A/N: So... had a somewhat involuntary hard drive reformat recently. As a result, writing has been somewhat challenging of late, and I had to redo this chapter pretty much from scratch... as well as many of my more recent notes.
Needless to say, this is somewhat frustrating. I didn't have a chance to review this chapter, either, so you're getting the rough draft. I just didn't want to wait any longer to post something. Still, we're driving onward. L's – or Elle's – journey is by no means over, just slightly slower than originally intended.
Lastly, there are a few minor deviations from canon in this chapter. However, all of them are are based on what I, as a player, noticed in the vision from the beacon on Eden Prime. The Shepard from this tale is smarter and faster on the pickup than the Shepard from the normal game.
"Captain, I just lost contact with the ground team," Joker said worriedly over his shoulder as he flew the Normandy to the ruined spaceport. "Suit feed, communications, helmet cam, everything."
Anderson leaned forward, staring into the darkening skies with furrowed brows."What's our ETA?" he asked.
"Thirty seconds, a minute maybe," Joker guessed, not bothering to check his instruments.
"Step on it," Anderson ordered. "Drop stealth."
"Aye aye, sir," Joker acknowledged, and the Normandy's drive pitched up an octave as the sleek vessel surged forward toward the spaceport.
"We should be seeing the spaceport soo- WHOA!" he exclaimed, his eyes fixed on the visual feed from the Normandy's nose camera. The spaceport was in ruins, of course, but the imagery they'd taken from orbit had already confirmed that. That wasn't the alarming part.
The alarming part was the brilliant blue flashes erupting from the coordinates for the beacon that Shepard's team had radioed in just moments before.
Anderson reached over Joker's head and grabbed the shipwide communicator. "All marine teams, prepare for immediate deployment," he snapped over the intercom, his eyes not leaving the surges of blue light from the spaceport. "Get that dock secured."
Hanging up the communicator, he turned to Joker. "Get us down, now," he ordered. Joker didn't respond, all his focus set on settling down the building-sized frigate down without crushing anything... or anyone.
The images didn't stop when Shepard finally fell unconscious.
Instead, like many things in dreams, the images and experiences that had been forcefully seared into her mind took on a life of their own. Unrestricted by the limits of mere reality, the increasingly distorted images and sensations played through her mind on fast forward repeat: Endlessly looping through her head as her subconscious desperately tried to assimilate thoughts and memories that were never designed for human physiology.
Shepard didn't, as a general rule, remember her dreams. They lacked a solid grounding in the real world, and her mind simply didn't form enough connections to allow her to remember them. She had no doubt that the experiences were there, etched away somehow in a dark recess of her mind, but she lacked a way to associate with something so far removed from the hard and rational world she lived in. As a result, any memories she had of her nighttime meanders were locked away, unreachable with the return of wakefulness.
Not this time, however. Shepard knew, in the distant and fuzzy way that one did when one was dreaming, that she would remember these experiences for the rest of her life. They stood out because they were different. There was nothing in her life she could relate to in the sensations imparted by the prothean beacon. The pure alien nature of it all led her mind to latch on to the foreign images, frantically twisting them in a desperate attempt to make sense of memories and feelings that she had never felt and would never feel.
It was exhausting.
Sometimes she would be whatever alien creature had left the recording in the beacon. Other times she was herself... but the fragile porjection of her true self in her subconscious would break apart the instant she stepped forward on a three-toed, reverse-jointed foot.
She was drowning in the impossibility of it all, unable to accept it, unable to escape it, and unable to change it, and something deep inside her screamed in agony as the memories tore through her head once again.
In the medical bay, Karin Chakwas' patient whimpered slightly in her sleep as the EEG attached to her skull beeped a quiet alert.
She frowned, tapping the instrument's calibration before sighing softly.
"How is she, Karin?"
She glanced up from the monitor to see an utterly exhausted Captain Anderson standing against the medical bay doorframe, his uniform covered with dirt and grime.
"It's hard to say," she said quietly. "She has a mild concussion from the landing, even with the helmet, but otherwise she seems unharmed."
Anderson nodded slowly. "Any idea when she'll wake up?"
She shook her head. "It's only been a few hours, David. Give her time. Frankly, even if she hadn't been exposed to unknown alien technology, I wouldn't expect her to be awake for at least half a day. The biotics she was using..." she trailed off, shaking her head once again. "They're something else," she said at last.
