A/N: More delays, of course; my apologies. I've been in New Delhi for a week (The post-farming season's stubble burn really does obscure the sun even now,) and I'll be in Istanbul before I head back home. Sometimes it feels like my life is not my own. However, this is the last of the Torfan flashback!
*** Torfan: Aftermath ***
Tokyo continued toward the relay; it was still a two-day journey. Shepard had asked for a shift at the FCO station to keep himself busy, and was twiddling some of the variables in a simulated attack to see if he could reduce power draw without proportionally reducing the ship's hitting power.
"Hey, son." He felt a friendly hand clap his shoulder. "Just read the prelim; damn tough mission. How are you holding up?"
"Staying distracted, sir." Shepard looked briefly to his left without looking completely up and back at his superior. "Plenty to do."
Anderson sighed. "I suppose that'll do for now. Eventually, you'll run out of distractions, though."
Shepard knew Anderson couldn't see his face; he smirked confidently. "Not in a world full of crazy monkeys."
He could hear Anderson's smile in his reply, "No, I suppose not."
"Will this mean I'll be getting less FCO time, sir? Not much use for an N7 on the bridge."
Anderson sighed. "True, and that's what I wanted to talk with you about. Your commitment might have been subject to involuntary extension with the situation in the Traverse. But after Elysium and Torfan, I think the batarians will be out of business for a while." He laughed shortly. "Which is putting it mildly.
"I know you had made some noises about a bridge officer career path a few months ago, but at this point, you'd be one of a very few N7s ever to not apply a that particular advanced field training to the field. On the other hand, the brass are going to want to point to you as a model, and not a martyr."
"You mean they might want to keep me away from ground fights, or send me on more of them?"
The older man shrugged. "You could probably push this in either direction. If you let me know, I can pass it upstairs, maybe even give it an extra push."
Shepard leaned back in the FCO chair, staring blankly at the displays for a moment. "Better polish up my crystal ball, then." He looked up at the older man. "You have a lot of groundpounder experience, Special Ops stuff. Would you do it differently if you had it over?"
"I would have known better than to…ah, hell." Anderson chuckled. "Not sure how much I'll be able to tell you with my blood alcohol content this low. Stop by my quarters after this watch. We can discuss it more."
# # #
December 2175 (eight months later)
"I don't believe it." Still wearing a medical appliance, Major Kyle continued to scroll through the analysis, shaking his head. "I don't god damned believe it."
Rear Admiral Stephen Hackett adjusted his desk interface to see what Major Kyle was seeing. "You were there, Major. What do you have to add?"
Kyle looked up at Hackett quickly, accusingly. "I assume your question is pro forma. I may have been there, but I was incapacitated, buried. This is the first I've heard of any of this." Kyle shook his head, his eyes darting to the display only briefly. "Admiral, I recommend that Lieutenant Shepard be court-martialed for executing surrendered troops."
Hackett raised an eyebrow, "Is that your official analysis, Major?"
"Don't pull that crap on me…sir. Admiral, look at those injuries, nearly every one of them died of a gunshot to the head. To the head. Lieutenant Shepard executed those batarians. He's a damned war criminal."
Rear Admiral Hackett studied the displays silently for a moment, stroking his deeply scarred cheek.
"Sir? I said–"
"I heard you, Major. There were a lot more bullet holes in other places. His report of having mowed them down with assault rifle fire and then making sure they stayed dead may be heartless and brutal, but it's credible. It's certainly no less brutal than what they've been doing for years to colonists in the Traverse. And worse. And not just to humans."
"The blood on the cages was coming from inside them, sir. It wasn't even fully oxidized."
"Those were clearly slave pens, and we know they keep batarian slaves at least as often as other species."
"There are burn marks on the enemy bodies at the entry points, with the-"
"With the Gorgon, you can get that up to three kilometers away."
"-with the wrong microparticle spread and penetration depth for a rifle at range, sir." Kyle drove a finger down on the table in time to his words. "This was pistol at point blank. What was it…fifty? Sixty? Those soldiers…probably prisoners…were executed."
Kyle leaned back with the datapad in hand, flipping through the vertical-scrolling report as if expecting it to show something new. Finally, he threw it down on the table in disgust. "You don't need my analysis to see that they were butchered. Sir."
