Interlude One: The Normandy
Admiral Hackett's voice came clear and calm through the Alliance broadcasting unit.
"All fleets! The Crucible is armed. Disengage and head to the rendezvous point."
Explosions could be seen on the Earths surface, out in space, as ships collided and were sheared in half by the Reapers pulse beams.
"I repeat: Disengage and get the hell out of here!"
Joker attempted to pilot the Normandy closer to the centre of the Citadel, to Shepard, swiping furiously at his control panels until Garrus caught his arm and said,
"Joker … it's time to go."
He responded with a simple "Damn it" before pulling the Normandy away from the remains of the citadel, towards the Charon Relay.
The arms of the crucible expanded, red light gathering at the centre.
It fired.
—
The planet was lush and green. Unspoilt.
Their target had been Relay 772 in the Calestron Rift, but they had dropped out of the mass effect corridor when the pulse beam had caught them. Luckily, it appeared that they were only a few hundred lightyears from the Relay, but who knew if it would still be functional when they got there.
They managed to repair the major systems needed for navigation and flight, and after a few months, the Normandy once again took to the skies.
—
It was Liara who made the first breakthrough. With Javik's help, she managed to re-engage the mass effect field, causing power to once again start to flow through the Element Zero core, but it still wasn't enough to power an FTL jump. If EDI had been around, the math would have been simple.
The frustration began to boil over, with Liara retreating to her office to tinker with the remains of Glyph before she and Javik had another blazing row on the bridge.
It was Karin Chakwas who finally solved the problem. Joker overheard something about it being similar to a neuron, and transmitting signals across it's length, but aside from that, the rest of the words made very little sense to him.
It had taken them just over three months, but the Relay was functional.
—
The jump itself was relatively unexciting, if a little bumpier than usual. Similar to the countless jumps made over the Mass Relay system in the preceding years, Joker would be the last to admit that the change in stability had anything to do with his absent co-pilot and AI companion.
It wasn't that EDI didn't exist, they just couldn't get to her. There was something missing in the coding that enabled her to interact with the world around her, sort of the mechanical equivalent of shut-in syndrome. Her memories, her personality, everything that made her, her, was sealed away from them. It was the same for all synthetic life.
It had taken them four months and seventeen days, but finally, the Normandy SR-2 returned to the Sol system.