"Yeah," he said guardedly, "they are. I take it you've seen her full records?"
"I have, and I wish you'd have shown me earlier," she said, her tone scolding.
He held up his hands. "I'm sorry. I would have if I could. It's just..." he shrugged helplessly. "Politics."
She sighed. "I can't do my job properly if these," she said, gesturing angrily at the faked medical records on her desk, "are what they give me. Politics won't matter if she dies because I don't know something about her physiology, David!"
Anderson winced.
She took a deep breath. "Still... I can understand why some might think it a good plan. Just don't do it again, you hear me?"
"I won't."
The two stood in comfortable silence for a few moments.
"What about the others?" he asked finally.
"Well, Alenko was working up a headache with the guilt he was wallowing in, so I sent him out to oversee the marines and treat any survivors they found," she said, and Anderson nodded. "He really should be resting, but I don't think that boy knows how to relax."
"I just saw him. He'll manage."
"Jenkins..." she began sadly. "Standard procedure for soldiers KIA by an unknown enemy is to preserve the body for a full autopsy, so he's in the freezer."
"He deserves better," Anderson rumbled.
"Yes. Yes, he does," she agreed.
They were silent for a few longer, less comfortable moments.
Finally, Chakwas broke it as she picked up a slate on her desk. "The other one, Williams – she wanted to go out even more than Alenko did. I put my foot down for her, though."
"She has a good heart," Anderson said. "where is she now?"
"Sleeping, if she has any sense," Chakwas said bluntly. "What do you need with her?"
"I'm considering offering her a slot on the Normandy," he said.
She raised an eyebrow at him. "Why?"
"Because she's good," he said, swiping his hand through the air in a cutting motion. "Because I've been there and the thing she needs least right now is to get bumped to another groundside posting as 'rest' with nothing to do but stew in it all. Because she's been passed over too many times for something that wasn't her fault."
"Not everyone is like you, Captain," Chakwas reminded him with a smile. "Still, I do see a few... similarities," she admitted. "Think the Commander will go for her?"
He shrugged. "I gave up trying to predict what Shepard would do about five minutes after I first met her," he said, and Chakwas laughed. "I just don't get her, Karin."
"I'm not sure anybody does." she said.
"You're probably right," Anderson said with a sigh. "I should get back to it," he said, pushing himself off the hatch frame. "I'll be helping sweep the city. Comm me if anything changes," he ordered before walking out.
Chakwas brushed a lock of gray hair out of her eyes and nodded to the empty room before turning back to the monitors.
Shepard woke slowly, the twisted and distorted images and sounds conjured by her subconscious fading slowly beneath the relentless march of the memories of her conscious mind. It was not, she reflected as her head throbbed, the most pleasant awakenings she had ever experienced.
She had no doubt that there would repercussions for what had happened. Nihlus dead, although thankfully not slain by any weapon carried by her, her team, or the planetary defense forces. The beacon they were sent to retrieve destroyed... and by her, to boot. The human colony of Eden Prime completely wrecked.
It really hadn't been a good day.
She resisted the urge to sigh, and began running through the ritual post-injury test that all soldiers did after waking from injury. The original test had simply been fingers and toes, but the importance of lost limbs had lessened with the advent of modern medical technology. Brain damage, on the other hand, was much harder to treat. The test had thus evolved, moving away from a simple physical self-check to a more extensive first pass test for brain function.
She wiggled each finger and toe, and all her fingers and toes bent obediently at her command. She took a deep breath, and felt both lungs fill completely. She counted to ten in her head, visualized the numbers, recited a memorized poem, spelled out the words, sniffed the air, and finally opened her eyes.
Stars swum in front of her eyes as she reflexively lifted a hand to her temples, wincing at the intensity of the dim med bay lamps while her stomach rebelled. Photosensitivity. Visual artifacts. Nausea. She sighed. A migraine. Wonderful.
She knew she was lucky, of course. By all rights, she should have died on the dock, or had her mind scrambled so badly that she would be on the short list for organ donation. Getting away from a brush with alien technology that seemed designed to directly interface with one's brain with nothing more than a migraine and horrible memories was fortunate, indeed... even if she didn't feel like it at the moment.
Wait. Memories.
She scowled and tensed, ignoring the surge of pain the slight movement brought.
The beacons were left behind by the protheans.
The protheans vanished mysteriously fifty thousand years ago.
