April 11, 2154
SSV Venice | Med-Bay
Lieutenant Commander (Lt. Cmdr.) Hannah Shepard
Pain makes Hannah's entire world wobble. She's been shot in the shoulder. Stabbed, although she played up that glancing scar under her breasts to impress Tom. She's been sucker-punched by a malfunctioning LOKI mech, turning her into a bruise from ribs to knees. Childbirth falls somewhere in between the fiery slice of the knife and the whole-body ruination of the steel-fisted surprise.
Sharon Culver's fierce grip on her left hand is the only thing anchoring her. The doctor is murmuring, mostly to herself. At least they gave up on that 'push' business after some more research, which probably reduced the fatality rate of fathers trying to help out.
Her old friend chuckles.
"Congratulations, ma'am. It's a girl."
Commander Harris is orbits the end of the bed, hands twisted around his datapad. It's his job to record this-heaven help the staff officer who forgets to account for the civilian lives onboard-but he probably wasn't planning to have this particular view of Hannah and the ashen color of his face and his ceiling-fixed gaze suggests that he's not enjoying it.
Harris swallows heavily, then raises his datapad.
"Name?"
Dr. Shamier gathers her baby up in a blanket and hands her over. Wisps of red hair stick to her damp skin and dark green eyes entirely her husband's search the room before landing on Hannah herself. They're Tom's eyes, thank all that's good and pure. Her little girl won't ever meet her father, but everyone who ever meets her will wonder who she inherited those beautiful eyes from.
"Katherine," she decides. "Katherine Elizabeth Shepard."
Culver squeezes her hand.
"Thanks, ma'am."
It isn't as if Sharon Elizabeth Culver is ever going to have kids of her own. It's so hard to meet people looking at them down the scope of a rifle.
October 31, 2157
SSV Einstein | Med-Bay
Dr. Nicholas Chakwas
The intercom light blinks on the inside of the office bulkhead.
"Doctor Chakwas?"
Nick looks away from his comm terminal. Trillions of miles away, his daughter laughs.
"I'll call you back, dad. QEC time doesn't grow on trees."
"Never been prouder of you. You be safe, Karin."
She presses disconnect at her end and Cambridge blips out behind her. The image of his little girl in a lab coat with a resident's ID badge stays burned in his retinas for a few heartbeats more.
"Doctor?"
The light pulses again.
"Doctor?"
"Enter."
The newest nurse they've assigned him is a blonde, doe-eyed, pretty little thing who stammers and shivers at the slightest hint of eye contact. William is going to get ground up by the job if he doesn't harden, or he'll get used as a chew toy by Nick's assistants.
Because of the divided command structure between Navy and Marines and the complexities of the Medical Corps itself, he can't reprimand Emily or Alina for cutting a two-woman swath of embarrassing incidents and broken hearts through the marine contingent. Not until they violate medical ethics. They've managed to avoid that by screwing the Marines but never the Navy, focusing on the new arrivals who have provisional chains of command and never screwing the ones for whom they did the physicals. He's convinced that they got a hold of some sort of illegal stimulant because if the grumblings of the sergeant-at-arms are to be believed, they get up to enough sexual mischief to put an ordinary person into electrolytic shock, and yet neither one of them shows up looking haggard. Ever. Then again, those two are either not aware of how madly in love they are-or else are not admitting it.
So even they don't know everything. It's the thinnest of advantages, but he'll take it.
William trembles in the open doorway. Beside him is a waddling gray being with a rubbery face and oversized head with huge, featureless black eyes. Kate Shepard is three years old, already nearly as formidable as her mother and twice as stubborn. She's wearing what looks like a handmade Halloween costume, billowed out at odd angles by an intense flare-up of her biotics.
Like many of the ship's more religious crew, William is terrified of biotics. Even adorable ones going trick-or-treating.
"And what are you supposed to be?"
"M'alien!" Kate huffs, stomping her tiny foot. "RAWR!"
Chakwas chuckles.
"I'm scared."
Kate nods, as if terror is what she is owed.
"You may go, William. Send Elena in. She's the only one this one listens to."
William all but sprints away and Nurse Bonare replaces him. Kate lights right up at the sight of the matronly woman.
She's been Nick's chief nurse for more than a decade. There's grey sprinkled into the dark ringlets she keeps gathered into a bun, and on her neck she has a US Army Medical Corps tattoo dating back to pre-planetary unification. With much fussing and a long-winded explanation from Kate about how dangerous the aliens are, they manage to wrangle the costume off the pint-sized conqueror and get her into a scanner bed. It hums to life, the rings moving up and down in slow sweeps. Kate doesn't fidget, whimper, or do anything except yawn at one point. She's been in that scanner once or twice a month since the day she arrived on the ship. Better safe than sorry when it comes to pre-natal element zero.
"Scary, isn't it?" Bonare asks him, looking up from the real-time display.
"What? Don't tell me you're afraid of the light show."
Elena shakes her head.
"We're doing a preventative cancer checkup on a three-year-old, sir. That's..."
It's nine kinds of fucked up.
Most children exposed to such a high dosage in the womb don't make it to two years old and Kate had the misfortune of not only piggybacking on a lungful of eezo dust her mother inhaled during a crash landing before she was born, but she also got splashed with a leak from an exposed fuel pipe after some rookie tech fucked up his sealing. Hannah Shepard had the kid off the boat so fast that he must've had burn marks on his ass. The reassignment might not have been fully to regs, but the captain didn't lift a finger because he needed a Flight Command Officer far more than he needed one more torch-jockey and takes a special kind of stupid to not triple-check your sealing work when working with refined starship fuel ten paces from the ship's classroom.
