Kara Thrace had seen a lot of bizarre things recently. If she closed her eyes, she could still see the clouds that she'd flown her Viper into, that had eventually taken her to what she had been convinced was Earth. She could see the mandala that she'd been painting since childhood, the flashes she'd gotten of the path on the way back to the Fleet - flashes that had eventually lead them to Shepard's Earth. But she had to admit, Shepard's Earth was different than the one she'd seen (visited?), which didn't sit easy with her.
Kara was the only one of the crew not turned out in full ceremonial regalia on the flight deck, despite the short notice given by the Old Man about their important visitors. She had a marine's combat armor on, the best that could be found onboard, and carried a rifle and a pistol. Besides her, the Old Man himself was standing at attention, his bandaged hand behind his back.
Lee and the President were standing next to one another, as they had been since Roslin came back from the basestar. Shouldn't it be the Old Man she's glued to? Kara thought, with a flash of jealousy. It was unfair of her, especially since Lee was a civilian now. Hell, he'd been the President while Roslin was gone. But he'd been there for her so many times now …
She shoved that thought away ruthlessly, returning her attention to everyone gathered there with her. Even the newly revealed Cylons had been permitted to attend. Tigh stood a half-step behind the Old Man, where he'd always been; Tyrol was off to the side with the rest of the flight deck crew. And Sam - Sam had taken his place with the rest of the Viper pilots. It was still odd to see him there.
"Shuttle coming in," someone called, and everyone stood to attention. Kara felt her heart beating in her chest as she watched the launch tubes.
What flew up - flew, not rolled - was about the same size as a Raptor, but there the resemblance ended. There were no wings on it - just rear thrusters that were dropped slightly below the rest of the boxy shape. There was also no visible armament on it. The shuttle was painted blue with a few white stripes, one of the stripes containing a logo and what Kara assumed was some sort of identifying number-letter combination. She knew her jaw was open, and when she looked around she saw she wasn't the only one completely gobsmacked by the sight.
Gentle as a bird returning to the nest, the shuttle set down on the ground. Kara heard the tell-tale sounds of an airtight door depressurizing and the hatch opened. She watched in utter fascination as three people - humans after all - stepped out. For the first time since the jump, Kara felt a bone-deep certainty that what they'd jumped to had been Earth. Despite the incongruities, the surprises, and the unlikelihood of it all - they'd found the Thirteenth Tribe. Their long-lost cousins. They could have come from any ship on the Fleet, any of the Twelve Colonies.
The three of them arranged themselves in a triangular formation, giving everyone a clue as to which of the two women was the Commander Shepard the Old Man and Dee had spoken to. The woman at the triangle's point was light-skinned, had red hair, shorter than Kara's, and green eyes, as well as a small scar over her left eyebrow. Her skin was a tone to match Kara's own, and she was wearing hard, black armor, with a stripe of red running down one arm and 'N7' in white on her chest plate. A military designation of some kind?
The other woman wore her black hair in a bun, with slightly darker skin than the other woman, and her armor was a dark blue with white stripes running down the side. Kara realized that the shuttle and the woman's armor had nearly identical coloring, which probably meant that blue-on-white was the default military color scheme.
The third member of the group, scanning the area with obvious surprise on his face, wore the same armor as Shepard's other companion. He had a tattoo on the side of his neck, black against his brown skin. Kara felt a bit of a lurch at the superficial similarity to her own tattoo. His black hair was cropped short, but came up to a point at the center of his head in what must be some sort of styling. Like Shepard, his face was scarred in visual testament to past battles.
They were all soldiers. That was painfully obvious in how they all moved, the weapons at their sides, the armor they wore. What kind of world did these people come from? How high up in the military system were they? Shepard commanded her own ship, but how important was that ship? And what rank did her companions hold?
You'll find out soon enough, Starbuck.
The Old Man stepped forward and extended his left hand to the woman in front. "Welcome to the Galactica."
"Admiral Adama," the redheaded woman said. "Commander Artemis Shepard. Also a Council Spectre."
Artemis? Kara's mouth went dry, and she heard many people around her murmuring at the name. This woman shared the name of a Lord of Kobol. That was meaningful, it had to be - yet another piece of evidence that these people were descendants of the Thirteenth Tribe.
