Flesh and Metal:
Book One:
The Saren Incident:
Chapter Nine
The world was on fire.
It was hardly a new sight for her, she had seen hundreds of worlds burn before her eyes and she had no doubt that she would see many more if she managed to survive today of course which was always the hope.
She let out a grunt of pain as she threw herself into the nearest crater to avoid the attack, the air was filled with the smell of burning flesh and the sound of screams and she could not see anything from where she lay but she doubted that she would want to anyway, she never wanted to see what was left after an attack. There was never much, but what there was was hard to look on.
She forced herself up and cursed as the smoke burned her eyes, but she pushed herself forward regardless because if she did not then she would die,
A great monster hung over the city skyline, it's black tendrils stretched out for miles and it seemed to her at the tip of each crackled red energy and every few moments the same energy seemed to plus around it's entire form, she could hear the distant whispering in the back of her mind that meant that the seeds of the invaders had been planted in her mind and were sprouting.
This would be her last battle one way or another, if she survived then she fully intended to turn herself into the scientific division, they had centuries to study how the monsters reached into their minds and turned them into puppets and she doubted that submitting her own mind to examination would give them any headway but she had been fighting since she was a child and even if it was only a slight help she would still do it.
Better that than the alternative, a mindless husk who obeyed everything she was told without question with no chance to resist before she would be reduced to an empty shell who was not even capable of feeding herself.
She was close now.
She hurled herself up from the pit and ran to the ruin of a building, whatever it's purpose had been before there was nothing in the ruins to offer a hint to it. She pushed herself forward and ducked behind a large chunk of rubble when she heard the sounds of the monsters getting closer, the sight of them always disquieted her and she would always have to fight off the urge to vomit when she saw them.
Her proud race that had touched every star in the sky, that had unified a thousand races under one banner, one creed, one name had now been reduced to fighting world by world and against their own who had been turned into empty monsters driven only by the will of the demons that had killed them and stuffed them full with their machine.
She breathed deep, pushed herself up and raised her rifle to her innermost eye and she gently pulled the trigger, a bolt of bright green light shot out from it and the monster that had been in her sights was reduced to nothing more than a red mist, turning the rifle to the next one and doing the same to it. Soon enough she had a clear path through the rubble to her target.
The lift was hidden exactly where the intel said it would be which was a pleasant surprise as intel could be spotty at best, the empire had been fractured for centuries and the resistances that had sprung up and still fought on against the monsters that were destroying everything in their path were disconnected and operating with little to no communication with one another and that meant that information could be woefully inaccurate when it came to operations.
She stepped on to the square panel in the floor that concealed the lift and knelt on it, running her fingers over the softly glowing green line of circuity. The glow intensified at her touch and a soft hiss filled the air as the panel pulled away from the rest of the floor and began to slowly descend, carrying her deep beneath the surface where the sounds of the dying world became muffled.
The lift stopped with a click and she walked into the darkness of the chamber, the walls reacted to her presence and started to glow with soft green light, it became more and more intense as she walked deeper into the darkness until the shadows receded completely to be replaced by the sickly green glow.
It was not a long walk, the console almost seeming to reach out to her and it almost seemed to sing to her as she got closer to it and the controls lit up as she stood in front of them and reached out to manipulate them, the tugging at the back of her brain that the intel had told her to expect from the old systems was already there and she had to just let it in.
It distracted from the whispering, at least.
A lot of the old communication hardware had been destroyed when the monsters had first crawled out of the darkness but the beacons were still intact, for the most part and they were not part of any of the traditional communication networks and they could reach out to one another across the vast void of the stars, it wasn't a traditional way of communicating but that did not matter, it suited their purpose better this way.
As the connection between herself and the system clicking into place all four of her eyes fell shut, and the pain blossomed inside of her skull. It was sharp and burning and wrong, this was not meant to happen.
The pain grew so great that her knees buckled and her vision blurred, she opened her mouth to try and breath but she could draw nothing in, the pain only grew and grew until she couldn't focus on anything and when she opened her mouth to scream nothing came out except a high pitch burst of noise like nothing she had ever heard before, nothing human could make that sound.
What was a human? Who was she?