There is only one other known case of such severe eezo poisoning, a boy three years older than Kate who suffers intense migraines and pseudo-seizures. Nick doesn't have high hopes for that kid.
He has some hope for Kate, though. He has to have hope for her. She's not the only brat aboard, not on a ship this size. But she's beloved. Anyone who's spent than two weeks aboard can sense that she has her mother's force of will.
"Eezo mass is in the same place, sir. No change in size or location. Some new filament intrusion along veins going into the amygdala, but it's within margin of scanner error. She is a bit elevated electrically."
"Define a 'bit', corpswoman."
Elena taps on the display a few times.
"One hundred and nine percent of her norm."
"Nine percent delta? That's..."
Children have died on operating tables during two percent spikes. Seeming to pick up on his line of thinking and not wanting to scare Kate, Elena starts suggesting explanations.
"Could be holiday jitters. Could be she's dehydrated from too much chocolate and not enough water."
Translated from nurse to doctor, that means quit overthinking it and focus on the patient, you imbecile.
"Possibly. Put her costume on the scale, please."
"Sir?"
"It was fluttering around her like a bedsheet on a clothesline. I want to know what it weighs."
"Yes, sir."
He pulls a chair up next to Kate's bedside and reaches for the plastic bucket of candy she brought in.
"Want one?"
"Pwease?" she simpers, fluttering her eyelashes and opening her palm expectantly.
"Manipulative, aren't you?" he chuckles. "I know you know how to pronounce that word."
She grins.
"Yes, sir."
Elena huffs from the corner where she's rearranging hyposprays for the drugs they use on soldiers crashing or bleeding out.
"Some lucky man is going to lead a very interesting life as Mr. Kate Shepard, one of these days," she mutters.
After rummaging around in the frankly obscene haul the girl has managed to accumulate, he plucks out two Cherry Singularities.
"I didn't know they still made these," he murmurs before handing one to Kate. "These were my favorite when I was your age."
"Really?" she asks, already busily chewing her own.
"Yeah. They sold them near the theater, in the town I gr-"
The overhead lights switch to red and the second-in-command's voice rings across it.
"All hands, general quarters. Repeat, general quarters. Gunnery crews to your stations. All batteries to condition one. All pilots to flight deck. Marine companies Alpha through Hotel, take up a defensive posture. India through Zulu, proceed to Hanger Two. Engineering, flush the trash and compute transit mass. All stations stand by for hard maneuvering and relay transit."
Tilting his omni-tool away from innocent eyes, he taps in his officer's codes and pulls up the alerts.
THE SHANXI COLONY HAS BEEN ENGAGED BY NON-HUMAN HOSTILE FORCE. ALL CONTACT WITH ORBITAL ASSETS LOST. SECOND FLEET AND ALL UNASSIGNED VESSELS, RALLY AT ARCTURUS STATION FOR COUNTEROPERATIONS.
"Jesus."
"S'bad word," Kate reminds him. "Grown-ups don't like it."
Far be it from him to explain the difference between cursing and religious exclamations to Hannah Shepard's daughter.
"Sorry, little soldier."
He turns to Elena.
"Radio the MCO, tell her that we've got Kate here."
"Aye-aye."
She taps something into her omni and ninety seconds later, Sharon Culver's best fireteam is spilling into the medbay like they're raiding a terrorist's lair rather than doing a favor for a friend. Targeting lasers sweep the brightly lit room and then the point man waves the rest of the squad forward. A buzz-cut marine built square and hard, like a paving stone taps on his helmet visor's controls to lower the opacity before taking a knee in front of Kate.
"Hey, little lady. Why don't you come and inspect the evac shuttles with us, huh?"
Kate salutes him, and it's all the man can do to restrain his grin.
December 8, 2157
Serrice University | Republic of Serrice | Thessia | Parnitha system
Dr. Liara T'Soni | Associate Professor of Xenocultural Studies at the University of Serrice
She's trapped. Six years times three classes.
Six years during four newly mapped relays will mean scores of uncharted worlds and generate a rush of information about new Prothean ruins. New knowledge and perhaps even that elusive piece that proves her theory, and it will be ground underfoot by grave-robbers and engineers scrambling for samples of intact gleam-alloy to work with.
Three classes each term full of strangers, sudden noises and maidens twice her age with bloodstreams sloshing with Serrice Ice brandy, and reeking of whatever species was their most recent bed-warmer. Six years of that fulfill her obligations for the tenure application-as if a maiden would ever be granted that honor. She can imagine the rejection chat now. "Try again in four centuries, dear." All of that discovery while they trap her here teaching just so she can stay tenured.
A knock on the inside of her office door rouses Liara and she grumbles out something resembling an invitation.
The teaching apprentice the University gave her is kind, patient, and has no business working for someone Liara's age. Sarei is a mother three times over, more than halfway through her matron years and says that she decided to go back to train as a lecturer in anticipation of her daughters being grown. Her mottled, midnight blue face peeks around the door and even at a distance, the thrum of eezo in her body is palpable. Her biotic aura is not like the students, with spikes and scratches dragging across Liara's senses like a knife across lyre strings. Motherhood and long bonding with what might be the galaxy's meekest krogan have cooled that out of Sarei. Liara can't help but feel like Sarei's youngest while in her presence. Relaxed. Content. Sleepy.