Shepard looked confused at all the murmuring, which was completely understandable. "Lieutenant Commander Ashley Williams, and Lieutenant James Vega," she said, nodding to her companions in turn.
"This is President Laura Roslin," the Old Man said, starting the introductions on the Colonial side. "Vice President Lee Adama. My XO, Captain Karl Agathon." He turned to Kara. "Captain Kara Thrace. She'll be accompanying you to … Mars."
"Commander Shepard, I realize that time is of the essence," the President said, doing her best to affect a broad smile. Kara, who'd spent a lot of time around her, heard the waver in her voice and the slight tremble in the way she held herself, and wondered how much it was costing her to appear normal. "But there's one question we need answered. Earth is … your home?"
"Humanity's homeworld, yes," Shepard said, a frown appearing on her face. "Though it's-"
Whatever Shepard was about to say was lost in the roar that erupted from her words. It wasn't surprising that people would want to celebrate, Kara thought, though she couldn't find it in her to join them. The confusion on the newcomers' faces was evident as they exchanged words and glances.
After a few minutes the Old Man held up his undamaged hand, and the crowd slowly quieted. "As you might guess, we'll have many questions for whichever of you is staying here," he said.
Shepard nodded. "That'd be Lieutenant Vega." The tall, muscular man took a step forward and started scanning the crowds.
Kara took that as her cue to walk forward and nod to Shepard. "Commander," she said.
"Call me Shepard," the other woman replied. "I hope you won't need it, but it's good you came armed." She frowned as her gaze traveled to the rifle. "May I see this?" she asked.
Kara shrugged and unclipped it, handing it to Shepard for inspection. The other woman shook her head. "James, give Captain Thrace your Avenger," she called out.
"Aye aye, Commander," Vega said, tossing a broad grin Kara's way as he brought his rifle out. Kara unclipped her rifle and handed it to Lee, forgetting in that moment that he was a civilian. "Madre de Dios! You still use these ancient things?"
"Ancient things?" Kara said, looking at the weapon Shepard had called an Avenger. It had an odd design, smooth and straight, and it was definitely heavier than the one she'd just given up. She hoped it wouldn't be too difficult to use.
"Yeah, no thermal clips," Vega said.
What's the alternative? Kara wondered, but didn't ask it aloud as she continued to examine the weapon.
Shepard coughed. "I hope you won't need it, but - well. We are at war. We should be going, Captain Thrace."
"Yes, ma'am," Kara replied, and took one last look at the flight deck. Lee offered her a small salute with his free hand, and she met Sam's gaze before ducking inside the shuttle behind Shepard and Williams.
The interior was a lot more open than that of a Raptor, more like a civilian shuttle. Kara saw another person sitting at the front of the shuttle, a dark skinned man who must be the pilot. He wasn't in armor, wearing what was presumably a standard issue uniform.
"Ready to go, Commander?" the pilot asked.
"Ready," Shepard confirmed. "Cortez, this is Captain Kara Thrace. This is Lieutenant Steve Cortez. He pilots the Kodiak for us."
Kara nodded to Cortez and followed the other women to the Kodiak's seats. "Hell of a way to travel," she commented. "Is this thing armed?"
"Yeah, we've got mass accelerator cannons on the front," Williams said.
"I'm sorry - what?" Kara said.
"I'll explain in a minute," Shepard said. "But first - what the hell was that, about Earth? Were you looking for us, or something?"
Kara took a deep breath and launched into the explanation of how the Fleet came to be. The Cylon attack on the colonies, something that had both women straightening in their seats and exchanging a significant glance. Their search for a new home, following the Scrolls of Pythia and trying to find the mythical Earth, where the Thirteenth Tribe had supposedly gone. She glossed over some of the details of how they'd come to jump to Earth, leaving out the fact that she had died or the near-disaster that had come from the standoff with the Cylon who called herself D'Anna Biers.
When Kara had finished talking, Shepard was shaking her head. "Earth's no refuge for you right now," she said. "I don't really know where you're going to go, to be honest. The Citadel's going to be overflowing with refugees, and the Reapers are probably hitting our colonies too." Her mouth twisted in an expression of disgust. "Tell me more about the Cylons."
So Kara did, starting with the 'toaster' models and moving on to the skinjobs. Williams let out an oath when she got to that part that was almost as good as one Kara would have used. Kara talked most about Boomer, Athena, and the Sixes, leaving everything with Leoben aside for the moment. They didn't need to know those details. She also held back on the so-called Final Five. If she didn't understand how the hell that had happened, they didn't need to know it. Yet. She did tell them about the division between the models, which ones were traveling with them on the basestar.
