A/N:
How ya doing. Been a bit, mostly because my professional work is otherwise keeping me occupied. Forgive this chapter by the way, it's a little transitory insofar as it is teeing things up for, well, next chapter. Next chapter will be the one that kicks off that final high-pitched speed chase toward the end of Mass Effect 1, but, in many ways, the next chapter is the climax of Section 1.
You might be able to tell there's not exactly a lot of weight in this chapter mostly because it's me trying to retread, ME1 completely, which isn't particularly exciting, so again, apologies for that. Just some behind the scenes thoughts. Next chapter is already more or less written by the way.
1-33
Deal with God
"That Human certainly is an inspired pilot." The navigator of the Ardent Prayer can't help but make the comment as the ship tracks the SSV Normandy easily. It flies more like a Seraph or Banshee than the smaller "frigate" that the Alliance designates that it is.
"Is that not the ship that the Demon and her Imp has embarked on? With the Commander Shepard?" Mercaius is quick to recall the Spartan. Not many of his people, nay, Covenant in general, are given the opportunity to meet them, more than once.
"It seems old acquaintances have come to bear." Karonee had been quick to observe, and quicker to look to Mercaius again. "Usze," she turned over to her ground force leader, the maroon Elite ready and rigid. "Assume a full combat deployment. Let us be ready to unseal our hushed station here."
The Prelate had bristled even in its tall, lithe form. "I hope you know what you're doing, Shipmistress."
Karonee had chuckled once with a breath of air. "Our Gods define the path, Prelate, it is up to us to walk the way."
It was enough for the Prelate, and with that the Ardent Prayer rolled itself awake in its secrecy, hidden in the shadow of the moon.
In her more dirtbag years, Shepard had been a fan of the term "real recognize real", and now as a fully dignified commander of a starship it is the term she falls back to as Hitman disembarks the Mako and meets the Salarian Special Task Group team here on Virmire. Meat-eaters, special forces that is, recognized each other.
It was a greeting of two equivalent masses colliding, elbows touched, hands shaken, nods given and received, and almost without a word save for Shepard's confirmation, Hitman had gone into the STG camp to alleviate and to take garrison of the area, the Normandy having set down within what was considered its safe area. The guard of the Normandy disembarking and only bolstering the area.
A Salarian had stood in much the same way she did looking at their two groups collide in fraternization and solidarity. They pick each other out and attract each other, hands shaken once. He stood, as most Salarians did, a great deal taller than her but they stood on the same measure then and there. A mutual agreement. If there was a comparison to be made, he was more JD than Mai.
"I'm Captain Kirrahe, Third Infiltration Regiment STG."
"Commander Shepard. Alliance Marines. Special Tactics and Recon." It wasn't a surprise he seemed to already know in a nod. "Nice place. Reminds me of Vietnam back on Earth."
"You make it sound like it's a nice place." Kirahe had been beleaguered, and suddenly all the dirt and combat scarring on his armor had come into focus. "You and your crew just landed in the middle of a hotzone. Every AA gun and Geth unit within ten miles has been alerted to your presence. Are you the spearhead to further reinforcements?"
She shook her head once, looking out as Humans outnumbered Salarians. She hadn't known how many Salarians made up an STG unit like this, but she knew that whatever it was it had seen better days. "We're it."
He was annoyed almost immediately, mouth curling tight. "Shepard, I know your reputation, and I know what you're capable of, but quite frankly this is more than something just a single ship complement can take. I told the Council to send a fleet!"
She nodded at his frustration. She'd been in his position once long ago, digging for her life to hide from Thresher Maws, and then before that on Torfan, trying to ask for more support to take positions. "Your transmissions didn't come through clearly, so they sent me to investigate."
"That's a repetition of our task." He was still indignant, looking out to his remaining men. "I lost half my men investigating this place."
"And what is this place?" She looked behind them in the foreground, great metal facilities that stood in contrast to the paradise around them.
"Saren's base of operations, possibly in the Attican entirely. He's set up a research facility here but it's crawling with Geth and very well fortified."
She suspected as much on the way in, and the fact that even an STG group couldn't handle it. Distantly Kaiden had been on the ramp of the Normandy's Well Deck, peering out, looking for her to confirm status. She had thrown one hand up, lassoing in motion, to which he had nodded and shouted out his orders: Lock down the perimeter. "I don't suppose we can take two birds with one stone if he's here, is he?"
Kirrahe shook his head once, disappointed himself. "No. But his Geth are everywhere, and we've intercepted incoming comms referring to him. This is his facility, there's no doubt about that."
"You mentioned research?"
Salarians don't have time in their lives for pretext and easing people in. There was only direct statements: "He's using the facility to breed an army of Krogan." No dramaticism in it, just what it was. Just how Wrex liked it. He had been earshot, and immediately over to Shepard's side. Kirrahe hadn't taken a step back, he was too much of a killer to cede any ground, but his chest had been out a little more as a Krogan made itself known, and Shepard, with one tiny nod, confirmed that he was with her.
"How is that possible?" Actual interest from Wrex had been rare, and it was piqued now.
"Apparently, Saren has discovered a cure for the Genophage."
One thing after another, all lined up for her. Saren, then Geth, then the Genophage. Maybe one day eventually she could find herself placed in a situation where she could cure cancer, she thinks. "Good for you, Wrex?" She posed.
"Hmph." He growled once, pleased, and yet cautious, looking at Kirrahe, his face in a disapproving curl.
"Shepard… That cure is a weapon being used by Saren, if it leaves this planet…"
"It should leave this planet." Wrex had stepped up instead, fist tightening.
"Are you going to be a problem, Krogan?"
Shepard knows when Wrex is challenging someone for the sake of the fight itself. She sees it all the time between him and Mai. The way his body moves, the war his neck tightens, this is a fight with a purpose beyond his own self-satisfaction. She steps in front of Wrex, head turned, eyes locked with him. "We'll talk about this, just give me a second."
Mai, ever present, ever scanning in the distance, clocks the situation. She is more oriented than most to be on hand for any Wrex (or Krogan) related matter. She tilts her head, catching Wrex's eye, and for the first time it is Mai beckoning him over. The Krogan gives one last glare at Kirrahe, and then an understanding nod at Shepard before walking off toward the Spartan.
"I came here to deal with one galactic threat. Not start another."
"Times change, captain. So do people. We're going to have to give the Krogan a chance one day. Why not now?"
"It's not my call to make." Even special forces soldiers fear. For him, it's the fear of mass effect, of having an impact that they cannot foresee. Salarians, behind the Asari, are more than aware of the phenomenon. For their short lives, they live on longer in the actions they've cultivated and the long path of history stemming from what they did do.
It's a fear that Shepard conquered long ago. "It's a call that has to be made though." And Kirrahe is reassured by the words of the woman the Galaxy calls Shepard. It's a moment of consolation before their inevitable deaths as they continue talking about the plan for the hours ahead.
It makes sense that Wrex gravitates toward Mai, given this choice of anywhere he would go. She stands in the water but feels nothing of it, and for Wrex he needs it to stay his feet as he plants himself next to her, both of them looking out to the blue dipped horizon of Virmire.
