There was a sudden grating noise that filled the space surrounding Shepard's bed, the sound of something rattling against a hard surface accompanied by a soft alerting chime. Instinctively, Shepard slapped at her nightstand until her fingers found the cool curved shape of her omni-tool. She pulled the device over, slipping her arm into it enough that the automated adjustments took effect and sucked the device against her skin until it couldn't be seen. Meanwhile, Shepard leaned back into her bed somewhat, bringing her arm swinging forward to answer and display the call.
Her eyes were still bleary from sleep, so she didn't know who was trying to call, but given her budding nerves from the mission at hand she assumed it to be Hackett or Mikhailovich. "Errm Shepard here," she slurred into the mic, her mouth still waking up some too. As if to prove the latter her words were punctuated by a drawling yawn.
"Did I wake you?" The voice wasn't the tempered gravel of Hackett, or the subtly concealed anger of Mikhailovich, it was the thick and warm tune of Ashley Williams. Shepard's words caught in her throat and suddenly she felt more anxiety for the current situation than she had at any point for their current mission.
"Oh hey, Ash, yeah it's alright. Night before an operation and all."
"You're on an op? I thought you were with the 63rd…?"
A sharp pang of remorse ran through Shepard's chest. Her distance from Ashley, and her struggle with staying connected had been an unseen issue so far, but for Shepard to have neglected to tell Ashley about something like a mission was a clear sign. "It's a new thing, and a one-time thing. Mikhailovich wrapped us up into an Admiral Grissom's operation."
"Oh okay..." Ashley's voice trailed off, and for a second the line remained dead. Shepard had to blink a few times to get a look at the holographic image to make sure Ashley was still there. "Are you okay Jess? Are we okay?"
The question was what Shepard had expected Ashley was working up to, but still it felt like a blade slipping into her chest. She remembered how passionately she and Ashley had been in love after the hunt for Saren. She remembered how seldom they even disagreed, and now here they were. "Everything's alright Ash, I'm just struggling with it all…"
Through the silence Shepard could see Ashley chewing at her lower lip, her eyes darting downward in disappointment at the answer. "Alright, I don't want to keep you up before a mission. Call me when you're back aboard, alright?"
"Will do, Ash. I'm… I'm sorry I worried you."
"Hey, don't worry." Ashley blew a subtle kiss at the camera and smiled something weak and tired, "I love you Jess, be safe alright?"
"I love you too Ash. I'll talk to you when I'm back."
The two just kind of smiled at each other, and Shepard's thumb found the disconnect button and ended the call. Draped across her bed, only somewhat under her blanket, Shepard was just falling back asleep when the omni-tool came back online. "Motherfucker…" Shepard muttered, "Ashley leave me the fuck alo-"
It wasn't Ashley on the screen, it was a ship-wide alert that there had been shots fired. Shepard was up and on her feet in a minute's time. Having been asleep she was only dressed in a pair of underwear and a tank top, and she was on the clock. Hopping on one leg at a time while she closed the distance Shepard slipped on a pair of tight black combat pants. She didn't have time to fuck with her jacket, instead she began strapping on armor plates and webbing overtop her clothes as were. She was slipping out the cabin door as she slapped on the last piece of her chest armor, and one of the guards at her door shook his head towards her. "You should stay put ma'am, we've got at least one active shooter."
"Fuck that, move. I'm an N7 and I'm going to go kill whatever buddy-fucking bastard is shooting up my ship."
She pushed past the guard, palming the door control for the elevator to forcibly summon it now. She had a carbine raised when the doors opened, half expecting the shooter to jump out at her unsuspecting. The elevator was unoccupied however, so she just slipped inside and selected the floor that it'd been happening on—the cargo-bay. Once the doors had closed the elevator began on its way down, and Shepard began to realize just how slow her elevator was, now that she had somewhere to be. Pacing back and forth, taking deep breath, she muttered aloud, "Mother fucker please just hurry your ass."
A soft chime told her that they'd arrived, and the Major took a quick step out and into the fray. The lights were out on this level, but she could hear the faint groans of the injured, and the haunting dueling cracks of weapons fire. "What in the fuck is going on here?!" Her voice was icy steel, with no time for any excuses as to the behavior at hand.