"Are you all right, doctor?"
"I've looked over the class list."
"And?"
"I have two T'Vans, a T'Sere, half a dozen whose fathers are notable turian officers, one who I think might start eating the furniture..."
"Nicini," Serai chuckles. "Her mother had a penchant for vorcha but settled down later on. Nic was raised by a drell."
"Explains the dichotomy between her political opinions and her deranged affect. The class is a mix of people who might try to meld for bragging rights, court me for a bon-"
A frown darkens Sarei's juice-stained lips.
"Athame forbid that you be happy."
Liara finds her lack of irritation at being interrupted odd, but the calm she feels with Serai is odd.
"...or stab me in the back, in the case of the older T'Amal girl."
"T'Amal girls are trouble. Aria proved that," Serai grumbles. "They should be so lucky as to get a smile from a T'Soni."
Liara feels her cheeks heat and dips her gaze. One thing she is not is desirable.
"And a dozen other social climbers who will see an avenue towards my mother in me. So I've decided to run off and be a dancer in Omega after all," I mutter.
"Excellent plan. It's the Terminus Systems lucky day," she teases.
"Don't," Liara warns, waving the stylus of the datapad like it's a warpsword blade. "Don't encourage me."
A smile spreads on Serai's face, teasing the tiniest of lines around her mouth.
"Remind you of your mother too much?" she chuckles.
Should she tell her that her supportiveness and her patience with the whining at being forced into a professorship that some matriarchs would yearn for is proof positive that Serai is not Benezia? No. She dares not speak ill, not when there are papers to be signed and permissions to be given. Perhaps there is still a chance. Benezia's last message was decidedly warmer. No longer 'deep space cold', at the very least. Liara might teach about the past, but at least her students are the future of the asari.
Serai steps fully inside the door and taps the control to lock it.
"I was sent something. Your eyes only, it said."
She holds out the datapad. Already pulled up is an encrypted video file and Liara recognizes the informal cipher in the title.
"Shiala," she murmurs. Liara knows she's betraying herself when her voice softens and her hands curl protectively around the tablet.
"Your mother's acolyte?"
Liara lifts her nearly depleted cup of kaffe to her lips and slurps the last of it.
"My mother's right hand. Captain of our House Guard, but also one of her oldest students."
More than that, now that Liara thinks back on her early years with the benefit of a maiden's mind and the accompanying...impulses. Shiala and Benezia were being discreet, or at least a stranger would think it discreet. In retrospect, her morning briefing on House T'Soni security was scheduled at that ungodly hour so that it would never be odd when the commando strolled out of Benezia's chambers first thing every morning. Perhaps she filled whatever need Liara's ainthar never filled. Perhaps she was safer, or easier for Benezia, less challenging or painful than whatever matron or matriarch came before. Shiala was in her mid-maiden years when they met, and Benezia her later matron years, but even as a maiden, Benezia had been a respected figure in asari philosophy and religious discourse. Whatever her age took away in the eyes of the matriarchs, her genius, eloquence, and good manners took back. They sought her out as a re-interpreter of ancient Athamism before Shiala's mother was a matron.
After going through self-defense training with Shiala on everything from biotics to small arms to either forcing or rejecting a meld, it's hard for Liara to imagine someone taking advantage of her. The Archon of the T'Soni Guard would have been at the Heiress' side most of the day, nearly every day, so Liara was always going to be mothered by Shiala, whether she was with Benezia's lover or not.
She'll sooner discover the Protheans' favorite food for a mid-day meal than untangle her mother's romantic life, she supposes. Liara taps on the controls and tries to play the file using her usual passcode. The tablet simply beeps sharply and powers off. She boots it back up and fetches a sheet of etching glass and a broad-tip etching stick from the drawer. Shiala's ciphers take forever to work out by hand. Annoying, but her putting one on this means she thinks it's important. A glance at her chrono shows three and a half hours to her next class.
She gets to work. Cracking the cipher takes an hour and the videos themselves are almost two hours long. At least it saves her cobbling together a lesson plan.
"Goddess."
Liara taps on her omni-tool's controls.
"Serrice City Guard, how may I direct your call?
"This is Liara T'Soni, daughter of Matriarch Benezia."
"Gentle rain and calm winds, Peeress. I am honored to speak with you."
Liara's next words sputter out in her mind like a dig-site campfire she forgot to tend. It's been so long since she's been on Thessia and so long since she's been treated like a T'Soni that she'd forgotten the esteem her name carries.
"I would like two officers sent to the Mirrored Sunset Lecture hall at Serrice University. I need to check the civilian's security credentials and secure a room from eavesdropping."
"Dispatching them now. Though your House Guard are better suited to anti-intelligence work," the matron reminds her. "Our officers will, of course, defer to their recommendations."
"Probably. But they are deployed elsewhere."
"Goddess' breath!"
Liara catches most of her groan before it's audible. She's admitted to being not just a matriarch's daughter but the daughter of a Peeress of the Thirty and walking around without a platoon-strength bodyguard as if that's normal. It is normal. From Liara's point of view. From the perspective of the City of Serrice, it's a nightmare. How have they been such poor hosts? How have they been such poor allies, neglecting the ancient bond with Sonalere? Why has no one been monitoring this? What if something were to happen to her? Et cetera.