The world suddenly seemed strange and unfamiliar, the pain was so much that he could not even think? There were two voices in her head and the thoughts and memories were strange and unfamiliar and yet she also felt like that they had always been there as well, she didn't understand and it was tearing her mind apart as she tried to make sense of any of it.
He tried to stand, she tried to stand. He tried to scream again, she tried to scream again. The floor fell out from under her feet, his feet, into an endless void of darkness filled with monsters and screams, fires and blood and an endless rain of black leaves falling from the void all around them, while deep below there was an orb, a planet, shielded in a golden glow.
And Ethan Shepard woke up with a scream trapped in his throat.
As he tried to push himself up from the flat surface he was laying on, he heard someone shouting. "Doctor Chakwas! He's awake!" The very next moment there was a face in front of his and strong hands on his shoulders as a pair of warm brown eyes met his. "Commander, you're okay. You're on the Normandy, you're safe."
Ethan took in a deep breath before the man's name came to him, Kaidan Alenko, he was a lieutenant on the Normandy and Ethan knew him, of course he knew him but it was hard to make himself remember that. The...horror, that he had been experiencing was still playing in the back of his mind and a part of him still felt like he was that woman, that alien woman and for a moment he didn't feel comfortable in his own skin, he almost felt like he was surrounded by strangers.
"Thank you Lieutenant, I'll take it from here," At the voice Kaiden moved away from him and Doctor Chakwas took his place, the sight of her grounded him a little and when she smiled at him Ethan found himself smiling back. "Honestly, you're going to give an old lady a heart attack if you keep this up Commander. How are you feeling?"
"Groggy," That was the least of it, but it was the only part he could actually focus on at that moment. "And a headache like someone shoved a metal spike through my eye and then lit it on fire without pulling it out of my head first. What happened?"
"The beacon did something to you, we're not sure what," Kaidan answered with a shrug of his shoulders. "Some sort of security field, Jenkins tripped it when he got to close to it and you pulled him back from it but got caught up in it instead."
That sounded a bit familiar, all through when he tried to picture what Jenkins looked like all he got was a blur, and there was a surge of irritation. "Jenkins put the mission at risk, the beacon-" Ethan let out a groan as a sharp pain cut through his head, flashes of the beacon running through his head and making his teeth chatter. "What happened to it?"
"It was destroyed, some sort of power surge." Kaidan spoke, his voice soft and Ethan could have kissed him for that. "At least that's the working theory for the moment, after you got knocked out we carried you back to the ship to get Doctor Chakwas to look over you, most of the hospitals back on Eden Prime are either overcapacity or on fire."
"I'd take Doctor Chakwas over any hospital surgeon, you made the right choice LT," Ethan said as he pushed himself up from the med-bed, his legs felt boneless but he pushed through that to stand tall. "I assume I've got a clean bill of health?"
Doctor Chakwas frowned at him in a way that he had become very familiar with over the years, both on her face and on the face of other doctors that he had ended up needing to be treated by and so he braced himself for a lecture. "Well, you don't seem to be in any immediate danger at the moment but I would hesitate before I let you out of here, I was detecting some unusual neural activity while you were unconscious. According to the readings I took it almost seemed like you should have been awake, but you were still dead to the world. For a moment I thought it might have been those implants of yours confusing the equipment but-
Chakwas's words fell away to nothing as a jolt of panic shot through Ethan's entire body, his hand coming up to rest against the side of his head, the scar tissue rough under his fingers. Nova was silent, and he didn't know what to do with that. She had been inside of his head for so long that he felt lost, the Network would probably want to replace her if the beacon had fried her somehow and he really did not want to have to go under the knife again.
"Was Nova damaged?" He asked Chakwas.
The doctor frowned at him. "I'm not sure, I'm not an AI specialist and I didn't want to risk tampering with it in case I accidently turned your brain into soup. I did a quick surface scan of it and it doesn't seemed to be damaged, just unresponsive."
Ethan tapped his foot against the floor as he did his best not to panic, his AI had probably been affected by ancient alien technology and who knew what that might have done to her? Who knew what it would do to him?
There was the soft hush of the med-bay door sliding open and Ethan knew that this was just going to get worse when Anderson stepped into the med-bay, when Kaiden shoot the captain a salute Ethan followed suit in order to avoid more headaches but Anderson didn't seem pleased, "How is he?" He asked, his attention fully on Doctor Chackwas.