Nearby her was Masters-At-Arms Ingrum, crouched behind a supply crate unarmored but with an SMG in hands. "One of the special operations units you brought aboard went berserk. He's already killed one of your teammates and he's going for anyone in here."
She was preparing a response to Ingrum, but the corner of her eye caught a flurry of movement. While still she heard the two sources of weapons fire in the distance, she also saw a hulk of a man lunging towards her with a raised rifle. She dove to the side, snapping into a quick roll only to come up with her carbine against the man's gut. Two rounds drove through him, with a splatter of blood and bone coming from his back. She stood, grabbing the back of his head and smacking it against the wall she'd been taking cover behind with a slick smack.
"There's more than one, it would seem." It was a time like this that she missed having EDI around, she could've told the AI to paint targets on her HUD. Instead she would have to figure it out herself. She had ducked around a supply crate and saw one of her marines nearby, engaged in a pop-up firefight with someone else nearby. She had ducked down to approach him, but from behind her she heard a few quiet steps.
She swirled, finding one of the spec ops slinking towards her with a silenced pistol. She kicked forward, ridding him of the pistol and fired two of her carbine rounds at him. He managed to dodge the two bullets, but brought a crate tumbling down into her, and she dropped the rifle. He then charged her, combat knife out and lunging for her abdomen. She spun to face him square on, her right-hand swirling with blue energy that snapped onto his knife and pulled.
The bladed weapon left his hand and came to hers, while her left hand grabbed him at the base of his neck and pulled him forward. His body met her newly-acquired knife and she felt it dig into his chest, but she pulled the knife out only to stab him again three more times to confirm the kill. Shepard felt the warm flow of blood across the exposed parts of her arms, but she wasn't focused on that right now. Turning in place she looked past the young marine that was engaged in a firefight, and then reached for the carbine that wasn't on her back. The shooter had caught sight of her though, and she winced as her shield appeared in front of her in brilliant flashes of blue as it caught three slugs from the air.
From the shooter's left came another figure, Master Sergeant Worbaar, dressed in combat pants and the lower armor of an alliance marine, with just a black tank top and shield capacitor strapped to her chest. Her arrival was announced by the ear-splitting crack of the shotgun in her hands going off, its slugs tearing into the shooter that'd been firing on Shepard. With every few steps forward that Worbaar took, her shotgun beat a steady cadence. By the time she'd reached the now-downed shooter, her shotgun finally gave the sad click and beep of a full thermal capacitor. Only ten feet away now, Shepard could tell that Worbaar was sweating heavily, and there was a certain mixture of fear and rage on her face.
"What the fuck was this, ma'am?"
Shepard's head shook, her chin dipping some out of somber observation. "I have no clue, these were MSOC guys, I've worked with a few of them before… We need to get some goddamn IDs going so I can figure out what's going on."
She stepped back from Worbaar, spinning on her feet to head towards the ship's elevator. The CIC would have both her answers, and the ability for her to monitor the ship in case of another shooting was taking place elsewhere. Lifting her omni-tool to her face as she moved, Shepard keyed on a line to the bridge. "Joker pull us back to real space now. I don't want to take another step until we know what the fuck just happened."
"No can do, Major. I have no idea where we are right now, and chances are we'll end up in hostile territory. This part of space hasn't been mapped or surveyed in almost three years now. Not since the Relays were busted."
Joker had a point, they'd been able to repair or replace any of the relays they needed to, but hostilities with the Terminus Systems, and raids on attempts to replace their relays, lead the C-Space races to neglect further attempts to re-install the Terminus' relay system. This meant that the Council species lost their intelligence in the areas, but any faction living in Terminus was subjected to cripplingly slow travel times. "Fine. Just keep us out of trouble, but in limbo, once we arrive."
"Copy that, Major. Stay safe down there."
The doors to her lift slipped open with a loud whoosh, and Shepard was plunged into the budding chaos of the Normandy's CIC. It was late for the crew, during the period that primary-shift officers would be sleeping, but the shooting had called for all hands on deck—and it seemed now was when most of those hands were able to finally reach their decks.
