A/N: Hello everyone!
So where do I begin? Oh yeah! Let's get the plug out of the way!
I've been working very hard on my original works. If you haven't had a chance yet, please check out the website at Melaradark com for more info and teasers.
I also have still been writing my fanfiction and have no plans to stop, ever, though my posting schedule will never be what it was when I first started Dark Energy waaaaaaayyy back in 2011. Good lord, has it honestly been 11 years?
Back then, I was posting five thousand plus words a day and usually five days a week at minimum. Unfortunately, such an intense writing schedule for several years dropped me into what I now call the Block, where I was unable to write so much as a laundry list for two whole years.
Well, the block is over, and I'm moving along at a good and (more importantly) comfortable pace where I am not in danger of burning out again, and things are still getting done in a realistic time frame.
Yes, that means it's gonna be years before I finish my current fanfic works in progress, but better years of fairly steady posts than never getting them done at all because I've burned out again. Oh, that reminds me as well, be sure to follow the story, that way you get email notifications when a new chapter is posted.
Ok, so down to brass tacks.
Yes, this is what it looks like, another Dark Energy fic! Best Left Said (my fanfic AU which turned out to be a literal DE canon AU) was so popular and I enjoyed doing it so much that I decided to return to the universe of Spectre T'Soni and Dr. Shepard.
Briefly, in DE: Inheritance, we see Ashley pulled from Dr. Shepard's universe into the universe where the Reapers were defeated and Del lived to a ripe old age. Our intrepid team, including Del and Liara's two grown daughters, works hard to get Ashley back to her home volume and in doing so they have to pinpoint where among an untold infinite number of volumes she belongs. They pull data through a miniscule fold that shows a volume where the asari were decimated by plague and war, and did not become the major galactic power that they were in 'our' reality. The turians instead discovered the Citadel, and because of the advantages in the galaxy that this afforded them tactically, they easily won the First Contact war and occupied Earth (to reread the portion in question, it is chapter 51 of Inheritance).
From this volume, our team discovers a picture and news of an alternate Del Shepard, one which paints our hero in a very different light. She is a Del that is not Alliance. She is a Del that unified gangs and splinter militias into a formidable resistance to drive the turians off of Earth. She is a Del that, having succeeded in driving the aliens off of Earth, was working on driving them out of the Sol system and further securing humanity's home.
Our Del or not, she's still a Del Shepard, and so we put that little brief glimpse of her to the side. We have no doubt that this alternate Del will somehow succeed in her endeavors, that she'll fight against all odds and obstacles, and ultimately be a positive force for humanity and the galaxy.
But I think our naivete is showing just a bit, our eyes clouded with stars and the memories of OUR Shepard. What if, for arguments' sake, we take another look at this strange, alternate Del Shepard and do a little supposing.
Suppose Del Shepard never joined the Alliance, because the Alliance was gone before she was old enough to do so? She never knew Anderson. Never knew Hackett. Two very strong and influential figures in her life, one a father figure…gone. Hmm. That hurts a bit.
Suppose that, because of the war and turian occupation, Del was also never adopted by Nancy, never met Paul. Ouch. We seem to be treading darker waters here, and I'm starting to get a little nervous. Dare we take it one step further still?
Suppose that Del never met Liara. Oooh, gonna have to breathe through this one. It's certainly possible with the wars and plague that decimated the asari, that Liara was never even born in this AU.
Yes, that definitely hurts. Del without her soul mate? But, I guess if we're wandering down this particular dark alley, that's for the best.
Right? I mean, certainly it must be for the best that Liara never be born here, then for her to have been born in the same universe with a Del Shepard that had no therapy, no discipline, no stabilizing forces in her life, right? Surely so. Could you imagine if Liara did exist here, and what would happen if she had the misfortune to meet a Del Shepard who has spent her entire life steeped in nothing but violence, hatred, trauma, and a seething anger so great it has almost developed a mind of its own? A mind bent toward one purpose, one singular focus?
Earth first, at any cost, and fuck anyone that gets in her way.
As always, I write left of canon, and in the case of my AU's, canon is on vacation in the Bahamas and I wink at it on occasion. I also have violence, strong language, and F/F romance, so don't read on if that sort of things offends you. I still tend to fade to black on the really romantic scenes as well, so if you're looking for detailed boom chickas, wow wow your way down the street. You'll be disappointed here.
All right, nothing left to do now but get started…
Wait, what's that you say? What does this have to do with Spectre T'Soni and Dr. Shepard? I thought you said this story was about them?
