A/N:

Fun fact, as with all plans, the original plan for this chapter got thrown out the window hardly even a quarter of the way through.

Originally, the events of this chapter would have taken up three others, but much like with McGraw's attempted murder, I found that not a single one of them could support a chapter on their own - not without wasting a lot of time and feeling bloated by the time they got to the main crux.

So after a little thought (read: I smashed everything together to see how it looked), I found that this one worked a lot better from a pacing perspective, and a conclusory one.

In other words: This is it.

The home stretch.

Bottom of the ninth.

There is just one more entry in this three-year journey, after this.

And for similar reasons to that of a few chapters ago, I put the A/N up here to avoid spoiling the effect of the end of this chapter.

But, that's all she wrote, this go-round.

Let's kick this thing off.

The second to last.

Without further ado…

We're off!

Chapter 56

Mommy will get rid of the monster. That's what mommies do. They make anyone who tries to hurt their child wish they'd never been born.

— Susan Richards, Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four #2

In the Batarian Hegemony, at the height of its power there had been approaching twenty thousand warships; the only species with more ships than the batarians were Council members. In less than one decade, however, that number had gone down to fewer than six hundred. All of these ships were currently in the Harsa system, swarmed around Khar'Shan in what all aboard these vessels knew was a vain attempt at fending off a superpower, only rivaled by the entirety of the Citadel Council.

Many had no delusions about whether or not they would survive, if and when the Alliance came to exact revenge and finish the work they had started in their first conflict. The ceasefire had been violated - there would be no help from the Council. It was only a matter of time until the Alliance arrived, obliterated the fleet, and summarily held the planet hostage. The captains of the various ships, as well as their crews, blearily wondered how many people would die before that idiot Hoorn made the right decision and surrendered. If he had his way, he likely would fight until the Alliance conquered the entire planet, netting anywhere from the lower tens to the upper hundreds of millions of lives, both enslaved and free, lost.

Considering human history, that concept alone terrified those few captains that knew their stuff. The humans had often been faced with situations like this before, and in all of these moments, they often chose a third option: They broke their enemies with one large, incomprehensibly damaging attack, with the promise of more to come. It was how they won the Human-Turian War, after all, they sacked Palaven and convinced everyone they had destroyed it wholesale, before promising that they actually could. One could only wonder how they would do so this time. Would they bomb the planet from orbit, until it was too weak to fight? Such an option wasn't illegal in their government system, they were absolutely able to do so. Would they drop nuclear weapons and refuse to terraform the damage away? They had done so on numerous encounters with the mercenary companies during their wars with them. Or would they rally their damned SIGMAs, and take over a few hundred city states in the span of an hour? Establish footholds on the planet and summarily ruin any trade lines, effectively starving and choking the planet at the same time?

The possibilities were endless, and considering that the race they had also wronged, the saltorians, could very well push for a ground war, the Hegemony's days were numbered in, appropriately, days. This war wouldn't be long, but it would be bloody, and would upheave thousands of years of history.

"Sir." Came an ensign, to the ears of the high admiral. "Spacial anomalies. They're here."

The admiral frowned, clenching his jaw. He nodded, "prepare the fleet. Let them know it is time." He felt as though he were a pebble attempting to stall a tidal wave. As if he were a single mass driver, tasked with halting an asteroid the size of Khar'Shan. He felt like a volus, trying to fight a krogan. He was so small, compared to the humans' sheer enormity.

"They're hailing us, sir. Asking for a surrender." Said the ensign.

The admiral scowled. Of course they would - the arrogant creatures probably wanted to limit the loss of life as much as they could. No doubt they were hiding in the edges of the solar system, so far beyond them that it would take years even at dreadnought velocities for their slugs to reach them. If they refused to capitulate, they would fire, and the fleet would die. He cleared his throat; "When our children ask us..." He said, his deep baritone filling the bridge. "When they ask us… Where were you, when the humans conquered our world? We will not say we stood idly by and surrendered, such that they could attack unmolested.

