*** Torfan, Betrayal ***

17 June 2155

There was no mistaking the windbike crash had been bad; it looked - and sounded - like the pilot had bashed his head into the frame above the door around 45KPH. Flying too low and through a ground car intersection, the windbike had been moving faster than the car. The ground car driver had screeched to a stop and jumped out to render aid immediately.

As a paramedic himself, the ground car driver knew that conventional CPR on a young teen was as likely – or even more likely – to kill or exacerbate injury as resuscitate. When a self-piloting ambulance arrived, he refused it, ordering a cranial trauma unit instead; the human paramedic continued to help the kid breathe, using GRCPR to keep his heart going until the advanced unit arrived, airlifting him to the local UN Alliance base medcentre once the victim had been identified as a resident.

After the parents arrived and had positively identified their 13-year-old son, the NP led them back out into the hallway. The attending physician assumed his "professional" demeanor, knowing that with injuries like this, most people never fully recovered. Paraplegia, paralysis, aphasia, amnesia, significant loss of cognitive function, even loss of plumbing control…there was almost no way to know until the injured awoke.

But he was also old enough to have seen the occasional "miracle." Recoveries that seemed to defy medical science, and seen them more often when the injured were young. Neuroplasticity was a powerful tool…when it worked.

He nodded in what he hoped was a reassuring manner…but not too reassuring. "Of course, because of the intracranial pressure from the injury, we would normally need to open his skull to relieve that pressure, and we would not have needed consent. But he wasn't wearing a helmet; the skull fracture that resulted has allowed the brain to expand and accommodate the increased blood volume. We're infusing thiopental to minimize neural activity and the increased pressure that results, so he's in a coma for now.

"But based on the areas where I'm seeing what looks like trauma, I'd say that the potential for future epilepsy is…significant. If you'll approve it, we have an neurological appliance that's been used successfully to forestall or minimise seizures. If there is cognitive damage, it could potentially enhance brain function to compensate for that. To a degree."

The parents seemed to be taking it well. The father made an attempt at humor: "I suppose there's no waiting until he's awake to ask him if he thinks this would be a good idea."

"He's a minor; we don't ask him, we ask you." The doctor shook his head professionly. "I'm recommending the appliance because its presence could help him in ways that won't be possible after more recovery. To put it another way, if a year from now, we find that this needs to be installed, it will cost four times as much, have a 30% reduced effectiveness, and be riskier to install. If we find a year from now that he didn't need it, it will have inflicted no harm to have installed it while the reparative and reconstructive work is being performed by the brain itself."

The mother glanced at the father, bit her lip, looked back at the doctor, and nodded quickly.

"You're recommending it, and it sounds like a good idea," said the father. "Is there anything else you need from us?"

The neurosurgeon held up a data tablet, twirling through the graphics. "We've got CT, GEEG, ssfMRI, NNEM…he doesn't have any bloodstream computing, but he has at some point worn a CB cap." The signs had been obvious to anyone who had seen the data, but he held up a reassuring hand, "And I'm a doctor, not a law enforcement officer, so I only care about that to the extent that it helps us, and we can use it. We've got some good data from that about normal configuration just before the impact. Unless you have an objection, I'm taking him to surgery within the hour."

They had no objections.

# # #

As young Shepard grew up, he discovered the functions that the appliance had, others that could be added, and how they could be used to his advantage. He experimented with its software, and found a "hack" online that could stretch his awareness of time. His first attempts at this made the world appear to flicker or strobe until he also learned how to increase and synchronise the "clockspeed" of his occipital lobes. He measured the speed of the overclock by running a long piece of music on his implant with the overclock in effect, and was delighted to find that another instance of that song on an external player took about six percent longer. The modification was esoteric enough that it provided him with extra leverage on timed tests, and it happened in his head, so nobody else knew.

He could slow his awareness as well, make an hour of waiting pass in fifty-something subjective minutes. Or so it seemed.

In any event, he wasn't as interested in having less time to think, he wanted more time to think. Upon discovering a PVR forum with a discussion called Hack Your Own Brain (if you have a gen6 or gen7a ACL, or pre-contact EPD), he made contact with the "community" of users, makers, tinkerers, and other brainmodders.

He discovered that the neurosurgeon and his techs had installed carbon nanotube scaffolds, steering the growths practically everywhere in an effort to provide additional stability. The resulting structure could be leveraged to provide a distinct layer of information flow, even a functional hypervisor for some executive functions. He began installing software to make the most of this, covertly enhancing his recall, and optimizing for more efficient parsing and storage of externally-sourced data. Though he did not know it at the time, doing so trained his brain to integrate omnitool and implant-processed datastreams.

# # #

23 December, 2157

The inductive cooktop squawked an alarm; 16-year-old Stephen Shepard flipped up his PVR visor. The smell of Nutri-Brix was distinctive, that of burning turmeric and cilantro. With his head out of the game, he was suddenly – and highly – aware of it.

His reaction was plaintive: "Mom? I think dinner's burning!"

The kitchen adjoined every room in the house, so he darted into it and used one haptic glove to push the two trays off the heating area, fanning the food with the other.

Another look at the trays showed they were not badly charred or blackened; the device might have shorted out or something, and dinner might yet be saved. His gloves allowed him to pick up one of the trays and inspect it. This one was clearly his, laden with curry, turmeric and spices; he held it close to his nose into it and inhaled deeply. Nothing had actually burned, as far as he could tell. He took a bite of it directly from the tray so as to not get it on his gloves. Most people would have called it pungent; he found it pleasing.

