London, Earth : Fred Shannon
Crucible Event + 3
The roar of battle for Earth had been followed by a quiet unlike any other Fred had ever experienced. All over the planet, the crashing of thunder rang out as ships entered the atmosphere and discharged their weapons of mass destruction upon each other. On the ground, people screamed and cried and died as they joined their voices, and the voices of their own weapons, to the song that was to be the last act of the Reapers' war.
Or more accurately, its eleventh-hour number. That final loud, rousing song that made sure the audience was still awake for the finale. Cerberus was still alive, after all. That meant there was more to be done.
After the Reapers had died, crumpling where they stood or plummeting to the Earth, the ash began to fall as well. It blanketed every surface of the scabbed over battlefield, spouse to the silence. The allied forces had withdrawn to the center of the city, or to their ships in orbit. The only living thing Fred had seen other than Wheeler and Kadek were two dogs tearing at something in the street. Probably a human or turian or one of the other allied races, or maybe even one of the Reaper foot soldiers. Things as starving as those animals wouldn't differentiate.
His two living squad mates were all that remained of everyone he'd ever known. In the suffocating silence of the post-Reaper galaxy, they could have been the last humans alive.
When he was a kid and heard stories about "reapers," he'd pictured robed skeletons with scythes rather than kilometer tall machine exterminators. But this was more like what he imagined. Not the pitched battles for the fates of worlds. The quiet graveyard that came after, where Death took its tally.
The three made their way through the carcass of one of Earth's most ancient cities, Fred in the back, Wheeler in the front, and Kadek in the middle. When Crucible had discharged its energy burst and the Reapers had died, fate placed one of the corpses just on top of the apartment building next to the one they had been holed up in. The rubble that crushed Kadek's leg would have made amputation necessary if a few beams had shifted this way to the left or that way to the right, but fate had given her that much. Two days they spent resting. On the third, she stood up, declared it was time to go, and limped ahead in the lead. Wheeler had relieved her of that, and now the big man set the pace.
They had places to be. PANDORA Protocol was active, and all Cerberus personnel were to converge on local rally points with extreme haste.
Fred knew nothing about what it was or what it meant. Thus was the nature of Cerberus. A day before they'd begun their trek, Wheeler had stated as much, but refusing to leave a third of his remaining troopers behind, put a three-day timer on Kadek's recovery. Maybe as a courtesy, she'd taken only a two days of that.
As Fred rounded a corner behind the still hobbling Kadek, he found Wheeler pressed up against an upturned bus, head titled ever so slightly around the corner. His head did not move, but a closed fist thrust up beside, and then a twitch of the fingers it; his signal to stop, and approach carefully. They were still radio silent, and relied on hand signals and voice alone.
Crouching, Fred approached behind Kadek. Her legs looked close to collapsing, but he assumed if he could see her face under her helmet, he wouldn't find a hint of that.
She pressed up next to Wheeler, and Fred next to her. Wheeler did not acknowledge them, and continued looking at whatever he was looking at. Or for.
"Activity?" Kadek said in a low voice, barely a hum of her throat.
"No," said Wheeler. "Destination."
Fred wanted to pull up his omni-tool uplink and check for any Cerberus satellites that might have escaped the Reaper's notice, but that would have violated mission parameters. Silent was silent. The navigated only by intuition and whatever device or signal or map was leading Wheeler.
"Kadek, drone. Thirty ten meters radius."
"On it."
Kadek tapped two keys on her omni, and the holographic sphere glowed to life. She tapped another key and set it on its path. Floating behind cover that would block it from sight ahead of them, Fred watch it drift into a shattered storefront before vanishing. Normally, his tactical goggles would be able to uplink with the friendly drone and see what it saw, but not on this mission. The drone would take in its data, come back, then upload to Kadek's HUD.
Or get shot first. Even then though, it would have succeeded.
It returned fifteen minutes later, only this time on Fred's right. It vanished in a wave of Kadek's hand, and she almost immediately nodded to Wheeler. His fist rose again, this time with his index, middle, and ring fingers raised. His ring finger fell, then his middle, and then his index. In less time than it would have taken to drop another finger, he pivoted around the corner and broke into a low run. Struggling, Kadek followed, and then Fred.
