Mass Riddick Effect

Chapter 3: Marching On

Shepard


Peering through the scope, breathlessly, she let the red crosshairs swerve and flick about the endless swarm of moving targets. Disheveled, mutilated gray bodies, some with exposed ribs, some with cybernetic tubing, and others with skin flaking like paper, were gushing forward recklessly. Their shrill screams filled her ears with misery. And those eyes. Those forlorn bright-blue eyes. Lifeless and void. Eyes that burned into one's consciousness and found a place to haunt for eternity. She'd never forget them. Those same eyes told her what she needed to know. She felt bile rising in her throat. Somehow, someway, these things were human beings once. Now they were disfigured into something in between.

"Jenkins! Keep moving!" Riddick's deep voice broke apart the mind-numbing screams.

Jenkins? She pulled away and rose from the scope to get a better view of the situation, but she only found herself regretting that decision for Jenkins, clearly possessed by something, had elected to stop running and start climbing up a tower-like rock formation. Gritting her teeth, she hunched back down and returned herself to the rifle's scope, latched onto an enemy target, then squeezed off a round.

"Jenkins, what are you doing? Get back here! That's an order!" she heard herself demand over the comms. Kid has no idea what sort of danger he's in. Fervor engulfed her senses. She had to do more. She had to keep shooting. Keep shooting, Char. It's all any of us can do.

To her gnawing anguish, the corporal did not respond. He was too busy pulling himself up onto a flatter surface of the planet's rocky protrusion. From there, he stood and seized hold of a cleft higher up on the tower-like stone, and continued to hoist himself upward. Surely he thought they were chasing him, but surprisingly, the creatures were ignoring the corporal entirely. They were focused on charging at the dig site. As if living prey in numbers is what drove their tenacious lust.

"This isn't working," one of the Alliance soldiers with Williams exclaimed from behind her, a hint of hysteria in his voice. She glanced back over her shoulder at them. As if on cue, the largest of the soldiers acted by throwing down his rifle and retreating deeper into the dig site. "Hey, Sarge!" The same hysteric sounding solider called out, "Where are you going!? Wait for me!"

"Stay where you are and keep shooting!" the other soldier barked back through the madness. Shepard turned fully to watch him climb up into the cockpit of the drilling laser. So called 'Sarge' apparently had experience with such equipment. In seconds, the soldier got the laser started and rotated so that it faced the horde of monsters. "Fire in the hole!" he shouted. Thankfully everyone in the line of fire heard him and ducked. In response, the soldier and drilling laser attacked by blasting a red beam into the horde, decimating at least fifty in a single, sandy explosion.

Still the monsters kept coming.

Out of Shepard's peripheral vision she saw a blur of motion. She removed her attention from the drilling laser and whipped about to watch a striding Riddick seize hold of Kaidan. The lieutenant commander had an aura about him she had rarely witnessed. A desperation of some kind. A craving for something specific and concrete. The large man had a grip on Kaidan's bicep and said, "Are the corporal's comms working or jammed?"

From her position, she could make out the confusion etched across Kaidan's face. Riddick shook him.

"The corporal's comms!" Riddick roared, "They working!? Check them!"

Upon hearing the words she closed her eyes to numb out the dark thoughts plaguing her mind. If the kid couldn't hear them they wouldn't have a choice. They might have to retreat without him, then figure out a way to backtrack and retrieve him. Provided the corporal could last that long.

"Yes, Sir!" Kaidan exclaimed, as if ashamed he didn't adhere to the LTC's request straight away. A small part of her regretted pushing Kaidan away when he tried to calm her mere minutes ago. Kaidan Alenko was a good man. A loyal soldier dedicated to doing what's right. Even so, she couldn't stave off the fury she felt for Riddick and show Kaidan mercy. Not to mention that Riddick still stood amongst them. That meant no one had retaliated against his mutiny, they had just accepted it. Thus, the fire inside her could not be cooled. Negotiable Commander Charlotte Jane Shepard had left the mission when her own squad mate punched her out. But we can't lose control entirely, Char. Hang in there. She reopened her eyes to see Kaidan fussing with his omni-tool, his face marked with determination. Appeased that she knew what they were up to, she gave the Alliance soldiers surrounding her a look over.