The food and room continued to smell of Indian and Mexican cuisine, but on fire. And his mother had not responded. "Mom?" He lifted her tray and inspected it closely; it appeared to be unburned. He looked around and did not see her, but saw a beam of light on the floor that clearly indicated the front door was open.

As he approached, he heard her voice, saw someone in an Alliance uniform standing just inside the door. The man's back was facing him.

His mother was not speaking.

She was clutching David Anderson and sobbing.

# # #

Shepard's reaction to his father's death was profound and unrelenting depression, but he kept it hidden from his mother because he didn't want her to feel worse than she clearly did. Though he had played and enjoyed 2156-7's Of All Trades 1 and 2, he escaped/disappeared into Of All Trades 3: Asari, the VR world of Calico Jack's adventure to Thessia. As humanity had only recently begun interacting with the aliens, much of it was conjecture and hype. Even so, it drew heavily from the findings of human ethnologists who had made the first reports on the asari to the Earth Alliance.

The teenaged Shepard found himself comforted and welcomed into a paradisaical world of beautiful female-like aliens, and began exploring the procedurally-generated story and its world in more detail than the designers had ever expected. He "visited" the real world as little as possible, coming out only because some things – such as eating, and most hygienic functions – could not be performed in-game without remapping parts of it to the Augmented Reality version (which he did not have hardware to support, nor the funds to purchase.)

On his second night of playing it (a Friday,) he accidentally fell asleep in-game. One of the NPCs carried his avatar to her home, where he awoke several hours later.

The ensuing hours of experience, though disorienting, were extremely appealing; in many ways, it decoupled him from reality. He wasn't entirely sure where he was or how he'd gotten there, and wondered if he had in fact died himself.

It was too easy not to question his good fortune, so he didn't.

When his mother sent him an RTM that afternoon asking him if he was hungry, he resisted answering because he didn't want to have to exit that alternate world; it was exquisitely beautiful, peaceful, fun, and utterly distinct from his mundane life. It was easy to forget his father was dead, and it made the game's draw even more compelling.

After several weeks of this, he had to be forcibly extracted, which only added more appeal to the control, escapism, and other pleasant aspects of being in-game.

He pursued the feelings it created in him almost relentlessly, sleeping in-game on weekends while visiting schoolmates' houses, and when he could get away with it at home. (When sent to live with his grandparents while his mother was deployed, they proved more indulgent.) But the depression persisted when he was not distracted, which drove down serotonin and cholecalciferol levels to the point where his implant began sending him warnings about it, and even recommending that he start the game while outside in order to get more sun.

When the game – which had some safeties built in – detected the warning messages in its behavior array, it modified the behavior of another one of the NPCs to encourage him to sleep more by doing so in-game. The nudge was effective because the character was his Love Interest. It provided some help, but only to the extent that the game had influence, and worse, it meant he was in-game even more.

Though the character could be immersively sexed, the nature of the game was such that it adapted itself to his age and behaviors up to that point, steering him away from that choice. Additionally, at his age, it required some time and focus to hack the immersion feature into place, and besides lacking the hardware, young Shepard was much more focused on programming his own brain. His age didn't unlock the potential sex elements of the game until the release of NurOswarm (an unrelated technological advancement for other functions,) and he bought that instead.

By the time he started at university, he wasn't playing it nearly as often, but filled his days with activity that kept him distracted, unaware that he was leaving a PTSD time bomb untreated.

Inspecting the system logs of the implant, he discovered that its automated anti-epileptic functions had never been invoked, and shrugged them off as insignificant. He knew the reasons why his parents and doctor had opted to have it installed at the time, and had even thanked them for doing what he would have done himself, had he been awake to be asked.

But during his second year at university, he learned that a significant upgrade of the OS was available from the original implant manufacturer, one that would allow a vastly broader array of capabilities, even on his "clone" device.

At least until he found the "clone" version needed more space for its DCE to accommodate the upgraded functionality. Either he had to spend money on a DCE upgrade, or he would have to perform a complete system rebuild, and omit several of its original medical functions. One required money, the other, only time. So he chose to rebuild.

It seemed like a good idea, and a perfectly safe one, if performed meticulously.

And until the horror of Elysium, it was.

Worse, his wife's suicide broke him in more ways than one. Part of the scaffolding, installed so many years earlier, had reinforced the lateral geniculate nucleus. In an unenhanced brain, this structure normally provides a cognitive shortcut between the visual cortex and the amygdala. Though quicker to respond, it tends to provide less accurate data because it is processed by less deliberation and recognition/comparison.

On prehistorical savanna, such a shortcut provided an advantage for the primates that had and used it; the costs of incorrectly identifying a non-threat as a threat were much, much lower than failing to respond quickly and appropriately to an actual threat.

The neurosurgeon had pruned some of this excess to throttle its bandwidth as a preventative measure against this, but the pathway is also rendered hyperexcitable in cases of PTSD. Shepard's modifications of this pathway network had given him the ability to seemingly implement executive functions at a faster neuroclock than an unenhanced brain, but at the cost of further exacerbating the PTSD he did not realize he had.

One potential precursor symptom of a PTSD attack is for the subject to perceive a smell that was present during the trauma, even though it may not be truly present at the moment.

# # #

Torfan, 2175

Shepard worked his way down to the ground floor of the silo, but had to check both sides carefully before his omnitool detected a human nearby. What had been a 3-meter high passage had collapsed, probably when Shepard had holed the base. It was completely blocked by equipment and debris; a truss and girders appeared to be held up only by the knee-high crates upon which they had collapsed.