Hackett would not be provoked. "We have the rest of the team's black box data, and Michaels' LOSI log covers nearly the entire mission. We know of nothing he did that was unethical up to that point, and we know he was responsible for the single-handed destruction of their heavy cruiser and her entire crew. He and his mortally wounded spotter worked together for days, killing thirty-six batarians one at a time."
"But it's obvious he tried to hide it by incinerating the bodies. If we didn't have Kyle's partial FBEA data, we'd have lost what little solid evidence we have. We'd certainly have misinterpreted the rest of it. Sure, Shepard's story agrees with most of it, but it's that final charge that doesn't line up. It sounds like he was talking to them while he was allegedly fighting them. I think he didn't give us the whole story. He found some way to corrupt the data from the two surviving DCEs he could access. Though Major Kyle's CEVA suit and its DCE was damaged, the data we did get from it just doesn't tell the same story."
Hackett sat back in his chair and sighed. "Major, the reaction you're having to this event…I had this experience years ago. And I'll admit, it's painful. But let me try to save you some time getting through it.
"I appreciate the value of choosing the hard right over the easy wrong. It's how you succeed at being a good soldier instead of a thoughtless automaton. The batarian hegemony has been avoiding diplomatic troubles by using small groups of privately-funded mercenaries, posing as xenophobic hate groups for years…hell, I was one of the first the Alliance sent up against them. It's only become more blatant as time went on, but at this point, they're full-blown standard military, assigned to the task, and equipped so.
"Unfortunately, because we've never formally brought this issue to the attention of the Citadel Council or any other governments, they have continued to escalate their attacks. Hopefully, Elysium was the turning point. At the moment, it's too soon to be sure.
"Now during this operation, Lieutenant Shepard was cut off from his chain of command, and he single-handedly tried to save the remaining members of the strike team. Only because it took Tokyo fifteen days to return did he lose everyone but you.
"The results of his actions have resoundingly ended any attacks from Torfan, though the circumstances make it difficult for us to know exactly how this was done. The helmetcam data, Shepard's at least, was almost completely unreadable and unrecoverable.
"Which indicates a bigger problem: How did the batarians damage the team's omnitech at range? They were clearly using EMP or DEW technologies we've never seen before. Almost beam-like in their directionality." Hackett pointed an index finger down at the tabletop display of the analysis.
"This alone is going to be a problem until we figure it out. They knew it, too: I've never seen a self-destruct system that liquefied the thing it was guarding. It was damned effective. The part of the base that was using exotic shielding was full of stuff that had some kind of self-destruct built into it, or was removed to the cruiser before it was launched and subsequently destroyed. Either way, the systems it was guarding were very effectively kept out of our hands.
"But even against an overpowering enemy, Field Engineer and N7 graduate Stephen Shepard has shown himself to be eminently capable as a combat commando. He'd already done it at Elysium."
Kyle looked doubtful. "I haven't read the official report, but I'm not sure I believe that, either, sir. Using an anti-materiel rifle to shoot down gunships in flight? While they're actively hunting him?" He shook his head, "Where did he get the weapon? He was on his way through the civilian spaceport when the batarians began their landing, wasn't he? So I'm supposed to believe he got all the way across the colony to the base, requisitioned the most advanced AMR we have, and went on a duck hunt for a week? And that he organized civilian resistance, showed them how to defend the colony while doing so? That's not a lone soldier, you'd need a squad or a whole section to do all that at once."
Hackett had looked up slowly as Kyle spoke, "The full report is available, and Shepard's omnitool went into Fair Witness, so everything about how he did what he did is well-documented. He's got ten years with the Softspotter VI, worked his way through the GuanYu and Ogun weapons, but he's been using the Gorgon for over three years, and his scores with all of them have been exemplary. I think we can now put to rest any further objection that Combat Engineers have no business leading the charge into a firefight; at least not that one."
Kyle's mouth was still open in disbelief. "So the end justifies the means?"
"The Allied Chiefs think so. Considering how long we've been taking it in the shorts from the batarians, I am inclined to agree; this will save colonist lives in the future." Hackett shook his head. "Maybe there was intent. Maybe it was just a lucky break. If I didn't know better, I'd say he'd been briefed about how to do it. Hell, maybe Making the most of plausible deniability is of the classes in the N7 training. I haven't taken it.