Crouched amongst crates and rock, Williams and the two soldiers were churning rounds from their assault rifles' at lightning speed now that Jenkins was out of the way. The drilling laser must have had only enough power for one blast though, for the 'Sarge' had abandoned it. The remaining members of the Eden Prime garrison only paused their attack every thirty seconds to vent the heat from their weapons with a hiss. Still, the Sarge and Williams had it timed out properly. When one was cooling their weapon the other was shooting. The third Alliance soldier looked a little less practiced at it. He simply shot whenever his weapon allowed it.

Shifting her gaze, Shepard realized that even the arrogant spectre leaned against a slab of stone shooting with an assault rifle, then his sidearm one-handed while the rifle cooled. He displayed a masterful amount of control, precision, and lethality as he switched between the two guns. His elite training made the impractical seem normal. It also proves his cocky attitude is for real. The guy's a flashy show-off with no patience, but wow could he shoot.

Still a good thing, Char. We'll need everyone, she rationalized internally, dipping her face back down into the scope. Swiftly, the crosshairs sought out the head of another creature and she tapped the trigger, the head detonating in a gush of putrid, green ichor.

"All right, coming in hot! Impact in ten seconds, hang on guys!"

Joker?!

A wave of shock stole her breath away. She jerked herself free from the scope, her head swimming with thoughts. Joker? Why would he be … Panic snatched control of her body from her. Thin streams of sweat seemed to intensify and race down every inch of her. Suddenly, she was aware of every prickle of discomfort afflicting her. The Volkov sniper rifle fell away from her hands as she leapt to her feet, her wild glare locking onto Riddick faster than a heat-seeking missile. Her emotions devoured her need for perfection. The collected logic consumed like an appetizer and her self-control inhaled as if it were a bite-sized delicacy. Without thinking, she crossed the space between them in three heartbeats like a tornado, her shields crackling from the impact of friendly fire as she did so. She could vaguely hear Williams' alarmed tone, but pressed on through the fray. When she reached him, she jammed a finger into the sternum of his N7 breastplate.

"What the hell did you do!" she demanded, blasting him with a litany of raw emotion. Rage, disbelief, and fear mixed together made for one potent concoction. Despite such, Riddick remained impervious and impenetrable. He just stared down at her. Expressionless. Stoic as always. And he stayed that way. Appalled, she turned away to watch Jenkins, who now stood at the rock formation's highest point and was shooting down at the creatures with his handgun. An unintentional final stand. He had no way of knowing what was coming.

Shepard slapped a hand to her ear to try drowning out the chaos. She could hardly hear herself think, but she had to try. "Jenkins, do you copy?! Come in, Jenkins? Shit! Joker," she addressed the pilot by name, firmly and calmly, "Can you abort?"

"What?! No way I'm right on top of⸺" his voice broke away when the Normandy suddenly invaded the atmosphere overhead. A deafening bellow sounded as shockwaves from the spaceship's epic power forced Shepard and others down into the sand. She fell into a protective brace position, tucking herself into a ball, her ears popping and vision shaking violently. Thundering, the Normandy's cannons boomed in rapid succession, then faded away, as if it all had just been a bad dream.

What followed could only be described as an eerie stillness.

Suffocating silence washed over her, as she numbly climbed to her knees and stared out at what remained of the trench they had once trekked. The sandy basin had been devastated by the Normandy's guns. The ripping of the terrain had summoned forth rocky avalanches from the bluffs on either side. The chasm no longer existed. Nor did their monstrous adversaries. Both had been replaced by a simmering mess of demolished rock, splatters of sickly green liquid, and hundreds upon hundreds of severed gray body parts. Through the haze she could make out arms, legs, bits of cranium and more sticking out amongst the rubble. The remnants of an orbital strike. Obliteration.

A stabbing pain threatened her heart into bursting. Tears came to her scrunched face as she keeled over, pressing her face to the backs of her hands. Somewhere among the debris was a comrade they'd never recover. A young man named Richard L. Jenkins. A comrade reclaimed by his birth planet in the worst way imaginable. An accident. A freak accident. Friendly-fire. Or was it?

"Spirits," the turian exhaled, off to her left. She turned in time to watch him rise to his imposing height, his red-black armor still glistening despite sand and grime. "I knew the Normandy packed a punch, but I didn't expect to see her in action up close." His raptor-like gaze hunted out Riddick amongst them, who was five yards away from her. "Well done, Lieutenant Commander. You made the right call. It needed to be done."