"That explains some things," Shepard said. "Edie, you copy?"
"Yes, Shepard," a female, mechanical voice said from the speakers, and Kara jumped so suddenly she banged her arm on the wall.
"Motherfrakker!" she exclaimed as the other two woman looked at her in confusion. "That sounds like one of the Cylon models. The Sixes."
"Huh," Shepard said after a long pause.
"I had never heard of Cylons before today, Captain Thrace," Edie said. "Though I now wish to meet one of these Sixes."
Shepard folded her arms and looked at Kara with another one of those significant expressions. "Edie's the AI of the Normandy."
"Your ship is run by an AI?" Kara exclaimed.
"She's seventeen different kinds of illegal, but she's on our side," Shepard said. "Saved me and my crew more than once."
"Gods," Kara said, shaking her head. "Hey, Shepard. What's up with your first name?" It was an extremely inelegantly phrased question, but she was rattled to hell and back by all of this.
"Dad was a professor of classical mythology. Greeks, Romans, that sort of thing," Shepard said. "Wait - you probably have no damn clue as to what that means. The Greeks lived, oh, three thousand years ago. They were polytheists, worshipped a pantheon of gods and heroes. Artemis is the goddess of -"
"The hunt," Kara cut in. "She's one of our goddesses." She swallowed. "One of the ones I pray to."
It was Shepard's turn to curse, in a guttural and clipped language that was completely incomprehensible to Kara. Williams looked at her Commander with an arched eyebrow, an almost appreciative expression, as though she understood. "There's some connection between your people and ours, that's for damned sure," Shepard said.
"Is the Citadel the seat of government?" Kara asked. "It sounded like Earth was your home planet."
"Earth is humanity's home," Shepard said slowly. "The Citadel is the heart of galactic government. Humans … aren't the only species in the galaxy."
Kara's jaw dropped again. "Say what?"
"There's thirteen other races in the galaxy," Shepard said calmly, while Kara's brain stuttered to a halt at that statement. Thirteen other races. "Maybe that number ought to be higher, now that I'm thinking about it. Regardless, the ones you should know about are the other Council races - asari, turians, and salarians." She offered the other woman a crooked smile. "I hope that my friends of those races will forgive me for being somewhat pithy and stereotypic when describing them. The asari are all female, and long-lived compared to the other races - they live about a thousand years. The salarians are on the other end - nine males for every female and with a life span of about forty years. Turians are very regimented and hierarchical, with an emphasis on service and duty to their people - but their gender ratio and life span is more in line with humans." Shepard looked at Williams as though trying to decide something, before turning her gaze back to Kara. "There's one more race I should tell you about. The quarians."
"Why?" Kara asked. She was trying to process everything that she'd just heard. But clearly there was something that Shepard wanted her to know. "What's special about them?"
Shepard met Kara's eyes with an almost unnatural serenity. "They're what your people could be, in three hundred years' time," the redheaded woman said. "They created the geth, who drove them off their homeworld."
"Gods." That was the only thing that Kara could think to say.
Shepard nodded. "Now that you know that humans aren't alone - let me tell you about the Reapers."
Kara listened to the rather outrageous story of the geth being pawns of these greater robotic beings, the Reapers, what they had tried to do two years ago through the turian Saren, and what Shepard had done to stop them. Her subsequent death and resurrection by Cerberus, which got a definite reaction out of Kara, with the parallels to her own apparent situation. (She still didn't really know what to think about how she'd been able to come back to the fleet.) The race to stop the Collectors, and then the invasion of Earth and her orders to get to the Citadel.
"Coming in for a landing, Commander," Cortez said from the front of the shuttle.
"Got it." Shepard looked at Kara again. "That suit of yours doesn't have a breathing mask, does it?"
"No, it doesn't," Kara admitted. Damn. They were out of time. There were so many more questions that she wanted to ask, so much more that she needed to learn about this strange place the Fleet had wound up in. What was the connection between her people and Shepard's? Why was this Earth nothing like the one she'd seen before? She ground her teeth together and bit back the questions with a serious effort. There was no point in antagonizing Shepard, and besides, they were about to step onto a new planet. New for Kara, that was. She knew there would be a lot that she could learn by just looking, and maybe there'd be more space for questions along the way.