"Problem?" She says after a minute of him grumbling.
He spits into the sea beneath them. "Ah, you know how it is. Something I want is out there, and the Galaxy is telling me I can't have it. Been like that for centuries. But this. This is something I REALLY want."
Cash is in her ear: "This is Saren's place, he's got a thing for that genophage of his, yadda yadda Krogan would be getting too much in their britches if they're allowed to not die out."
"From what I gather it's not something universally seen as good." Mai answers Wrex, and to that he can only sniff in her direction, trying to find out if she stank of deceit.
"Hmph." Wrex snorted, kicking at the beach sand below, but the impression filled in again with the tide. "What do you know about good? Thought all you knew about was killing."
Maybe a fair point, for a different Mai. "I'm learning." She declared, quietly.
"Well, let me teach you this then. Never trust the majority to make the best decisions for the minorities." It's not exactly the most groundbreaking news to Mai, not as she grew up on New Jerusalem. He keeps kicking sand into the water, those granules dissolving. "It must've been nice. All those Krogan that we've killed up to now, almost all of them have been fighting for this hope."
"Their hope brings extinction." She clarifies. It was as easy to see for her, surely Wrex knew that.
Wrex looks out to the same horizon as he takes in her words. "Yes. But it was hope regardless. Only the luckiest die knowing they did it in the name of hope."
Mai thinks of the other IIIs, and what they died for, and how, and why. All of them were angry and spiteful against those that had made orphans out of them, and they sent that back onto the world. She knew that anger, and she can hardly imagine dying for hope, even if it sounds nice. Nice was not a word for Spartans.
"Saren must be doing something right." Wrex grumbles, and Mai knows what must be done. "It's getting hard to know who's really fighting for the greater good nowadays."
There were many doubts in the war against the Covenant she thought extraneous. The doubts of final victory are the doubts she had hated the most. There was always a chance at victory against the Covenant as long as she was still breathing. That same annoyance rises up in her. She thought of Shepard as many things: an enigma, and a parable, but in the end there was no doubt in Shepard's driving force. Even Mai knew that.
Wrex should've at least respected it.
Her helmet is off, and Cash is cut off for the briefest moment as the armor drops to the ground and beneath is only her balaclava-adorned face, blue eyes run fire hot and she has taken Wrex by his shoulders. The crack of bone and impact echoes throughout paradise as all in the camp turn and see only the aftermath of what it looks like when a Spartan headbutts a Krogan. They see both Mai and Wrex stumble back from each other, their impresses in the sand made several inches deeper by the impact she had imparted on him, and as Mai settles she wills words through her teeth:
"This will destroy you."
Wrex is not sure the last time he was challenged, or rather, the last time he was shown his place, but if there was anyone to do it the Spartan would.
"I know what it's like to want and not be able to have." She spits out, a piercing pain through her skull from the impact settled as she scoops up her helmet again, shaking it of sand, and putting it on as Cash has to deal with the bio-neural equivalent of seeing the latent effects of what seemed to be a head-on car accident in her head.
"Hah!" Wrex has recovered far quicker than her, but the daze presented affected him as well. "Was that to stop me?"
She shakes her head once, fists curling. "No." She hangs her rifle off of her front again, returning to ready for what orders may come. "I just want you to know that I understand, and, despite that: Don't compromise the mission."
He spits in the sand to his side, aiming for the water but coming up short. "Sure. Sure. Heed your own words though. One day you're going to be on the other side of this."
Cautious as he is to watch on tension between giants, JD finally is on Mai's arm as Wrex, grinning, looks from him to her, and her to him, and then leaves them to it to go sulk somewhere else.
JD's faster with his hands than he is his words, both of them curled to his throat and then doing an outward spin toward her, palms out, head tilted.
ARE YOU OKAY?
She nods, once, and then twice. Cash would've at least put her squad IFF condition to yellow otherwise.
"Why'd you do that Mai?" He asks, watching Wrex walk off. "Problem?"
She shook her head to that instead now. "I… I understand, Wrex. There was an issue. There isn't anymore." It's a quiet admittance backed by the roll of waves. "There are expectations that we hold very close to who we are. Many of those expectations are failed every day. I simply met his expectations."
A laugh escapes from JD's lips which trips her up. She wasn't expecting that response out of him. "Very Shepard of you."
Approval then, she takes it, holds it, and is happy with it.
"Mai, about what you expect of me. Have I met your expectations?" He asks after a few more moments, alone with her in the middle of that beach as the forces around them got set and waited for the word to come down of whatever action was to come.
Every moment, every day, a memory at a time. Is what she feels as an answer.
"More than." She says instead. The act of it flashes by her mind and she barely catches it: She wanted to, once again, take her two fingers and draw a smile across his face, but she didn't. So, she stays there, solid, and JD does nothing but look up at her in a position of presence only the two of them now have. "Have I… met yours?"
"Do you feel like you have?" She tilts his head in mirror with him.
"I… I do not know."
The ODST looks out on the waters, and is reminded that this planet is so much like Altis: Where they both began again. "Well, I suppose that's just the fact of being Human, or normal. Let's just uh, we'll find out together?"
Right hand, thumbs up, planted in his left palm, bringing it to her and then back to himself.
HELP YOU HELP ME.
Asides from the general conversational signs, she knows that this is phrase that passes the most between them.
She nods, but, more than that, as JD turns away to go attend to his own preparations for the mission ahead, she grabs his arm. It is all of strength, and all of her Humanity, held in her touch as JD feels it through his suit. It is not grip that burns, instead it is a touch that wants him to stay, and he does.
"I do not wish to lose you-… your presence if you go to C-Sec." Here, of all places, she wanted to speak that. He had known of course that she had her reservations about him leaving, but for it to be out like that, her words had sounded too innocent. An innocence she wasn't supposed to have. She fights so hard to not draw him back with her grip.
The words of another Spartan ring in her head as pain:
You can leave that lonewolf stuff behind.
JD he mulls her words in his head, taking his helmet off properly and smelling the sea breeze of Virmire and all the good it does him. She wouldn't lose him, but there'd be distance of course naturally. He settles her, as best he can, taking a step forward and touching upon your arm.
"You do more good out here."
Liara is in her periphery, looking out on the waters, studying it. She looks so alone. "Do I…?"
JD nods, confident in his heart.
"Mai, it's the same story you know? As long as you're around, people like me will be okay in the end." He believed in the Spartans still, whether he should or not was another matter. If nothing else, he believed in Mai.
"People like you?" She asks, she hopes.
He nods. If there was any hope for Humanity, it was in the Spartans, vile as their origins might've been.
There was a fizz in her mind, something from Cash. She could feel him making a conscious effort not to speak at that moment. She too had words to hold back.
"JD. I need you over by the tents." Shepard calls out for him over the radio, and he affirms in a quick answer, touching Mai's elbow as he passes, but lingering as he leaves before his arm does. The silence he leaves her with: the waves and chirping of fauna, it's pleasant.
"Chief, can I talk to you candidly?" Cash is inside of her head, and she can imagine him tapping his foot, hands akimbo at his hips. "Ain't nothing bad, just, uh, I want to get my ducks in order with what I'm seeing on my bio readings of ya."