Shepard paled. She felt as if a hand were squeezing her intestines in a fist. Merciless and unrelenting. The right call? There shouldn't have been any calls made by anyone but me. She had led hundreds of missions. Seen combat on more than half of them. Most importantly, no casualties. Ever. Not once under her command. Today the unthinkable had happened. Today, the absolute worst had happened.

Riddick met the spectre with his poker face. Those black wraparound goggles ever aiding his ambiguous effort. "Yeah," he tore his gaze away from the spectre as he climbed to his feet, dusting himself off, and muttered, "Something like that."

Sniffling with warm tears cracking down her face, Shepard pushed herself back upright onto her knees in the sand. Her mind started pumping thoughts, That's it? That's all he has to say? 'Something like that?' A slow, howling fury began to grow within her. She brought the palm of her hand to her face and rubbed it as dry as she could manage, the fury within gaining momentum and mustering into a storm of icy-cold anger. The pressure built from the waist up until it was pressing against her temples from the inside. An animal roaring for release. Abruptly, she pushed herself up and onto her feet. "He made the right call?" she cried out, her voice cracking as the gaze of all came to her like insects to flame. "How the hell did he make the right call? Someone care to fucking explain that to me?"

She felt dirty. She felt exposed on the battlefield without her helmet. Her scars and tears unsheltered. She hated crying. Worse, she felt humiliated. Someone had knocked her unconscious to make a decision she couldn't make. An impossibly costly decision. An inhuman decision. The decision to sacrifice a life for the better good. For the sake of a mission. For the sake of a goal. For the sake of, shit, she really didn't know... At this moment it seemed like a waste entirely. A young, wasted life they could never get back.

The spectre snorted, holstered his handgun, and hefted his rifle so that it rested backwards over his shoulder, the barrel pointing into the sky at an angle. "He eliminated an enemy force we had no chance of defeating. He took control of a mission near critical failure and prevented that." Nihlus gestured toward Riddick with one of his long, sinewy arms. "He's the reason we're still standing here." The turian's piercing emerald eyes did more than look at a person. They attacked. Shocking one's essence and demanding attention. Right now they held no affect over her. Through inconsolable rage she resisted any intimidation those eyes might normally command.

She chose to fight back with fire.

"And all he had to do was disobey a superior and kill one of his own to do it." She eyed the others, Kaidan, Williams, and the other Alliance soldiers. They were frozen like statues. Williams seemed to offer the most sympathy. Her frown and expression exuded empathy. "Marvelous," icy rage seeped out with her words as she continued, "Isn't it fucking marvelous?" The two newcomer Alliance soldiers blanched and stared at her as if she were crazy. Let them, Char. The line that had just been crossed on this mission was unforgivable.

Of all people, he started talking. "Commander, I think he had our best interests in mind when he made the call." Kaidan swallowed. The man continued cautiously, like he was walking through a minefield with his choice of words. "Nihlus is…" he paused and sighed, then pressed on. "Nihlus is right. We were pinned down and running out of options."

"You guys all right?" Joker crackled over the comms. Everyone ignored the helmsman.

Her icy-cold anger persisted. It slashed the staff lieutenant's words aside and let her focus on what really upset her. The human life they had thrown aside. The comrade they had left for dead. A young life she would have to answer for. The anger lashed out once more.

"I can't believe I'm hearing this! That could have been any one of us back there." She pointed at Williams, "It could have been the Chief." She pointed at Nihlus, "It could have been the Spectre." She stopped pointing to stab a thumb into her chest, "It even could have been me." She sighed heavily, a weary throb resonating within her chest. "Jenkins just drew the short straw." She fixed her gaze on Riddick, the fire within trading away for exhaustion, "But who follows someone that leads like that? Do you just see everyone as expendable?" She shook her head, her gaze settling on Nihlus, meeting his gaze with what steel she could summon. "Is that what it takes to be a spectre? Because if so, forget it. I'm out."

For a jolt of thirty seconds no one moved. Finally, Nihlus chuffed.

"Being a Spectre takes more than that." He lifted his head to stare up into the clouds. "But yes," lazily, he brought his sharp gaze back down to her, "I suppose at the end of the day getting the job done by any means necessary is a crucial part of the job." He tilted his crested head to the side, as if passing judgement on her. "Allow yourself to be weighed down by anything or anyone, and that job is much more difficult to complete. That's why so many of us work alone."