"But here's the important part: With the rest of his team down, Shepard's handed us a victory. Not just important one, Major; this is singularly critical. And by doing so in the way that he did, he gave us plausible deniability.
"Even if you're right, I'm not sure we're seeing the real Shepard here. Realize that while you drifting in and out of consciousness, Lieutenant Shepard had been in a high-tension combat environment, fighting for his life against an entire company of batarians for a week and a half. True, he might have cracked.
"But sometimes you have to make a spectacular mistake to learn from it. His record and psych profile indicates he would not do something like this. He has an Alliance-installed cognitive EPD. Though I also see here that he just lost his wife, and the losses of civilians at Elysium to batarian pirates, and, it seems, to these pirates in particular probably weighed heavily on his mind."
Kyle recalled the first time he and Shepard had spoken in Tokyo's medical bay. "Well then he should have been a professional about it, sir," he said with rising conviction. "Alliance soldiers do not kill prisoners, and if they do, they do not stay Alliance soldiers."
Hackett sighed heavily. "True. But the evidence is circumstantial. He'd beaten a T-3 battlesuit nearly to scrap, he didn't know if you were still alive. He probably thought he was on his own, and fighting for his life. Major, with the condition you and your CEVA suit were in, if he hadn't known where you were, I'm not sure we'd have found you, either. After the events of Shanxi, the batarians probably thought the other Alliance team members would just…surrender."
"Admiral, stopping the batarians may have been your goal, but this is a travesty, a black eye for the Alliance."
Hackett looked up and nodded at his own display. "Indeed. If Shepard had done something manifestly wrong. But we can only act on things for which we have incontrovertible evidence or support. We know there was a firefight that lasted for almost two continuous weeks, with heavy losses on both sides. We know you and Shepard were the only survivors, and it looks like Shepard killed a lot of them at close range."
He waved a hand at the holograph before him. "But let's be fair: It would also look like this if he'd taken them down in a small arms exchange inside a pressurized installation. And he is a graduate of the full N-series trainings. If it came down to hand-to-hand with these guys…"
Kyle looked up, put his hands on the desk and leaned forward. "Admiral, do you have any idea how much abuse a batarian will take? Do you even realise that they don't wear helmets because they can give bighorn sheep a concussion? Are you seriously telling me you think Shepard managed to take down every one of these guys in single combat with the same bullet-to-the-head move?"
"That's almost the only way to stop them," Hackett said dryly, "I should know."
Kyle sat back in his chair and pointed at the report before him. "Sir, Shepard is a borderline psycho. If you don't Cat Six him right now, you are asking for trouble. He's a danger to himself and others. You put him in combat again, and he really could fully crack, start shooting everyone. You're really going to look the other way until then?"
"Major, we are both battle-hardened veterans who have seen the worst of humanity, and can recognize it when we see it. I am experienced enough to understand exactly why you would come to the conclusion you did within minutes of seeing this report, because I did, too. I have already spoken with the Fleet Admiral's Office at Trident about what this represents, and that I have been instructed not to make assumptions or accusations that cannot be specifically and directly proven."
Hackett's expression became slightly more intense. "Lieutenant Shepard saved your life, and completed the mission unaided. He has destroyed an enemy vessel of heavy cruiser displacement, and in doing so has certainly reduced batarian capability in the Verge and the Traverse so as to significantly reduce the number of attacks on our colonies. Most significantly, he did it single-handed, and while injured.
"I have been informed that he is being awarded a Distinguished Service Medal, and may be awarded a gold leaf cluster for the Silver Star he has yet to be presented for Elysium. It may interest you to know that the Allied Chiefs were already considering awarding him the Star of Terra for that. After all he accomplished at Torfan, I'd say that's a certainty.
"We have invested millions of credits in his training, and would be doing him and the Alliance a disservice to have him do anything other than keep being one of the best damn soldiers I have ever seen."
# # #
Though it was now several months after the Pyrrhic Torfan mission, Shepard had decided – reluctantly – to visit the families of the junior team members who had lost their lives. In spite of the fact that the Alliance had already sent official representatives who were better trained than he to handle that unpleasant duty, he had done this for each of the families deprived of a loved one.