He would have run forward, but his injured foot objected. A glance at his ARO showed his VI considered his physical operability to have fallen from 55% to 50%. Examining the fallen debris, he realized there wasn't much chance he'd be able to move any of it to get to his CO.

He raised two fingers to his ear, "Major? I think I found where you are, but I don't think I can get to you." He scanned with his omnitool, looking for a way through the dense debris.

When he reached the point where the ceiling had been bent down far enough that he had to stoop, he leaned to his right on a jutting support, continuing to look at his omnitool. "It looks like you were in the wrong place at the wrong time when this level collapsed. I assume you're held in place or somehow pinned under this stuff, and your suit has taken some serious damage."

Ack.

He continued to scan the area, then sat on the floor to focus on his task. After a few minutes, he shook his head. "Sir, I can't seem to link to your suit or your omnitool. I can't see you, but it looks like you're about six or seven meters from the closest I can get. I assume the damage you took, or the position that you're in, is why you're having such trouble with your comms."

He paused for a moment, considering what heavy equipment he would use to extract his team leader, and then realized he needed Tokyo to come back for them.

"Major, I need to make sure Tokyo knows to come back for us ASAP. I'm…I need to get back to the dropship, see what I can do from there. I'm hoping the comms are still working. If I can't get something working there, I'll have to find some way to use the base comms. Are you going to be okay for an hour or two? If so, send me one ping now."

Ack.

"Okay, I'll still be able to receive you in this mode, but the only thing I can do is come back if you signal." He turned and started away. Stopping, he added, "I'm not sure what I'd be able to do, but if you signal repeatedly after I leave, I'll come back. Give me another ping if that's okay."

Ack.

"Very good, sir. Stay safe. I'll be back."

He returned to the silo and started across it before realizing he would have a difficult time climbing all the way to the top of the silo by ladder. His omnitool still had a map of the base, so he headed toward what he hoped was a lift, scanning carefully for any signs of bad guys.

To go outside, he'd need to get his battlesuit's helmet back on; Jordan's used a standard flexible neck ring, but the T-3 used a fully-integrated (if removable) helmet that combined superior protection with its own DCE.

He started to ride the lift up. Crap, he remembered, I also need to make sure the batarians aren't starving or something.

After switching back to his own helmet with its broken aft-view camera, he rode back down, limped to the slave warehouse.

He walked first to the fallen body of the one mysterious batarian in the red and gold outfit. Who was this guy? Why did he do this? What did he hope to do?

A warning popped up on Shepard's ARO:

WARNING: Lateral Geniculate scaffold section C-1(f) has locked open
Hypervisor functions compromised due to increased output from amygdala zone 2,6-2,7
Error 811 : : Halt/Reset/IPL/Rebuild/Command?

As he stopped in place to read the message, he was suddenly aware of the smell of something burning. At first, he looked around, then realizing that if he could smell it inside his pressurised battlesuit, it might be a system or subsystem shorting out or otherwise failing. But if there was a fire in the warehouse from when the batarian had used that minigun…

He cracked the helmet's seal and lifted it off, sniffed experimentally, inhaled deeply. It didn't seem to change the amount of smell, but it did smell more like coriander. He looked toward the fallen "pirate" in its alien battlesuit and frowned.

WARNING: Lateral Geniculate scaffold sections C-1(b) – C-2(d) have locked open
Hypervisor functions compromised due to increased output from amygdala zones 2,2-3,6
Error 811 : : Halt/Reset/IPL/Rebuild/Command?
Seek respite

He scowled at the warning, and dismissed with an irritated wave of his hand. He stood and turned to face the batarians. The cages had one solid side, probably designed to keep occupants from seeing much of each other. When he had first entered, none of them could see him, he could see none of them. If one of them was helpful, maybe another one is.

Walking around to the other side of the rows of cages so he could address them, he shrugged his shoulders, steeling himself to try to help the powerful, ugly, barbaric aliens. He switched on his external speaker, routed the omnitool's translation vocoder to it.

"Do any of you know who that was?" He pointed across the room toward the bodies. "The guy in red and gold, who led you in here. Does anyone here know who that was?"

The suit vocoder provided its translation; a growl of disapproval continued to circulate through the room. Shepard became aware of the burning cilantro smell just starting to become noticeable again, but he couldn't determine its source.

WARNING: Lateral Geniculate scaffold sections B-3(a) – D-6(e) have locked open.
Hypervisor functions compromised due to increased output from amygdala zones 1,4-5,9
Error 811 : : Halt/Reset/IPL/Rebuild/Command?

He flicked it away again without noticing the message was different.

It was followed by another:

Cascade Event detected.
Amygdala activity increasing 1.8%/second, compounded.
Seek respite immediately.

"Is this translator working correctly?"

Shepard lifted his helmet off again, checked the system for function, manually restarted its sensor controller. He became quite certain that he didn't like the sound of batarian. He re-seated the helmet; its HUD covered his field of view with highlights almost indiscriminately. He turned the HUD back off and routed the datastream to his omnitool, which sent it to his ARO, using its settings to reduce the data displayed to his preferences.

None of the prisoners had responded to his question about whether they could understand him. But they should have translation tech that can at least meet me halfway.