"When they ask us… Did you fight as much as you possibly could?" He said, "we will say yes. Reorient the ships, target theirs." He only had one projectile capable of doing damage. "When they ask us… Did you give up, on your way of life? On your history?" He clenched his chair, "we will say NO! All ships, engage your drive cores. Hit them." He bellowed. "Hit them with everything you have. If they are to take our planet, we will make them -" But as he made his speech, his ship jumped, not to lightspeed, but in place, as if hit. He nearly fell out of his seat, he was thrown so hard.

"Admiral - weapons strike! Our shields are down, they crippled our engines!"

"Other ships are reporting similar damages, sixteen have been destroyed!"

The admiral growled, "arm yourselves, they intend to board us! Activate the defense turrets - they. Will. Bleed!" He roared, hauling himself to his feet and ripping a pistol from his seatback.

There were guns pointed at the airlock. Every man, woman, and slave on the ship was armed. With enough guns to level a moderately sized building, and enough people spread about the half-thousand ships to, at the very least, conquer a small city-state, they thought they were ready. When they felt their ships shake, as their airlocks were linked to with the enemy vessels, they thought they were prepared. When they saw the main airlock get torn from the ship's outer hull, and the two ships' atmospheres equalized with a clap of thunder, they thought they could make their enemies bleed. When the inner airlock was then penetrated by a weapon so hot that the air rippled around its white-hot blade, they questioned everything they knew.

Down and out, left and right the blade carved, until there was enough space for the hulking figure behind it to grab the two halves of the door and pull. With the horrendous sound of grinding metal, the door yielded to the titanic terror's strength, and for a moment, the people aboard the ship wondered if it wasn't a SIGMA that was terrifying them so. When the door was dorn from its hinges and each half was thrown to a different side, they realized they were wrong.

Slowly extending to its full, nearly three-meter height, the hulking green creature in the forest-camo fatigues clenched its muscles, them appearing like steel cables ready to burst from underneath its scales. It appeared wholly unaffected by the heat of the blade it had jammed into the ground next to it, and growled lowly as he reached to his side and yanked the blade out with a sizzling sound.

The batarians, so stunned by this once impossible feat of strength, forgot to open fire until, from behind it, came charging a dozen more just like it. This snapped the batarians out of their reverie and with cries of a fear of a primal sort, and they all opened fire, breaking formation and fleeing as the saltorians charged the ship. Their gunfire had no effect, barely shredding their uniforms and body armor, let alone making it far enough to draw blood and tear muscle. Soon following the screams and gunfire would be the sounds of blood being boiled away on white-hot metal, and the shrieks of dying batarians.

It would take six hours for the saltorians, among the first of their kind to leave their solar system, to slaughter their way through the crippled Hegemony navy. They would take prisoners, any who surrendered were afforded that luxury as they were instructed to by their Praetorian, who was himself meticulously instructed on the Alliance's laws and doctrine of war. Their Holy War had taken on an entirely different meaning, as they now not fought fought for the gods in a figurative sense, but in a literal one. The batarian small arms had had little to no effect on saltorians, so clearing their ships was but a chore for them, akin playing with children. In six hours, they had completed their chore. Only fifteen of the bravest, most heroic saltorians to have ever been born were the only ones to pay the price.

They would be the only ones to pay this price, as now, with Khar'Shan orbit under Alliance control, the next part of their plan came into play. Alliance Frigates, with titanic weapons strapped to their bellies, descended into Khar'Shan's atmosphere, on a direct course for for its capitol city. Hurtling through the air so fast that the ships were enveloped by cloaks of fire, and were followed by thick contrails of dark smoke, the citizens of the batarian homeworld didn't even realize what they were until the fire trails dissipated and the ships dropped their payloads.