The pile of glass and concrete that had once been an office building had something written in large metal letters. The last one had been "Energy," and the second something that ended in "-ater." Perhaps the headquarters of a water and power company once, but it probably never again. Who was to say how many of the people who worked there had died when the Reapers came. The writing on the building meant nothing anymore; the Reapers had robbed them of their meaning.
They had entered through what was maybe once a door, or maybe had just been part of the wall when the building was still whole. Weapon mounted flashlights on, they'd entered the depths of the building, using the stairs where they could and the elevator shaft's ladders when they couldn't. In the basement corridors where they might expect to find boiler rooms and rats, they found what was apparently a receptacle for some code or verification. It looked to Fred like a bare wall, but Wheeler hunched over it, did something Fred could not see, and the wall swung open. The tunnel it revealed was lit by dull blue LED strips, and was wide enough for two of them to walk side by side, but just barely.
Wheeler entered first, then stopped to help Kadek in. The first signs of care he'd shown to her since offering seventy two hours and not a second more for her to heal her shattered leg. Fred entered, and Wheeler did something behind him. The wall slammed shut, and Wheeler slumped against it.
"Hell…" It was all he muttered before propping himself against the wall and remaining there, still and silent, for nearly ten minutes.
Kadek read his mood as needing the time, and so began to slide down to the ground to take the pressure off her good leg. Fred helped her.
Fred was standing back up when something clattered to the ground, nearly prompting him to grab his gun. When he saw Wheeler's bare face, he realized it had been his helmet.
"We're on mission," said Kadek, barely more than whispering. "You could get shot for that."
"You gonna do it?" Wheeler said. She snorted, then took off her own. She reached up and undid the bun that held up her hair, and it fell in one black knot to just beneath her ears.
Fred kept his own tactical mask on. He was never one to just roll with the crowd, even when the crowd was two officers technically superior to himself. Plus, if they were being rebels, he felt justified in indulging his own curiosity.
Subtly, he flicked on his tactical visor. Without his own helmet on, Wheeler would not be able to tell. His HUD began to talk to him about where he was, and it told him more than he'd expected to hear. Many meters underground, far from the prying eyes of the Alliance. The area immediately around him was far warmer than it was outside the tunnel, and electrical signatures confirmed that a number of generators were around him. He was also shown a number of open radio channels that had accepted him as friendly, with messages coming in and going out, but mostly going out.
It seemed to Fred like they'd reached Pandora's Box.
Wheeler knelt and scooped up his helmet; he hadn't been petrified by the sudden relief of safety after all. He helped Kadek to her feet.
"Breaks over," he said, taking point down the tunnel. "That's all we get. Next time we rest is when they tell us we can rest."
Who is they? Fred wanted to ask, but held his tongue. That was not a workplace friendly question with Cerberus.
The tunnel seemed to go on for kilometers, but his HUD told him that the trio had yet to even walk one. Subtle indents in the wall implied to Fred that other tunnels in the area, maybe even all over London, fed into this one. Whoever had built this bunker liked their hidden doors.
Wheeler and Kadek walked ahead of him, and so most of what lay ahead was hidden. But when both hurriedly donned their helmets and drew their weapons, Fred knew it must have been bad.
Or not. They lowered them quickly, and began to shuffle forward a little faster. Fred tried to match Wheeler, but it was getting hard not to trip over Kadek.
"Welcome," a voice called, echoing off the tight metal walls. "You just as lost as us?"
"Cut the small talk, time's wasting," said Wheeler tersely. Something about the man speaking with others in the same way he spoke to Fred and his squad mates was comforting, like listening to a parent yell at a sibling.
Wheeler's bulk hid most of what was in front, but past Kadek, Wheeler saw three more white and gold clad troopers, and a metal blast door the width of the tunnel. There was no clear point of entry.
"How long have you been here?" Wheeler asked, holstering his weapon.
"Ten minutes. Fifteen, maybe," one of the troopers responded. His accent sounded Welsh. "Voice on the other end told us you were coming, so we waited."