"Go with the Goddess, officer. I have to prepare a lecture."
This will be an interesting afternoon, if nothing else.
Liara looks out over her students. There are twice as many as there should be, meaning either the truth has spread or a particularly colorful rumor has spread in its place. She's also not watched her VI's attendance logs closely. The layabouts and skippers always show up in the grading process, anyway. For all she knows, this may simply be a case of full attendance.
As she feared, the Serrice City Guard made a show of force. They sent two squadrons and a quartet of specialists. Twenty-eight commandos, each clad in skintight nanoweave-suits so black they seem to consume light and wearing a pair of hip-holstered Acolytes, a Disciple on their suit's rear clips and depending on the soldier, either a Zealot assault rifle or a Spirit sniper rifle. Liara wonders if the fact that the Justicars lead most of Thessia's weapons research is at the root of the religious naming scheme.
Four of them have split off to block the doors and scan each and every student entering. Sarei received four consecutive checks by four different huntresses, seemingly for the crime of standing closer to the podium.
Liara's fingers curl around her suit jacket and she tugs it down sharply, trying to turn the fidget into a gesture.
"Please be seated. My thanks to the city guard for providing us with some extra security. No doubt you're wondering why you were scanned for listening devices and had your omni-tools deactivated. On your desks, you will find etching glass and fine-point etching tools. For today's lecture, I expect you all to take excellent non-digital notes and keep said notes non-digital and secured until told otherwise."
"If you do not agree to that, raise your hand and you will be escorted out. No penalty."
Blessedly, no one takes her up on that offer.
Liara plugs the tablet into a hard-line connection to the hall's projector.
"Very well. This information was collected by units operating with the blessing of Asari High Command, embedded in the joint fleets. Thirty-seven Thessian days ago, the Hierarchy's navy undertook a top-secret mission following a report from automated probes that a previously unknown species was activating dormant mass relays. Specifically, they were trying to activate Relay 314, which links to unknown and possibly hostile systems. The Council ordered the Hierarchy to contain and analyze the species. The alien garrison held out for two days against massively overwhelming numbers and superior technology before surrendering. They captured the colony and placed the population under armed surveillance."
She starts the first video. Rows of heavily armed turian troops funnel clearly bipedal sapient beings towards prefab holding blocks in long, shuffling columns.
"You are among the first, if not the first asari civilians outside of the Matriarchy to learn of the existence of these beings. I am exposing myself to possible legal consequences for a simple reason. You are taking my class to become students of cultures and races. We are privileged to be witnesses to the introduction of a new race. I'm going to zoom in on one of the individual feeds now."
The image resolves based on the suit camera of one soldier, caught in an altercation with a resisting prisoner. The prisoner is unsuited, soft-skinned, and to Liara's eyes, unsettling. Too flat. Too angular. Blocky. Like biology took a block of stone and never finished carving it into an asari.
"Thoughts? Yes, you, in the third row."
"Largely asarioid body types."
"Anything else?"
"Sexually dimorphic?"
Liara zooms in on the background of the image.
"Quite probably, and I'm impressed you noticed that based only on a background silhouette."
One of the T'Van girls in the front row leans forward, shock written across her face. Liara jerks her gaze towards the ceiling as dark purple flesh threatens to spill out of the top of her gown. She's never taken this-she glances at her roster-she's never taken this Neata seriously before.
"Goddess...this type...they're...asari," Neata exclaims.
Liara hums.
"Not quite, though I can understand the confusion. Based on this small and unscientific sample, the gender we see here matches overall the asari phenotype extremely closely. In fact, it matches more than any other species. Everything from the number of limbs, the direction of locomotor joints on said limbs, the hands, the number of fingers..."
She switches to an enhanced image of four pink fingers clutched tight around the neck of a crying offspring while a thumb swipes the tear away.
"Their outline. Their facial structure."
She extracts the image and splits the screen between it and an ancient asari anatomy text. Broad hips, a narrower waist, breasts. Even the curve of the back and the slope of the shoulders are similar.
"Based on the footage I've been able to analyze, these specimens are shorter and lighter than the other or type on average, approximately 80% of average asari height at maiden stage. Those we suspect are military average closer to 90% of maiden height and resemble huntresses in a superficial analysis of their musculature. Who can provide me with some other key differences?"
"No crests," Nicini notes. Her peers snicker. "Hair! Like ancient quarians."
Liara taps her stylus on the podium's rim.
"Good. One presumes modern quarians retain that trait, but you're correct. It does match. Visually, at least. It's unknown if these are inflexible like quarian quills, but the number of styles displayed suggests it is much more malleable."
Liara keys up another bookmark.
"After twenty-one Thessian days, a large armada entered the system via mass relay and engaged the Hierarchy's Fourth Fleet in orbit. In the space of two of the planet's rotations, they destroyed five frigates and three cruisers, incapacitated three more cruisers, forced a troopship to make a controlled crash-landing, and damaged the engines of the dreadnought, leaving her incapable of FTL retreat. Simultaneously, their ground forces inserted from the far side of the planet and liberated most of the population in a sneak attack. They did this despite the handicap of firing at a planet inhabited by their own species and after taking significant losses in both space and ground combat. Fortunately, a First Contact team from our High Command was able to insert and one of the huntresses initiated a forced meld, which convinced the alien leadership that communication was possible. Communication is rudimentary, as they seem to speak dozens of languages on this planet alone and indications are they speak hundreds more on their homeworld. Eighteen hours ago, a ceasefire was struck."