Why yes, astute reader. I did indeed say that…and it is. You see, a strange thing has happened. In that distant alternate volume, Supreme Commander Del Shepard is just about to get a very interesting report from her Chief of Intelligence.
It's only a matter of time now, before Spectre T'Soni and Dr. Shepard find out the hard way that not all Del Shepards are the good guys.
Some, it seems, have been lost to that anger, hatred, and misery.
Lost…to the monster within.
Dark Energy AU: The Monster Within
"Feisty fuckers aren't they? Nearly dead and the pendejo is still fighting."
"Can it, Vega, and lift. I'll drag his dead ass in if I have to, but if he can take some of his own damned weight I won't complain."
Both men hauled, getting their shoulders back into the armpits of the krogan's torn and scorched battle armor, hefting him up. It wasn't easy, and not just because of the weight; the armor was drenched in blood and getting a grip was difficult.
As they got him upright, the krogan's half-lidded eyes seemed to focus a little more. Teeth bared, his boots churned a little as he tried to get them back under himself, struggling feebly. Samson Wilcher allowed the boots to find purchase, but the moment he had it, the prisoner tried to haul away from him again. Wilcher punched him hard in the side, right where the plating of his hard-suit had been blasted away, and the largest wound was raining down on the deck plates.
The krogan barked a wheeze, and nearly went down again.
"Damn it, do you want him upright or not?" James Vega asked as they steadied him. "Come on, it's not far."
The krogan's head bobbed weakly as he struggled to stay conscious, giving only one or two more paddling motions with his boots as they pulled him down the last of the corridor and into the tribunal chamber. The moment they were clear of the doors, they dropped the krogan to the ground with twin grunts of relief. The impact seemed to jar the monster again, and with sluggish determination, he tried to leverage himself up. Wilcher and Vega, ignoring him, saluted.
The tribunal chamber bore dark vid screens that took up most of the left and right walls. Directly opposite the door they had come in was a massive, curved desk. Three chairs were behind the desk, though no one was sitting in them at the moment. The one in the middle was set slightly higher than the other two, and nearly obscured the door behind it. Bone spires of some sort had been set in the back of this chair, forming a sort of fanned crown.
Hung on the wall over this door was the flag of the Resurgence, a silhouette of a red moon rising over a black planet, with a starburst on the horizon between the two.
Though three chairs were behind the desk, only two people stood with them. On the left was a tall and icy Caucasian woman, blonde hair drawn back from her face, and a scar splitting her eyebrow. On the right, a Japanese man with neatly slicked hair and an unforgiving expression. Both wore the black and red uniform of the Resurgence, their rank insignia in gleaming silver below their left shoulders. It was these two that Vega and James had saluted.
Attached to the center front of the desk was a massive krogan skull, that of a male in his prime. It had been bleached, deep scars on the forehead plate still visible. It was flanked by the skulls of two male turians. Looking at the bleached spires of their crests, it took no imagination to conclude that the bone spurs attached to the chair had come from similar such skulls.
The wounded krogan prisoner shook his head once, blinking almost drunkenly as he tried to clear his eyes. As his gaze fell upon the scarred krogan skull he bore his blood-stained teeth, and surged forward with a snarl.
Wilcher's boot sank into that wounded side again, dropping the krogan onto his belly. With his arms shackled behind him, the alien could not easily pull himself up again but damn if he didn't try, lunging forward another several feet and bellowing as he skidded and slipped in his own blood.
The two behind the desk watched dispassionately as Vega and Wilcher grabbed the prisoner again and hauled him back.
"I will kill you all," the krogan snarled, then spit a stream of orange-tinged foam onto the floor.
"Whatever you say, big guy," Vega told him, then slammed a hand over the bastard's ear, just below the hard bone plate. "Now shut up."
The door behind the desk opened. Four men in full combat armor entered, splitting in half as they walked around the desk and took up stations against the walls. Simultaneously they shifted the rifles in their hands to port arms.
Wilcher and Vega, never releasing their hold on the krogan, shifted their free hands up and saluted, as did the icy woman and her stone-faced companion as a final figure entered.
This woman was not in combat gear. She wore the same black and red uniform as her two compatriots, her insignia in the form of a spread-winged golden eagle and five flanking stars. As well, four additional red stripes slashed diagonally across the chest of her uniform just underneath her left shoulder.