He snapped the visor back down into place so he didn't have to listen to their growling. "Fine, it's just you lot and me. Under the Citadel conventions, I'm required to make sure your basic needs are all being met." He started walking down the first row of cages, continuing to talk, "If you have medical needs, you need to make me aware of them as soon as possible. I'm going to go find some food and water from your own stores, even though I assume you have stuff you would feed to slaves that might be right…here…"

While walking past his improvised prison, occasionally looking into the cages, his ARO tagged one of them, and added a notification: Present at Elysium, Invading Ground Force. O-3 or equivalent.

The line below showed a link to the camera records from the colony that the Alliance had made part of the official record.

Time.
stopped.

Mouth open, Shepard stopped in front of the cage. "You!" He took a step back, eyes widening, snatched his pistol from its holster, snapping the safety off as he did. "You were at Elysium!" With his right index finger held forward against the trigger guard, he pressed the weapon through the cage bars and to the batarian's head, raised two fingers to his left ear to activate his probably-working comms. "Major Kyle! Major Kyle, I have one of the Elysium invaders!"

This was a war criminal, and the alien Council would have to sit up and take notice, but silence over the 'comm was the only response.

Shepard struggled with the digitally-perfect nightmares of Elysium, clamoring for attention. Flashes of what he had seen dipped into consciousness, disappeared again only to be replaced with others.

He pulled the weapon away again, stood there waiting for Kyle to answer.

He lowered his left hand from the side of his head, raised it again. The comm system chirped an acknowledgement of his reactivation.

"Major Kyle, are you there? Holy hell sir, we've hit the jackpot, I have one of the Elysium invaders, an officer! I'm not reading any telemetry on you, are you still alive?"

Is another batarian still on the loose, and he killed the Major? Did he just die of his injuries?

Shepard's face drained of colour. Then he bared his teeth, gesturing to the 'comm system again. It chirped another activation acknowledgement. What if these aren't all the batarians! "Major Kyle! Major Lawrence Kyle, come in!" He paused, looking down the line of caged prisoners, naming his superiors, "Perling! Endo! Edwards! Come in!"

His memories of their bodies being identified by his onboard computation flashed into consciousness, and out again just as quickly. Unconsciously, his trigger finger stopped pressing forward in its Soft Safe position.

No, dammit. No, no no no. He paced his way down the line, then returned to the batarian he had positively identified, carefully poking his weapon's barrel into cage and against the alien's head.

The alien regarded the weapon, watching with disdain, bared its teeth at him in a casual sneer. Shepard's ARO showed him that the batarian had begun to turn slightly pink. Of course; other batarians are watching.

"Victor Indigo, realtime translation to batarian and back, route through externals." The VI chirped its acknowledgement of his repeated command. "You," he continued, "You were part of the operation at the human colony of Elysium, correct? Answer me now." He glared at the batarian, unconscious of the fact that he could feel the crosshatched pattern on his weapon's trigger through the powerglove's tactile system.

The batarian's mouth dropped open as if to deny the fact, its smaller eyes narrowing in response.

Does it know I know? Or is it just scared? It should have been scared before it started carving up colonists on Elysium with their neural control tech. Shepard's weapon was still trained on its head as he turned away, speaking through his teeth. "Major Kyle!" He paused for just a second. "Is Major Kyle or any s–"

The batarian's head cracked open with a BLAM.

Shepard yanked his weapon up, at first startled it had discharged. Time spontaneously dilated for him; suddenly everything was moving more slowly than he had ever experienced. Another head exploding, and at his hand; his wife's suicide began to flashplay in his mind. Without even time to gasp, he clamped down on the thought and focused on the present.

The emotional impact persisted as the organic goo sprayed in incredibly slow motion away from the pistol.

I didn't mean to kill him, he thought. The batarian blood crawled through the air with an iridescent shimmer. It reminded Shepard of a decorative, lighted water fountain.

That looks messy. As Shepard's pistol was still coming up toward his shoulder, he had a lazy stretch of time in which to notice the muted highlights of its matte black finish. He could count the tiny screws that held the weapon together, read the numbers etched next to each to show disassembly order.

What have I done? In his peripheral vision, he could see the other batarians just starting to react. The same thing they would have done to us, he thought. That they've been doing to us. For years.

Shepard was not only the most senior officer in the mission to have survived, it was looking like he was about to be the sole survivor. Kyle, Negaard, Perling, Nordberg Endo…their faces flashed past his mind's eye.

More dead people. All on my watch.

I didn't kill them, these assholes did.

I have to stop this. I have to stop it today, right now, even if I have to stop it by myself.

The sense of time dilation persisted, seemed to be slowing down even further; the batarian's head rebounded to the cage wall, then the body began to collapse. The pistol, still on its way to his shoulder, flickered its status lights and shifted from the red of Discharge to the yellow of Reloading as the next fragment of ammo was shaved off the block and slotted into the end of the linac; he found he was just contacting the ground again after jumping away from the batarian.

And now this son of a bitch has paid for Major Kyle's life. An icy resolve, somehow tinctured with certainty and relief, expanded slowly, saturating his brain. It felt good. And you will never kill or enslave another being.

Muscles on the back of his scalp tightened; the hair on the back of his neck lifted away from his skin.

I will stop it. None of you will ever kill or enslave another being. THAT, I can make sure of.

The hours he had spent investigating the batarian camps at Elysium flashed through his mind; colonists mutilated, killed, or implanted with control technology.

This was important. These atrocities had to be stopped, no matter the cost.

No matter the cost.

He turned his weapon on the next batarian, who slid as far away as the cage would let him get, in hopes of avoiding being shot.

Shepard's left hand was still to his ear, gesturing to his comm. "Endo! Corporal Toshihide Endo!"

And you will pay for his life.

