. The batarians accuse us of shelling civilians, and they have evidence to "prove" it. That was almost as bad as the first option, effectively giving the batarians the same victory that the Alliance was trying to pull off.
Option three: We push on. We likely lose the rest of the ground team, but given how thin their defense seems to be... they may be as badly wounded here as we are. That was probably the best option, then. She took a deep breath and lifted her helmet, quickly scarfing an energy bar from a belt pouch as the woman with the charges walked up to her.
"All set, ma'am," the demolitions expert – Casey, J. her shirt read – said as she twisted a pair of keys on a remote detonator and handed it to Shepard. "These new shaped charges are pretty good, but I'd still recommend being a ways back before we blow this door."
"Thanks," she said before turning back to the resting remains of the company. "Okay, people, on your feet – get at least twenty meters back and behind cover. When that door goes down, I want two groups pushing in. Doyle, Nunez, Zimmerman – you three take the right side behind that roadblock, and I want Klein, Padilla, and Gibbs on the left side. Jefferson and Wong, you two are with me. The rest of you, stay here and secure the entrance. With any luck we'll get backup."
The men and women of the eighth platoon jumped into motion despite their wounds and exhaustion, and Shepard nodded approvingly at their dedication. "Ready," she shouted, "blowing the door in five... four... three... two... one..."
She stuffed a finger in her ear, shoved her other ear into her shoulder, and twisted the knob on the small box. A heavy crumph echoed through the thick air, followed almost immediately by the almost electronic whine of element zero powered assault rifles as the two groups stormed into the breach.
Klein's group died almost instantly, cut apart by a mounted turret that the batarians had set up inside the entryway. Shepard threw a barrier up that blunted the worst of the attack on her squad before the turret swept over the right side of the room, chewing divots in the supply crates that Doyle had taken cover behind but leaving the squad cowering behind it unharmed. Knowing that her barrier – strong as it was – wouldn't soak another sweep of the gun, she dove to the ground, flinging her second to last grenade forward as she did.
She was rewarded with another loud explosion that left her ears ringing slightly and an agonized scream as the incendiary payload she'd equipped her modular grenades with ate through batarian equipment and flesh with equal rapidity. A relatively quiet secondary explosion told her that at least something in the gun was broken, and she clambered quickly to her feet.
The room was a mess, she noticed as she surveyed it quickly. The ruined bodies of Klein's group near the entrance, the burning and broken gun, the screaming batarian trying to put the phosphorous incendiary out by rolling around on the ground, Doyle's group firing blindly down the hall at nothing in particular...
She sighed and gave a vehement 'weapons down' handsign to Doyle's group, who sheepishly let go of the triggers. A quick round from her shotgun shut the screaming batarian up, and the ringing in her ears was even more pronounced in the sudden silence.
"Right," she said, glancing around the room. "Nunez, you have medical training, right?"
One of the soldiers from Doyle's group nodded, eyes not leaving the hallway leading deeper into the complex. "Yes, ma'am," he replied.
"Good. See if anyone in Doyle's group is alive. I'm going to move in on the base," she said and stepped out of the smoke filled room to bring another group forward.
"Aye aye, ma'am," the medic said, stowing his rifle and limping over to check on the thoroughly mangled bodies near the entrance.
Shepard ignored him. She had other things to worry about.
It had taken the better part of an hour and the lives of forty eight of the remaining ground team, but she'd managed to push almost all the way through the labyrinthine bunker.
She'd sworn when her last technical expert had tripped one of the countless booby traps the batarians had left behind as they retreated deeper into the complex. There wasn't much you could do for someone when they were on the receiving end of an antivehicle shaped charge.
Low on explosives and with no hacker, they'd been restricted to areas that weren't locked down, which weren't many, or areas that they'd been able to blow or pry their way into. With the moon's dawn rapidly approaching, Shepard was about to call the mission when she heard something clatter from the hall where they'd just been.
"Hold it," she said, holding up a fist to stop her squad. "Any of you hear that?"
"Yeah," a burly private said behind her. "And we just cleared that passage," he added.
"That was passage to their quarters, wasn't it?" her other teammate asked.
"Yeah, it was," Shepard said with a grim smile. "Let's go see who got locked out."
Shepard knelt down gently, hands in plain view and palms up, attempting to look as nonthreatening as possible to the young batarian boy they'd found hiding in one of the crates.
"Hey there," she said to the boy gently. "We're not going to hurt you."
The terrified kid scuttled deeper into the crate.
"Easy," she said soothingly. "easy. Can you understand me?" She spoke slowly, in a low and calm tone of voice.