"Physically fine, for the most part but I would like to keep the Commander in for closer observation at least until we arrive at the Citadel, I'm still not sure how to account for those unusual brain waves that I detected," the doctor activated her Omni-Tool and brushed her fingers over the interface. "Also there was a massive increase in the Commander's delta waves, you must have been having a whammy of dream."
"It wasn't a dream," He had never been more sure of anything than he was in that moment, he may have been unconscious while he was living through it but it had been far too real to have just been a dream. "It was...at first it was like memories, someone else's memories and I was living through them like they were mine and then it was...I don't know, the memories seemed to have broken down and it was like the person I was in the memories off somehow knew that I was there, and then there was a void and I was falling and...I can't remember anything else."
Anderson looked unhappy. "Doctor, Lieutenant, could you both please leave the room while I have a word in private with the Commander?" Both nodded and saluted and left the med-bay so it was just the two of them left in the room. "EDI, please shut down all security feeds in and out of this room, executive override."
"Executive override accepted Captain Anderson, logging you out." There was a soft beep at the end of EDI's words and Shepard crossed his arms over his chest as he fixed Anderson with a an even gaze.
"Well, if you were ever planning to kill me I suppose this would be as good a time as any."
"I'm not going to try and murder you Shepard, I might want to but I'm not that stupid and I'm not a murderer either. That's you," Anderson sighed and shook his head. "Look, you and I have our differences and we are probably always going to, I am never going to like you and I am never going to forgive you for what you've done but this is bigger than us and I've never doubted that we are both willing to protect Earth and the Alliance."
"We have a dead spectre and an important piece of Prothean technology that's been reduced to scrap metal and we have to go to the citadel to answer for that, do you have any idea what happened to Nihlus? Legion and EDI are working on recovering the footage from the wrecked recon drone you found but so far they haven't had any luck at it so, did you notice anything about the scene which could have hinted as to what happened to him?"
"The only thing that struck me as odd what that the wound in his chest was a close range shotgun blast, Nihlus was wearing top of the line armour and the only way that sort of damage could have happened was if they got pretty close to him and I don't think Nihlus would have let that happen. He was also finished off with a shot to the head that look like it came from a heavy pistol, whoever killed him didn't want him to suffer and both of those things implies familiarity but who on Eden Prime would both know Nihlus, want to kill him and not want him to suffer?"
"There should be no-one, and from the reports I've gotten from the ground team I doubt those Batarians would want to kill him clean," Anderson shook his head and rubbed his hand over his eyes. "This is bad Shepard, if we don't have answers to the council as to what the hell happened then Earth could be facing some serious sactions and considering that would be on top of the fallout from what happened on Eden Prime and it might be something that we can never recover from."
"So what do we do?"
"For right now? When we get to the citadel we stall the council for as long as we can and hope that EDI and Legion can come up with something from the drone, otherwise, to put it bluntly, we're fucked." Anderson stared at him deeply then. "Tell me that you didn't kill him."
"Me!?" Ethan gawped at the captain. "Why would I have done it!? And I was with the ground team the entire time, when would I have even had the opportunity to do so."
"You have that cloak thing of yours, we only have your word that you were with the ground team the entire time," Anderson narrowed his eyes. "And as to the why, you might not have a personal reason to do so but if the Network told you to do it then I don't doubt that you would do it in a heartbeat."
"My cloak is only for short bursts of stealth, it's impossible for me to have stayed cloaked for long enough to find Nihlus, kill him and then get back to the ground team without anyone noticing and the Network has ordered me to kill a lot of people in this galaxy but they did not order me to kill a spectre, the last thing that they would want is the council's attention."
"Fine, I'll take your word for it for the moment considering that I don't have any other choice at the moment but we are going to find out the truth about what happened one way or the other," Anderson turned and made his way out of the med-bay, stopping for a moment in front of the door. "I really hope that you are lying to me, I would love nothing more than to finally see you punished for what you've done."
When Shepard was alone he sighed heavily and laid back down on the med-bed, allowing his eyes to fall shut.
And in the darkness behind his eyes, the monsters were waiting for him.
End of Chapter Nine
I am so sorry for the wait!
Next chapter we're back in Jenkins P.O.V as we have our first chapter set on the citadel.
With a lot of love,
DiscordantSymphony