*BLAM* Blood and brains tumbled slowly through the air, elongating as the bullet pulled them along behind itself, splattered against the inside of the cage. To Shepard, it seemed to take several seconds to do so.

"Sergeant Esther Finnigsmier!"

And you will pay for hers, he thought. The next batarian was moving in slow motion, palms toward Shepard as if to deflect a bullet. Embarrassingly slow. No chance of escape. The weapon pushed itself back into Shepard's hand as it fired even more slowly.

*BLAM* It was surreal, being able to see all of this slowing down as it was happening: The muzzle flash, a blur of motion, a head jerk and turn, looking like the grotesque alien was coughing blood; it seemed to throw itself to the bottom of the cage and bounce once. Shepard fired a second round, aiming carefully through the back of the alien's neck; it collapsed to ground and did not move again.

"Sergeant Chere Glaze!"

*BLAM*

He went on like that, naming his fallen friends, the soldiers in his charge, thinking of all the civilians killed or taken during the Blitz on Elysium, or on Torfan since this whole debacle started. Dozens, maybe hundreds of them; not nearly enough batarians to set things to right, but at least no more of these ones would terrorize colonists…and it felt like he had almost half a subjective minute to savor each pull of the trigger.

"Sylwester, come in! Sergeant Roland Sylwester!"

*BLAM*

"Edwards! Lieutenant Dick Edwards!"

*BLAM*

"Sergeant Chmiel! Sergeant Henryk Chmiel!" He pistol whipped the cage once, "Henryk!"

*BLAM*

"Lieutenant Perling! Lieutenant Dan Perling!"

Pause.

"Lieutenant! Where the hell are you?"

Finally, he needed no more justification. Every single one of these god-damned batarian fuckers will die, and they will absolutely die right fucking now.

He refreshed the ammoblock, teeth bared in white-hot fury as he started walking down the row of cages.

"NO!"

*BLAM*

"More!"

*BLAM*

"Colonists!"

*BLAM*

"Ever!"

*BLAM*

"Not you!"

*BLAM*

"Not you!"

*BLAM*

"Not you, either!"

*BLAM*

*BLAM*

*BLAM*

*BLAM*

# # #

*click* *beep*

*click*

*click* *beep*

Shepard inhaled sharply, realizing he had been shooting a dead batarian in a cage.

It looked more like a pile of meat at this point.

Fish in a barrel.

The weapon in his hand clicked again. He had run it out of ammunition.

The realization sank in: He had fired the entire ammoblock of his pistol, a mass effect-driven pistol, which should have been able to shoot for longer than he could pull the trigger. What have I done?

What have I done?

He slowly lowered himself to the ground. Looking around the hangar-sized room with its cages hanging by chains, blood spattered on nearly every surface he could see. The cages were utterly still, containing bloodstained piles of meat with batarian uniforms.

How long have I been like this?

His ARO showed the time, but he didn't know when he had entered the room. He started to run back his camera data, then stopped. He wasn't sure he wanted to know.

From the markings and staining on the wall opposite the big doors, it wasn't hard to figure out where the batarians put the dead bodies that resulted from their slavekeeping. Numbly, he rose to his feet and began to open each cage, extract a dead batarian, and slowly deliver each into the dumpster-sized opening.

With his injuries, he had to take them one at a time, and slowly.

It gave him time to think.

What would Commander Anderson would say if he knew?

"Well, you're all in this together," he said aloud. It wasn't very funny, but he laughed for several minutes at it, continuing to carry bodies to the pit.

You're all in this together now!

He noticed his throat was almost too sore for him to speak. Have I been shouting or screaming?

Whose father is this?

Whose brother?

Whose son?

Who the hell cares? You're all in this together!

Bodies yielded to his work, technology bent to his will. He realized he couldn't even tell the difference between male and female batarians. Then he recalled reading that their government only let males serve offworld.

Eventually, he noticed he had left his pistol where he had sat briefly on the ground.

As he bent to pick it up, he thought, I have to find a printer for Jordan. I have to print Medi-goo.

I have to find the other team members. And Kyle.

"Major Kyle," he croaked. He swallowed, coughed hoarsely.

His comm system indicated it was working.

"Task Force Vel, this is Shepard, is anyone alive? Respond, any medium!"

Alliance comm systems didn't even offer static as a way of knowing they were operating.

As he worked to find anyone else, a question kept coming to mind: What have I done?

He stopped at a wall filled with what looked like primitive neurotech appliances. His ARO highlighted each item, describing its function and use. They were control instruments, driven into the heads of slaves, usually with a hammer.

Or a fist.

Each device had instructions written on it, with simplified graphics showing their use.

This was a nightmare factory. He conscientiously plucked one of each item from the shelf, rack, hook, or spindle from which it was dispensed, knowing he would have to leave them in place to prove what the batarians had been doing, but feeling he had to do something to commemorate his ending of this base perpetrating such malice, particularly on human colonists.

I've stopped them from ever doing it again to anyone else. From taking human slaves and implanting them with this shit. He hurled the armload of batarian technology he'd been carrying into the mass grave with a vindictive shout. He stopped, consulted his ASP map data. This was an automated incinerator, and infrared showed it was warming up to begin its cycle.

I am going to need a damned good cover story, a paranoid part of his brain realised.

Hours later, he had returned to Jordan, still safely hidden, but no longer comatose; dead of her injuries. Kyle still didn't answer hails, and his body appeared to be inert. He also learned that there was no uplink to Trident.

He was completely on his own until – or if – the Alliance decided to come back and get them.