"I shouldn't have to tell you that fighting a turian fleet to the point where they will even consider a ceasefire is no simple task. This is not merely a new species. This is a significant player emerging, which is something that does not happen in an asari's lifetime. Here is what I consider the most important piece of footage."
She pulls up a clip from the ground combat on the last day. Murmurs ripple across the auditorium. Even some of the huntresses seem affected, though they have the control to only show it in a shuffling of their rigid stances.
"We can't be certain without a proper omni-tool translation program, but..."
Liara sighs. She's here to teach. She should ask the students.
"What do you think is happening?"
"Biotics," the class replies from half a dozen directions at once. "Warpfire."
"Yes. Given that the turian whose suit cam took this died three seconds later from diffuse hemorrhaging, it was effective. And judging by her injury afterward, it's not something she's trained on. It was spontaneous, during an emotionally charged moment. This is a species that has either discovered or engineered biotics into themselves, and probably recently."
One of the students asks Liara to rewind to the beginning, and she obliges. They watch it together four times. The class runs on past the allotted time, then twice as long as it should, then three times as long.
By dawn, her class has taken enough notes to fill whole piles of etching tablets, asked questions that Liara can't even begin to answer and made her prouder than she ever thought she could be as a professor.
Nicini has demonstrated insight that Liara wouldn't have suspected the inattentive maiden possesses. Perhaps she's putting in effort now that she has more information to work with than just Liara saying the Protheans built a city there. Even the more vapid of the T'Van girls shows promise.
As they pause to rehydrate and organize their notes, the huntresses sternly remind them of the secrecy. In the pale pink of mid-morning with the thin veil of white fog that always cradles Serrice this time of year, professor and students alike scatter. Ninety-odd keepers of a galaxy-shaking secret.
When four of the huntresses insist on escorting Liara to the professorial residences, she's far too tired to even consider refusing. Her omni-tool pings as she's staggering towards bed. It's a tone keyed only to Shiala.
"So they call themselves humans," she murmurs, toppling face-first towards the silk.
December 8, 2176
Illyria (colonial capital) | Elysium colony
Ensign (Ens.) Katherine Shepard | 103rd Marine, Foxtrot Company
Kate swaps a thermal booster into her ammo block and unloads three rounds on the prefab's wall. Cracks spread along metal and ceramic alike and she shatters it with barely a flicker of warpfire. Three sniper rifle shots ring out, evenly spaced. Her hardsuit's motion tracker shows the shock waves of impact and the resulting drop in electromagnetic wash. Her suit's combat VI is telling her that three high-velocity darts of hard metal came to a sudden stop, and three slow-moving, radio-emitting things were destroyed.
Three pulls, three pops, as a marine would say.
Amani is a sixteen-year-old girl, and she hasn't missed a kill. Kate never had to move in to mop up someone for Amani. The kid was trained to hunt game and leave pretty, edible carcasses with one or two shots she can line up at her leisure. But she snipes like a marine. Body shots first and shared equally among moving targets. Easier and more reliable and still likely to kill the target. If it doesn't work, she follows it up with a headshot.
The galaxy is lucky Amani prefers big game hunting and gushing about Elysium's plant life. She hasn't kept a sniper's logbook, so Kate kept one for her, just in case she ever enlisted. As the rover for their merry band of idiots, she was out in the mud to confirm each kill. If Amani does enlist and swear the Oath, no sense in her not getting credit.
Inside the prefab, lights buzz and pop and the hydroponics sprinklers gush rather than mist like they're supposed to. Zig-zagged lines on the couch and the dining room table indicate where batarians with shock sticks knocked the residents out for later pickup by the slavers.
Harry is slumped against the wall, unmoving. Three batarians and a turian are dead against the other wall and two more four-eyes are down, but not dead. Suit overloads from the look of it. Probably one of those skycar-battery trip mines Harry and that weird kid rigged up the first night in the caves. It seemed to keep Zach calm to do it, so she let him work under the eye of what's left of Alliance Combat Engineering on this rock: Two rookies greener than she is who haven't even bothered to optimize their omni-tools.
She calls on her biotics and rips the slaver's visors off before jamming their comms with her own omni. She crushes all but one of the visors under her boots, kicking the last one into a corner. Then Kate aims low before toggling the inferno ammo off. Each merc gets one round to whatever their species has for an abdomen, off-center so as not to just cut them in half.
Let them bleed. Let them crawl towards that comm unit, dragging their raping, slaving, murdering guts along the ground and if any of them reach it, she'll pull their eyes out with her fingers.
Collins coughs.
"Damn, kid. Harsh. As a cop, I feel like I should arrest you."
"Collins! Hey. Hey! You stay with me, you hear?"
Collins chuckles, his silver-and-rust hair matted with blood and most of it batarian, greasy and red-orange. His breath is shallow and fast. His ballistic jacket is shredded and the used-up bucket of a helmet she grabbed from the armory is all that's keeping the left side of his face in, from the look of it. Her suit triggers the medical scan program on her omni without her asking it to-small blessings-and Harry's citizen ID number splashes up along with a scrolling list of injuries.