She followed JD with her eyes as he walked on that beach out toward Shepard, waiting with Captain Kirrahe, but turned away to talk to Cash. "Go ahead." She said with as much trepidation as she could muster.
"Masterson, my donor, he had a wife you know. Loved her. Missed her. Of course, they split up because being a spook isn't exactly the best decision to make to maintain a healthy marriage, so that's that. He had a daughter too. Colette. She was a Marine. KIA."
"I see. Why are you telling me this?" She asks as if asking for an update from the UNSC battle net.
Cash is as quick on the draw with his mouth than a proverbial six-shooter. "Because the imprints of those emotions are very readily called up by me. I understand Human emotion in a way I can understand algorithms, or hell- the way I can tell you that the water content of these beaches are about three degrees below the galactic standard, our galactic standard anyway. I won't be able to feel myself though because I ain't got a pair of legs 'my own. That ain't my privilege to be able to feel those things. But I understand it. And because of that I want you to know that, as far as I can tell, you feel very strongly about Chief Durante. I mean. I do too, given that he's, to me at least, one of the last two members of the UNSC I will ever know, but you have an attachment to him that I think your ONI handlers wouldn't quite be okay with." Long-winded, and even he who does not to breathe takes a breath. "He's a good guy." He ends with his true belief.
Mai takes in every word of her AI's and each meaning. It's not a critique, but it is a change he has noticed. He is used to noticing changes in data points, so she does not doubt his evaluation. She just doubts more the reason it was brought up. It was something that was only brought up if it stood to be a factor.
"It's not an issue." She responded, still against the beach with the sun beating down on her wolf grey armor, soaking up the heat.
"Not saying it is." She could hear him shrug. "But the Spartans have their emotional baseline for a reason, Chief. It is what it is."
She had tolerated Cash, and, in the end, he had now become a regular part of her, as was the design for the neural lace. Despite this she was reminded on why she preferred ops without their support.
She wasn't a II. She was allowed to be emotional. And yet she had been given that same cocktail that all the II's sipped from and had an expectation thereof. Wrong mold, different fiber.
It is what it is.
Expectations put upon her by people who barely understood her.
She stares out to the horizon for a long time after that, the camp behind her moving slowly, slowly for the mission ahead of them, but after this long there's little she thinks she needs to concern herself with. As she had long known, she could handle everything sent at her.
Why would today be any different?
In her battle belt, Shepard carries her blue and worn Alliance officer's cap, a welcoming alternative to wearing her helmet outside of the action, but still on the field. The shade of its brim giving her reprieve from Virmire's rays above.
"I've lost people before, Captain." Shepard tells him as the Salarian looks right into her, judging her, making sure she understands the situation she's in. "Seventy-two men during the Blitz. Another forty to Cerberus and the Thresher Maws. Another ten, from then and now. I'm a military officer at war with a hostile galaxy. I know loss."
She knew loss in every way, and Kirrahe knew then as he nodded.
He wanted to make sure she knew because of the plan they'd discussed.
The facility still needed to be dealt with in the end, and they were all that they were going to get. What that left was only action, and purpose.
"Feel like a damn Batarian." She wasn't quite pleased with the method on how they were going to destroy the facility, but she knew the practical realities of war often made her take on tactics that terrorists used against her.
Kirrahe chuckled once. "Well, unlike Balak, this bomb detonation is for an actual good."
"You know about that?" She rose her eyebrow at the man, amused at his knowledge of that incident over Terra Nova.
"I'm STG, Shepard." He shrugged. "Besides it was all over the extranet a few years back that, once again, Commander Shepard saved the day."
Her reputation was one day going to kill her, but for now, it impresses Kirrahe, and for that she would be thankful.
Behind her, the sand-muted footsteps of the Normandy's shock trooper, she turns over, finding his eyes behind his helmet as he depolarizes it.
"JD, it seems like Mai settled Wrex." Shepard noted. All he can do is nod and hope that was the correct assessment, waiting for his own orders. Kirrahe had regarded the black-clad shock trooper once, but put it off; any questions he had about the obvious two odd-Humans out in non-Alliance standard gear was a smaller concern to him than Saren's facility. She was left to explain the rather simple plan.
"Chief. We've got a plan, going. Backing off isn't an option here, so we're going in to terminate this facility. The STG team will be donating their ship's drive system as an impromptu explosive."
Déjà vu. The more things change the more they stay the same. JD nodded. He was familiar with a plan like this.
Shepard continued, "Due to the nature of this facility, however, we're going have to be precise with its delivery. Set it down on the ground and then kick it off from the Normandy."
JD nodded along. The number of times he's had to deliver explosives or mission crucial items within enemy lines had left him more than comfortable with Shepard's plan, even as she outlined it.
"You don't seem surprised, trooper." Kirrahe interjected, leaning back from the map table that was arranged in the main tent. JD shook his head at that.
"Chief Durante here seems really familiar with bad situations, which is why I've brought him here. He's dependable like that." She reached out, shaking his shoulder pauldron, minimal reaction out of him outside of a knowing smirk. "I've got orders for you specifically, I'll fill you in now, but it shouldn't be an issue as we go into it."
Shepard told JD his orders, and that had been that.
One by one, members of the Normandy and then the STG team were brought to the tent, and given their orders. This was going to be a multiple-pronged assault, with Shepard leading a rear-element to infiltrate the facility as the rest attacked the main defense partitions, drawing forces away from her.
Five teams were to attack the front, three of them the remaining Salarian STG forces, one of them being Hitman entirely, and the last being just a single woman: Mai.
"A single person?" Kirrahe can't quite believe the idea.
"Aye, designate her element as Spartan."
"…Shepard. One person?" Kirrahe pressed on, even in front of said person, towering above all as she was mustered to report for orders. "I don't know if you fully understand the veracity of what we're dealing with here."
Shepard had looked from Kirrahe over to Mai, and then back again. "Don't worry, captain. Chief Gul here is capable of far worse than you might think. I've seen it." Shepard had looked one more time at Mai, and for all the misgivings and ideas about her, there was a truth that Shepard saw. "She works better alone anyway."
Mai's shoulders relaxed, a breath within her let go.
Finally.
Kirrahe had been restrained himself, but Shepard had seemed fully confident in the massive machine monster that had appeared with her. So be it.
There was a legend on Sur'kesh, one of the oldest parables of Salarian canon: a great monster, who prided itself on strength alone in its domain over a great kingdom, whose strength was so terrible that it could fell entire armies ruled for centuries until one day a circle of spies, children, started spreading rumors of the monster's weaknesses and failures. Little white-lies that would do much harm to the ego of the monster king, nothing more than little pinpricks alone, but as years went by and rumors and lies amassed, this network of false information wore down further and further on the great monster until they went insane, believing all of the lies against it being true after so many times repeated by his denizens. For most parents on Sur'kesh, the tale is truncated, modified, as to highlight the importance of telling the truth and that words can hurt. For the STG it is the origin of the idea of Salarian predisposition toward information and intelligence services.
All he can do is think about what truths can fell this metal monster known as Mai as she walks away with her orders to execute.