Wheeler nodded. Fred heard three pops, helmets disconnecting from their suit's systems, as the other troopers took off their helmets. He could see one man, fair skinned with closely shaved brown hair, and half of a shorter woman with skin a shade darker than her companion's. The other trooper was blocked off by Wheeler.
"See the Aug troopers on the way?" the brown-haired man asked, his voice matching the one Fred had just heard.
"A few," said Wheeler, "And watched them drop when the Crucible went off. Wasn't pretty."
"Aftermath wasn't any better" the short woman said. Her accent was faint, but Fred thought he heard traces of Spanish. "Wires and implants under their skin popped. We saw goo oozing out of their ears."
"The stuff crystalized when it hit the air," said the trooper Fred could not see. His accent was definitively Icelandic. "Blue, it was. Not any color you'd expect to see come out of a human."
"They weren't human anymore," said the woman, and Fred clenched his teeth. All it took was the most subtle raise in Wheeler's shoulders to indicate to Fred that the man was entering the early stages of fight prep.
"Illusive Man made that call," he growled, wolf-like. "Augmented Cerberus is still Cerberus. They fought humanity's foes better than we all could."
"Did they?" the Welsh man said, cockily. "All dead, far as I can tell. Us home-grown homo sapiens are all that's left now, chum."
"Chum" seemed accurate to what the man would be when Wheeler got done with him. He'd made it clear that weakness and lollygagging from that point on would not be tolerated while they were on the Illusive Man's time, but questions on their supreme leader's authority didn't seem to be covered by that. The first post-apocalyptic Cerberus infighting was stopped only as a voice chimed from the ceiling.
"Input PANDORA Protocol identification." Wheeler dropped his aggression immediately, activating his omni-tool and broadcasting his code. Fred and Kadek were right behind him in doing so. With slight hesitance, the other three complied too.
The second the last of them sent their codes, the doors swooshed open. Cool air flew into Fred's nostrils, on it the smell of engine exhaust and mulch. They entered, the door slamming shut as soon as Fred's heel cleared the frame.
Headquarters had been a very good guess on Fred's part. As he and his squad mounted a short set of metal stairs, he could see the whole operations. Tunnels that looked twice as wide as a metro lined the walls at the base of the cavern like they were in an anthill. He saw a few shuttles hover in and a few hover out. Trams as well. Cerberus personnel in armor and black thermal body gloves hurriedly unloaded and loaded cargo, but mostly the latter. LED strips lined the walls, and the loading zones were lit by floodlights from the back of trucks. It looked simultaneously long-planned and thrown together.
A track hummed as a tram pulled up just in front of them. The door to the roofless cart slid open, and a sharp woman in an administrator's jumpsuit stepped off. She read three names Fred did not recognize off a datapad, then Rufus Wheeler and Sari Kadek. She beckoned them onto the cart. Wheeler looped his arm under Kadek's shoulder to help her the last few steps, gave Fred a glance and a nod, and left with the rest.
"Mister Shannon. You and I will be taking the next tram."
Not concerned with making the noise, Fred cleared his throat before he spoke. He was too afraid of it cracking. He read the name "Olson" on her suit, but nothing else indicated her station aside from the sophistication of her dress.
"Sir, what rank are you?"
"No rank. And not your superior." Her expression remained as hard as it had been the second she stepped off the tram, and her eyes were so focused she might have been trying to see the neurons firing in Fred's brain. "The director, however, has requested someone of your ability."
"My ability, sir?"
"Olson. And you are rated as a combat engineer, no?"
"Yes, s-…" Unconvincingly, he faked clearing his throat. Olson, her eyes like black glass, seemed to notice while not caring.
"Electrochemical focus, but they had me running combat maintenance on Atlas mechs."
Olson remained completely stoic as another tram pulled up behind them. She stepped back onto it, her back as straight as a broomstick.
"Very good. If you'd please."