In doing so, he was following in the footsteps of David Anderson, who had come on his own to try to make things right, to impress upon himself the human cost. It was part of his personal responsibility: Own The Failure. He hoped, as had Anderson before him, to motivate himself against letting it happen again.
He had saved this one for last: His "spotter" and friend Jordan. He had hoped the other such visits would have acclimated him to the experience, make it less painful.
It was not working as he had hoped.
The house he stood before looked ancient in style, modern in materials. The low-slope roof was only a meter above the main entrance, a real wooden double door with handles at its centre, which were surrounded by decorative trim.
But the Portcullis™ controls on the right side of the entry were state of the art, and the VI face that appeared on the display recognized him when he was still approaching from the street.
"Welcome, Alliance officer Shepard."
Shepard stopped crisply at the door, his full-dress Navy uniform starched and precisely fitted, doffed his cap and tucked it under his arm. "I'm here for a scheduled meeting with mister and missus Michaels."
"Just a moment. I will–"
The VI voice cut off suddenly as the doors made a subtle thunk and then dropped into the ground with a pneumatic whir. Inside was a man in shorts and a belt-projected holographic golf shirt. Generally considered informal, but extremely comfortable in the local environment.
"Lieutenant," he said a little stiffly. "Please come in."
As they walked down the short foyer/hallway, Shepard spoke quickly, "Thank you, sir. I know you've already had to go through this when it happened, and you were unprepared. I'd like to thank you in advance for your and your family's time, sir. I won't take much of it."
"I'm still not sure what you're here for, but what can we do for you?"
They had stepped into a living room that opened to the left, a den to the right. In the living room was a period-looking conversation pit, where sat a woman and a twenty-something girl. Shepard looked around; the brother was not present.
But the other daughter looked hauntingly like her sister; Shepard cringed inwardly. Though she looked like she was controlling herself only with great effort, Shepard found himself wanting to embrace her, as if that would somehow make him feel that 2LT Jordan Michaels was not dead.
He stepped down into the pit so he could appear as small as possible. "Sir…ma'am…miss," he addressed and made eye contact with each of the family members in turn, "my father was killed in action when I was sixteen years old. It absolutely tore my heart out. When it happened, his CO, then-Lieutenant David Anderson, did not just let Alliance Personnel to handle it, he came to our home and told us himself.
"This is not Standard Procedure. The Alliance normally sends a professional counselor so that those who have lost a family member do not have to be told by someone who could be held responsible. It usually reduces the trauma on both sides by…displacing it in this way."
Having felt his self-control start to slip; he took a breath. "The day it happened, I could have…I'm sorry, I felt like I could have killed that man with my bare hands. As far as I was concerned, that man was responsible, and yet he was the one who was alive to stand there and tell me. I...hated him." Noticing himself start to make the sort of frown that was a precursor to tears, he paused, stamping the emotions down again. "I swore I would never take command of an operation where someone might be killed and I would have to do that. I became an engineer, so I could build things and help people.
"I had applied for the Combat Medic Secondary Proficiency, even though my array was already full. When they turned me down, I still audited VRS and PVR trainings. But we lost a lot of equipment with most of our team, and my training was…not enough without a way to implement it."
"The mission itself was originally thought to be simple and easy. I was one of three at the third level of operational command, and one of five of my rank. But within minutes of our arrival, we had sustained significant casualties, and within a day, there were only three of us left.
"The reason I've asked to visit you today is because I hated the Alliance for killing my dad. I did not stop to think about the fact that it was the aliens that did it. When David Anderson told me he would have traded his life for my dad's, I did not believe him. But now that I've been through it myself, I…understand more. And with this much distance from it, now I do believe him, and I begin to understand why he came to tell us himself, even if it hurts."
He swallowed. "Mister and Missus Michaels, if I could trade my life for your daughter's, I truly would, and right now. I don't have any siblings, and most of my family is gone. And more importantly, I would stop hurting.
"I don't expect you to fully appreciate what this means, but Jordan and I weren't just friends, we were warbuddies. I may have had rank on her, but she was always watching my back. I focused more on the field engineering tasks, she made sure no one shot at me while I did.