But she is not his enemy, the enemy today is Saren.
"I hear Saren sees you as a legitimate threat, Shepard." Final preparations are being made as Kirrahe runs down notes on the data pad.
Shepard nods, looking out to the soldiers gathering, mulling over their parts in the coming battle. "Geth hit units here and there, assassins every once and a while. Not too much trouble, all things considered."
"You seem unbothered."
She sometimes wonders, privately, if she'd make it to fifty. Fifty was a good age for her, she felt. "Perhaps." She answered. "Not the first-time people have wanted me dead, and I don't think Saren's the last."
"You and him are the same, according to our briefings," Kirrahe admits. "Highly driven, willing to do everything and anything for the best outcome. The differences lie in the nature of that outcome."
What Saren had seen, she had seen, and her process of dealing with the Reapers had been to save people, not accelerate the end. What in his life had led him to this? For what it mattered to her, that didn't matter, no more than she was sure that if he knew her own life story nothing would change. Context and circumstance only mattered so much out when the gunfire rained and the simple question of good and bad fought in their wars.
Everyone loved a speech.
Hold the line.
Emphasis was made by Kirrahe, his foot dragging a line in the sand below.
Bombast and power and purpose was all anyone could ask for in that moment as Hitman watched on to the side with Shepard as the Salarians had their own ceremonies for what was to come. A private moment, greatness promised dead or alive.
"You remember that speech, Shepard?" Private Loke had asked her quietly as Hitman congregated around the Mako, it would be used in the forward assault with them. Those that were there at Torfan had all remembered the speech that Shepard had given then. "You know, before we got into the shuttles and started the landing on the pirate positions?'
It was a good speech by Shepard's bare recollection. She could hardly remember anything about the Blitz that hadn't been just pure emotion and the death of those before her, but the speech she gave before they all descended into hell had been recounted enough by the survivors that it had become the start of her persona of being a particularly good public speaker.
It was a speech full of hellfire and retribution of the innocent, that each of them had a duty, not only to those dead-on Elysium but to those yet to be born, for a safe galaxy. They were anointed by God to keep the peace, and when they descended upon Torfan it was with the vindication of angels, Valkyries.
The speech she gave painted them as angels from on high, and for many who lived, they carried that fire still.
"I'm not giving one if that's what you're asking." Shepard had moved to replace her officer's cap with her helmet proper, eyeing each of Hitman, reassured in their success. They knew the score, and every battle was one that posed fatality finality in it. To them, suicide missions as frontal assaults often were, were just another day, and an eventuality of serving beneath the Commander Shepard. "Williams, regret joining us yet?" She singled out Eden Prime's survivor, but the Marine had melded into Hitman easily.
"Hell nah, skipper. This is the fun part of the job."
Williams had just become another Marine, and, hopefully, the best of them for her sake, Shepard wished for.
A token force of the Normandy's complement would remain with the Normandy as it waited for Shepard's personal team to swing around the facility and take out the AA guns, ready to swoop on down and deposit it to get ready for detonation. Kaiden had that effort well in hand, leaving the usual suspects with her. Even Wrex.
"We good?" She asked him, point blank, shotgun in his hand.
"For now." He admitted, nose crinkling at the air. "You've done me a favor. Now I'll do one fair back."
She hadn't known what Mai and Wrex spoken about, but knowing Mai it was enough for him to be put into line. "If there's a way for us to find that cure…"
He shrugged. "You do what you want Shepard. I'll take care of myself." He'll take care of himself because he's been able to for centuries. Shepard hadn't been as convinced, but even Wrex had his empathizers. Tali had been on his side immediately, shotgun brandished on her side herself.
She proclaimed once, and with a confidence earned after so much time on the Normandy: "I'll hack half this damn sector if it means finding what you're looking for."
"Hmph," Wrex gruffed to Tali. "Big talk from a small girl." That type of tone however meant appreciation of the thought at least.
No offense taken on Tali's part as she sneered, her poncho flowing in the ocean wind.
Shepard's team comprised of JD, Garrus, Tali, Liara, and Wrex. A misfit bunch, but capable. She didn't want anyone else at this point. In this assortment, it had been JD, the odd man out, missing a half of him. He misses a half of him by the way he looks down the beach and sees her, already embarked on her mission wordlessly, out along the coast until she disappears into the blue. Her orders are simple, and they are the same as the rest of the assault teams as they get ready and pile into the Mako to move out on their end.
"She'll be fine." Garrus catches him watching out. "I still don't know too much about her, but what I know enough that she'll be fine." She walks like the titan gods of his homeworld, and in that Garrus does not worry about her unless that worry is about her. He taps onto JD's shoulder, but he does not move until she is fully gone and nods up at him, SMG ready to go.
Shepard does her final checks, making sure everyone is geared up and ready to go. "Liara?" She passes over the Asari in her Alliance combat armor, a spare SMG from JD borrowed.
She nods once. "I'm ready, Commander."
"'Atta girl." Shepard knuckles her helmet. Liara is lighter without the presence of Mai, almost immediately noticeable to her, but it was simply a matter of fact that she would obviously be uncomfortable with her mother's brutal killer. "Say, after this, we get ready to look into this dumb nogging of mind, yeah?"
Liara brightens up to the idea, even the slit of her helmet that reveals her eyes says so, and with that something to look forward to.
It's so natural the way the entire team pivots toward Shepard, knowing she's drawing them in one last time before they set off themselves. "We all know the plan, what's at stake. We got our own people and the STG team going up to bat for us to head around and get their underbelly. I know slow is smooth and smooth is fast, but we gotta put a hustle in it. Gotta do some real meateater shit like Chief Durante here can do." Shepard's verbal jab is in good jest, but the man is within himself, and the echoes of what Mai was, the silent hulk of a machine soldier, is suddenly an image JD takes on.
"Don't you worry." Western drawl is in JD's ear. "I'll tell you if anything goes wrong."
Maybe, JD decides, it'd be better if he didn't hear that.
In the long line of who Shepard trusts to operate on a certain level on point, he and Wrex are it, so with a knowing nod to them, and then a nod to Kirrahe that she is off, the mission is on, and the hike over to their insertion point of the facility begins.
Far above, the Ardent Prayer watches the classic maneuver unfold: a diversionary assault making the way for a true covert strike. The Covenant had long since discarded such subterfuge in light of their massive military prowess compared to the Humans, but times have changed, a refresher was appreciated; a demonstration acted out before them.
"How many Geth have our estimates come up with?" Karonee asks from her gravchair, eyes scanning the holographic representation of the battlefield below.
The Kig-Yar that has been promoted to intelligence officer answers from their post on the bridge. "Twelve hundred, based on overall energy readings. Several hundred organic signatures as well, however they are… stagnant."
"Stagnant?"
The Kig-Yar scritches. "The Geth signatures are moving throughout the facility, but the organic signatures are completely motionless."
They didn't have signatures as per being able to see where individual units were in the facility below, but the energy output as residual readings could, like the sway of fluid motion, give and tell general heatmaps.
"Fascinating."