"Somebody get me a goddamn sitrep on what's going on. I want to know who the rotten apples were, and I want to know who we lost." Her voice was a cold steel rod injected into the nervous fever of the CIC, and if by mere presence alone Shepard drove them to a cool efficiency previously absent from their work flow.
"Right here, ma'am."
The call came from Chief Rosine, a Comm Systems Operator. She had pulled up on the screen in front of her 5 service records, each featuring the service photo of the associated soldier, and had a freshly-added photo taken clearly by an omni-tool cam in the dark of the cargo deck only minutes earlier to confirm the death.
"We lost five of the MSOT operators, though three of them were the shooters." A trio of the files, which had been bound together by a red rectangle, came to the foreground. "Terrell Humpherys, Rocke Brayton, and Seejan Gover. Each of them have a service history going back a decade, and none of them have anything on file that would link them to something like this."
The three highlighted files fell to the background as another two files came forward, one of them for Colonel Coats, and a Lt. Colonel O'Moore. Shepard felt an icy dagger stab into her gut a the sight of the familiar marine lying dead on her deck. "Shit… They went for Coats first, this was planned. Did we lose any of our own?"
"Yes ma'am. We lost four of our own, Lieutenant Haight is handling last rites and burial preparations."
Shepard didn't have anything immediately to say, but she began clinching her fist in anger. She could feel the now-dry blood on her hand flaking off, the visual frightening the young officer she'd been speaking to.
"Carry through with the mission? Are you mad?"
"We were sent on this mission for a reason." Shepard replied, cool-tempered despite the incendiary indignation in the voice of her verbal assailant, Captain Iken Hipps. "We've got dozens of marines dying a day from these raids, and its increasing by the week. If there is organization structure here for the pirates, we need to eliminate it. We're going through with it."
"I don't remember someone making you the goddamn mission commander." The newest voice to cut into the fray was that of Major Amirah Lowery, his gravely voice adding a baritone to the hectic melody of their argument.
Shepard squared her shoulders, staring down the larger man with unwavering confidence. "No one did, they made Coats CO, and now he's lying in a body bag in the freezer downstairs. Someone didn't want this mission to go through, and I'm goddamn going to make sure it goes through now."
The fight seemed to draw both the thrill and the alarm of the marines Haight and Faunce, both of whom were also present for the briefing. Their presence had agitated the former MSOT members earlier in the conversation, but Shepard had made it clear their participation was non-negotiable. "It'll be a goddamn suicide run." This from Commander Maisy Meyers, a younger brunette N7, roughly five years Shepard's junior.
"That's what we're here for, ma'am," Faunce's voice cut in. "We're bringing Normandy's marines groundside with you."
"We've done a cursory scan of the planet and revealed one semi-large compound on the northern hemisphere. It's surrounded by what we believe is an energy shield, and thermal scans show foot patrols pacing the outside area. It goes without saying, we think that's where the bad guys are." Joker's voice had a familiar tone through the crackling speakers of a Kodiak shuttle, reminding her of times when she was able to go groundside more often. "Your shuttles will put down a klick south of that, to allow you enough space to approach and breach the compound."
She turned a head to make sure the other two shuttles hadn't faced any troubles that had them out of formation and felt reassured to see them flanking her own shuttle. "Half a minute to touchdown, Major." This from Cortez at the front of the Kodiak. Shepard's veins felt like they had pressurized warship fuel inside them, her blood combusting with rage from the attack during their flight here.
Shepard was preparing a few words to say to the collected teams, direction for once they hit the ground, but a jarring crash killed the words in her throat. She had been standing up at the time, and now she was thrown almost to the ground, clinging barely to a support bar on the wall. The other marines inside the shuttle were struggling against their restraints, and she could feel the knocking stutter of their shuttle now. "Fuck, we got rammed by one of the other shuttles. It's gone completely erratic."
A glance at the rear cameras showed that the shuttle was swerving all through the skies in a plummet towards the ground. At the very last minute it tried to mitigate the impact with a sharp upward pull that kept it from being a nose dive. The shuttle carved a sizeable trench through the sparse forest they had planned to touch down in, and she saw angry red flames licking at several points on the shuttle.