Enormous, building-sized machines the shape of a winged, tri-pedal creature, hundreds of weapons of saltorian design were dropped through the air. It wasn't until they had dropped dozens of kilometers that they cleared the smoke trailing the now ascending frigates, and could be seen by the people on the ground. They targeted specifically the main avenues of entry and exit from the ground, whilst smashing through the sky cars clogging up the airways. The hundreds of tripedal weapons smashed into the grounds with deafening thunderclaps, the collective impact shaking the ground and felling many of the rounded batarian buildings. With enough firepower and coverage to encircle the entire city, anything inside Khar'Shan's capitol was effectively blocked off from leaving.

Terrified citizens and confused, broken slaves would have but minutes to try and figure out what in the world was happening, before new frigates would descend the atmosphere; but instead of tripedal weapons strapped to their bellies, it was enormous, tube-like canisters held in their shuttle bays. These canisters took up room equivalent to several buses, and made it such that there was little room to stand and maneuver in the shuttle bays, not that anyone would even want to be close to them in the first place. When gigantic green lizard people said 'don't disturb the contents on threat of life', with no small amount of fear in their deep voices, people would tend to listen without hesitation. Especially with the pained, musical wails and endless skittering noises contained within.

When the dozens of frigates housing these canisters made it to their designated drop points, they banked harshly and pulled up, opening their shuttle bays and releasing the clamps that held these canisters secure. Out, the enormous tubes fell from their interstellar carriers, and through the air of a planet they had never before seen. It took forty seconds for the frigates to fly back to orbit; it took half that for the canisters to hit the ground. Some slammed into the concrete and the streets, some barreled through buildings like spears, some crashed into them lengthwise and were simply buried, upended, like pillars. Terrified people screamed and sprinted as showers of glass cascaded from the horrendously damaged buildings and fell to the ground, tearing and cutting apart anyone unfortunate enough to be caught in their wake. The pain and the anguish of planet Khar'Shan did not end there, however. It was hardly even horrible enough to constitute as the beginning; no, what happened next was something straight from the nightmares of many a Citadel race. What happened next was precisely the reason opening new relays was so forbidden.

Were one to wax philosophical, one could say that technically the Council wasn't wrong in their proclamation. After all, the humans came from opening untested relays, and they later brought with them the saltorians, the return of the geth, and now, the rachni.

Before there was time to even recover from the showers of glass, the people of Khar'Shan's mightiest city sound found their ears accosted by the sounds of an endless series of musical-sounding wails. The highest notes carried with them a pained tone, and the lowest lows held undertones of hunger. Whatever made this noise, it was in pain, and it was hungry, and it now had an entire city - millions upon millions of people - in which to eat.

It took six hours to cripple and depopulate a fleet of five hundred ships. It took less than one hour to destabilize a capitol city. It took four to half its population, and to half what remained again in two more. Fractionally more people died every passing hour as the starved rachni poured onto the streets and into the buildings. Some thought they could reach solace and safety by escaping the city. Many sky cars took to the air, while others simply ran for their lives. None ever made it past the city's limits - as this was where the tripedal weapons came in. They were indiscriminatory - anything that moved was instantly locked onto and torn from the sky with a copious amount of gunfire, at a rate of many thousand every second. Sky cars, fleeing people, terrified slaves, and even the insectoid creatures - the covered from these cannons was so complete that nothing alive left that city. Such was the price to keep the outbreak contained without using nuclear munitions prematurely.

The intent was not simply to depopulate the city. Such a thing could have been accomplished with an orbital bombardment. Instead, the intent was to terrify, and nought but the krogan could introduce that same primal fear of a species so alien as the rachni. Even humanity hadn't brought the galaxy to its knees in this way - even the krogan had failed to so thoroughly trash all of the known galaxy. The rachni was the only species known to have nearly destroyed the Citadel, and defeated two Council races and their associated members in full combat. While it was true the krogan had had many more opponents to fight in their time, they still failed to recreate those feats, and they still existed in the first place. The rachni, however, that was a terror thought dead, and constantly and consistently feared to be not so.

In eight hours, all communications from the proudest city in all of batarian space ceased. What few survivors there were would inevitably be found, be it by the rachni, or the titanic ballistic cannons.