Her black hair was cut short and ragged, shaved fine on the sides. Her face, though warm in coloration, somehow still seemed immensely cold, scarred in several places in haphazard white lines. She wore an eyepatch over her right eye that seemed almost fused or welded into her flesh. Her other eye seemed as unforgiving and black as space itself.
The krogan, breathing heavily as he sought to remain conscious, sneered at her. A low rumble sounded in his chest, quickly emerging into a sort of rough, coughing laugh.
"So tiny," he said. "Nothing but a milk-fed pyjak."
"Identification," the woman said. Though her words were directed toward the stone-faced man beside her, the hard gaze of that single eye never left the krogan.
"Urdnot," the man replied. "I believe its name is- "
"I am Urdnot Grunt," the krogan said, and tried to pull himself up even more. "Battlemaster of the Urdnot clan. Look close, pyjak. My face is the last one you'll ever see."
Instead of taking a seat, the woman moved around the desk and stepped down to the level floor. At a faint nod and a flick of her fingers, both Wilcher and Vega loosed their hold on the krogan and stepped back. Grunt nearly fell again, then tried to surge up again. Both efforts ended with him on one knee, teeth still bared as he rumbled at the woman. She seemed utterly unconcerned.
"The first krogan I ever met in person was an Urdnot," she said. "Wrex. We had a spirited and enlightening conversation. He found it so enlightening, in fact…"
She halted in front of the desk, her fingers trailing almost lovingly over the front plate of the scarred krogan skull. "…he decided to stay."
Grunt let out a roar and lunged to the attack, only for his eye to be met with the human woman's fist. The agony was hot and instant, and far greater than it should have. As he fell to the ground, the side of his face on fire, he saw the serrated blade held in that fist. Only a gnawing, throbbing darkness remained where his eye had been.
"Don't do that again," she told him, as the icy blond woman came around the desk and offered her a cloth. She wiped off the knife blade, sliding it back into the sheath on her belt, then began to mop the blood and fluid off her fingers. "I want you to see something."
She nodded at Vega and Wilcher, who pulled the writhing krogan back up on to his knees and turned him toward one of the viewscreens, as the stone-faced man selected some controls on the desk. A live feed appeared, showing a green and gold planet. Ships could be seen, mostly Resurgence frigates and cruisers, with the occasional krogan battle ship. The scattered debris said there had been many more of them not too long before.
The occasional flash of weapons' fire or bright blue flash as an eezo core gave way, showed that what great battle had been fought here wasn't quite over, though it was clearly already well lost.
"It's not Tuchanka," the one-eyed woman said, lamenting. "But I suppose a small Urdnot colony world serves to get the point across just as well. There are, what? Nearly a billion of the Urdnot clan down there, clan chief?"
"I'm not the clan chief."
"No, that's true," she told him, gesturing at the skull. "He was. You and I both know, however, who would have eventually been clan chief in his place. Nearly a billion Urdnot…"
She said this last almost to herself, before she nodded ever so slightly at the icy woman, who in turn looked slightly upward.
"This is General Rasler. Fire at will."
A moment later, on the vid screen, no fewer than two dozen of the Resurgent vessels began to fire on the planet. Most of the ordinance looked like typical bombardment munitions; capable of delivering an explosion upon hitting their target the equivalent of a sixty-megaton nuclear detonation. Some of the weapons' fire, however, looked strange, like rivers of light lancing down to the planet's surface.
"Magnetohydrodynamic weapons," the human woman said to Grunt, though he had not asked. "The turians had it in development, until we took it from them. You're watching the first live field application. Beautiful, isn't it? A molten stream of metal accelerated to nearly the speed of light. And if you're expecting your planetary defense grid to limit the destruction, I must inform you that we have already taken care of that little problem."
Grunt wasn't listening. He was only bellowing and snarling, watching as the colony planet he'd called home his entire life was reduced to an apocalyptic ruin, hundreds of millions of krogan – his clan, his people – erased.
Flash after flash dotted the surface of the world, explosions so massive that the clouds of debris they threw up were visible even from here. Dozens of them. Hundreds.
Grunt thrashed, and Wilcher dropped his hold again, once more slamming a kick into his wounded side. He lay on the ground, far too weak now with blood loss to get back up. A fine mist of blood sprayed out and dotted the floor with every one of his exhalations.
"You won't…you won't win…" he gurgled, and a bubble of blood swelled from one nostril, before popping.
She waved the two men off again with another casual flick of her fingers, then crouched.
