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Vega apparently had to wait until Shepard was done with the tribunal, and Kaidan told himself that it was to keep Vega company that he stayed, too.
It had been strange to see her, he thought. Like there should have been some recognition, some pang, and when there wasn't, he'd felt a hole where that pang should have been. For her part, she had been happy to see him, or so he'd imagined, but not especially emotional. It had been a long time, after all, a lot of water under the bridge. He had risen within the Alliance; she had gone through the Omega 4 relay and destroyed the Collector base.
Kaidan smiled to himself. Playing "who wins" with Shepard was always doomed to failure.
"Credit for your thoughts, Major?"
"Oh, nothing, just—"
But he never had to decide what to say, because the room exploded.
When he came to, his ears were ringing. Vega was crouched over him, shaking him awake. "Come on, man, we've gotta go."
"Shepard?"
Vega winced. "Still in there. Not a chance."
Kaidan tried to say that it was Shepard, and there was always a chance, but the sheer magnitude of the destruction around him stopped the words on his lips. People had been flung everywhere, no sign of movement from any of them. He and Vega had been fortunate to be standing in the center of the room, farthest from the walls.
"Major!"
"Yeah. Let's—let's go." He had to think. He was ranking officer here. The debris between him and the chamber where the tribunal had been held was too dense to get through; there was no one left in the room to save, it appeared. "What hit us?" He and Vega moved cautiously to the hole where the wall had been and looked out. "My god."
"What the fuck are those things?" Vega demanded.
"Reapers. They're here. And we are not ready."
"Reapers? Shepard's Reapers?" A spasm of pain crossed his face. "I'm kinda glad she doesn't know."
Kaidan paused. "Yeah. Me, too." Shepard, he thought. And where Shepard went ... He keyed the comm link in his collar, relieved when it worked. "Joker?"
The familiar voice came crackling through the comm. "Kaidan? That you?"
"Yeah. You guys ok?"
"For the moment."
"Can you get to my position?"
There was a pause, some muttering as though the pilot was conferring with someone. "Give us two shakes, Lieutenant."
Kaidan almost corrected him, but who cared about rank right now, with the world falling apart? It was enough to know that his guess was right, that Joker was here and in charge of the Normandy. He would think about Shepard later. For now, he would do what she would have done in his situation—take the fight to those Reaper bastards. "Come on," he said to Vega. "Let's get ready."
Shepard stirred, coming back to consciousness slowly. Her ears were ringing, but beyond that there was—silence. A terrible silence where there should have been voices, a room full of people talking, screaming, crying, calling out for one another.
She opened her eyes, finding herself lying upside down on a bench, staring across what had been a conference room moments ago and was now nothing but rubble.
A voice cut through the ringing in her ears, calling her name, and she twisted, noting almost absently that nothing seemed to be broken, until she saw Anderson standing over her.
"Shepard! We've got to go." He was holding out a pistol, and she took it without thinking, automatically checking the heat sink.
"What—?" But she didn't need to finish the question. She could see the fallen bodies of the tribunal around her as she moved out from behind the bench that appeared to have saved her, and outside the windows she could see what had caused the destruction. "Reapers. We're too late." Shepard wanted to cry. Why hadn't they listened?
Anderson was on his comm, tapping it again and again, looking for someone to answer. "Lieutenant Commander Alenko, is that you? What's your status?"
Shepard checked a body that seemed as though it might have moved, but if the man was alive, they couldn't help him. Not without medics, and those would have to come from the Alliance infrastructure, not from two old soldiers who appeared to be on their own.
Near the shattered windows, Anderson was still talking. "I can't raise anyone. You'll have to try to pull something together. Meet us at the landing zone." Over his shoulder, he called to her. "Shepard! Time to go!"
"Right." She got to her feet, joining him at the window, where they wasted precious seconds shocked and horrified by the destruction around them. The Reapers were making a statement, taking out as much of the Alliance as they could in this attack, and they were ruthlessly efficient about it. Shepard felt sick. After all this, she was too late.
"Come on," Anderson said, stepping through the broken glass out onto the ledge of the building. "Alenko is getting a ship. He'll meet us at the landing zone."
