Flesh and Metal:

Book One:

The Saren Incident:

Chapter Four

He knew that it was considered more than a little odd but Ethan didn't think that he had ever felt more comfortable anywhere else then when he he was in the sick bay of a ship, it reminded him that he was away from a battlefield and that he was safe and being patched up, that at least for a moment or two there needed only to be a bit of peace and he could let himself rest while the doctors patched him.

That feeling of comfort was only amplified when he was in the capable hands of a Doctor that he trusted and he didn't trust anyone in the entire fleet than he did Doctor Karin Chakwas, she had been a Doctor for over thirty-five years and all but three of those years had been in the navy, she had served on dreadnoughts all the way down to Corvettes.

Ethan had been surprised that she was here, Karin was one of the most highly sort after Doctors in the entire Alliance and the last he had heard she had been offered a position on the Independence, the flagship of the entire Alliance Navy and you didn't turn down that sort of position to work on a frigate even if it was meant to be top of the line with some experimental new systems.

In all honesty Anderson being on the ship didn't make much sense either, he was one of the most decorated and respected captains in the fleet as well as having a brilliant mind when it came to navel combat. Really, he should have been an admiral by now but Ethan knew that the captain had turned down any advancement up the ladder at least half a dozen times, hating the idea of being desk bound.

But all the same it didn't make sense for Anderson to be in charge of this ship, he should be commanding a dreadnought by now or a heavy cruiser with a frigate escort at the very least. He had taken a quick glance at the crew manifest before he had come on board, he had not read it the whole way through so he hadn't know that Karin had been on board but he had read through it enough to put his teeth on edge.

Chief Navigator Charles Pressly was highly decorated and had a service history of over twenty-five years and before he had been transferred to the Normandy he had been serving as the Chief Navigator on the Kilimanjaro for the last three years and looked like he had been ready for getting his own command before the transfer orders came.

Chief Engineer Gregory Addams had almost just as long and distinguished a career as Pressly and he had served in the engine rooms on every single type of ship in the navy and had also spent eighteen months in Geth space and thus was the rare organic engineer who was fully qualified with repairing damaged Geth mobile platforms and warships, he was in high demand and yet he was on this ship.

Master Chief Nicola Baroni was a veteran of the First Contact war and Ethan had thought that she had been retired but it seemed that if she had been someone had brought her out of it. Her record spoke for itself and she had been instrumental in the defense of Shanxi, most well known for holding off a ground invasion single handily for twenty minutes before Geth ground combat units arrived to provide back up.

Decorated officers, war heroes and some of the most experienced and technically capable officers in the entire Navy and they were all here on this ship. If he didn't know any better it would almost seem like someone was trying to impress someone by putting the best that the Alliance had on one ship. There was something else going on other than an advanced ship being put on a shakedown run.

He had tried to use the Network but it seemed that no one was willing to talk to him about it, whatever was going on it had been regulated to need to know status and apparently everyone below a certain rank did not need to know. He did not like this, when the Network was keeping their mouths shut this tight it meant that it was something big was brewing and something big generally did not mix with something good.

Not even Nasreen had been willing to tell him anything about what was happening, she had simply smiled that infuriating half smile, half smirk and simply said that he had his orders. That had put an end to any sort of conversation they might have had, when Ethan had his orders they had to be followed. Nasreen had left him on the Citadel with the number of the bay where the Normandy had docked and nothing else.

He knew it wasn't his place to question any of the operators but even so he didn't like the idea of leaving Jin in her care but it wasn't as though he had any choice when it came to it, Nasreen had sworn that Jin would be put in a good place and there might even be the possibility of finding her a place on Earth, somewhere safe with a good education lined up for her and that was all that Ethan had ever wanted for her.