There's no uplink, he realized. There's no uplink! If I can make the omnitool and suit recorder data go away, the info in my head is the only record of this. I've hunted down every last one of them after they killed my team. Then I have to contact Trident, or Tokyo.

Methodically working his way up and through the circum-silo base, he searched first for a bio-quality printer, and then for a printer of any sort, not realising that the ones aboard the cruiser were all the base had.

He had wasted hours. Hours that might have saved Jordan. No, wait; she's already dead.

He wasn't going to be able to save Kyle by himself, he had to get Tokyo back to have any hope of that.

He spent almost an hour setting up a rappel from the balcony above it to the accessway the team had used to enter the base, only to find that its far end had been chemically sealed since his ASP scan.

I should have known that. I'm the one who shot a hole in it.

What's wrong with me?

He also noticed there was a serviceway he could have used instead, had he taken the time to look more closely at the scans. Looks like I'm going the long way around.

Another hour later, he exited the base from its main airlock, hiked 6.2 kilometers over the mountains to the LZ, using the relative positions of the phony landing platform and the exit to determine his location on the map. In the almost two weeks since landing, the fragile dropship was already deteriorating by design, but the cockpit had been obliterated by a desk-sized piece of debris from the cruiser. The crater, where the front of the dropship used to be, made it look like a bug with its head squashed, lines of impact radiating outward.

Clearly its stellarcom device was a loss.

He walked to the airlock, opened what was left of the outer door, and drove the 2-seat ATV back to the main base airlock.

His map indicated there was a compound of rooms that were larger than most others nearby; likely the Officers' Quarters. As he approached, his sensors showed two batarians standing guard.

With a fully-functional battlesuit and body, he could easily have cloaked and attacked them before they knew they knew what was happening. But he knew he couldn't stay operational much longer, and headed back to the stairs.

The Gorgon's scope still integrated with the ASP and sensor data through his omnitool, so he was able to see where the two guards were standing. At first, he was going to fire straight down at them, but then realized he might be able to do better from another location.

He entered another room to get the right alignment, but took the time to deploy the weapon's bipod, pulled a chair over to help with stability. "Weapon, zero dee-spread, one gram. Optimize em-vee for successive penetration, ten to twenty meter range." Though the order was filled almost immediately, he returned to stand directly above them and scanned once more to verify the data was current.

The two guards were standing dutifully still, about three meters apart, on either side of a double door. Awaiting the return of…whoever. Nobody gives a damn.

Shepard walked carefully back to his weapon, knelt behind the stool, fitted the stock to his shoulder, sighted through the head of the first guard and the torso of the second, and applied slow and steady pressure to the trigger. The weapon jumped against his shoulder.

Standing, he paused to consider the massive rifle with its stock resting atop the stool and the bipod on the floor. Lifting it by its scope-handle, he walked back to the area above the front of the door and scanned through the floor beneath him.

One of the batarians, the one shot through the abdomen, was crawling toward the other.

"Weapon, repeat last order."

As he heard a chirrup of acknowledgement, Shepard spread his feet for additional stability and aimed straight down. As the wounded soldier moved into scope, he squeezed the trigger.

The batarian did not move again.

Slinging his rifle, it took only a few minutes for him to return to the door below, determine the security in place, use the dying batarian's hand to open the door.

After Shepard let the guard fall to the ground again, it moaned and began to move that hand on its own. It was reaching for its weapon.

Damn, these guys are tough, he thought. He drew his sidearm and balked, reflecting that he had emptied it. He considered using the batarian's own pistol to headshot it, realized it might have biometric security like Alliance weapons did, and took the time to unsling and decompact his Gorgon. He fired three more rounds; two into the moving batarian's head, one into the other.

With the doors open, he could see inside the compound, and it was almost immediately apparent that it was de luxe. Enormous murals of mythical scenes spanned the walls, a fountain trickled softly in its centre. Bright metals and rich colors were everywhere, mostly reds and purples.

Numbly, Shepard realized the fountain was surmounted by a batarian skull, water flowing prominently from its eye sockets.

Unwilling to trust the belief that he had wiped out the entire complement of a base, he started to drag the two guards inside until he noticed the trails of blood they were leaving. He dropped them where they were, then closed and locked the door from inside.

Shepard felt drained. Everything hurt. The exoskeleton, almost the only thing that allowed him to keep going, was making more and stranger sounds.

A look into one of the mirrors showed second- and third-degree scalp burns; he was missing a lot of hair and an ear. He took a washrag bath with water from what was probably the toilet, and slicked his hair back. It made him look like he had mange. He started to remove the exoskeleton until he realized he had at least one broken leg, so he simply loosened the other limbs' webbing and found the least uncomfortable position he could assume on the expansive bed, then set his implant to keep him asleep until his bloodstream tech had performed as much repair as it could.

Sixteen hours later, he awoke, washed himself again very slowly with a soft garment he found in what seemed to be a mostly-empty wardrobe, and used the base's comms to broadcast one byte of data at a particular time and frequency provided by his omnitool, which would provide an update about the mission and status.

Then he reviewed the base's problematic "cloaked" area, marked out on his older ASP scan data.

As he struggled back into the exoskeleton, he could see that he was wearing the webbing more tightly as he cinched it beyond where it had been set for the days before. He was losing weight, but was not hungry as he left to investigate. He actually felt a little less sore, and his ARO reported his operational condition was back up to 62 percent. It made him consciously appreciate having software control over his pain awareness. And the suit was behaving better now that he'd tightened it back down.