Cracked vertebrae. Nicked liver. Sucking chest wound. Dislocated retina. She's not sure she could fix this with that fancy new 'medigel' the docs are rambling about, let alone with foam bandages and synthetic blood.
Fuck.
Harry's meaty paw grabs her wrist and squeezes hard.
"You get that squawker on?" he growls.
He's dying, and he knows it and he wants to know what any soldier would want to know. Was it worth it?
"Yeah, yeah. Sure did," she sniffs. "Called for backup. Got a ping."
"Good. You take care of that little girl, you hear, missy?"
"Yes, sir."
He squeezes her wrist again, far more feebly this time.
"Make sure they play Parting Glass, huh?"
"I'll sing it myself, Harry."
"That's good. That's..."
That's it.
There's no shroud to pull over the body. There's not even a clean scrap of sheet metal. Just a dead man. A dead man in a dirty machine shop. Harry walked a beat in Boston forty years before they cracked a relay. He matched Shepard shot for shot in the bar and waggled an unsteady finger and demanded the bartender make Kate the Biotic Blast she ordered-fuck the Batarian Hegemony and their slavers for attacking before she could drink it. He told stories about kids he let off the hook for drugs, and how he kept in touch to make sure they went straight. He tells stories about those he didn't let off, and about the one time he found a mayor's aide pissing in the street and ran him in just so his boss would have to deal with the consequences. He sang like a broken waste compactor, but taught Kate half a dozen songs. He showed her pictures of Dublin, because he'd traced his great-great-fuck-knows-how-many-great-grandfather to Ireland. He even coughed up a limerick on the fly when the bartender claimed there was no such thing as a limerick about a turian.
Just gone.
She flicks her comms back on.
"Amani, Harry's gone."
"Amani?"
All she gets back across the channel is silence.
Her world is pain, and heavy breathing, and red that sizzles and throbs at the edges of her vision. Amani was a kid. Just a fucking baby who watched vids about heroes or some fucking shit so she wanted to help. Kate let her. She grabbed a retrofit kit, militarized the rifle on a dingy workbench in a mine then Black Widow as tall as Amani was in her hands rather than doing the right thing: Stuffing her ass back in the bunker and waiting for reinforcements.
She can hear her breathing, her pulse, the crunch of broken glass under her boots, and the warbling of alarms in ruined homes.
Heavy weapons fire draws a stripe across a parked skycar, slicing it in half. Kate rolls behind the scalloped concrete of a decorative planter. She's in the courtyard of a business. Bank. Insurance company. Something. Whatever it is, they've got money to splurge on landscaping, because that gun hasn't broken the planter yet.
"Times up," she reminds herself. "You get out of this cover, and that's it."
It's a bad fucking idea if there ever was one. But all she knows is that the girl screamed, and if there was a body, the four-eyed perverts would be pissing on it on forced broadcasts all over the colony.
In the cracked mirror of the skycar, she can see two blinks and a drop-in turret on the roof she left Amani on.
"Gotta be two hundred yards," she mutters. "At least. FUCK!"
If she tries to run the distance, a weapon of that caliber will pulverize her. But there's nothing even resembling cover until she's right up against the target. She closes her eyes, empties her lungs, and forces her muscles still. Out, in. Out, in. Fist open, fist closed. Repeat. If she doesn't center herself and get her biotics perfectly in hand, she's going rip herself apart. Ruin this nice lawn.
She drills for the memory from when she had her 'adult' amp installed a few years back. It was calibrated by a retired asari huntress en route to Earth with her daughters. A huntress who apparently owed her mom a favor sent it with a disc of training vids. Ten years total runtime, because what's ten years in one class to an asari?
Lift field centered on myself. Barrier, focused forward. Head tucked down. Palm strike with focused warp field. Throw field on myself, centered behind and generated last.
There's no reason a human wouldn't be able to do a biotic charge. In theory. Just a few minor details about focus and precision and how it's easier to do for a species that can sense changes in mass, energy, and gravity before they can walk or talk. It's never been done by anyone except an asari huntress, at least as far as she knows. Her implant is asari-made and her nerve-laces are wired in their style, so that's a start. She's either going to pull this off or pop so hard the blast will be visible from orbit.
Kate pulls a smoke grenade off her belt, triggers it, and rolls to her feet. She locks eyes with the batarian on the gun and flings herself on the mercy of dumb luck.
Almost as soon as she's thought of it, she's there. Warpfire spreads in a ring, scorching the building and the enemy alike. The one on the gun disintegrates. His spotter's legs are fat and meat bubbling out of the stumps and smashed ceramic. She puts two shotgun blasts into his torso. Her suit alarms are shrieking about her shorted-out shield capacitors, but her barrier is surging. Her biotics are so overwhelmed, so thick around her, that it's like moving through tar. The last one fumbles for a pistol and starts unloading it in her. Each impact lands like a blow, bending her barrier but not breaking through. She's either not hurt, or too raged out to notice. Kate wraps her fist in dark energy and lunges. Aided by the warpfire, her fist pierces the helmet like paper and comes out the back of his skull.
Amani's body is at the end of the roof, still tucked into the cut-out Kate dug with her omni. They cut her in half with heavy fire and the top half is still clinging to the gun, face tucked against the scope. Still smirking.
She had somebody sighted in when she died.
Didn't feel a thing.
Time passes. Minutes. Hours. Maybe a day. Who the fuck knows? Elysium's peculiar orbit gives it a balmy climate, gentle weather, and day-night cycle so unlike Earth's that sleeping drugs are literally in the drinking water.