Cortez's hands were dancing across the controls to keep their shuttle aloft, but she could tell he was trying to bring it down controlled rather than keep it in the air. The third shuttle seemed untouched, however they were making an urgent landing to check on the deviant shuttle. Thankful once again for Cortez's expert piloting, Shepard felt the shuttle subtly contact the ground, and she was on the move. Pulling her helmet down with a locking-click, Shepard rushed towards the smoking shuttle. By now they'd opened their side hatch, and half a dozen marines were stumbling out coughing. There was a corpse slumped over the shuttle's controls, and one plastered against the shuttle's wall.
Shepard drew her Valkyrie from her back, the rifle aimed downward but in the direction of the shuttle. "What is going on here?!" She could feel Vega and Faunce's presence behind her, both with weapons also drawn.
Kian Miller, an N7 marginally older than Meyers with sharp white-dyed hair, approached Shepard slowly, her hands raised away from her unthreateningly. "Hipps turned on Lowery while he was piloting, put two rounds in him before any of us knew what was coming. I think he knew there was no way he was going to survive, because he didn't get much of a fight off. Fired one round off, but all that hit me was the muzzle flash." She motioned to the enraged burn on her cheek.
"Motherfucker." Shepard clenched her jaw in rage, looking back towards the carnage in the shuttle. "We're down almost half of our original unit, and a shuttle." She stopped short of making accusations that remaining members of the unit might be disloyal, but the tension between Miller and Vega already present was enough to make such a sentiment known.
"Alright, we move out now. Strap on what gear you can carry, you've got five minutes." She stepped past the other woman, her head on a swivel looking for one of her marines. "Haight!" She called when she finally caught sight of the Marine Lieutenant. "Get some charges planted on the downed shuttle and blow it to shit. We can't leave that much evidence lying around that we were here."
"Copy ma'am. We'll get it done."
The marines hustled around her as the five minutes passed, bustling in and out of shuttles to strap on whatever gear they might be, while nearby Lance Corporal Maldonado was planting charges on the downed shuttle. One by one the marines began to assemble in the flat area they'd been using as a makeshift staging area. "Vega, you're on me. Otherwise, form consolidate teams with casualties together to make three fireteams; the MARSOT will fill the role of 2-2." There were a series of 'copy's, and the marines began shifting into visually cohesive units.
The marines took on a blistering pace through the forest, even as its trees became denser the closer, they got to the compound. To Shepard's surprise, even as they drew nearer to their destination, they had yet to encounter any pacing guards. Most of the pirate facilities she'd raided in her day had seen some sort of patrolling guard structure. Anxiety felt like a steady pinprick against the back of her neck, steadily reminding her how many things were frightfully awry about this operation—the lack of guards only serving to be the latest in line.
Behind the sharp features and inscrutable expressions of her face, her mind was working overtime to try and decipher how the different oddities tied together in a reasonable explanation. Her rampant thought process was shattered in an instant, as in the distance there was a ground-shaking explosion, kicking up thick black smoke and bright orange flames billowing into the air. The two foremost marines in their formation stopped so abruptly they slid to the ground, instinctively shielding themselves from the explosion despite its distance.
"Fuckin' haul ass!" Shepard shouted, and broke out into a full run. These things didn't just coincidentally happen together, and there was no way that was an accidental explosion. Someone didn't want her here, and they'd tried twice to the members of the MARSOT team meant to come here, though they'd ultimately failed. Now they were putting what they could up in flames, and either needed all hands on deck or didn't want to leave bodies behind to be identified—thus the lack in guards.
With Vega, Haight, and Faunce following quickly behind her, Shepard reached the wall of the facility and could see the thick plumes of black smoke pouring up from just on the other side of the wall. "Vega, explosives." As she snapped the order back to the Lieutenant, she pulled explosives from her belt herself. The pair planted four bricks at equidistance, and then blew the defensive rampart away with an ear-splitting detonation.
There were a little over a dozen armed soldiers standing on a pad outside of one of the buildings, all wearing stark white armor that resembled Alliance Marine armor, though more refined. Neither Shepard, nor the guards, had a visual of the other until the former emerged from the cloud of smoke surrounding her new entrance. Though, as soon as the first intruder was in sight the guards began to fire.