The protheans left almost no intact traces of their civilization beyond the indestructible mass relays and equipment buried deep in bunkers or on remote worlds.
A working piece of prothean communication technology carries horrifying images of a fight against giant... well, squid-like vessels assisted by what appear to be reanimated corpses.
We saw a giant squid-like vessel leaving the spaceport... and Williams' husks are...
She sat up so quickly that she managed to get nearly halfway out of the bed before her inner ear informed her that her stomach would be emptying itself immediately, thank you very much.
Chakwas had been a doctor long enough recognize that the Commander was waking up before Shepard did. Even without the electroencephalogram, she had learned over the years to recognize the subtle shifts in breathing that heralded a return to consciousness. In soldiers, it was even easier – the ritual self-examination (or "POST" as the engineers liked to call it) never failed to rustle the sheets of the beds.
With a scanner hooked directly up to her brain, of course, Chakwas had an even more pronounced advantage. When Shepard's brain waves had finally stabilized into something resembling normal human sleep, she'd noted down the time. When they began their shift into REM sleep, she knew that – barring any disasters – Shepard would be awake in a few hours' time.
She'd sent out two comms at that point. One to Captain Anderson, informing him that his Commander was likely to be awake soon, and a second letting Lieutenant Alenko know that Shepard seemed to be on the mend and headed for a full recovery. The latter wasn't technically allowed, and definitely not part of policy, but Chakwas had been serving with soldiers to know when to ignore the rules and when to stick to them.
This explained why Kaidan was sitting on a portable chair in the med bay while Anderson paced back and forth in front of her desk.
For the last forty five minutes.
She was about to order them both out of the medbay when Kaidan's hesitant voice called out from the back of the medical bay. "Chakwas? Doctor Chakwas? I think she's waking-"
He was interrupted by the sound of the lightweight medical bay beds rocking on its locked casters and the all-too-familiar retching of some poor soul attempting to evacuate an empty stomach. She sighed and tapped her terminal, ordering the small cleaning bot to police the mess on the floor of the room.
Shepard's head spun, her ears vaguely recognizing Kaidan's voice calling for the doctor. She shuddered before wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, and grimacing at the trail of slime she left on it.
She felt miserable.
"You had us worried, Commander," Chakwas' soothing voice called from the doorway. "How are you feeling?"
Shepard spared enough energy to glare at the doctor before grabbing the small proffered cup of water. She swished the first half around her mouth, spitting it on the med bay floor before swallowing the second half.
Chakwas scowled.
"Like the morning after shore leave," Shepard said with a groan, passing the empty cup back.
Truth be told, she'd only been really drunk once, and not in the military. It wasn't that it turned her into something she didn't like – it was that it let other people see in her something they didn't like, and that wasn't something she liked to advertise.
That wasn't to say she was unfamiliar with the partying that soldiers did on leave. If she had a credit for the number of times she'd had to ignore the obvious miserable hangovers that her men and women were suffering from the morning after leave, well... she couldn't quite retire, but it would be close.
"How long was I out?" she asked.
"About fifteen hours," Chakwas said, tapping a button on her data slate. "Something happened down there with the beacon, Commander."
Shepard bit off a flippant no shit as Kaidan stepped away from the wall. "It's my fault," he said flatly. "I must have triggered some kind of security field when I approached it. If you hadn't gotten me out of the way..." he trailed off and shook his head. "I can't throw down like you can, ma'am. It would have killed me."
She waved a dismissive hand at the guilt-ridden lieutenant. "Don't worry about it," she said. "What happened to the beacon?"
She was fairly certain it had been destroyed, either by her hand or by coincidence, but she was in the unpleasant position of not trusting her mind. Not completely, at least. Until she figured out exactly what had happened, she was going to double check everything.
"The beacon exploded," Kaidan said with a sigh. "System overload after your assault on it, maybe. The blast knocked you cold. Williams and I had to carry you back here to the ship."
"Thanks," she said, and took a deep breath before looking Chakwas in the eye. "What's the damage, doc?"
Chakwas looked down tapped a button on her slate. "Physically, nothing serious. Severe hypoglycemia from biotic overuse, a mild concussion from the blast, and contusions from landing. Get some food to replenish your liver and you'll be fine."
"Mentally..." she pursed her lips and lifted her gaze to Shepard. "It's hard to tell," she admitted at last. "I detected some unusual brain activity, but I'm not sure how much of that was due to the beacon and how much was due to..." she glanced at Kaidan, "pre-existing conditions," she said euphemistically.