Usze appears on her arm again as he emerges from the door leading into the troop deployment bays. "Shipmistress. Our forces are rallied. We await your signal."
"Excellent." Karonee nods over to Usze to have him join her at his side, and he does, promptly, Mercaius otherwise concerned with the rest of the ship's status. In the corner, as it usually did, the Prelate remains watching over, forever. "This… Council task force seems to be angled to attack from the south and west end of this facility. Prepare insertion either on top of them, or from the other ends."
"As you wish." He nods his head before he goes to his own station on the bridge with his own planning instruments, coordinating with bridge crew as needed. Any misgivings, any doubts he has are covered alone by the easy grooves he fills in as the Ardent Prayer hums in preparation for a battle. A true proper battle. The pirates they had killed that led them here had been one thing, but this was another. This battle had meaning and consequences baked into it. Pirates had been one matter, but the first interactions with the Geth outright had been another. Perhaps, Usze muses, his caution is born from his interactions with Shepard on the Citadel, having been swept up with her in that one moment, hunting for the Quarian. He cannot admit this, and he can hardly make it out himself, but that feeling he had while working with Shepard is perhaps the most progress, the most forward he's felt.
Every day, every moment in this galaxy, it leaves a scar on him like the red line across his face. He wonders when it will heal truly, fully, but the scars of the war he had fought up until then had not yet done so, even with the years between then and those battles. Some scars never fade.
All he can do is to try and keep going that mystical forward.
She's the first to kickoff the battle. Lone Wolf often meant First Strike in practical application, her stride had often been three times that of normal infantry, but it was no matter to her as the plasma fire came raining down, and she did the only sane thing in response: shoot back.
The defensive positions on one of the facility's broad sides, a giant sea wall, had been designed to whether an assault.
They hadn't been designed to whether a Spartan however as Geth are alerted and start lining those walls, pouring one suppressive fire as sand turns to glass and she sprints from cover to cover, each time finding an angle and popping off shots into the monoculars of those looking down on her.
She finally decides, in a simple statement in her own mind, that the Covenant was stronger. She fears not the gunfire above her head or the machine accuracy of her enemy. She fears them not, because she decides, they cannot kill her. They do not have that right because she can, would, will kill them.
That's why they, what Geth came out to meet her on the beach by the dozens, were down, destroyed, or deactivating.
Like waves against rock, they beat against her, but they cannot destroy her (at least not in the amount of time that matters). It only change the way she takes them all on.
There's clarity in a fight, or the way her rifle burns itself down only to be vented and come alive again after a short period. Mai has half a mind to simply dip her rifle into the water to accelerate the process, but it's nothing. Simply nothing. She's alone, fighting up sandy hill to a metal made structure stocked with metal men, and she is content as her shields flare and the rock she momentarily takes cover behind is chipped away.
Elsewhere down the flank, she hears gunfire, and the concussive pops of explosives, take hold. The other teams have begun their attack.
Her route of ingress was inspired but inherently simple: She walked. Took the long way around into the water, trudging through the coastal shoals of the main island, until she emerged like a monster from the deep out onto the beach, one woman invasion force on the far-right flank, darting between cover to cover right up to the sea walls as she uses her active camo to keep the enemy second guessing where she is until she's too close, too far, and then all at once on them. She fights silently. Cash keeps himself back, not reporting for Mai as he is supposed to do as a good AI, but he still has his role to play, inside of her head, letting her bleed her senses on the microns of a second; super soldier supreme as she clambers onto a infrastructural support in jumps and self-made climbing points made by pre-placed gunfire. They try to shoot down on her, but she's too good, her aim on point, and what takes the other teams dozens of men and women dying and fighting, she does alone, coming onto a defense tower on the wall and ambushing the Geth hosted in it. She does not burn them down: she charges them, a Geth Juggernaut on the floor as she grinds her fists into its chest, shots of plasma bouncing off her shields as she whips off, snaps out, and is on the next closest Geth as she draws her knives, not meant outright for metal, and carves them out.
Did not Beta Company die on a mission like this? She remembers as the light of a Geth's ocular is crushed by her boot and she is standing amongst five dead different Geth types, her rifle up and ready as she pers down the walls of that facility. It's large, seemingly swallowing the island whole atop it, but all they were concerned with was the west and south end for ingress.
Here she is, one of three survivors, having done the missions that killed her ilk again and again and again solo.
Lone Wolf was right. Hyper Lethal Vector was right. Every battle she is reborn and remanifested from the Human she is told she is.
Every single time, it gets a little harder to separate.
But when it does, she tells this new Galaxy she is a Spartan, and she does so in gunfire chorus and knife bled melodies.
Further along the defensive edge Geth are continuing to engage the other teams. No one had expected to actually get to those walls, only to simply press upon them, to buy Shepard time to hook into the facility proper.
Mai defies as she does, and she reports, out loud: "I've eliminated the defenses on my end. Will provide internal support." Whatever that means is carried out over the radio.
Kirrahe, stuck in a divot in the sand, cannot believe his ears, but he knows to take his miracles as he has rounded the beach to his designated application point. Artillery fire from beyond the walls and even from sub-orbital munitions rain down upon him, and his men are silent save for their combat callouts. They are at the breadth of being killed, turret fire shooting down upon them and all the rest of the attackers, an impossible wall, and yet she has made it. What had he missed since he was down here on Virmire? A question for another day, assuming he made it himself.
Up above, Geth units on the defensive walls seemed to be distracted, pulling off to the right, and that had only offered opportunity: "There's a lapse in their fire! Time it! And then push!" Kirrahe yelled out, and the battle went on.
Virmire is beautiful, its long tropical karsts dripping with its green splendor to white sands and ocean wash below plays backdrop to perhaps the worst: war itself, long shadows cast from a blue sky as Shepard leads her team through the maze that would lead to the facility's back door through its refueling center. Geth stand artificial before natural splendor, and all they can do is shoot them down as bodies drop to the sand and splash. Each bound and cover maneuver is sloshy, the water, although only up to their ankles, is enough to create noise that a machine would call out, so their stealth insertion is that in name only as gunfire erupts and echoes.
The tinge in the air is shared by floating Geth, and for Tali and Wrex it is no problem with Liara's help to shoot down the floating units left helpless by her biotic powers. Garrus and JD clear otherwise those remaining on the ground, the shock trooper hucking grenades, blowing rocks open where cover would be, the steam of water droplets coming up and touching upon his suppressor's barrel hissing.
"Good job!" Shepard yells out to Liara, dropping what Geth remain active from the air down to the ground in a sloshy impact. They fall at Garrus and JD's feet, the two of them confirming kills with double taps as they push forward still, following the line of the river to the facility's access point.
It's a long line of smash, destruction, kill, repeat, and eventually the water before them becomes metal, back entry into Saren's facility after dozens of Geth and the subsequent sabotage of internal systems. Tali asks why bother if they were going to blow the place sky-high, but Wrex answers for her, even if it's not the same: "It's fun to break shit." He says before the stock of his shotgun plows into a power junction in sparks.
The facility reminds them all of Noveria, and, more likely than not, there was probably shared DNA between here on Virmire and then Peak 15. All the more reason to torch and burn.