So he shut up and followed his orders, not that he had a choice in the matter anyway. He had long ago gotten used to the AI that they had shoved into his head when he had first joined up with the Network, hell he even considered Nova to be something of a friend considering they had been able to bond over the fact that she wanted to be in his head as much as she wanted to be there, but it didn't change the fact that if he ever disobeyed a direct order then it meant that she would fry his brain stem with a massive jolt of energy.

Apparently they had gotten the idea from the Salarian STG, all of their operatives were apparently equipped with some form of suicide weapon in order to prevent from being captured but some, who were too much of a risk for even the possibility that they might defect, were given similar shackles as he was. Ethan didn't consider himself to be particularly valuable or likely to defect from the Network but someone high up disagreed with him.

Ethan was drawn out of his thoughts when the door at the back of the Med Bay opened and Doctor Chakwas came out, a dozen small medical drones which were slaved to her omni-tool hovering about her as she walked. Two of the drones broke away and began to swarm around Ethan, chirping and scanning him as Karin examined the results on her omni.

After a few moments of studying the results she tutted and looked up from her omni-tool to stare at him disapprovingly. "What have you been getting up to? Honestly, you have stress fractures in both your left and right Tibia and in your femur, your right arm has been broken over a dozen times in the last three weeks and hasn't healed properly and you have a dozen bruised ribs."

"Well, it wasn't my fault. What could anyone have expected to happen to me when I didn't have the best damn doctor in the Alliance at my back to patch me up." He spoke with a smirk and Chakwas letting out a long suffering sigh didn't do much to make him stop. It had been such a long time since he had seen her last and he had missed her, a lot.

"Yes well, I'd rather you didn't need me to patch you up quite so regular. There's only so much any organic body can take, even with the most extensive cybernetic and genetic modifications and you have neither of those. These stress fractures are your body screaming at you to take it easy, or at least not to push yourself as hard as you are. Your ribs will heal with your time but your arm is the most serious injury, you're at very high risk on an infection if it's left as is and it's been healed that way, you're going to need corrective surgery but the Captain insists on having you out in the field for the mission and nothing short of you being on death's door will change his mind."

Anderson wasn't the sort of man who would let an injured solider go out on to the field unless he didn't have any other choice, not that Ethan considered himself to be injured but Chakwas certainly did and he knew that Anderson always listened to her whenever it came to the welling being of his marines. But if he was determined to see him on the field, then that meant he knew something more than he was letting on.

Though Anderson was never rational when it came to him, for all that Ethan knew perhaps Anderson thought he was injured badly enough and he placed him on the mission in a fool's hope to get rid of him. David certainly hated him enough to try something like that even if it wasn't his style He understood why David hated him, it was the same reason why he hated himself.

But it was something that had to be done, it was needed. And he would do it again a thousand times over, the mission had to be completed no matter the cost. And he had paid it, the nightmares had been endless and even after all this time they had never really stopped but he had been able to bear every single night of them, knowing that what he had done had ensured that billions of others would be able to sleep soundly.

At least that was what he always told himself, it was what he had to tell himself in order to stop himself from going insane after a nightmare which had made him wake up in a cold sweat and unable to stop shaking. It was what he told himself when he stood on the balcony of his apartment in Nos Astra and wondering if it would be better for the fall to kill him or if it would be better if he was hit by a skycar as he fell.

Not as if Nova would allow him to harm himself, she could not actually control him but she could force him into a coma like state if she believed he was about to harm himself. His AI had only been forced to do such a thing twice before but Ethan had learned to keep control of his thoughts, being forced into that state was not pleasant to say the very least.

The worst thing was that he couldn't even hate Nova for it, not without feeling like a massive asshole. She didn't want to force him into the state, sometimes he got the feeling that she wanted to die those days as much as he did, but she was a prisoner of her programing as much as he was of her and her programing stated that if he was to do anything that would put his life at risk that wasn't related to his currant mission then she was to stop him however she deemed fit.