"Extra masks in that cabinet," Shepard said, pointing to one near the door. "You've got goggles, at least. That'll help with the dust storms."
"Joker, anything new?" Cortez asked.
"I've been trying to reach Mars on secure channels. No one's answering," the pilot said.
"Any sign of Reaper activity?" Shepard asked.
"Negative."
"The base appears to be online," the AI that sounded like a Six said. "It's possible the inhabitants were evacuated."
Shepard sighed. "We'll know soon enough. Be ready … just in case."
The shuttle landed with much less jostling than Kara was used to, and she grabbed a mask from the cabinet that Shepard had indicated before the door opened. Shepard exited first, gun drawn, and Williams motioned for Kara to follow before she jumped down herself. Kara took the opportunity to scan the environment looking for the same threats they were, but she found her gaze drifting around and wished that she could just stand still and drink it all in. The atmosphere of Mars reminded her of the planet she'd she'd crashed her Viper on, not long after the exodus from the Colonies. But there were buildings and structures there. This was a planet where people lived. Lots of them. Possibly more than the entire population of the Fleet. The thought chilled her. The Fleet was badly outnumbered by these humans. It would be too easy for them to be forgotten, especially with these people facing an enemy that sounded just as bad as the Cylons had ever been.
Kara resolved that she would do everything in her power to prevent that from happening. She would make sure that Shepard - or someone else - remembered and gave a damn about what happened to the Fleet.
"Cortez says our comms will be down in about half an hour," Shepard said. Her voice was projected through a speaker that Kara quickly identified as being on her helmet. "Let's try to be out of here by then, if possible."
"Understood, Shepard," Kara said, the words muffled through her breathing mask. Vega's gun was an unfamiliar weight in her hands. She almost wished she'd fought harder to keep her own weapon. Maybe they wouldn't encounter any trouble on whatever this mission of Shepard's was.
Yeah, because that's always how these things go, Kara.
They moved across the rocky ground, the wind howling around them. Kara reminded herself to take deep breaths and keep moving rather than letting the enormity of her surroundings get to her. They reached a cliff and Shepard jumped down first, scanning the area before motioning to the other two to follow.
"Aw, hell," Williams said. Kara turned and saw a body, slumped against the back wall of rock. "He's Alliance. Sergeant Reeves. Looks like he didn't put up much of a fight."
"Doesn't take a genius to know something's wrong with that," Kara said cautiously, scanning the area.
"Keep a low profile till we know what's going on," Shepard ordered.
The trio advanced forward slowly until they came to an area with waist-high barriers set up, leading towards a slope. Kara craned her head to see a group of soldiers standing around someone else in armor, on his knees -
"Anyone else think that looks like an execution?" she asked.
"Goddammit," Shepard cursed. "Stick to cover and move forward."
Kara followed Shepard and Williams' lead as they closed the gap between them and the other group. Something was very, very off about this whole thing, and Kara didn't have the slightest clue what that might be.
And then the other group opened fire, and there was no more time to think about it.
Kara was used to being the one in charge of ground teams, who knew how to shoot and not get shot - but it was clear after only a few moments that she was seriously outclassed by Shepard and Williams. Shepard was only using a pistol, but she was making every single shot count - and there was something bright and orange on her arm that seemed to be doing something as well. Kara decided she'd try to figure it out later. For now, she really needed to focus on staying alive and holding her own. The Avenger was a heavy weapon, and Kara's first few shots were cautious and measured, getting a feel for how the gun functioned. She remembered her determination not to be forgotten and became bolder with when she popped out from cover to take shots at the other group.
Sooner than Kara would have guessed, the men in front of them were dead. Shepard signaled Williams and moved forward.
"Those guys were Cerberus," Williams said, an obvious note of disgust in her voice.
"I told you, Ash, I don't work for them anymore," Shepard replied. "I want to stop the Illusive Man just as much as you do."
"The Illusive Man?" Kara said. "That's the leader of this Cerberus group?" At Shepard's nod, she barked out a laugh. "He sounds more egotistical than Gaius Baltar."
Shepard grinned. "We can compare notes about egotistical maniacs later. For now - we need to get to the Mars Archives. I'll tell you about them, and what we need to find, on the way."