Kaidan blinked in confusion at the two, and Shepard waved him off again. "Don't worry about it," she said. "Advantages."
"Ah," Kaidan said. "I won't pry."
"Well, Commander? Anything you want to report?" she tapped the slate expectantly.
Shepard scowled slightly. "I saw..." she shook her head. "I'm not sure what I saw," she lied easily. "Put it down as unsettling dreams for now," she ordered.
Chakwas nodded and scribbled a note on the slate. "Nightmares. I'll make a note," she said. "It may- Oh, Anderson!" she looked up as the door to the medical bay hissed open.
"Doctor Chakwas," he said warmly as he walked up to the bed. "How's our XO holding up?"
"The readings look normal enough," she said. "A bit of rest and some food and the commander should be fine."
"Glad to hear it. Shepard, I need to speak with you – in private," he said, with a meaningful glance at Kaidan and Chakwas.
Kaidan saluted. "Aye aye, Captain. I'll be in the mess if you need me," he said and walked for the door.
Chakwas nodded at Anderson, then looked at Shepard. "As long as you take it easy, there's no reason you can't be moving around," she said. "I brought down a clean uniform for you. It's on the shelf next to your bed."
"Thanks, doc," Shepard said. Truth be told, she wanted a shower more than pants, although that could wait until after the debriefing.
As Chakwas took her leave, Anderson leaned against the wall with a tired sigh. "Sounds like that beacon hit you pretty hard, Commander. You sure you're okay?"
She snorted. "I hit it harder."
He chuckled. "I don't doubt it."
A thought niggled at her. "What happened to Gunnery Chief Williams?"
She swore that the captain looked sheepish at the question. "I asked that she be reassigned to the Normandy. We need a replacement for Jenkins, and her unit's gone, so..."
Shepard raised her eyes in surprise. That was a bit fast for a reassignment, even for the captain of a vessel like the Normandy.
"Well, her reassignment has been requested, and she's on board in the meantime," he admitted.
"Ah." That made more sense.
"We need a replacement for Jenkins, Commander, and from what Alenko said I think she's competent enough," he said, a bit defensively.
Shepard shook her head. "I don't disagree with you, sir. She seemed good to me, as well."
"Oh," he said.
Shepard kicked the covers on her bed off, eliciting an alarmed beep from the scrubber bot working the floor. She half slid, half fell out of bed, catching herself on the armrest with a grunt.
Anderon grabbed her other arm and lifted her to her feet. "Take it easy, Shepard. There's no rush."
She nodded her appreciation at the man – she hated being this weak – and reached for the shelf that had her uniform on it. "You wanted to see me in private, sir?" she asked, pulling her hospital gown off and tossing it in the disposal bin in the corner before reaching her undergarments.
Anderson's reflection in the polished steel bulkhead shook its head – whether at her blasé attitude toward his presence while she dressed or at what he was about to discuss, she didn't know.
The distorted reflection backed against the wall again and leaned against it. "I won't lie to you, Shepard, things look bad. Nihlus is dead, the beacon was destroyed and the geth are invading. The council's going to want answers. So is the alliance."
"I'll cooperate with any investigation they care to mount," she said as she settled a pair of plain panties into place on her waist. "I will not be shot for being the bearer of bad news, however."
In the shined shelf, she saw Anderson begin pacing back and forth. "I'll stand behind you and your report, Shepard. You're a damned hero in my books, especially after that stunt with the nukes at the spaceport." He sighed. "But that's not why I'm here. It's Saren, that other turian. I know him. He hates humans."
Shepard shrugged. Lots of people hated humans. She didn't like it, of course. Machiavelli was many things, but a fool was not one of them, and his line regarding fear and love remained true to this day... especially the final piece, which most people had an irritating tendency to forget:
"It is important above all to avoid being hated."
Shepard worked hard to prevent people from hating humans, but the fact of the matter was that there were still people, powerful people, who hated humanity. She would try to change that, but for now, she simply had to accept that some people would hate her for what she was.
Anderson ignored her accepting shrug and continued on. "But Saren has allied himself with the geth. I don't know how. I don't know why. I only know it had something to do with that beacon."
Shepard pulled a shirt over her head and turned to face him, tugging it down as he stopped pacing to look her in the eye. "You were there just before the beacon exploded. Did you see anything? Any clue that might tell us what Saren was after?"