She hadn't needed to do it for awhile thought, not since Jin had been born. Ethan had no doubts that by any standard he would probably be considered a pretty crappy Father, it certainly did not help that he did not have the first idea on how to raise an Asari child, for the most part it was similar to dealing with a human baby but a human baby might be up all night with teething not with a crest forming out of the back of their head and screaming bloody murder and making their parents thinking they were dying.

But a crappy Father or no, he did love his daughter more than anything else in the world and he had done since the moment she had been placed in his arms for the first time, she had been so small and her crest had just been a series of bumps on the back of her skull that he had felt on his palm while he supported her head and he was certain that he had never seen anything more beautiful in the entire world.

For a while he had tried to keep her a secret from the Network but that was always a fool's errand, the Network always found out anything that they needed to know and one day when he had come home from one of Nassana's parties at the Dantius estate he had found his daughter sitting on Nasreen's knee, completely oblivious to the danger that she was in.

For all of that time she had been there she had kept Jin on her knee and Ethan watched her like a hawk, ready to act if he saw any movement that looked like it was going to be harmful to his daughter. Nasreen had done just as many fucked up things as he had, snapping the neck of the baby wouldn't be the worst of it.

He had done the only thing that he was capable of doing in that moment, the only chance his baby girl had, he fell to his knees and he begged. It was a desperate move and not one that he honestly thought would work but it was also the only move he had available to him. Nasreen had watched as he fell and pleaded for her not to hurt his daughter for a few moments before she let out a laugh, telling him not to be so foolish.

The Network had not been pleased that he had kept such a secret from them, but they weren't black hat villains with twirling mustaches who killed children with no good reason to hear Nasreen tell it. Apparently they had dispatched Nasreen to retrieve Jin to take her off his hands so that he might focus fully on his currant mission but seeing how desperate he was to keep her with him had changed Nasreen's mind.

Nasreen left that night with a promise to inform the Network that any attempt to forcefully separate the two of them would be damaging to his mental health, and far more importantly decrease his efficiency as an agent. It must have worked because after that night there was no more contact with the Network aside from him filing his reports and he did not seen Nasreen again till the night she had come to his apartment after he had killed Talia, they had wound up separated in the end but they had more time together, even if only for a few short months.

Knowing exactly where his daughter was not apparently information that he needed to know, and one letter a month seemed strict to him but he also knew better than to push his luck. He had already drafted his first letter to Jin, it was short but he hoped enough to the point that she would know how much he loved her. And all he could hope for now was that whoever was caring for her would read it to her.

"Commander, did you hear me?" Ethan blinked and looked up to see Karin standing there with a look of faint concern that he knew so well on her face. "You left me on my own there for a bit, are you alright?"

"I'm fine Doctor, just got caught up in my thoughts a bit. What were you saying?"

Doctor Chakwas did not look convinced he was alright and simply activated her omni-tool again and the medical drones swarmed all around him once again and Ethan had to fight the urge to slap them away as they began to circle his head, wondering if he could convince Nova to fry their sensors. Though it would probably end up coming out of his pay to replace them. "What?"

"Have you had any episodes like this in the past?" Chakwas asked as she typed commands into her omni-tool and her medical droids chirped in response.

"It was hardly an episode, I was just thinking about something and I got caught up in my thoughts. I hardly had a seizure." A glare was the only response he got to that and Ethan rolled his eyes and sighed. "This isn't the first time I've spaced out, no. It's normally when I'm remembering something with a heavy emotional significance to me or some sort of trauma, I can think of two specific instances when it occurred, once for five minutes and once for three and each time I came out of it with no problem."

"That may be so but any kind of mental event like that is cause for concern, even more so considering your...unusual circumstances." She shook her head and sighed as she examined the results of the scan. "The Geth are allies, I know that and developing our own AI's and putting them in our ships to help run them is one thing but what they've done to you is beyond the pale, you essentially have another consciousness inside of your head. Not to mention the amount of cyber implants in your brain could cause a rejection, not to mention we're still not entire sure of all of the effects of cyberware and how it interacts with Biotics yet."