"Kaidan's alive?" That was a relief, a worry she hadn't even known she had. What about the Normandy? Joker was still on it. He wouldn't have left his ship, and the Reapers would have wanted it gone, of that much she was sure. "Vega?"
"He didn't say." Anderson was halfway down the ledge now, heading toward the waterfront, and Shepard shook herself and stepped through the broken window. She should be reacting the way Anderson was, ready to get back into battle, not like some green recruit seeing her first attack.
They ran along the ledge, jumping over bits of rubble, dodging blasts from the Reapers, making a path through the destruction as best they could. Anderson was surprisingly nimble for a man his age, especially one who had been pushing papers for the last few years.
A nest of husks waited for them as they came over the edge of a building, and Shepard was sickened to see it. Not here, not on Earth. Husks belonged out there, far away in space. As did she, for that matter, and she couldn't help feeling that if she wasn't here, the Reapers wouldn't be either.
That was foolish—they had already made it clear they were interested in humans, given the Collector attacks—but she couldn't help it. So much of this had been her responsibility, ever since the Prothean beacon, that she had a hard time not seeing herself as some kind of cosmic jinx. She thought of Thane, wishing desperately that he was here, hoping that if she never made it off of Earth she would see him again somewhere across the sea.
"I thought we'd have more time," she said to Anderson as they made their way through the ruins of a building.
"I know. We knew they were coming, and they still cut through our defenses." He shook his head. "We need to go to the Citadel, get the Council to help."
"The fight's here," Shepard objected.
Anderson shook his head. "It'll be everywhere soon enough. They won't stop here, Shepard, you know that. They'll destroy everything if we don't stop them. All of us, working together." He keyed his comm. "Alenko. ETA three minutes!"
They were outside now, the Reapers continuing a path of destruction all around them. Shepard tried not to look, to watch where she was going instead, to keep her eyes on Anderson.
Arriving at the water's edge, Anderson searched the sky. It was full of Reapers, but no ships. "Have we given up already?" Shepard asked in despair.
"Conserving firepower until we can make a coordinated attack. There's nothing we could do right now if we tried." Anderson reached out and put a hand on her shoulder. "Shepard. We need you."
"I know." She took a deep breath, trying to pull herself together. And then above her came the first hopeful sight she'd seen in entirely too long: the Normandy streaking through the sky. Tears filled her eyes and she blinked them away, not wanting to miss a moment.
Anderson waved, and the ship banked hard and came down toward them. Shepard and Anderson hurried down the dock toward it, the Normandy hovering just at the end with the cargo bay doors open. Inside, hands held out to them, were Kaidan and James Vega. Shepard was glad to see both of them, reaching out and letting them pull her aboard.
"Welcome aboard, Commander," Kaidan said.
"Thanks. Glad to be here." She looked around at the familiar surroundings, feeling the well-known lift of the ship beneath her feet. "I can't tell you just how glad." Shepard turned to Anderson, holding her hand out to him. "Let's go, sir."
"Not me, Shepard. You. No one else can convince the Council how serious the threat is." He pointed behind him. "And the people here, they're going to need a leader, someone who knows what they're up against. With you up there, and me down here, we might have a shot at this. Look, we need every species, and all their ships, to have an chance at defeating the Reapers."
"Commander, we're a hell of a target hovering here," Kaidan broke in.
"You're right. Is that Joker at the helm?"
"Who else would it be?"
"Good. Tell Joker to get us the hell out of here. Course set for the Citadel." Soon as she could, she needed a change of clothes with a comm link. She knew the Normandy was being retrofitted, and hoped maybe some of her stuff was still here. If not, she could pick something up when they got to the Citadel.
"Talk to the Council!" Anderson shouted as Kaidan was relaying Shepard's message. "Convince them to help us! And Shepard?" He dug something out of his pocket and tossed it across the space between them, the metal flashing in the sun.
It was her dog tags.
"Consider yourself reinstated!"
"I'm coming back!" she called to him. "And I'm bringing the whole damned galaxy with me!"
"I'm counting on it!"
And then the doors closed and the Normandy streaked through the sky, leaving the destruction on Earth far behind.