High speed slugs sparked against Shepard's shield, the indicator on her HUD showing as it ticked lower and lower each time one of them hit. The Major dove for the cover of a nearby prefab structure, a thin structure with only three sides already. "We've got weapons fire, take cover!" She saw Vega and Haight nearby, behind a piece of machinery, while the other marines waited behind the wall.
"Major this is Impact-Mike," A voice cut into her helmet, the voice of Corporal Evetts the medic for Ares Platoon—as they'd named Normandy's MARDET. "We've got wounded, PFC Stanley took two to the abdomen in that stream of fire."
The situation was just getting worse, but Shepard realized, amidst it, that the fire didn't seem to be directed at any of their cover positions—but rather at places they might emerge to fight. The enemy wasn't trying to kill them so much as they were trying to suppress or delay them. "Forgive me for stating the obvious, Lola, but those aren't pirates."
Shepard nodded slowly at him, from her own cover position, "Yeah whatever this place was, it wasn't what Gafford thought it was—or at least what he told us he thought it was. Someone is willing to kill to ke-" She was interrupted by another ground shaking explosion, this one sending chunks of metal debris raining down on the structure she'd hidden behind. Shepard slipped her head to the side some, peeking towards the group of guards to get a hold on the situation. She was focusing her attention on the space between the guards, summoning a warp field to wrench them all from their firing stances, but the wall behind them erupted in a blinding flash, vaporizing them with it.
The explosion blew through Shepard's cover, meeting her with a searing concussive blast. She felt her body crash through the wall behind her, which had been crumpled and weakened by the same blast carrying her through the air. Pain seared up from her legs and her shoulder as she rolled, flames occasionally jutting through the air above her. "Ma-" the fragment of a word came through her helmet comms, and then was lost to static. "-leeing the system. Orders?"
"Joker hold," She muttered, crawling to get further from the flames, "Vega, status?"
The land stretched out in front of Ashley Williams was a disaster scene. There were half a dozen skeletal remains from multi-floor buildings that'd been systematically bombed out and then burned. There were at least two dozen charred corpses strewn between the center of the compound and one of the far walls, where a group of marines had set up a field medical station.
Either the group of marines hadn't seen her arrival, or they'd been waiting to see how she would approach the situation. She was wearing her trademark polished-blue armor, a Spectre's insignia painted on the plate protecting her collar. She had opted against wearing a helmet, wearing her hair instead pulled back in a tight pony tail.
Williams wasn't sure yet who the marines she'd be dealing with were, the intelligence she'd received was low on details. What she did know was there was an Alliance Warship that'd sailed here, intending to attack a Terminus settlement or facility, leaving high risk for an outright war with the fringe systems. She was here to either end the operation, or make sure it didn't end with Council Space getting shit flung on their shoes.
She stepped closer to the gathered marines, her hand resting on her belt near where her pistol was holstered in case this didn't go as well as she hoped. After subtly clearing her throat, Ashley raised her voice and shouted towards the marines. "I'm Captain Ashley Williams, Spectre Council and Alliance Marine. What's going on here? What unit are you with?"
There was a flurry of movement at the center of the marine gathering, and a previously unseen marine stepped out from amidst the others to face Ashley. The woman approaching Ashley was a few inches taller than her, dressed in matte-black marine armor with the signature N7 Blood Stripe up one side, and obviously fresh damage done to various sections of the armor. The real thing that caught Ashley's attention though, was the stinger of familiarity in the marine's face. The woman had removed her helmet upon approach, and in the freshly exposed face Ashley saw in the blue-green eyes, sharp cheekbones, and pale cheeks of a woman she'd spent years falling in love with.
"Shepard?!"
Shepard looked worse for wear, a black eye shadowing part of her face, and several lacerations darting across her cheeks and jaw from debris kicked up at her. Her armor was singed and burned away in some places, and she looked tired. "Ash what the hell are you doing here?"
The words, though blunt rather than pointed, stung a bit for Ashley to hear. She set those feelings aside though and drew nearer. "I received a tip that the Alliance was making a move on this world, and that it had decent odds of starting at-best a skirmish. I was sent in by the Council to make sure nothing was done to cause instability."