"No shit," she huffed, then moved to retrieve her Volkov sniper rifle. "What took place today is madness," she said coolly, picking up the gun and collapsing it into its more portable shape. "Insubordination and third-degree murder is what I saw today." Clicking the rifle back onto the magnetic clasp on her back, her eyes snapped to him. The man who made the call. "Riddick, you got the balls for it. The rest of this mission is yours."

"Someone answer me, dammit. Come on. I have to say something to the Captain or he's going to have my head!" Joker almost sounded pleading.

Riddick leered at her. "That so?"

"Yes, I'm done playing your sick game. Your hear me? I'm done."

"Commander, I don't think that's such a good—" she severed Kaidan's vocal chords with a look. He may as well have turned to stone, the final pieces of his sentence dying on his tongue. He retreated a step with his eyes falling to his boots. Let him marinate in his own guilt, she thought to herself. She had trusted him and he let her down. Up on the hill when Riddick trapped her, he wasn't there. When Riddick struck her down, he wasn't there either. Instead, he witnessed and allowed a mutiny to occur. Thus, it's only fair he deals with the consequences. She studied Riddick, the unmoving Riddick, carefully. Now what are you gonna do, she wondered. You're the leader.

Moments later, true to her expectation, Riddick seized control fully. Though he did so in a manner not benefitting of a leader. At least to her, he didn't sound like one.

"Joker, we survived," he said over the comms, then addressed the ground team. "The rest of you heard her. I'm in charge now." He whipped his shaved head in the direction of the woman in white armor, his tone accusatory, "Williams, you said the beacon would be here."

"10-4, I'll give the Captain an update. Shepard okay? It looked like someone might have been down there when we came in hot."

She struggled not to inform the pilot of the life he had claimed. Jenkins. Poor kid. Resisting the temptation to blurt out such dismal information felt as if a fist were shoved down her throat. Unlike Riddick, who likely would never tell Joker, and simply let the casualty be discovered via report, she would make sure Joker knew. When the time was right.

"She's breathing," Riddick replied to Joker.

"Okay, not sure I buy that coming from you. No offense or anything."

"He's telling the truth," she said over the comms. "I'm alive and here, Joker."

"Thank god. Alright, I'm giving the Captain an update. Christ, be careful down there. Joker out."

Williams had walked closer to the drilling laser to better survey the area, "Yeah, the beacon was right here." She seemed to be searching their surroundings, but notably avoided the corpses on spikes. While the dig itself was impressive in terms of what had been accomplished and how deep they had gone, nothing about the metallic crates or laser drilling equipment residing here now held any meaning to them or the mission. "It must have been moved, Sir," she concluded, sounding disappointed.

"By us or them?" Riddick stalked deeper into the compound to inspect things further himself. Krogan wanna-be looks clueless.

"Hard to say, maybe we'll know more once we check out the research camp up above," Williams suggested, gazing up the steep path. Said curved path wrapped around the edge of the dig site and miraculously, had not crumbled despite the Normandy's assault. Though its stability could certainly be questioned.

"Then what are we waiting for?" Nihlus asked, already trotting up the path. "Let's hurry and move out. If the beacon's not here, we're wasting time."

"You two," Riddick spun suddenly, and lifted his chin at the two newcomers. The Alliance garrison survivors. "What are your names?"

"Private Daniel Carson with 232nd, Sir," said one soldier, giving a salute with his free hand. He wore black Alliance armor and beyond the brown eyes beneath his visor, had limited recognizable features. Shepard had learned over time that norm held in the Alliance. No one should stand out too much. They were all to be treated equally. That's how they instilled discipline. It's also how she found a way to embrace individuality, at least in her own way.

Carson turned to look up at his comrade. The large, burly soldier pulled his half-visor helmet off and tossed it aside. Clearly, he no longer cared to wear it and had no intention of picking it up.

"Sergeant Jager Kowalsky of the 232nd, Sir." He dwarfed his companion and Williams in height, but still wasn't as tall as the spectre. He was close to Riddick in height though. "We'll follow your orders from here on out," he added, nodding. Jager had a thick red-rust colored beard, and bloodshot blue eyes.

Riddick gave a half-smile. "Good. Glad to hear it."