Her team is smooth and steady, doors are breached with textbook procedure, violence and the speed of action. She has brought all of them there that needed to be brought to standard well beyond that. Distantly, through the very bones of this facility, she feels the gunfire and explosions on the other end. Over the radio it confirms as much: they're taking a pounding, losses piling up. None from the Normandy. Close calls, yes, shots taken, bloodied, but none having been attached to that damnable word: "Down."
The facility is stone and grey, salt stuck to every place exposed to nature by open windows or sheer openings.
But there's something else Shepard feels more than bombs and battle. It's a resonance that speaks to her from the walls, ebbing and flowing like the waves that surrounded them, and yet not away, but rather at her. She is the focal point, bouncing off of another. The whispers guide her more than her own feet, leading her team through the facility in a synth blood gash that is in the general direction of where they need to go until the thrumming in her ear gets louder, and louder.
They pass by holding cells of the barely alive, researcher stations, experimentation rooms, breeding grounds, and every time the team takes a momentary breather to comb through for what they can, as Tali tries her best to poke into the system from where they are, her feet drag her closer, and closer, until she knows that her mind is not her own anymore.
The nightmare visions speak again to her in waking daylight.
Somewhere, Kirrahe screams for his team to move to draw out fire as Emerson calls out targets. Quietly, a wolf moves among synthetics and cuts them down. She can feel the wolf, prowling, alone, on a hunt beyond her understanding as a machine is untangled from within.
JD is up next on this door breach: the door sliding open to wire walkways. He steps in, and the air of the room floods out into Shepard's senses.
Even as he swings his gun to clear out it out, its cramped confines reveal all from its two levels: on its lower level, at least, is something very much recognizable. He cannot will himself to say it, so the man who was on his back, Garrus, alerts for the rest as they flood into the room: "It's another beacon. Like the one on Eden Prime."
Liara has been silent in her own right the entire time, falling into becoming nothing but an element of the fireteam, but she is audible now: "What?"
There was only one other person there in her fireteam that had seen it before, JD, and before he can do anything he feels for the paracord on his belt, just in case. Mai was not there to drag people down from its pull, but Wrex might've sufficed.
Though its pull was more than literal. To the rest, it was the aspect of awe and curiosity: that this was what Shepard found and had started all of this. A monolith.
Little did anyone know truly that Liara had changed, but there had been pure contrast itself as she spoke up and was as she once was: A researcher with a very particular niche, in over her head. What she was now no one wanted to admit, but here was who she was supposed to be, looking at a working artifact. She reaches out a hand to it, slowly, but it's not fast enough.
"Don't touch it!" Shepard barks, and more than that, grabs Liara's hand.
"Wrex," Tali asks almost against the furthest railing away from the beacon as it hums and glows, the team congregating around it still, the battle beyond those walls suddenly unimportant. "Have you ever found one of these before?"
The Krogan grunted a negative, shotgun primed. He didn't trust it. No one did, the least of all Shepard. It wasn't her choice in the end however. "JD." She said, and the man was at her side. "Tie me up. Just in case."
He had already gotten the cord out and threaded from his belt to her, attaching it around her waist.
"Shepard…" Liara quietly asked as she prepped. "If this is as you say… I need to see as well."
Shepard's helmet is off, both her hands on Liara's shoulders, bearing down with burning green eyes. "Liara. What has happened to me because of these things, I do not wish on an enemy."
"Then why yourself?" Liara pressed back, and, at once, she had gotten Shepard's belief.
"Because what's been done is done. I need to know."
She always needed to know the truth.
Not the truth about Saren however.
Not the truth about the Reapers.
She would find those as they came, and even now, if it so happened to come up. Though she craved something deeper, further. If there was a chance for her to fully understand herself again, she would take it.
And she did.
For the first time in hours it felt, JD spoke up, one hand on the cord holding Shepard, the other waving back to the rest of the team. "Back up!"
Like two whirlpools converging on a perfect frequency, she reached out, and it took her once again. "Alright come on you-" She couldn't finish it as one more time: the Apocalypse consumed her mind and she was taken from this reality to a visage and memory she knew, but had wanted so hard to forget. But this time, it's cleaner, the horror is old hat, but no less more terrifying. Though it is something she has been prepared for now, something that even as it seizes her she stands steady.
Her nightmares have been made real, but in the end they are nightmares she is far and away familiar with. She understands them, and so a new demesne is revealed.
Saren Arterius was not himself. Not whole, at least. Not as he looked upon his left arm, chopped off by Nihlus, and saw a black mass in its place that served all the utility of an arm, but yet was not. It was an appendage, to be sure, but it oozed the energy of the oldest gods.
He had made a pact, not with the Devil, but with God.
There was nothing left for him to do but to face his destiny and finish what he had set out to do.
It was what God wanted.
The STG team and Shepard's forces had been attacking his facility presently, but he thought nothing of it as he took in a breath after recording his final message into a data stream with its own instructions.
Benezia had been dead. Liara had been untaken. Millions in assets and hundreds of lives, resources between the Geth and his remaining Spectre-founded help had been withering away by the slow, relentless roll of Shepard and the Normandy. Here, they had found his trace, and were on his doorstep, but he wasn't worried.
He had been told the truth, and if he was to fail, he would leave the Galaxy with its own fair share of problems, leading up to the final insurmountable fate of their civilizations.
He knew the Covenant had an idea: About the Mantle of Responsibility.
On it was the burden of life itself in all of the galaxy, for the sake of life. It was a promise that could only be given gods, and yet gifted to mortal men. Only the great could take that Mantle, and if life were to survive, to go on, to blossom toward the sun, the Mantle of Responsibility was his alone.
The Galaxy would think of his acts as they would, but they could not doubt the reality of the Reapers, and they would be hopeless to stop it.
On his own systems in his personal command center, he had seen the room where he communed with God be compromised. A flare of anger arose in him, but such emotions were now beyond him.
There were other Demons among them for Shepard to deal with.
Shepard wasn't the first. She knows that now in a way she was never supposed to. The voices of the Protheans, their warnings, they are stream past her head and she understands now their agony. She understands now in a way that won't make her mad, the idea of apocalypse coming at them head on. Machine metal and man flesh are no longer that unknowable, unholy texture of her nightmares, because she has had now comparison. This beacon clarifies her mind in a way that no medicine could ever.
This beacon clarifies her mind in a way that lets her understand Mai Gul.
Shepard wasn't the first commander to have Spartan B312 deposited under her command and to see her do as she was called: become a Lone Wolf.
Shepard knows now: an image, a memory for Mai Gul, plays in front of her eyes.
Reach. Not this galaxy. A planet yet to be found by the Systems Alliance.
Around her are people like Mai, and then Mai herself. They are not considered people insofar as much as they are called this title: Spartan.