"My apologies, I didn't quite hear that. Would you mind repeating yourself?"
"You won't win," he said, lifting his chin off the ground. One eye was now nothing but a gore clogged socket, but the other blazed at her with blue fire. "You humans may have torn up the turians but…we krogan…"
"We are too strong, too many, we will destroy you monkeys, ooh ooh!" She mocked him with a smirk, making a fist and beating it lightly into her chest on the last two syllables, as a gorilla might when trying to prove its dominance. Then she tsked. "You krogan are all bravado. Your numbers do pose a bit of a problem, but we've got that covered. You see, we took more than the MHD tech from the turians. It seems they were already working on a way to cull the overwhelming locust swarm that is the krogan. They called it the 'genophage'."
Still crouching, she looked up toward the viewscreen, consideration in her eyes. "Granted, they were a distance away from perfecting and distributing it, but we were able to combine their efforts with some similar projects we also took from the salarians. The salarians were too kind in their efforts. Their goal was to merely reduce your reproductive rate down to only about ten in a thousand of your children being born alive. The turians were a bit more hard-edged. They were going for only one."
She looked back down at him with a faint smile. "I've remedied that. Once distributed, the genophage will bind itself to krogan DNA. We made it a hundred times as contagious as the common cold, and we've already begun to distribute it. Once that is complete, each and every one of you krogan animals in this galaxy will have your fertility rate reduced effectively to zero. Your chest beating means nothing, Urdnot. Your threats mean nothing."
His burbling snarl grew, and with much effort he managed to roll slightly, struggling. Unconcerned, she looked at Wrex's skull again.
"I suppose that's one thing you can be grateful for, if your kind can even feel gratitude," she said, and then grinned. "Daddy didn't get to see what a mewling little worm his baby boy truly was."
The roar sprayed the air and, eye wide and maddened, the krogan lunged forward with the last of his strength and sheer will.
She never blinked, not even when her face was spattered as she drew the pistol on her hip and put out his other eye.
Rising to her feet over the now dead krogan, she holstered the pistol and gave Vega and Wilcher a nod and a 'thank you boys' as they began to haul the carcass out. Still holding the bloody cloth she'd used to clean her hand, she folded it onto its clean side, then lifted it and idly wiped her face off, before she passed it back to Rasler.
"I don't want a thing left moving on that planet when we leave," she said to her general. "Or in its sky."
"Of course, Commander."
Del Shepard, Supreme Commander of Earth and the Resurgence Fleet, then turned to see the stone-faced man had come down from behind the desk as well. He offered her a data pad.
"Ah, that's right. You wanted to show me something. What is it, Keiji?"
As she took the pad and began to scan over it, Rasler said, "Not something he should be bothering you with. We were just discussing it before they brought that animal in."
"It is not something I normally would bother you with, ma'am," Keiji Okuda replied to Del, returning Rasler's annoyed look with one of his own. "At 07:50 ship time my intelligence network out on the fringes picked up a signal tapping into the general galactic grid. It flagged on several essential keywords; war, Alliance, Earth, Ashley Williams, as well as you. Whomever sent the signal also pulled a general data dump from the extranet system before the signal cut off."
"That's pretty typical," Del said, looking up from the data pad. "And since my Chief of Intelligence wouldn't be wasting my time with some random alien using the extranet from an unapproved source, I'm going to presume you have more to tell me than just that."
"Yes, Commander," he said. "There were several keywords that were also used that were a bit...puzzling. Things like 'Reaper', 'Galactic Council', and 'krogan genophage'."
The former two terms did nothing to change the look on her face, but at 'krogan genophage' she straightened. "That is highly classified information."
He nodded. "That is what drew my attention. When we examined the signal more closely, we found first that there was a strange resonance signal that almost seemed to be using the initial signal as a carrier. Further investigation suggests that it wasn't using the signal as a carrier, but the other way around – technology with this unusual resonance signature seems to have been used to send the signal to begin with."
The Commander found the outline of the signal in the report and studied it with a taut frown. "That is strange. I don't recognize this resonance even slightly."
"Neither do I. Nor do our experts. We were also working on finding the source of the signal – what base, ship, or transmitter it originated from. We have just confirmed that no source in the known universe originated this signal."
"What the hell are you saying, Director?" Rasler asked, now looking at the report over Shepard's shoulder.
"I am saying, General, that whoever tapped into the extranet and downloaded this information did so not only from outside of this galaxy; they did so from outside of this universe altogether."