"The Asari and the Salarians helped us deal with all that, it's not like I'm running around with an L2 implant. I'm fine, and the cyberware was installed by some of the best surgeons and engineers in the entire Alliance, it wasn't as if I could say no." Nova had been something of an experiment, to see how an AI and a human would interact with one another on such a closer level and how it could improve effectiveness of missions.

In terms of mission effectiveness Ethan couldn't deny that Nova was a godsend, she was capable of hacking through any security system that he had ever found himself on the other side of, anything that he ever needed on a mission, plans, security codes, needing the entire security system disabled and the communication network shut down, all Nova could do with an ease of effort that surpassed any organic.

But having what was essentially a second person inside of your head all of the time was not an overly pleasant experience even at the best of times and he would be lying if he called the past five years the best of times. Migraines had been almost a constant companion as Nova had been since she had been installed and every now and then his vision became unfocused.

Spells of vomiting and dizziness had also been common in the first days after the cyberware had been implanted but that had stopped after a week after the implants had been put into place and he had still been in the medical facility with an entire team of surgeons all around him, he hadn't even been able to take a piss that week without someone taking an extensive series of notes about it.

But he had been given the all clear to operate in the field, his brain wasn't liquefying from the presence of the implants and he had started to experience any sort of hallucinations and that had been good enough for them. Still, every month he was expected to check in with an Operator and Nova was keeping a constant check on his vitals and had a constant upload link with a Network server, if the higher ups had any problem with either the AI's report or the Operator's second opinion then it had not made it's way back to him.

"No, you aren't an L2 and let's be thankful enough for that. I don't want to imagine the amount of complications that could add on top of all of this." Chakwas bit her bottom lip for a moment before she typed a command into her omni-tool, shutting the medical droids down and lowering her arm. "Well, there doesn't seem to be any sign of implant rejection or any infection either but all the same I am going to recommend that any such events like this are brought to my attention as soon as they happen, understood?"

"Yes Ma'am." Ethan replied, knowing it was pointless to argue.

"Good." Chakwas stood there for a moment with her arms crossed, glancing down at her feet for a moment before she looked back up. "Can it-Can she hear me? Is that how it works, she can hear what you hear?

"Basically, I suppose." Ethan admitted. "Except, it's not like she literally hears what I hear. It's more like I hear something or see something and that's data that gets saved into my brain and then she can read it. That might not be the most scientific example but it's the best way I can describe it. Sometimes I like to think that she's talking to me, but I know that's not true. She doesn't have vocal processors but we can communicate with one another, I don't know how it works you'd have to ask the people who put her in me."

There was fat chance of that, the entire team that had been in charge of melding him and Nova together had been disappeared after her had been deemed fit for duty. He doubted the Network would have killed them, that would simply raise too many questions and a lot of them had no doubt shown skills that the Network would think that they could use, they had probably each been transferred to different sites scattered all across the galaxy, never to see the sunlight again.

Once you were in the Network, it was impossible to get out.

"I'll keep that in mind." Chakwas replied dryly. "At any rate, I can't think of any reason for you to not go out to the field, so consider yourself cleared for duty. But once you get back from the mission I am setting you down and we are going to have a proper talk about these injuries, Medi-Gel is all well and good but it's a quick fix and it is not a substitute for an actual Doctor. Whatever this mission turns out to be, please try to not get shot."

"I'll do my best but what can I say, my job does involve a lot of getting shot at. But if I do happen to get shot at, at least I know that you're here to patch me up." He gave Chakwas a smile that he had used a thousand times on her, back when he had first joined up with Alliance and he had been carried into the med bay of the SSV Singapore with two broken legs and most of his blood on him rather than in him.

Chakwas had to patch him up from more than a few rough fights, one time his arm had almost been completely severed, and each time he had given her the same smile. It was a tradition, of sorts between the both of them that she would always be willing to patch him up but only if he gave her that smile. It was stupid and didn't make any sense if they tried to explain it to anyone else, but it made sense to them.