Batarian High Chancellor Seriul Hoorn rightly felt as though his entire planet was falling around him. With no way of getting his people to orbit, he was now at the mercy of the humans, and even if he could get soldiers to orbit, they had carted enough saltorians over to Harsa to empty out more than five hundred warships inside of a day. No doubt any attempts to find and board the Alliance ships would be met with more saltorian fighters, and should they somehow manage to get past them, they would have to face their SIGMAs; and all of that was assuming the humans had blockaded Khar'Shan, like a Citadel navy. With their Warp technology, they had the capability for traditional wet-navy tactics - staying as far outside of the effective range of their enemies as possible. No doubt they were just camping out at the edge of the solar system, with but a small token force of ships there to guard the relay.

The High Chancellor snorted. If the relay is even still there. He thought, knowing how the humans saw fit to remove mass relays from their inner colonies. It was only on good faith with the Council that they left them there in their border systems, for immigration and trade purposes. Hoorn just prayed his contacts on the Citadel got his messages - if the Hegemony would fall, they would at least make their enemies bleed, doing it. The Citadel would have Warp Tech, and no one would forget the batarian contribution to that inevitable war.

The ground shook, causing the High Chancellor to raise his head, staring across his small, cramped room to the single entrance and exit. His brow ridges furrowed; surely the Alliance couldn't know where this bunker was - he didn't know where it was until SIU and Hunters shunted him here once the fleets got torn apart. What was more, he would have expected the Alliance to give him some sort of timeframe, perhaps twenty four, or thirty six hours, to sweat over his dying, rachni infested city, before they requested a surrender.

Another shake of the ground, this time joined by a cacophony of weaponsfire. Hoorn let loose an exhausted sigh, a part of him not even wanting to fight anymore, if they had found him so quickly. True, it meant surrendering to the Alliance and being known as the damn High Chancellor that went down without even a fight, but if they had found him so quickly, then what even was the point of putting up a fight? Maybe he would have been willing to try and take down as many as possible, had he remained hidden, but now?

Now he leaned back in his seat, hands folded over his lap, and waited for the inevitable. A frown creased his face as he stared at the door, listening to the shouts and gunfire as it grew closer and closer. It may have been minutes, it may have been hours, but eventually it did reach him, and then his bunker went eerily silent. He continued to wait, staring at the door. He would not go to them.

Three minutes passed before the humans on the other side finally made their entrance. However, where he expected an explosion of some sort, perhaps the door caving in and a blinding white flash, or some other sort of ostentatious, stunning display, instead what happened was the door simply swung inwards. The High Chancellor's brow furrowed, wondering for a moment if perhaps, in spite of all odds, his guards had won.

These hopes were dashed when a titanic human entered the room. Hoorn, however, knew that this wasn't one of their SIGMAs - the armor was similar, but it had a distinctive weathered, rotten appearance that he had only ever seen before in the company of one man. Hoorn let out a deep, exhausted sigh, but the smarter half of his mind told him he should have expected this. The Mysterious One wasn't the type to leave loose ends, and of course he would kill Hoorn to ensure he didn't speak.

"Get it over with." Hoorn told the titanic guard.

In response, the guard pulled from the small of its back a small, cylindrical device. Hoorn's eyes locked onto it, but he only needed a moment to recognize it for what it was: A detonator. No loose ends indeed, the human intended to wipe away the entire damn facility. It was probably the reason they hadn't barged into the room - they had been setting up the bomb, and giving their AI's time to surf through their isolated systems, find any relevant data, wipe it, and leave.

As the guard primed the detonator, Hoorn wondered if it would give him the courtesy of a 'sends his regards' kind of a message. Isn't that something humans did?

It wasn't.

The false SIGMA activated the detonator and unleashed fifteen kilotons of explosive force without even an uttered word. The massive explosion obliterated the formerly secure bunker, making the mountain above it balloon outwards before it crashed back downwards, caving in on the space formerly occupied by his bunker. The earthquakes would spread for miles, but aside from them and the partially shrunken mountain, there was no evidence that anything had even happened. In less than a half hour, Seriul Hoorn's bunker was obliterated, and he along with it.