She stopped dressing and leaned back against the shelf, folding her arms. Now the captain gets to decide whether to institutionalize me or not, she thought ruefully.
"The protheans..." she began, for once at loss for the best way to describe something. "... didn't communicate like we did, apparently. The beacon gave me a vision: Images. Sounds. Sensations."
"A vision?" Anderson asked skeptically. "A vision of what?"
"I saw..." she glanced at the deck, racking her brain. "Synthetics. Geth, maybe. Slaughtering people. Butchering them. Also... I saw that ship. The big one that we saw on the flight in. And... I saw corpses. Walking around, covered in sparks."
"We need to report this to the council," Anderson said slowly, and Shepard laughed bitterly.
"What are we going to tell them?" she scoffed. "That I had a bad dream? Everything I saw could be waved away as stress or nightmares from the Alliance's pet psychopath," she said bitterly.
Anderson shook his head vehemently. "We don't know what information was stored in that beacon. Lost prothean technology? Blueprints for some ancient weapon of mass destruction? Whatever it was, Saren took it."
There's definitely something going on with Anderson and Saren, Shepard thought to herself. I reveal that the ship that attacked Eden Prime might have been built by the people that destroyed the protheans, and he focuses on some turian?!
"But I know Saren. I know his reputation, his politiucs. He believes humans are a blight on the galaxy. This attack was an act of war!" Anderson nearly shouted, his face reddening as he resumed his pacing back and forth across the medical bay. "He has the secrets from the beacon. He has an army of geth at his command. And he won't stop until he's wiped humanity from the face of the galaxy!"
Shepard shrugged. "So get your friends to mark him as a 'person of interest' in the attack on Eden Prime and I'll kill him for 'resisting arrest,'" Shepard suggested. "We've done it before."
Anderson deflated slightly. "It's... not that easy," he admitted. "He's a Spectre. He can go anywhere, do almost anything. That's why we need the Council on our side."
"Oh, great. So he's a Spectre. You realize how bad this is going to look, right?" she said, and he nodded. "Well, as long as you know."
She tilted her head in thought. "Did either Alenko's or my helmet cams survive?" she asked.
Anderson blinked at the non sequitor. "I believe so. Why? Did you have evidence that Saren was behind this?"
She nodded. "We found a smuggler on Eden Prime who saw Saren kill Nihlus, and identified them both by name." She tapped the side of her jaw thoughtfully. "He's also likely the source of the leak, so you'll probably want to pull him in regardless," she suggested.
Anderson's eyes gleamed. "Excellent! Have Alenko edit that footage together into something presentable. I'll contact our ambassador on the citadel, see if he can get us an audience with the Council."
He brought up his omni tool and checked the time. "The relief force from Arcturus should be here shortly," he said. "As soon as they get here, we'll head out. Put some pants on and get that data to Alenko, we're going to be on the citadel in no more than twelve hours and I want to be fully prepped by then."
He spun on his heel and headed for the hatch. "Aye aye, Captain," Shepard called after him.
As she pulled the pants of her uniform up and buttoned them, she smiled to herself. She was glad she hadn't burned any bridges over the Spectre nomination yet. If she was right... and if she wasn't insane... then she very might need the powers that they offered.
Destruction was coming to the galaxy. If Saren truly had managed to find a way to control the geth... if he actually did possess a vessel built by the people that killed the protheans... if he really did hate humans as much as Anderson claimed... then if she wanted any future in the galaxy at all, she would need to fight him.
Fight him like she'd never fought before.
It was going to be a glorious challenge.
Assuming, of course, that she wasn't completely insane.
She would have to have that discreetly double checked that when they reached the citadel.
Next up: A little bit more on the Normandy, then the citadel!
I was always a little confused why Shepard just so blindly accepted the "vision" from the prothean beacon as truth. The citadel will have an extra side mission or two exploring why she's confident about it... although she's still not going to be stupid enough to go claiming that the reapers are real without a lick of solid evidence before the citadel council.
Lastly, as we're moving out of the "only one story path available" part of the game, I thought I'd mention that I don't plan on adhering to strict game chronology in any part of this story. In the original game, for example, Shepard can't do some missions until after going through a certain number of plot worlds. In this story, side-quests on the citadel (or elsewhere) will happen in the order that feels appropriate.
Shepard will still follow most of the same arcs. Just don't be surprised if some side missions happen sooner or later than is normally possible in the game.