For a moment it looked like Chakwas was trying to fight against it but she let out a small laugh. "Yes, I will be here to patch you up if you do get shot but I'd rather you did not get shot at all. Of course, I am talking to a marine I won't get my hopes up that you actually listen to some good advice."

"You'd have to be more of a miracle worker than you already are for that to happen." The doors to the med bay of the Normandy slid open as Chakwas sighed and shook her head and turned to work on her terminal, a cobalt blue Geth Platform walked into the med bay with a with a while stripe on the left arm and a black and red stripe on the right, Ethan almost missed the N7 on it's chest as it walked in.

"Chakwas-Primary Medical Unit, Anderson-Captain/Local Command Unit sent this unit to inquire if Shepard-Commander is at prime battle readiness, expected arrival time in the Utopia system in forty five galactic standard minutes." Chakwas frowned and nodded and gestured for Ethan to stand up from the medical bed.

"Yes, he's ready to go. I'll forward the captain my full report in a moment. Legion, could you inform the Captain that I would like to speak to him when he has a moment?" The flaps around the Geth's long tubular head fluttered out in a short burst which Ethan had to assume was a gesture for the affirmative.

"Legion? You have a name?" It wasn't very common for Geth to give themselves names, they weren't indivduals but simply a group of runtimes inhabiting a server or a hardware platform and those runtimes simply interacted with one another, growing more intelligent due to however many runtimes were grouped together. It wasn't a hive mind, that would imply that every single runtime was an individual which would be like saying every single brain cell was an individual.

"EDI came up with it." Chakwas said without looking up from her terminal. "She has something of an odd sense of humor, of course when the one person she interacts with more than anyone else onboard is Mr. Moreau then you would have something of an unfortunate sense of humor. It's from the the bible, I believe. Oh, how did it go now?"

"My name is Legion, for we are many. The Christian Bible, Gospel of Mark, Chapter Five, Verse Nine. We find it an appropriate metaphor for our own existence." Legion spoke before it's attention turned over to Ethan. "Shepard-Commander, Anderson-Captain/Local Command Unit requires your presence in the comm room, located at the stern of the bridge."

"Then I'll head up there now, thanks Legion." The Geth's had flaps moved again and he turned, exiting the Med-Bay without another word. Ethan turned his attention back to Chakwas. "He's kinda chatty for a Geth, isn't he? Most don't normally talk unless they really have too and even then they need to be in a group, and since when can Geth apply to the N7 program?"

"Legion's a special case, he's an advanced platform. Can hold upwards of a thousand runtimes in its platform, all of them linked together it's about as smart as a fully fledged AI. As for the N7, well, there's nothing to say that it couldn't have run in the program. Apparently it passed all of the technical exams with flying colors and the training regiment was nothing to it as well."

Ethan couldn't help but frown, not because of something stupid about how it was unfair that Legion would have an unfair advantage compared to organic marines, it might be true but if that was the case they might as well not accept any more Asari into the navy either, but it was more due to the fact that Legion was on this ship. An advanced Geth platform with over a thousand runtimes, almost as smart as a fully fledged sentient, as he was on this ship alongside experienced officers who should all have their own commands by now.

It was like someone was ringing alarms bells and flashing a warning sign right in front of his face, if the fact there was a Council Specter on board wasn't proof enough of that already. He had worked with Specters before, well he had worked with one back when he was on Illium. He wished that it had been Tela Vasir that the Council had sent, he trusted her and her was certain that he might have been able to convince her to tell him exactly what she had been sent to do.

But this Turian was a stranger to him, the name didn't help him narrow things down. He had asked Nova to do an extranet search for any information on a Nihlus Kyrik after he had spoken a few words him and the captain had sent him down to the med bay but she had been quiet ever since. That normally meant one of two things, the first would be that there wasn't much public knowledge available about him which would not be much of a surprise, people knew that the Specters existed of course and they were more public when compared to most black ops groups but that didn't mean you could just find out anything you wanted from the extranet about them.