Shepard found himself hesitating in strange places as he spoke, "We played BlackJack II, and we were always on the same side. She saved my butt in and out of operations. She helped me work on my omnitool, squeak more cycles out of the same compute without spending money on it, or making it heavier. I don't think I know anyone as clever with omnitronics, and she regularly handed me my…butt…in thin slices…when we'd do match shooting. That's why she handled shooting and I handled engineering.
"She taught me how to origami my gear so I could get to it without unloading my whole pack. She always spoke very warmly of all of you, and that's what makes this very painful for me."
He swallowed again, looked away, shook his head. "I know that doesn't help."
"Even when she had lost…her legs above the knees, she killed eight enemy combatants, continued to drive drones and keep watch so I could keep up a polyphase sleep cycle. She was one of the sharpest, team player soldiers I have ever had the privilege to work with." He stopped, pinched the bridge of his nose, then wiped one eye with his index finger and the other with his thumb. "If not for her, I would not…be breathing.
"There were a dozen other things that could have happened differently that might have saved her, and I can do nothing about them, but I am here to apologise for my failure."
Jordan's sister asked accusingly, "How many bad guys did you kill trying to save her?"
Shepard held her gaze, debating for a moment what to say. Even with 25% cognitive acceleration, it didn't seem to be enough time, but the fact that he could hide behind bureaucracy allowed him some emotional balance. "Ma'am, I'm sorry, but the operation has not yet been declassified. That means technically I'm not allowed to say even what I have about what she did." He sighed. "But I wanted you to know your sister absolutely kicked ass trying to save mine, even while injured. I was not as badly injured, so it was easier for me to…do more." He looked down for a moment. "The important thing is that it wasn't enough."
"The day Commander Anderson came and told us we'd lost my dad, he…excuse me," Shepard coughed to cover his effort to push the memory away, "he told me that he had come to our house himself because he and my dad were good friends, and knew us because my mom is Navy, and I grew up on board. When we were groundside, he'd even been over for dinner a few times, and I thought of him as…well, as an uncle."
"And he told us himself because he felt he had to. 'So that he would be motivated to prevent it ever happening to anyone else under his command.'" He stopped and took a breath, making sure he had a solid grip on his emotions.
"Every soldier knows there's a risk. But you always think it'll happen to the other guy." He shook his head. "It's only worse when it does. I don't know if this is the rightest thing to do, but I know it's difficult, so I hope that means it's worthwhile.
"Jordan had a standing order for cryonic preservation." Mrs. Michaels looked up from her omniwatch. "Is she…preserved?"
Shepard blinked, furrowing his brow. "I'm sorry, ma'am." Though he was mortified, he appeared to take this in stride. He ran his left thumb along the inside of his ring finger, gesturing for maximum acceleration. "I'm…I…it was not an option at the time. If she meant to have a contingency in place, she did not inform me of my part in it." He couldn't take high acceleration for long, so he adjusted it back down.
From her reaction, Mrs. Michaels seemed to have prepared herself for this. She rose to her feet and took something from a pocket; a small cylinder about the size of a lipstick, which she extended to him. "I'm a neurologist, and the company I work for has developed this. It's called SavU, and it's one of a class of medical devices broadly known as Nanotech Neurological Preservatives. They're meant to be used on people who have died, just in case they had such a wish. It selectively preserves brain tissue with cryonics in mind, largely focused on the frontal lobes, and is fully redaction-compatible with SNAPCap, ERAs, EPR, PI 3-kinases, and all hydrogen-sulfide knockdowns."
Looking up from the tiny cylinder in his hand, Shepard's mouth had gone dry. He had known about things like this, but had never taken it seriously. He lied, "I'm sorry, ma'am, I'm not even sure what that is or means."
"It means her wish for cryostasis might have been fulfilled, even without facilities ready to hand. In the next few years, it might even mean her personality could be run in PVR from her original brain."
"It means we might have had her back," the sister snapped accusingly, "She could have been resurrected."
Mrs. Michaels was well-accustomed to answering questions and responding to FUD campaigns. "We can't make that claim," she said patiently, "We don't know if it can work outside lab conditions. We don't even truly know how high the fidelity is."
"Why are you acting like this doesn't matter? Why doesn't everyone know this?" Jordan's sister leapt to her feet, practically assaulting Shepard. "You could have saved her if even you'd only used this. Even after days, they still could have chilled and preserved her brain. Even if you couldn't bring her back alive, you could have saved her for us. We could have had her back in a few years!"