It didn't feel like hesitation that was pushing back against Fred as he entered the tram, feeling like he was doing so in slowed time. There was no doubt that he'd come all this way to continue serving Cerberus, and that he could not possibly refuse and live. There was something else gumming up his joints and frosted his muscles. Like the next great door of his destiny lay open before him, and a gust was flowing through the cracks, trying to knock him on his ass. Or maybe just slow him.
Olson, who Fred got the impression perceived the world sped up by half, had evidently waited long enough, and with a flicker of her omni-tool set the tram into motion. Fred hadn't been fully onboard for more than a millisecond, and embarrassingly stumbled as the tram jolted forward. Fred was surprised when he saw clear signs of disgust manifest around her nose and eyes for just a second before she put on her steely mask again.
Cerberus' ramshackle operation faded quickly as the tram entered a stark black tunnel. With the limited night vision that his hood gave him, Fred could see that the transit tunnel featured thick meshed cable bolted to the ceiling and the tram track on the ground, and nothing else. It screamed rush job, but in the Cerberus operating manual even rush jobs were meant to provide two things: quality and disposability. It had to be able to function just as impeccably as any standard Alliance equipment, with the added buck of being able to be broken down or detonated in a second.
It took only five minutes to reach their destination. The tram wasn't particularly fast, but that rack was short, and when they stopped it was definitely at its end. Fred and Olson had traveled downwards, sharply around a corner, and then downward further to where they found another small tram station bolted to the rock and the tail of the tunnel. He saw a massive door that looked more like the airlock of a ship and the walls that rose around it that also vanished behind the cover of rock. Almost as if it were entirely separate from the base itself.
Fred stepped off, and a nod was all he got from Olson before she sent the tram off back the way it came with her on it. He almost asked the obvious question of where he was to go next, but obvious questions weren't the type Cerberus personnel were allowed to ask. Doing so raised questions of their own of a person's usefulness to the organization.
The great doors opened for him, slowly and creaking. As did the second set behind them. He entered, and his suit alerted him to multiple x-ray and MRI scans bouncing off his body. His hunch about being inside a ship proved more and more disturbingly accurate, as he saw the thick mylar coatings typical in the walls of starships, and a number of cramped access corridors tightly guarded by nearly a dozen Cerberus troopers wearing some of the fiercest power armor Fred knew the organization fielded. Their formation resembled that of an honor guard, and Fred felt his stomach knot. One of the snarling heads of Cerberus very well might be waiting for him.
But who could it be, he wondered? Could the Illusive Man have fled to Earth after the fall of Kronos Station? Cerberus officers squashed rumors about their leader more aggressively than anything else, but the fact that they existed must have meant something big. Had he predicted that the allies would be victorious, spiriting himself away to Earth to prepare to lead Cerberus against the weakened Alliance? Or he could be truly dead, as some Cerberus troopers had whispered as quietly as they could manage. In that case, it could be another one of the Illusive Man's lieutenants, but that line of thinking raised even more questions. Oleg Petrovsky was a prisoner of war, and Heinz Griske had vanished before Earth had been invaded. Kei Leng was dead, and Miranda Lawson had masterminded the mass defection of the crew of Normandy SR-2 after Commander Shepard had destroyed the Collectors. Who did that leave?
He entered into the buried ship, his only indicator being the arrangement of the guards implying where he was not permitted to go. Before him, the holographic interface on one of the doors flashed from the orange of pending permission to a permissive green. It was flanked by two final guards who conducted to final scans with their suits before permitting him in.
The hatch that connected to the tunnel could have been anywhere, from the bridge to a maintenance corridor on the lowest deck, so Fred had difficulty ascertaining where on the ship he was. The shepherding of the guards seemed to indicate he was being brought to somewhere of importance, perhaps the main machine shop or even a captain's quarters. But the examining tables and medical chairs told him that he was in the med bay.
Just one of these tables was occupied, a tall silhouetted figure sitting hunched over on its edge. The light in the room was harsher than outside, and for a moment Fred could not tell if the figure was a man or a woman. But from their back and skull, massive cables protruded and snaked up into the ceiling.
"Operative Shannon. I appreciate your coming," said the ship's VI. No, he thought, Not the ship. She looked up, and her lips moved, and a computer's voice came up. He could see her more clearly now. Her hair was silver, as was her uniform. And her skin and eyes. A machine.