He's a man that reminds her much of the Old Man Ryder, donned in that same unbreakable armor she's seen Mai in. A different variant, a different shade of blue, but still quite recognizably of the same cloth. MJOLNIR. It was go time, and Mai had been by his side, walking toward a chopper for transport. It was day one for her on a new team, and she fit right in save for all the parts where she hadn't been welcome: "Not gonna lie to you lieutenant. You're stepping into some shoes the squad would rather leave unfilled. Me? I'm just happy to have Noble up to full strength." Spartan Carter spoke to her, admitting her and his position. Mai had thought nothing of it. She was needed, and thus she would do as she was told as they clambered into the transport chopper, aimed to investigate outposts gone dark and whispers of an insurgency brewing on one of Humanity's, the UNSC's, most important planets. In retrospect, they had wished it was that instead.
Carter, hand on the chopper, moving himself in, looks at her one last time. Among Spartan IIIs, she was a rumor: a lone survivor of Beta Company, a vengeful ghost of all the IIIs lost in the war. "Just one thing: I've seen your file- even the parts the ONI censors didn't want me to. I'm glad to have your skillset. But we're a team." She pauses before getting in, hearing those words. If Carter had really known, and yet still he pressed upon her this request, he must've believed in an old idea, one that Shepard agreed with:
No one saves themselves.
"That lone wolf stuff stays behind, you hear?'
A war happens for Reach against the alien menace the Alliance currently harbors out of fear and reciprocity. And then, years back, she sees the unsung war of the woman that would become Noble Six, and then, at last, simply Master Chief Mai Gul.
Covenant, UNSC, Spartan, Earth and her Colonies. There is no more veil.
There are no more secrets. Only the truth.
JD does not need to pull down on Shepard for her to fall, and instead of on her side, she lands on her feet, the chaos of the unknown long gone as Shepard's eyes have seen lifetimes transpire before her, and finally, there is peace, and then consolation. It wasn't the time or place for the horror, the realization of what she understands now to really take hold. They were in the middle of a mission, one that mattered to her Galaxy, but besides her, her squad looks at her as if she had been born again. Her vision falls on JD.
He is there in Mai's memory, and she realizes, as her gut feeling against the Covenant has arisen in disgust against them, she too has taken on the aspect of Mai that understands JD and who, what, he is.
Orbital Drop Shock Trooper.
She feels sorry for him now. Intensely.
He had to hide a war in his heart, and here he was, a survivor by circumstance, forced to make peace.
She understands now, and only the adrenaline of the day keeps her from crying for him.
"Commander?" Liara asks out, but Shepard does not stop looking at JD as he reels his cord back to his battle belt, trying to avoid her gaze. He cannot fight it for long however, and he is captured. "What did you see? What happened?"
She can say nothing, but she wants to give him everything, for his service to Earth and her Colonies. Across a divide in reality, two soldiers of losing war have come beneath her to stop the apocalypse, and she cannot speak their truth back to them. Not yet.
JD goes to his medical pack, pulling out his battlefield aids, but Shepard shakes his head before he gets too into it. With a hand signal, her fireteam seizes up, ready to be commanded, military conditioning well beat into all of them. "Go secure our exit to where we're planting this bomb. I gotta tell JD something, Alliance ears only."
The rest, they cannot fight orders, so they walk back up the walkway as Shepard beckons JD closer, their helmets almost touching. JD wonders what Shepard could possibly say to him concerning the mission, but he is frozen by her words.
The truth has set him free, and he is falling. Just like how he is supposed to.
"Why didn't you tell me?" She whispers.
Damn their orders. Damn them all.
JD steps back, and shock in him however is cut off by the way Shepard holds his arm, not to grab, but to anchor him. "I- I don't know what you're talking about."
"Cash." She speaks a name not present, and yet, she knows otherwise now: a Humanity who knew how to live, side by side with Artificial Intelligence. "When we're done with this mission, me, and this ODST, and the Spartan-III… We're going to have a long talk in my cabin. You're also invited." She speaks not with ire, not with disappointment, not with any tone of hostility at all. She speaks like a mother, because she was one, and yet she will never be one. She speaks like someone who cares.
"Aw Christ." Cash says silently to Mai, someone else in the facility, raising hell, pounding a Geth Juggernaut into the floor of a walkway. "She knows."
Mai pretends not to hear as her gauntlets pound metal into stone, and then over and over again as more and more Geth assault her to no avail.
JD's entire body, his blood, it feels like it tightens, it freezes over, but Shepard is far too warm for him to stay like that as her fingers try to touch him beneath his BDU.
"I may know now," she starts, and her voice is barely above the drone of the computers around them in that room. "But I want to understand."
She wants to understand how a Humanity like them could fight, for so long, against a foe so unstoppable. She wants to understand how they could be like them.
But that was for a later time. A mission that mattered just as much as any in the war against the Covenant was underway.
The nightmares had their purposes she realized: had she not suffered them before the weight of this new world on her might've maddened her, then and there. But now it was her first breath in a long time. This is revelation.
It was a breath she needed because right after, it was back into the deep. Before that however JD moves, a hand resting on hers, and a nod, understanding.
She knows now what the end of a Human race is like, and it is a terrible, terrible thing.
Shepard and JD don't even get the chance to think as they move on as a communication console on the main level of the room begins to buzz, and then to glow. Someone was calling. An accomplice of Saren who happened to have the worst timing? Or maybe Saren himself. Shepard had gone to the center console all the same as her squad watched on, covering the doorways in and out. None however could do their duty as an image appeared before them, gargantuan in size, and for Shepard and JD, a familiar one, last seen over Eden Prime.
"What is that?" Garrus spoke for the majority at the red tinted figure, that has finally, for Shepard, been seen in her nightmares, and now manifested into reality.
If no one there had been familiar with the concept, the word that came, looking at this creature seem born of the deep, red angel glow making up its body, would've been what it was: Reaper.
Shepard knew that's what she was looking at, face to face with realization after realization.
"This is…" Liara wanted again to reach out, to touch it, approaching it on the walkway behind Shepard, but could not, for the force that stopped her this time was the aura it emitted, biting at her as ice does flesh. "This is not a VI."
"Rudimentary creatures of blood and flesh. You touch my mind, fumbling in ignorance, incapable of understanding." Words came not from sound, but into their minds it felt, as the room tremored. "You are not Saren."
What use did JD have to raise a gun against a hologram? He found himself doing it anyway. The word threat didn't even begin to take hold in his mind.
It floated, unregarding, no face, no eyes. The only way they all could look at it was just at its whole, reflected on each other.
Forever more, for all who gazed upon it, the stars would always be red.
There are a million questions Shepard should ask, for a being that has answers that go back inconceivable generations of stardust, but the words that this Sovereign of existence has are words not given freely, and not for questions that are worthless.
Shepard finds perhaps one of the greatest questions of this universe as all look upon and wonder, question, the idea of mortality itself:
"Why?"
This question, the Reaper could perhaps entertain, for it knew, she knew. She had seen and beholden the generational penstroke corrections of trillions brought to oblivion. It did not need to waste words on formalities such as.
"Organic life is an aberration. An accident. We impose order on the chaos of organic evolution. You exist because we allow it. And you will end because we demand it."
The voice is the vibration of background radiation itself, endless, and yet so intertwined with the fabric of reality itself it tore at the air around them.
Quiet words, quiet thoughts exchanged between all of them as Shepard and this red mass spoke to each other. Worries. Fears.