Shepard's face had an unfamiliar ashen color to it, and her breathing was tight—a trait Ashley had seen a few times when the other woman was trying her best to hold her composure together. "We've got it handled." She replied, her voice a pinched monotone.
Ashley closed the distance between the two of them, wrapping her armored arms around Shepard with an awkward clacking sound as their ceramic plates smacked together. "Hey, hey, Jess—it's me. Let the iron curtain down, let me help."
Shepard out of her armor vs Shepard in her armor was a visual Ashley had been forced to get adjusted to years prior. While wearing the marine special operations Onyx armor, her hair pulled into a helmet and various pieces of gear slung onto her combat webbing, she looked like a hulking soldier. But when she stripped away the bulky ceramic plates and large rifles, Shepard was a lean and thin-framed woman, and her face looked even more gaunt than usual.
Right now Shepard was only a few feet away, on the other side of her cabin door while Ashley patiently waited. On the ground Shepard had kept the curtain up to get their marines back to the Normandy, but once aboard the ship she had quickly crumbled. Ashley had noticed Shepard's retreat, without the latter having ever actually admitted it. Ashley knocked again, and again it was ignored from within. Silently she keyed in the 4 digit pin she knew to be the passcode, and the door's red indicator changed to green.
She stepped through, the doors, and for a second she wondered if Shepard hadn't actually been inside. She took a few more steps inside, only to find Shepard crumpled on the floor of her cabin, just outside the showers, with her tank top halfway off. The top was off her right arm entirely, which left it pulled up for that half of her body, while her other arm was still fully inside. It looked like she'd tried to take the top off, struggled, and slumped to the ground with the shirt half on.
"Jess, are you alright?" Ashley was knelt beside Shepard in an instant, her fingers instinctively reaching to check her pulse until Shepard swatted her hand away. Ashley felt her hand brush against warm tears as she pulled back from her jugular, and looked closer to see the pale skin around Shepard's eyes was bright red, and there were tears coursing down her cheeks. "Hey, hey, talk to me." She awkwardly knelt more, wrapping an arm around the half-dressed Officer.
"I.." Shepard's voice raised, but she choked on tears she thought she'd swallowed, and had to begin again. "I couldn't get my shirt off… my arm—" She wiggled her left shoulder some. "I can't get it to move right sometimes."
Ashley remembered seeing Shepard struggling with the arm before, during their time together, but Shepard didn't like talking about those kinds of injuries, the ones that stuck with her no matter how much medi-gel and surgery she went under. Now she just silently helped her pull the cloth shirt up her chest once more, and her eyes were once again treated to the gnarly sight. Though she hadn't asked about the arm, Ashley had always assumed that it was a life-long burden from Akuze given the sight of it. The shoulder was marred in scars, some of them twisted and discolored, and one whole section where the muscle and flesh were burned away, leaving the skin to wrap directly around bone. She also saw an angry circular maroon scar; the sign Shepard had once been shot in the shoulder.
Ashley stooped down to kiss the mangled limb, and she smiled slightly to feel Shepard's warm and somewhat soft skin pressed against her. "I'm sorry you had to see that, I just wish the damn thing would move like it should…. It does still sometimes." She tugged harder at her shoulder, as if jerkier movement could force the limb to restore its old range of motion. Shepard's voice, when she spoke, was hoarse and raw, more so than it had been when Ashley even first entered the cabin. The battered Shepard began struggling to her feet, her knees clicking and popping as she stood. Ashley's hands steadied her and stopped her from slipping away into the shower.
"You don't have to talk about what's happened Jess, just talk to me." The words brought Jessica's attention back around towards Ashley. She could see Shepard's façade breaking away now, showing the raw emotion left after the two friendly fire incidents, the crash, and the explosion.
"I warned you when we started this thing that I'm not good at this." Shepard voice was harder than she likely intended it to be, Ashley could tell from the slight recoil of her face when the words escaped her lips.
"Just talk to me Jessica."
"I've got some shit I can't get out of my head, Ashley. Both sights I've seen, and things that have been put in my head, and I see them every time I close my eyes. I can't get any of it out by going ground side anymore, because I'm bound to the CIC, and I don't have you at my side anymore. You're not here."