There was enough time to flash-forge a drone and send it to check on Harry's body. Then she stormed colonial HQ and butchered everything that moved, practicing her little trick over and over. Charging from room to room, spattering some enemies with the shock waves, blowing others open with her shotgun. It's a haze of blood spatters and noise in her head. She killed a batarian with officer's marks, She remembers that. Broke his legs with opposing pulls of her biotics, lifted him over the stem of a broken office chair and let the field lightening him fade slowly, giving him to gravity.
She captured the flag and brought it back to wrap Amani up. The flag was the same color as the headscarf she was wearing when Kate first led her into the bunker with the other refugees. It tore the next day and Kate held back with her while the kid used her omni to rip up a tablecloth and scorch it black.
"Harder to see at night," Amani said. "Animals spook when I wear bright colors."
"This is SSV Agincourt to any planetside personnel. We are on station and ready to provide support. Respond."
"I'm with the 103rd Marine. We have civilians in the tunnels north of town. Got blinks and spikes dug in all over between my position and the civvies. I need fire support."
"Stand by. Transferring your channel to CIC."
"This is Agincourt CIC."
"Kate Shepard," she hisses, shoving herself halfway upright against the complaints of every muscle in her body.
If he cares that she threw out that useless detail, he doesn't say it.
"Copy that, marine. Name's Pressley. The gun is drawn. Give me a target."
She checks her omni, marking no-fires over herself and Harry's body before circling the locations where she found the resistance fighters missing or dead. Anything still moving on the surface is probably hostile.
"Pushing a map of the AO and target co-ords. Everything but those markers are a killbox."
"Received and marked, Shepard. Gunners, get to work!"
Thunder rumbles. One of the pirates' jury-rigged warships takes off to flee but the shot cores straight through and goes up in a flash that scalds her retinas before the helmet glass can adapt. Then another shot slams into the city itself and an office building packed with mortars and heavy ammo becomes a crater. The skyline of Illyria disappears shot by shot, leaving only craters.
Kate slumps by the body of an innocent she murdered and curses the angels that came far too late.
April 14, 2182
London | Systems Alliance, European Continental HQ
Lieutenant Commander (Lt. Cmdr.) Katherine Shepard | X-FRG-04 Prototype Vessel Group, Assigned to 63rd Scout Flotilla
The shuttle keeps high altitude over the city, turning thousand-year-old landmarks into brown and dark-gray dots below them. On the flight across the Irish Sea, she read the briefing packet for postings here. Like many national capitals, London protects its terrestrial pride by putting the Alliance presence in a single district offset from the older and more storied parts of town. Battery after battery of GARDIAN anti-air turrets that ring London like it was the center of a bullseye and kinetic barrier generators are attached to every power substation, swaddling the city in five thousand overlapping bubbles. But the only place that they admit to the advent of the Alliance and the interstellar age is inside a ring of blue-and-silver skyscrapers south and east of Parliament.
Four marines line the bench on the opposite side from her along with a dark-skinned woman in a lab tech's jumpsuit. Her name badge is color-coded for a civilian contractor. She's been stealing glances at Kate every time she can. Her gaze is heavy. Intent. Kate wouldn't need urban infiltration training to read her body language. She's staring at a well-known, over-photographed lesbian soldier in her dress blues and thinking about it, biting her lip and trying to hide the fact that now and then, she squeezes her thighs together.
Most of her N7 cohorts are infamous in a fight, but forgettable as people. The powers that be tag citizenship records to fake them being orphans, with their actual relatives logged in separately encrypted databases behind layers of fake names, fake addresses, and often fake planets. If a hacker cracks that database, the trail leads to the wrong house and an N7 squad is dug in at the end of it. The truth lives only on hard copies stored in bunkers.
She's the only N7 who features in tabloid columns. Given that her mother, Sharon, and David live and work either inside the wire of a base or on armored decks behind a dreadnought's barriers, there's no way for her fame to hurt people she loves.
It's been a long time since Sharon Culver caught her ogling a gunny doing pull-ups at fifteen. She's not sure what made her lie the first time. Sharon Culver is a bulldozer in fatigues and the prospect of trying to repeat the lie to her mother cracked Kate all of three minutes later.
Hannah's reaction was classic Mama Shepard. "Understood," she had said, in almost exactly the tone she used with any random petty officer handing her a tablet. It hurt, at the time. God, it hurt.
That night, her mother came by her hiding spot in the munitions bay. Kate wept and shook and sobbed about how hard it was and how scared she was, and her mother just ignored it. Her mom said she'd taken it like she took a mission report because she wanted Kate to feel like her daughter saying she was a lesbian was ordinary order-of-duty stuff and that nothing was going to change.
No one's ever accused the Shepard women of being top-notch verbal communicators, let alone non-verbal communicators.
She's never really hidden herself. In the interviews she couldn't avoid, she's been called lesbian, queer, gay, bisexual. She claims the one she can, rejects the ones she's sure she's not. She's keeping bisexual open as a long shot because it's a big galaxy. She only knows her opinions about turian, human, krogan and salarian men.