In which case that meant Nova had dug deeper into the background of the Specter, which most likely meant hacking into council information archives which were under heavy security, literally thousands of firewalls, tracker programs, decoy programs and hundreds of other nasty surprises which if Nova managed to run afoul of would mean that he would be entirely fucked.

Thankfully, Nova had hacked into dozens of advanced security systems since she had been installed and she knew what steps to take in order to avoid being detected or tripping any security measures. Of course, there was always a chance that she would miss something and they would track it back to him and he would most likely be found, capture him and take him to some dark hole where they would torture him for the rest of his life, which would no doubt be short when they found out that he would not give them any information.

And he would not give them anything, he had been trained to resist torture when he had first joined with the Network and he had the scars to prove it. Asari mental flaying, Salarian nano-poisons and venom's, Turian's spitting in his eyes and Batarian's actually flaying him with very sharp knives. The Network had trained him to resist all of it and hundreds of other torture methods to boot.

Most of the scars had been easily healed, sink grafts and cloned organs and it was like all the damage had never happened. But he had learned how to resist he would speak nothing and he had nothing to speak off, nothing that would lead them to the Network at any rate.

"At any rate, forget Legion. I believe that the Captain wanted to see you." Ethan nodded and left the med bay, once he was outside he glanced over to the table where a few crewmen were sitting around playing a card game that he did not recognize and speaking in hushed voices. Ah, scuttlebutt was alive and well. He had missed being on a ship.

One thing he had not missed was the elevators on a ship, they were still as slow as a mammoth stuck in tar. And while the Normandy was an advanced ship with a lot of money being poured into it but he doubted that any of it had gone into getting faster elevators. Thankfully, there were stairs that lead up to the bridge so at least for a moment he had missed out an opportunity to slam his head against the wall in boredom.

Captain Anderson was waiting for him in the communication room with Specter Kyrik standing next to him and Shepard wished that Nova would hurry up with finding out anything about the man. Anderson broke his attention away from Nihlus and narrowed his dark eyes at him. Those eyes had been full of fondness for him once, pride as well before Ethan had fucked it up.

"Commander, thank you for deciding to join us." Captain Anderson spoke, crossing his arms over his broad chest. "I believe it's time that we let you know exactly what's going on here."

"This mission is far more than a simple shakedown run." Nihlus took that moment to chime in. "Congratulations Commander Shepard, you are being considered as a candidate for the Specters. If you are proven worthy of joining our ranks, you will be the first human to do so."

The best of humanity, the best of the Alliance, all on one ship, the most advanced ship in the Navy no doubt which was a join effort between the Alliance and the Turian Hierarchy and in that one moment all the pieces fit together and started to make a perfect, ugly sense. The Alliance wanted a human specter, they wanted influence with the council and this was sure to be an excellent first step.

Ethan would never have considered himself for a candidate however, the Alliance would surely want someone with better publicity, a war hero they could use, a golden child. Ethan was not that, in truth he was the farthest thing from it. He did the terrible things in the dark, so the Alliance could be safe and the heroes could stand in the light, soaking up the praise.

"The Alliance is Humanity's golden sword and it's silver shield, to cut it's enemies to ribbons and to guard it's people. The Network is Humanity's dagger in the dark, we cut the throats of Humanity's enemies while they lie asleep in their beds and open our own veins, shedding blood so others need not." His first handler had said that to him, after the first day that had been the hell of his training. And to think, there had been a time when he had thought that basic training was hell.

Under the layers of skin that had been grown in vats, Ethan felt his flesh burn as he glanced between the Captain and the Specter. "I'm a candidate for Specter membership?" He repeated, just to be sure that he hadn't heard it wrong.