"The 232nd, so you guys were guarding the scientists?" Williams asked, her expression enlightened, "Does that mean you know anything more about the attack?"

Jager solemnly shook his head. "I wish things were different… but we were taken by surprise too. Comms went down and then… I'm sure you know the rest."

"10-4. Didn't mean to stir anything up. Just wanted to make sure we're covering our bases."

"No worries."

"Alright, enough chit chat. You heard the Spectre, let's move out," Riddick ordered, then twisted to start up the path after Nihlus.

Leader or follower, Shepard wanted to ask, but did not dare. This mission had gone off the rails. She didn't need to make it worse voluntarily.

The group obeyed their 'new' Commander, but Shepard hovered. She clenched her fists at her sides and squeezed her eyes shut. Here it is. Her decorated career taken away by one mission. Her father's words echoed in her mind about the situation, powerful and clear as glass. So as always, he was right. She pursed her lips and dug her fingernails into her palms as much as her gloves would allow. Only when she began to lose feeling in her hands, did she finally follow the group uphill. She was the last to do so.


The squad ascended the curved path carefully. Most everyone, save for the headstrong spectre, were measuring their steps with precision. The going was slow, but ensured no one took a fall. An injury of that measure had to be avoided at all costs.

Shepard's anger still sizzled. Only with more time would it depart her fully. Much more time. As she pondered how long might be needed to collect her thoughts and comprehend what took place, she felt a familiar presence match her stride. She knew who it was without looking.

"You okay?"

She did not make eye contact with Kaidan. He had not backed her up when everything came crumbling apart. Hadn't supported her. A year together aboard the Normandy, and still, he had done nothing. Again, it seemed her father's advice proved true, 'No one ever owes you anything'. She disliked how right the man proved to be over time.

"Fine," she answered Kaidan, keeping her gaze fixated on the path ahead. Rays of sunlight sparkled off the armored hard suits of her comrades and changed the sand from dingy brown to golden orange. The day was changing. Nihlus led the group with his long-legged, loping strides. The sunlight hitting him casted a long, menacing shadow. A sinister avian creature stalking at the head of its pack. Riddick followed just behind Nihlus, looking relaxed and undaunted per usual. She glared into his back and added, "Just focus on the mission, LT. We don't need anymore casualties."

"Look what I said back there and what I didn't do… it's just that⸺"

"Kaidan, save it. I understand. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Taking a stand and playing a hero isn't what you signed up to do."

"Signing up to play hero isn't what I⸺"

"I know."

He sighed, audibly. "Sooner or later you're going to have to stop cutting me off and let me finish my thoughts. Surely you know that?"

Finally, she allowed her eyes to look upon him. His dark eyes met hers and that chased her off. They invited familiarity and that wasn't something she cared for at the moment. She wanted isolation, space, and brevity. She stared straight ahead again, focusing on the backs of her comrades, doing her best to force away any non-mission related thoughts. She settled for a whimsical reply, "That'll be the day."

"SPIRITS! We got more of those things at our 12 o'clock!" Nihlus called out, dropping to one knee.

Eager for action and escape, she didn't wait for Kaidan to say more and raced ahead with the others. She crested the hill only for her heart to sink at the view. The research camp had not survived the invasion. Not at all. Cold bodies, burning structures, and more of the peculiar spikes impaling humans were all the eye could see. Wait, there's more, she realized, as one of the spikes with a corpse lowered to the ground. When close enough to the grass, the corpse could be identified as one of the monsters from before. Worse, there were several spikes and bodies lowering. Then those horrible gray bodies tore themselves free from the spikes. Their eyes glowing and terrible.

"They're creating these things?" Williams exclaimed, shouldering her weapon. In the brief time Shepard had known her, the chief never looked out of place with a gun. She might have even been born with one.

Nihlus gave the order instead of Riddick. "Open fire!"

Ear-splitting shrieks sliced through the air as the gang of monstrosities started to rush them, each with outstretched arms. The group heeded the turian's command. Mass accelerator rounds ripped and tore at the creatures' flesh. Spraying putrid green liquid, losing limbs, eyes, heads, flesh, and skin the once humans fell one on top of the other, not a single abomination getting within five yards of their mercy killers. Relieved, the group began to fan out into the research camp, treading slowly.

"Keep your eyes peeled for more," Nihlus shouted before creeping out of sight behind a pile of crates. He stayed solo despite his options, which is a strategy Shepard would never understand. Spectre logic...