Much of the base's hidden area was entirely unremarkable: barracks, mess, supply, power, and other compartments perfectly typical of a military base. Presently, he noticed that these were duplicates of other similar rooms that had not been cloaked when he first scanned the base. With one exception.

He had no idea how much time he had to go look at it. Though he wasn't hungry, his ARO was still nagging him to eat. I don't want whatever the batarians have in their kitchen; they probably eat each other. Or us.

As he trudged anticlockwise around the arc of a corridor, the bulkhead to his left bulged out, not just describing the circle of the silo, but as if it were itself a tube. His ARO cautioned that it was charged, like an electric fence. When he reached the 5-meter wide, deck-to-overhead door, he found it marked with batarian characters that his VI interpreted as [unknown] and [restricted].

But further ideograms indicated this was a place of derived technology, both dangerous and of very limited access.

It took hours for him to crack the lock, but he had nothing else to do. As soon as he stepped in to examine the device, his ARO froze, and his omnitool began to reset itself repeatedly.

Backing quickly out into the hall, he spent a few anxious moments waiting for his ARO to reset.

The omnitool completed its cycle first, his ARO recovering and rebooting more slowly. What did that thing do to my implant?

He could check it against his last backup when he got back aboard Tokyo, but for now, local storage was seriously compromised. He was not exposing himself to it again if he didn't need to. The device that had caused the damage was contained by the batarians within some kind of compartment with exotic shielding. During the few seconds he had seen it, the thing looked to be perched atop an ungainly-looking two-axis mount. Was this what they used to destroy the other LV?

Though he was unsure of the type or extent of damage it would do, he removed his own battlesuit – slowly and painfully – including the DCE. Pushing it inside the "electric fence" area, he bathed it in whatever that thing was emitting, presumably rendering its data a useless, scrambled mess. He started to drift off while laying against the wall several meters away, wearing only the tattered remains of his bio layer.

He awoke with a start, crawled back to the door, reaching around it to grab the nearest corners of his suit and equipment to drag it out of the shielded chamber. Restarting it, it took several hours to reinitialise and IPL itself, which put it in a workable state, but devoid of much useful data.

Though it took most of the next day, he repeated the process, exposing Jordan's omnitronics in the same corrupting influence and reattaching them to her suit when done.

The omnitool would not start, and the suit DCE was only running on its failsafe ROM. Any report would come from his own head.

Which was something the Alliance could not grant itself the authority to access; Shepard himself had to tell them what he remembered, whether this data came from his organic brain, or its neurotronic enhancements. The Hero of the Blitz, with his story largely corroborated by the recorder information on his teammates' unaffected suits, had clearly saved the day. Single-handed. Again.

When Tokyo slipped into orbit around Torfan, he had been carrying the one remaining coma-inducer around with him for two days.

# # #

Shepard's head was largely covered with rebuilder panels, but it was the medical exoskeleton that made him look and sound ungainly as he walked. Major Kyle was almost unrecognizable for all the things plugged into and wrapped around him.

Though the Major's eyes were closed, the mechanical sounds of Shepard's approach seemed to alert him. Kyle's less-blackened eye opened to find and focus on the younger man. "Shepard…?" he croaked, "Shepard…you made it. You made it!" The ventilator system wheezed, an electronic device beeped objection. "What's all this you're wearing? Are you okay?

It was not the same exoskeleton he had been wearing during the mission; Shepard looked down at the robo-appliance.

"Uh…the mission…went badly, sir."

A holograph of a VI nurse appeared in response to the stress in Kyle's voice. "Major Kyle. Are you all right?"

"Yes, yes, I'm fine, go away!"

"Your pulse and blood pressure have just risen sharply. If you are in distress, I can have this visitor rem–"

"I'm fine, go away now! You're causing me distress!" As the holo disappeared, Kyle's one open eye looked to Shepard again. "They didn't tell me anything. I thought anyone else who made it had to be in worse shape than me." He paused, looked the younger man up and down. "Christ, how long have I been out? Were you hurt?"

Shepard sighed heavily. "Not as badly as anyone else…uh, no. But…" He swallowed, continued to study the medical displays as if they meant anything to him. "Tokyo arrived three days ago, they extracted you yesterday afternoon, this is the soonest they would let me move about again." He closed his eyes, shook his head. "I'm sorry, sir; I… I lost everyone." His voice broke, "The whole damn team."

"No." Kyle wheezed again. It looked like it was more difficult for him to talk than he was letting on. "Don't think like that. You'll…" He paused, focused on a breath before continuing, "You'll hurt yourself more than the batarians ever could. You didn't lose them; they were taken. You've saved me, and that's…" The man flinched visibly, inhaled with difficulty. "That's my problem. It means I lost everyone but you."

"I'm sorry, sir. They told me you needed to recover, but I had to see you, make sure you were okay."

"Yes!" Kyle nodded feebly. "That's good. Celebrate the victories. Keep each other strong." He made a fist, but could barely move it.

"What happened to you, sir? We were communicating one bit every eight seconds or something. You were under a lot of debris, I know. Did it happen when I holed the base?"

Kyle blinked slowly. "Probably. You'd have to ask the rescue team. They said I was Code Blued as soon as they got to me, I'd lost a lot of blood over the week I was pinned in there. Want me to call the doctor? She can probably tell us, and I'd like to know."

Shepard lifted a hand with noisy servo assistance and scratched uselessly at bandages. He glanced anxiously toward the duty nurse at his desk. "Um...no. Thank you, sir. I should go."