"My squad made our way here as soon as we received the codes…sir," said Fred, unsure of how to address this machine. Even before he'd seen it, his interaction with Olsen had scrambled any assumptions he'd had about how the post-Illusive Man Cerberus command structure would shape up. But it was difficult to assume a person behind this many walls and power-armored guards wasn't someone he should be respecting.
If it was a someone, after all.
"And it is a good thing that you did. Even with the Alliance and their allies weakened, Earth will not be safe for us for very long. Whatever stragglers remain will have to join us soon or be left behind."
The gynoid stepped towards him, the cables and wires rooted into its head spiraling up into the ceiling like some misshapen halo. Even with its stark metal coloring, the machine's body dimension were convincingly human, and seeing the machinery dug into the spot where the human spine met with the brain horrified Fred. It reminded him of how he felt seeing Augmented troopers under the helmet.
Her machine movements seemed hostile to Fred, but when she reached personal distance of him, she extended a hand to his shoulder. "I'm sure you have many questions, Operative Shannon. It is the nature of being Cerberus to have them and not ask them, but this is a new world. Cerberus will find a new place in this brave new world, and the chosen survivors deserve to be appraised of this situation. You are one of these chosen, Fred, and you have a special place among them."
Fred swallowed. He thanked God for his mask, because under it he was sweating bullets. "I'll do humanity proud, sir."
"You will," said the machine as its metal approximation for a mouth simulated a smile. "But I can sense you still have questions. Please ask them."
"Of course sir, and forgive me for my ignorance, but…who are you?"
The machine's face returned to a neutral state. "In the absence of our former leader, and with the initiation of PANDORA Protocol, I am Cerberus' new director. My name is Doctor Eva Coré. I am a founding member of Cerberus, along with the Illusive Man. You may address me as 'Doctor' or 'Director'."
Fred did vaguely know that name, but only so far as to know it was a name he shouldn't know too much about. The knowledge had come from rumors surrounding the foundation of Cerberus, and as anything even remotely close to the subject of the Illusive Man's past and identity, it was firmly taboo. A ghost with a name shrouded in black ink returning in a metal body to lead the remainder of Cerberus on some new crusade sounded more like an idea he could sell for millions to Hollywood. Or the new horrifying reality he lived in. After the Reapers, anything was possible.
But he had seen outside. Earth was dead, or at best dying. Humankind needed strong leadership and it needed it now. Cerberus was still here to give them that, as it had always promised, and Fred was still alive to give all he had to Cerberus as he had promised.
"Of course, Dr. Coré," said Fred, finding a serviceable reserve of resolution. "It's been months since I was with a Cerberus cell larger than my own unit, but I'm sure I can speak for all of the soldiers still with us that we're ready to go on this last leg of the journey towards humanity's salvation."
"That is what is feels like, isn't it? With the Reapers gone, the story of our people is in a sort of epilogue. Does that sound right?" asked Director Coré, turning her back on Fred.
"In a sense, sir," he replied.
Coré sighed. A basic human gesture like that coming from a machine both unnerved Fred and set him more at ease with his new superior. "That is of course what I meant when I called those who remain my 'chosen few.' I'm not a spiritual person; someone who was would find being in this position rather difficult. But everyone here now survived the prescribed end of our species. Your survival was earned, and you were chosen by nature to carry on."
"And why was I chosen by you, sir?"
Coré turned back, and Fred saw her smile had returned. There was a light in her mechanical eyes with a human warmth to them, not artificial light. She opened her palm, and her omni-tool displayed a holographic representation of the Sol system sprang open. Points in the disk of the system began to light up: Mars, Ceres, Titan, Neptune, Io, Venus, and a dozen others scattered about asteroids and space stations. Cerberus' plan of attack.
"This protocol was meant to be activated in the event that Cerberus could rapidly seize a power vacuum present in the Sol system. The circumstances are beyond unideal, but the moment is here. The PANDORA Protocol will reinvigorate the human race and put Cerberus at its head. I need you, Fred Shannon, to help me open some boxes."