"Keisha!" the senior Michaels snapped.
It was so easy to see Jordan's intensity in her sister, and more painfully, to see himself eighteen years earlier. Shepard didn't even hear what she was saying, he could only see the faces of people he might have saved…if this stuff really did what Jordan's mother said it did.
It was clear that the older woman was using her professional script as a way of staying balanced. "As nanotech goes, it's inexpensive, and easily produced. This sprayer has a full set of omnitech-compatible instructions, and is reloadable." She paused, made eye contact with him. "Please save other families from what we are going through. I know there's a lot of push-back and lies being circulated by religions and Luddites, but you can potentially use this to save your friends, and bring them back, even when you can't bring them back alive."
Shepard regarded the sprayer, and then the grieving mother. "I'll…uh…thank you for this, ma'am. I'm sorry I didn't know to carry it." He slipped it into a pocket. "Um…I should go."
As he pulled his cap out from under his arm, he felt something out of place. "Oh, wait." He ran two fingers around the inside of his cap, pinched out a small PIRAD chip and palmed it. "Ma'am, I…was given this by…a friend in Forensics. It's irregular, but there are personal messages your daughter had dictated. I assume she did this while she was letting me get some sleep.
"I didn't know she'd made them until a couple of months after we got back. The examiner didn't only give me Jordan's message to me, but all her messages. I suppose in the hope that I would get them out to their intended recipients. This is all of them, including the one to me."
He offered the chip to Mrs. Michaels. "I remember what it was like when I lost my dad; suddenly everything he had said or done became important to preserve, no matter who he said it to. I don't know if you'll want it, but I…wanted to offer it in case you did."
Mrs. Michaels had not taken her eyes off the chip she held; none of the family had.
Jordan's mother took the chip; her father nodded and looked at Shepard. "Thank you, Lieutenant."
"Ma'am. Sir. Miss." He took a step back and then turned to the door.
He had not even taken two more steps before putting a hand to his pocket to be certain he still had the first-generation NNP sprayer. They can really save lives with this? Why isn't this standard-issue?
*** Glossary ***
CEVA: Combat EVA, either the activity or the suit
EPD: Epilepsy Preventative Device
EMP: Electromagnetic Pulse
EPR: Emergency Preservation and Resuscitation
ERA: Elemental Reducing Agents
Fair Witness: court-admissible electronic recordings; unlike conventional ERDs, Fair Witness data is encrypted so as to prevent tampering, editing, or forging
FCO: Fire Control Officer (sometimes called "Weaps")
FUD: Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt
hydrogen-sulfide knockdowns: field medicine alternative that slows metabolism down, essentially putting user in a state of suspended animation (citation: PBS/Nova episode about caves wherein spelunkers exposed to a particular mix of hydrogen sulfides were rendered unconscious until returned to conventional atmospheric gas mix; this concept was even used in the original Philip Francis Nowlan story Buck Rogers, which allowed the eponymous hero to wake up five centuries after his spelunking accident.)
NNP: Nanotech Neurological Preservative
Portcullis™: A branded VI for answering the door of a residence, also allowing telepresence for the owner.
PI 3-kinases: Phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K) constitutes a family of evolutionarily conserved lipid kinases that regulate a vast array of fundamental cellular responses, including proliferation, adhesion, cell size, and protection from apoptosis. Their output can be modulated by specific configurations of bloodstream computing, several of which are leveraged by early 2180s Medi-gel™, though at the time of this chapter, are not.
PVR: Polyphase Virtual Reality; a total-immersion VR technology with between two and five channels of data that stimulates multiple regions of the brain, allowing for a nearly complete reproduction of environments or experiences. Because it is a demanding, high-bandwidth technology, it became a measure of network capability, particularly among users who depend upon it. PVR games can be very addictive, particularly to the young.
SNAPCap: Single-Neuron Axon Path capture, a way of mapping individual neuronal output and path distribution, and from which can be derived a "map" of how a brain is wired. When this map is recast in silicon, the personality can be simulated, or even emulated. However, once it is in silica, the normal processes of brain development stop due to differences in the substrate, and the "personality" so derived will never become what the original would have.
VI: Virtual Intelligence
VRS: Virtual Reality Simulation