"I did not stutter Commander, yes. You are the candidate that the brass decided to put forward." Anderson squared his shoulders and stood taller. "This is an amazing opportunity Shepard, not just for you but for the entire Alliance as well. The Council's always held us at arm's length but there's rumblings in the Asari Republics and the Salarian Union, they aren't blind to our potential. We could form a better relationship from this."

"And I am here to evaluate you Commander, to see if you are worthy of membership." Nihlus spoke up and began to circle Ethan who simply kept staring at the wall, it was a standard intimidation tactic and he knew not to rise to it. "Your record is certainly impressive, joined the Navy at sixteen, good technical scores, a biotic, rose through the N7 program very quickly."

"And then came the Massacre of Akuze and the Slaughter of Torfan, something like that is going to leave any solider with severe emotional scars. Nothing to be ashamed of, of course but at the same time it is something that I will have to keep in mind." Ethan nodded stiffly and Nihlus stepped closer to him. "What is interesting, is that your record has been very vague for the last five years on what exactly you've been doing. It just says you've been on assignment, but it doesn't list where you were stationed and I could not find out anything other than that. In fact, aside from your official military record, there's almost nothing about you. You barely seem to exist at all, isn't that odd?"

Ethan found himself starring into Nihlus's green eyes, all Turians were taller than humans and he knew that but having one breathing down your neck was an entirely different thing. Thankfully, he was saved from having to respond when Captain Anderson interrupted. "Yes, it is odd. Of course, the same can be said about some Turians when they join the Blackwatch, don't you think Specter?"

"I imagine you're right." Nihlus pulled away then. "We're going to your world of Eden Prime, you are aware of that? We are going their to retrieve a Prothean Beacon that was discovered accidentally during the construction of a colony wide rail system, the colony contacted the Alliance and the Alliance contacted the Council. Now we are going in to retrieve it and deliver the beacon to the University of Armali on Thessia."

Ethan nodded, already familiar with the laws written up long before they had come on to the scene, about the sharing of Prothean technology in order to keep a balance and ensure that no race advanced to fast. And, even if nothing came of him being a Specter which he would be perfectly happy with, he could finally scratch off another home world that he had never been to off of his list.

Before anyone could say anything else Flight Lieutenant Jeff Moraeu's voice came in over the comm. "Sir, we just patched into a comm buoy and we've received a signal from Eden Prime and it's...You'd better see for yourself Sir."

"Put it on screen." Anderson ordered and on the far wall of the Comm's room a projection appeared, for a moment it was only static but it soon cleared into a fuzz picture of a man in black armor shouting silently at them. After another moment the audio feed kicked in, still heavy with distortion and many words being lost. "-212 on Eden Prime, need evac-"

"Get Down!" A woman in white and pink armor tossed herself at the man to push out of the way of what looked like a plasma blast as gunfire echoed out all around them, for a moment all was lost to confusion as desperate screams of the injuries and commands being given out were lost in between blasts of heavy machine gun fire.

But then the noise came, Ethan honestly didn't think it was possible for him to be scared anymore. He had endured so much, done so much, seen every kind of depravity capable of being inflicted that he honestly thought that he had outgrown fear. But when the deep noise echoed from across the comm feed, he knew he had been wrong.

For just a moment, a state of grace occurred on the other side of the feed and all the fighting had stopped aside from the heavy machine gun fire. The feed swung around and their descending from the sky, haloed in the red was a large black metal leaf, crackling with energy and scaring the shit out of Ethan even though he had no idea what it was.

All he knew, was that he wanted to get as far away from it as possible.

The feed died, turning into a wall of static. "Reverse, hold at eighty-three point five-"

The image turned back to the black leaf descending through the blood red sky, like and old and angry god. Anderson's face was grim and Nihlus, though it was harder to tell, did not look happy either. "Take us in Joker, fast and quiet. This mission just got a lot more complicated."

End of Chapter Four


I hope you enjoyed this chapter everyone.

Please feel free to leave a review, constructive criticism is always welcome.

With greatest respect,

DiscordantSymphony