The boy nodded jerkily, tears in his eyes.
"Good," she said in the same voice. "I know you're afraid of us, but we won't hurt you if you do what we ask. Do you understand?"
The boy nodded again, still trembling.
"Alright," she said, and began to stand, offering the kid a hand out of the crate. "we need you to let us in to the living quarters. Can you do that?" she asked.
He froze for a moment, then shook his head.
"I'm not going to hurt you," she promised him. "And I think the people there want to surrender."
He gazed at her, wary but hopeful.
"Really," she said again. "If I were them, I certainly would," she smiled kindly at the boy.
"Okay," he said, his voice sounding weak in her translator, "I'll take you."
True to his word, the boy led her and her squad back to the armored door to the living quarters. He glanced once more at Shepard, then punched in a code on the door's red panel, which flickered to green.
Shepard motioned her two accompanying soldiers to stand aside and raised her barrier in case the batarians had a trap planned. Taking the kid gently by the shoulder, she held him in front of her as she slapped the door panel."
The room inside was nearly packed. There were wounded soldiers, what looked like a few merchants, some of what Shepard assumed were female batarians – Shepard wasn't entirely sure with their bulky armor on – and several kids.
The room froze as they saw her.
One of the older-looking batarians in the front stepped toward her, stance formal. "We surrende-" he began.
Shepard's rising fist interrupted him, the searing blue glow of the strongest lift field she could generate flinging everyone into the air as well as casting the room into a sudden harsh blue relief.
She unslung her shotgun and proceeded to casually blow the batarian's skull into shreds.
"This isn't vengeance," she said calmly to the shocked and floating room, her shotgun punching a hole through another suspended batarian. "It isn't revenge."
"This isn't about the dead soldiers upstairs, or the families you tore apart on Elysium," she continued as she walked along the suspended slavers. "It isn't even really about slavery." Her shotgun clicked, its heat indicator beeping, and she stowed it for her pistol.
"This is about consequences," she said, loading a block of explosive ammunition into the butt of the pistol. "You can attack our colonies, capture our people, hurt us," she acknowledged. "But there will be consequences. There are always consequences."
She took careful aim at the boy she'd found in the crates earlier, aiming between his upper eyes and squeezing the trigger as he trembled. His head erupted into mist that floated in the air, condensing slowly into droplets. Somewhere in the room, he heard a strangled cry, and she redoubled her focus on the the lift field to keep her captives still.
"If you attack the Alliance, we will come for you. We will hunt you down. No matter where you run, where you hide, whose arms you seek solace in, we will find you," she promised, her voice as empty as the holes she'd been leaving in the slavers.
She walked along a line of batarians clustered in the corner, taking them out with carefully placed single shots. "This is not a threat. It is a guarantee."
"You have my word on it," she said, and tossed her last incendiary grenade into the center of the room.
After the screams finally died down, Shepard looked up to see the two privates she'd had with her standing slack-jawed in the doorway. "Holy... fuck..." one of them swore slowly, eyes sweeping the carnage-covered room.
"You killed them," the other stammered out. "You killed... all of them... the kid..."
Shepard gave a tired grin at the shocked man. "I kept my promise: I didn't hurt him," she said wearily while chewing on an energy bar.
"You killed him! That's him, right there!" the soldier pointed at the small corpse missing half its head.
"I didn't hurt him," Shepard reiterated. "Hypersonic explosive round between the upper pair of eyes, which is where batarian upper brain functions reside. He was functionally brain-dead before he had time to feel the shot."
"Jesus," one of them whispered, turning a little green around the lips.
Shepard sighed. "If you're going to throw up, do it in the hall, please," she said as the private made a run for the door. She tucked the wrapper on her energy bar into one of her belt pouches and gave a final look around the room. "Let's get out of here."
She walked for the door without a backward glance, slowing only to grab the collars of the armor of the two marines as she stepped into the hall, dragging them topside, away from the little slice of hell she'd just created.
"In other news," the asari newscaster said, "batarian intelligence claims to have evidence of war crimes committed by the systems alliance in clearing the slaver den on Torfan. Alliance high command has dismissed the claims, calling the purported evidence 'an obvious forgery' and refusing to give credence to the issue by discussing it further. Futures in batarian labor firms dropped heavily on the news-"
Shepard smiled to herself and clicked the news display off.
A/N: Well.
My apologies for the huge drop in quality for this chapter – I wrote most of it with a hundred and one degree fever. I might edit it later.
We'll see the other sides of Shepard as time goes on - she's not all murder, all the time, even if that's what happened here.