It wouldn't be hard for a stranger to figure it out upon meeting her. She's dropped eleven guys in three bars on two different planets for insulting her, her date, or women in general. And then was the Terra Nova incident. Her friend in the 309th called it 'dykeblasting' when she looked at the remains of the bar after someone decided to poke the hornet's nest when Kate was having a bad day. She did warn them she was a soldier. She even warned them she was a biotic...after she'd introduced the first four guys' noses to the floor.
That would be enough for a reputation and for mothers to warn their daughters on frontier colonies and for rumors in the ranks. It's counterproductive how many hot, muscular, capable women are Alliance enlisted and soldiers because no touchy and badass really is her type.
Thanks to Elysium and Torfan after it, Kate's the second-most-watched person wearing this uniform. Any girl with an extranet connection can look up the paparazzi photos of her on shore leave and research her sexuality in the public record. She's gotten more than a few enthusiastic thanks-for-your-service from the female half of the human race. She shows up on the top ten video personalities from human space whenever a popular singer retires or an actress doesn't cheat on her partner, ruining some parasite journalist's carefully laid out drama. Camera drones buzz along the street behind her at the minimum legal distance any time she's in a big city. When they cross the legal line for being too close, her omni-tool pings her and she smashes them against the nearest flat surface with her biotics and waits to be billed for it.
The reporters love a tragic hero, after all. Amani-a literal child-has been twisted into Kate's doomed lover in three novels, nineteen vids, and two newspapers. Elysium survivors' groups have sued them and so far, they've all retracted.
Kate feels it differently. The idea that she used that brave girl sits like acid in the guts. To keep herself from picking up her gun, she keeps lists instead. Addresses. GPS coordinates for nearby hills with good cover. The nearest trash incinerators and the angles of security cams around them. She plans it out, so she isn't too tempted to do it.
After-Elysium Kate would already be pushing her contact info to the hungry-eyed tech's omni.
Last-Week Kate would be.
Funny how getting rolled and robbed changes a girl.
Rasa seemed like a war hero groupie at first, but she came back the next day. They liked to spend the days Kate was off class cuddled up on the shabby sofa in the apartment under a pile of secondhand blankets, Kate complaining about Dublin weather and Rasa rubbing her cold feet on Kate's shins. Rasa loved classic vids. The ancient stuff, going all the way back to 2D non-interactive and even black and white. She had a skilled tongue and eyes Kate could drown in. Rasa also had sticky fingers, it turned out, plus a raging Hallex addiction she fed by working for red sand dealers.
What scares Kate most is that she almost fell for it.
The sex and the company were good enough that Kate let one of the lowlifes she usually blows to bits in pirate bunkers stroll into her life and into her heart. One more drug pusher with sketchy contacts.
The day before yesterday, Rasa rolled out of bed to throw together breakfast and came back to find Kate armed, her biotic barrier on full blast and holding a used-up Hallex mister. Most breakups don't involve weapons pointing, or so Kate has been told. Human breakups, at least. Gunfire is traditional for the krogan. It would be insulting if the female didn't think she needed a weapon to drive off Mr. Wrong.
Sic semper monstra, Kate reminds herself.
She hates that line, even if she now recites it in the field when there's a chance that cameras are around.
Rasa pleaded, swore to get help. Begged. Cried.
"Sic semper monstra," Kate replied.
Rasa was out the door in seconds.
She hates that line, even if she now recites it in the field when capturing a pirate or slaver and there's a chance that cameras are around.
The Terra Firma types have turned it into some imperial fantasy and, in keeping with their need to aggrandize, started calling it the Challenge to the Universe. If only they knew her famous 'catchphrase' on Torfan was a snarl from a wounded animal. A few words vomited up by her potassium, water, and eezo-depleted brain. She remembers making the kill, but she doesn't remember saying anything and she collapsed into a medic's arms ten minutes later.
One of the guys who put her pieces back in when they scraped her off the bunker's floor on Torfan said she tried addressing them in an asari dialect before they put her under.
Both the kill and the catchphrase played well on the vids. Three words, a nod to long-gone assassins that must have had Alliance Political Operations creaming their pants, and four shots into the face of a batarian thug. One round per eye from half a meter. It's truly amazing the sort of breach in prisoner handling regs they overlook when it serves their needs.
The shuttle rattles as it loses altitude. The specialist on the other bench ducks her head, pretending to read the text on a datapad she hasn't toggled or refreshed in half an hour. This time Kate doesn't look away and when her admirer looks back up, she realizes she's been caught.
"What's your name, egghead?"
"Sam."
"Sam, who doesn't have a last name?"
"Sam, who knows who you are and is not sure she can trust that smirk," Sam-the-Unnamed retorts, clutching the datapad to her chest.
"Fair enough," Kate jokes, throwing her hands up in apology before sprawling back against the bench. "I surrender."
The cockpit bulkhead swishes open, and the pilot thumps his fist on the plating to get their attention.
"London Spaceport in five."
It would seem that Traynor, S. from the Communications Research Group isn't aware she's wearing a nametag.
For detailed entries on all, see the Systems Alliance Officer's Codex
"General Quarters" - Naval term equivalent to "Battle Stations".
MCO - Marine Command Officer, the officer in charge of training, preparing and commanding a ship's contingent of Marines or a ground-side base or regiment's marine deployment. Typically holding the rank of Staff Lieutenant or Lieutenant Commander, an MCO is a junior officer with enough experience or training in paperwork, administration, medicine and psychology that the commander of the vessel or unit can delegate the day-to-day maintenance of the infantry's combat readiness to him or her.