They penetrated the research camp with coordinated military movements. Everyone had their weapon trained and senses heightened. Every building, window, corpse, and otherwise was considered a threat. A danger that could lash out at any given moment. They were so quiet in their movements, that the only sound among them was the crackle of flames licking the rooftops of two box-like structures. A miserable, discomforting sound. The sound of a settlement lost and consumed by death.

"What the hell are these things?" Carson approached one of the gray creatures carefully, tapping his foot against its arm in disgust. "Half machine and half...?"

"Humans. Like us," Williams replied, flipping one of the creatures onto its back. "Once." Unlike the private, Williams moved with confidence. A lioness amongst antelope.

"Yeah, well I'm not a fan." Carson looked squeamish.

"The dead should stay dead," Riddick drawled from the front. His behemoth shoulders locked, he kept crouching and moving forward at breakneck pace. Too fast for anyone to back him up. No doubt courage and bravery carried him. Just like they had a Torfan. For better or worse, Shepard decided.

She could not prevent herself from staring at the mutilated gray bodies. Their gaping jaws and exposed insides stamped themselves into her head. It seemed as if they were disemboweled and replaced with mechanical tubes. Such would become nightmare fuel later. If she somehow managed to survive this. Right now nothing seemed certain. Anyone could have been in Jenkins' place.

Out of nowhere, pistol-fire shattered the fragile serenity. Three shots rang out.

"Where the hell did it come from?" Nihlus demanded over the comms, since he was out of sight.

"No idea, sounded like it came from inside somewhere," Williams said, Shepard could see the chief ahead of her, swiveling in multiple directions.

"HEY!" The whole squad turned to the northeast, where Sergeant Jager stood with a single arm raised. Recognizing that he had their attention, he lowered the arm and jutted a thumb at the rectangular structure behind him. "We got Civs here!"

"Civs?" Kaidan repeated over the comms.

Williams leapt at the chance to answer. "On ground missions we call civilians, Civs, LT. What's the matter? First time ground-side?"

"Negative, it's just been awhile."

"Everyone move in, but no one enters," Riddick ordered, Shepard could see him backtracking to them out of her peripheral vision. Their 'leader' had pushed ahead pretty far there. Way farther than she ever would have.

Nihlus appeared from around the building's backside, armed with his shotgun. To be so deadly with so many weapons in his arsenal only further displayed his profession. He was the last of the squad to arrive. The building's door panel currently glowed a mean red color rather than the inviting green most panels presented within human colonies. They all knew that to mean locked. That way intruders stayed out. Unless said intruders had blow-torches, omni-blades, explosives, or hacking expertise.

"Two inside," Jager explained, his eyes locking on Riddick. "Girl and a guy with no training to speak of. They missed every shot. Pretty sure they're lab rat type, but I don't recognize them."

"Got it." Riddick searched their faces until he found Kaidan. "Alenko, get this door open."

"On it, Sir." Kaidan obliged in seconds by hacking the door panel from mean red to inviting green with his omni-tool.

Riddick moved towards the door, "I'm in first, the rest of you behind me."

No one protested the request of their new squad leader. Shepard herself found his approach interesting. He's putting himself at risk before anyone else. She didn't know how to feel about that.

Inside, true to Jager's words, they found two civilians. Said civilians shot at Riddick, but found themselves quickly dissuaded by his shields and appearance. From there, Riddick began the interrogation. From the civilians, which they confirmed to be scientists, the party learned little more about the assault other than it was flawless. The female scientist confessed that she had only survived because she sealed herself in with her assistant. This made no difference to Riddick; for it was her rambling assistant that had brought upon his wraith. The young assistant, seemingly only a few years apart from Jenkins or Carson, had seemingly gone quite crazy. He spoke of the galaxy's end along with the end of humanity and did so on repeat. Eventually, Riddick responded with a backhand, knocking the assistant unconscious. After doing so, he advised the woman to stay hidden with her assistant until further Alliance help could arrive, then led his squad back out and onto the search for the Prothean beacon.

Kaidan snuck up on Shepard before she could react. "What was that back there? You're the CO and you just let that happen?" She met Kaidan's bewildered expression with a straight face. "The Shepard I know would have handled things differently. She would have helped them."