"No, don't. I need to talk." Kyle inhaled more easily, looked around the ward. "Can you tell me what happened?"

Shepard's mouth opened as if to answer, but then closed it again slowly. "I happened, sir. I suppose you could say that all the N7 training paid off." He looked out at the other ICU beds, empty. "After they ambushed us, I thought you were dead. Even after I found where you were, which took days, I couldn't get to you by myself. Jordan lost her legs, and she thought you took a grenade. I couldn't keep her alive, and…" He looked at Kyle, looked away and sighed heavily. "I'm sorry sir, it's…it's still kind of fresh, sir. If you don't mind."

Kyle sighed. "All right. Well, your damned CO was incapacitated, so you assumed command of your first action. How do you feel?"

Shepard looked down, inhaled deeply, exhaled and shook his head. "Does everyone feel like this afterwards?"

"How do you feel?"

Shepard closed his eyes and was silent for a moment. "Sick. I feel like my soul is broken. It's like…it's…it feels like my heart is trying to implode. I'm the sole survivor. And it's my fault."

Kyle wobbled his head uncertainly. "Well, you have to feel alive to feel sick." It still sounded like it hurt him to talk.

He means well, Shepard thought. "Sir, you are just no damn help. You asked me, I told you. I feel sick." He paused, looked around the ward again, wishing he could see bodies in beds here rather than know they were in the morgue. "There's something else. I feel…ashamed. Was that how it was for you, sir? The first time?"

"The first time?" He coughed. "No. My first commanded action was nothing like this. This was a disaster for both sides. But it beats the hell out of dead."

Shepard frowned privately. "Or enslaved."

Kyle sighed. "Yeah, there's that. I'm not sure they really do that, though. Not to…aliens like us, anyway. I think we're not worthy."

"Then you haven't seen…" Shepard gestured to his omnitool, but it remained dark. He shook his arm as if that would make the omnitool work again. "Dammit. Well sir, then you clearly didn't see what I saw on Elysium, and here. They do, and at every opportunity. Wait, you did see it. Remember the human remains we found in the bottom of the silo?" He pointed to his left forearm as if the omnitool was still working. "Humans are lower than their slave caste, and more expendable, too. There wasn't time get anyone on the ground there, but the numbers from Forensics show they have processed at least hundreds of human slaves. More likely thousands over all this time." His lips curled into a sneer. "Assuming they're still alive."

Kyle sank his head into the pillow, eyebrows up. "Well, that sure gets your hackles up. What are you going to do about it?"

"I don't know. I didn't know. I still don't!" He shook his head angrily. "I'm an Engineer, not a warfighter. I wanted to build things. Bridges, landing fields, hospitals…but this?" He closed his eyes and inhaled, let it out as an agonized gasp. "God damn it, this…this is…awful. I get it why the Alliance offers the 93(g)." He shook his head dazedly. "It probably prevents a lot of suicides."

Kyle asked casually, "Are you feeling suicidal, Lieutenant?"

Shepard chuckled bitterly. "If I was, I'm not stupid enough to admit it to you." He gave Kyle a sardonic look, "Sir."

Kyle, even in drug-attenuated pain, managed to look hurt. "Don't be like that. I ask because I don't want you dead. So are you?"

"No, sir." At least not at the moment, Shepard thought.

Kyle was supposed to be relaxing, but equipment rustled, and alarms hooted softly. "It's important, Shepard. Doctors can help. Don't be ow, shit…" the man winced in pain. "Dammit. Shepard, don't be…a statistic."

It'd just devastate my mom, he thought. But I'm going to need some help that doesn't show up in records.

One of the medtechs was approaching; Shepard sighed. "Looks like I'm about to get booted out, sir. Sorry about that." He indicated his damaged and darkened omnitool. "I should go get this restored and, uh…see you again later?"

*** Glossary ***

ACL: Advanced Cognitive Lace

CB (cap): CogBoost, a cognitive enhancement skullcap-like device of questionable effectiveness, but probable damage; though pulled from sale, the design was produced by bootleggers until NurOswarm provided the benefit without the danger

cholecalciferol: vitamin D3, the kind manufactured by the human dermis when exposed to UVB radiation

CT: Computed Tomography

CPR: Cardio-pulmonary Resuscitation

DCE: Distributed Computing Environment

EPD: Epilepsy Preventative Device

ssfMRI: sub-second functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging

GEEG: Gigabit Electroencephalography

GRCPR: Gag Reflex Cardio-pulmonary Resuscitation; an advanced, very specific form of CPR that uses the body's own reflexes to restart heart or lungs or both.

NNEM: Neural Network Emission Mapping

NP: Nurse Practitioner

NurOswarm: a nasally-administered nanotechnology that merged glucose-powered swarm microbots with a wearable control interface (or omnitool app,) resulting in an early application of controllable cognitive enhancement via bloodstream-based DCE. Think ninth-generation NeuraLink.

OS: Operating System

RTM: Realtime Text Message

serotonin: neurotransmitter that is the precursor to melatonin, which helps regulate the body's sleep-wake cycles and the internal clock; it is thought to play a role in appetite, emotions, and motor, cognitive, and autonomic functions; low serotonin levels have been linked to depression

Soft Safe: Unlike a mechanical safety on a firearm, Soft Safety simply involves holding one's trigger finger as far forward in the trigger guard as possible; the weapon may be fired at will, but the forward pressure creates a kinesthetic mnemonic that - theoretically - keeps the user more aware of its status, and thereby reduces the incidence of accidental discharge