They're harvesting us! They're here to wipe us out!
I get the feeling something bad is about to happen.
It's impossible!
This was a Reaper, the very force at Saren's back that justified and burned cruelty and husks into the Galaxy. They were an Answer to an impossible Question.
And yet…
"The Cycle cannot be broken."
"The Cycle is not the only way." She spoke its language, imbued with the knowledge of a different galaxy, and different way.
If their galaxy had been a snow globe, the glass had cracked, there had been those there that promised a different type of history. Before Reapers, there had been Forerunners. Not here, but somewhere close, somewhere identifiably the same. She knew this now. An avatar of that very fact stood near her, dressed in the armor of a shock trooper.
Sovereign paused, floating, seeing, and then finally, answering.
"The Others who have come to this galaxy think they worship gods, but their faith is just an aberration of an aberration. They think they understand, but they understand lies, and we are a Truth that when brought to them, they will see far more easily than you. We will teach them belief before their absolution. An absolution that we can define, far better than the Demons among you can."
Liara had been first to see the language of Shepard and it, speaking on a level of mutual understanding, hidden in plain sight. Shepard knew something that she didn't, and it had filled her with the tenacity to speak before God.
Shepard fists curled, two Human histories swirling in her head together. "You're no longer the final answer. Not really. Not when there existed an alternate. Things have changed."
If there were bodies to leave in her wake, the trail would've piled high, but the Geth leave no bodies behind. Just pieces, parts, explosive impressions where they fall. By that metric however she has put down so many, and so many still as she burns her away across the defensive wall. The larger problems, the turrets, the artillery, they have been taken out by Shepard's team elsewhere, and what is left is now just her: going forward, shooting everything in front of her like her old poetry.
The Geth did not feel. The Geth did not live. If killing was sin, then what this was, as it had always been when she took on the Geth, a substitute with no victim.
"Hey, you heard what I said back there?" Cash speaks to her, no more concerned with the battle than she is. "Shep knows."
She fails to see how this is a problem.
Somedays she wishes there was a mag based system to the weapons of that galaxy based on how fast she can burn down an enemy, but, to her, it simply means that her older arts still apply: in the face of a Geth Juggernaut and charging into it with her shoulder onto the ground, metal grinding on metal. She's up as the Geth beneath her crushes, rifle in her hand as two regular Geth units charge her, only to be cut down as she draws her pistol offhand. The location becomes indistinct, the mission is God, but the Devil tempts her in Mankind's oldest art: killing. Because that's all she can do as the Geth come at her from every nook and cranny, their weapons not yet able to deal with her shielding, her armor, her fighting, herself.
She continued killing still.
The Ardent Prayer's sensors had gone alight, Karonee's request answered before she had yelled her order: "Status?!"
One of the sensor crewmen had yelled from his station, throwing up a map of Virmire on the main holographic display in the center of the bridge.
One of the main tags the Ardent Prayer's tracking sensors had been following was the SSV Normandy as it loitered in a holding pattern by the main facility, however, further north, in a massive sink hole dozens of kilometers away, a massive energy signature, rising out from the crust of the planet.
"Massive Element Zero readings! We've never seen such concentrations before!"
"On screen!" She yelled out, and there behold, had been a monster from the deep, cloaked in black, like the ancient monsters of Sanghelios's seas. It rose, a gargantuan vessel, no bigger than the battle cruisers of the proud Covenant Navy, but its design had been so much of a monster, that when those of the Ardent Prayer looked upon it, they saw not a ship, but something living, something moving.
"Is it…?" Karonee asked.
"It is a… ship." The sensor crewman had confirmed. "Moving toward the facility at incredible speeds."
It had buzzed the SSV Normandy, the far tinier frigate bobbing out of the way in atmosphere, but hardly a consideration. As it flew, the great leviathan ship dripped with the planet, what it brought up from its sinkhole taking flight in its wake.
"Any readout on shields? Energy source? Lifesigns?" Karonee had gone down the list, but every question yielded no answer.
Shepard and her team had passed by the breeding facilities for the Krogan as they cut through the facility: giant incubation tubes with Krogan, fully grown, yet born. So many, kept warm as if they were still resting in the womb. To keep them alive had required an energy output fueled only by the facility's massive hydroelectric plant, which they had finally come down to, the floor beneath them warm water having gone through its processes, open sky, and a clear shot for the Normandy to deliver the bomb.
The mission was all they could concentrate on. They had all spoken to God, and God had wanted them dead. Sovereign had been coming for them all.
The Normandy, after getting an all clear, had buzzed the facility,
"Shepard," Joker had sounded mildly panicked over the radio. "That massive ship buzzed us on the way. It's loitering at a distance, out of visual range. What the hell is going on?" The lip of the Normandy had touched upon the ground enough for the Normandy's crew members, Kaiden in his gear once again, overseeing the makeshift bomb delivered, humming dangerously in its haphazard construction.
"Wish I could tell you, Joker." Shepard had said, hoarsely, the rest of her team taking a knee and securing the site. That far in, and hardly a touch upon them all that hadn't been beaten out by their kinetic barriers. With the bomb dropped off where it needed to be the Normandy crewmen had all retreated back into the ship, Kaiden and Shepard sharing a stare, a nod, and a thumbs up as the Normandy dusted off as soon as it came, kicking up water with it. Its next move was to go pick up the distraction force at a designated point.
"All teams, how're we doing?" Shepard asked out. JD had taken his place near the bomb, looking over its control panel, welded on: all systems go.
Kirrahe had been first to answer, out of breath, somewhere off in a firefight still continuing, but controlled. "Shepard, do we have the a-okay to start moving back?!"
"Affirmative. Get out of here Kirrahe, the Normandy is moving to extraction point now." Shepard said. She wanted this mission to be over, and she wanted to do nothing but think.
What had been left however, had been her Human portion of the distraction force.
And the last team: They had come yelling out. "Shepard!" It had been Ashley on the horn. "Do you read me?!"
"Hitman?!" Shepard spoke back into her comm piece, urgent enough that the rest of her team had turned to her concerned.
"We're pinned down at an AA tower! We've taken casualties and are in need of immediate assistance. We'll hold them off as long as possible!" Explosions and gunfire in the background, the hiss of weaponry going hot. It had sounded dire. It had sounded like Torfan all over.
"Chief Gul," Shepard immediately asked for out on the radio. "Chief Gul did you copy that last?!"
"Affirmative." Came the lonely voice, far calmer than anyone else there.
"Get to that AA tower, we'll meet up with you there!" Shepard ordered, her feet wanting her to take flight already.
Her team hadn't been done yet, but she had thought something like this was going to happen. Final plans were for the Human forces to rendezvous back at the bomb anyway, and Hitman had gotten bogged down. They couldn't just leave the bomb however. Shepard had risen to action, like she always did, the life of her men at risk, but not before securing the entire point of this:
"JD?" Shepard looked over to JD across the bomb. He looked at her through his visor as it depolarized. He nodded at her orders before they even left her lips. "Do you have it?"
He had been assigned to protect the bomb if complications opened up.
This was war, and he was a warfighter. He could hold ground as people were saved.
"I have it."