"Kaidan," she sighed, allowing her gaze to drift free of his tense expression, "I relinquished command to Riddick. This is his mission now. Not mine." She found the man of which she spoke and dug her eyes into him. He spoke to Nihlus, Jager, and Williams unconcerned, issuing out orders while looking stiff as ever. Good ol' Stiffy-doo, she considered calling him. Sometimes he didn't look real. He looked like some action-hero cut out of an old comic book from Earth. Something grounders, those who never left Earth, fantasized about.

"So that's it? We're just going to leave them like this?" Kaidan grew incredulous. "Hoping that Alliance reinforcements will get here in the next 24 hours like we promised them?"

"Kaidan, just go back in there and give the man some treatment. Make sure he doesn't have a concussion. You know it's the right thing to do, so do it." She found her gaze held captive on Riddick. Only when he shifted his weight and looked at her, did she retreat her eyes to Kaidan. "You have medical training, right?"

"Yes, Ma'am. Is this an order?"

"If you need it to be Kaidan, sure, it's an order. Now move it. We don't have much time."

In less than five minutes, Kaidan re-emerged from the research structure. Riddick gave the brisk signal to keep moving immediately after. Despite the order not being his, he clearly permitted the time needed for the lower-ranking LT to administer first aid. Shepard didn't quite know what to make of that. She said nothing and so did Riddick.

The group made swift progress out of the research camp and up the hill filled with plains-like greenery. It was at the top of the rise, not more than a hundred yards from the research camp, that many of them found themselves paralyzed.

"Lieutenant Commander, Sir, I still don't think that was necessary back there. He was just scared," Kaidan chose now to speak his mind, and clearly had not noticed the others coming to a complete halt. His head swiveled, eyes darting amongst the group. "What? What now? What am I missing?" He studied Nihlus and Riddick in confusion, his brows rising as Carson's jaw drops. Finally, the staff lieutenant gazes up at the sky to behold the awesome sight that brought butterflies to life within Shepard's stomach.

"Beautiful," she could hear Riddick whisper.

What Riddick found beautiful she could not prevent her eyes from widening at. She even found herself struggling to breathe at the awesome sight.

Propelling upward through Eden Prime's atmosphere accompanied by thick red smoke, appeared the enormous metal hand they had seen back aboard the Normandy. Only this time, the thing was in-person, and beyond magnificent to witness. It made the Normandy look like a plaything. Just as before, red lightning sparked about the strange ascending form, the majority of it already hidden amongst the clouds. Soon the tips of its giant fingers disappeared too, leaving the squad to breathlessly stare after it in awe. Nobody dares to twitch a muscle. The gigantic dreadnought may as well have been a God they were worshipping. When it disappeared from sight entirely, the group seemed to shuffle and fidget in discomfort. But Shepard couldn't stop herself from scoping out the valley down below.

At least three hundred yards down the hill from them, a gleaming transit station rose up from the ground. Its defining features of more crates, metallic canisters, and rectangular structures aided the silvery geth in terms of camouflage as they slinked about the area. It did not take a salarian scientist for Shepard to identify that the geth outnumbered them 3 to 1, but what they had in their possession disturbed her deeply. Kneeling in the center of the transit station were eight human dock workers. They were hostages. No doubt about it.

"Riddick, you see that down there?" she asked, not taking her eyes off the scene.

"Yeah," he mumbled back, as if it were unbearable.

"Hostages," Nihlus stated, then followed it up with a growl. "Based on enemy numbers, not sure how many of them we can save." He stepped back to get a good look at her. "It's said you're handy from long range and have a keen eye. Any ideas, Shepard?"

She bit her lip. Fight the emotions down, Char. You're here, you're with them, and you need to succeed with them. You can't pick family and you can't pick teammates in the military.

"I think we can⸺" she trailed off when recognizing a non-silvery figure sifting between enemy ranks. This member of the group below wore grayish-platinum looking armor, similar to the geth, yet clearly stood out amongst the synthetics. Instinctively, Shepard dropped to a knee, unfolded her Volkov sniper rifle, and began searching through the scope. In seconds, she found herself looking at a blue-eyed turian, pacing alongside the hostages with a pistol in hand. "Jesus Christ. It's a turian."

"What?" Nihlus demanded.

"A turian," she repeated, her breathing grew into a rapid dance. "There's a turian down there with the geth."


A/N: Hope you all enjoyed the chapter!

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