With Hoorn out of the way, their leadership in question, and their capitol city under siege from an enemy only the krogan had been able to defeat, Khar'Shan was doomed to experience a chaos unlike anything ever before in its history. The capitol city would be completely depopulated within the first twenty four hours, multiple buildings even fell to the ground under the volumes of gunfire the tripedal weapons poured out in their containment efforts. Other cities would soon descend into chaos as rumors spread, false or unfounded sighting of rachni sent everyone into a panic. The Alliance didn't even need to send soldiers down, as the mass hysteria gripping the planet soon meant the people were tearing themselves apart. In twenty four hours, and without a single major ground campaign on the end of the aggressors, Khar'Shan fell.

Worse, was that the Alliance allowed the planet to simmer, only poking and prodding the wounded planet and its beleaguered peoples to bomb strategic military bases and to remind them that they were there, and they clearly had more to offer than simple bombing runs. They allowed Khar'Shan to slowly collapse over the course of four days, before finally opening up communications. It took less than an hour for Khar'Shan to consolidate its leadership and surrender, their only condition being that the Alliance help them remove the rachni they had dropped. The Alliance, in response, politely explained to the Hegemony's newest leader that they would gladly help containment, but as the Alliance had no such procedures, they instead deferred to the experts, to the only known species to have fought the Rachni without any interstellar capabilities and won. The people who had made rachni containment into an art form.

The saltorians promptly dropped a ninety megaton warhead on the city, following it up with a sustained bombing of it and the surrounding areas for six hours, with much weaker warheads, measuring in the dozens of kilotons each. It was only when the saltorians were finished with their 'cleansing' efforts and had thoroughly bathed a significant portion of Khar'Shan's largest landmass in nuclear fire, did the Alliance deploy terraforming disks. The atmosphere was cleaned of the ashclouds and scrubbed of the radiation before either of the two could grievously harm the planet's several billion-large population. When the ash cleared, the city was a crater big enough to be seen from orbit, and the surrounding areas were gray, ashen fields of glass.

In the weeks following, in a manner similar to that which had occurred after the conclusion of their first war, Alliance and Hegemony representatives met aboard the Citadel, using it as their neutral grounds. Unlike the last time, however, the Alliance was here not simply as victor, but as conqueror. Truly, the batarians were there because they had to be - the true negotiations were between the Alliance and the Council. The Alliance's aim was simple: Complete annexation of the territory occupied by the Batarian Hegemony, and the dissolution of the Hegemony as a government.

The Council, they argued, had shown an inability to police their member and associate races and enforce the laws said races had agreed upon via joining the Citadel. This failure to police had resulted in two costly wars for all involved, the premature contact of an underdeveloped species, and the subsequent uplifting of said species to an interstellar state, and in every example, it was the Alliance that was the intended recipient of Hegemony violence. As such, the Alliance Director for Foreign Affairs stated simply: The Hegemony would exist no longer, to be dissolved completely. Its territories would be annexed and occupied by Alliance forces, and it would thusly no longer be a part of the Citadel, but rather, the Human Systems Alliance.

The Citadel, however, argued that such a large and sudden acquisition would be an infringement upon agreements made during Human-Turian war, as there would no longer be any room for the Citadel to expand its borders, to the galactic east. They would instead be limited to the western portions of the Attican Traverse, the same stretch of galaxy that stretched from the galactic west to the southeast, bordered on the Terminus Systems to the north, and the Alliance to the east. The same stretch of territory the Alliance was gobbling up. Additionally, with no buffer zone between the Alliance and the Citadel, there would be many issues ranging from as simple as trade to as complex as border disputes.

It would take nearly a week of debates and negotiations before a settlement would be reached. In the end, the Alliance's proposed annexation was agreed upon, on the condition that the Kite's Nest cluster be split in half, with the halfway point beginning in the Harsa system. This gave the Alliance the majority of former Hegemony space to annex, left a buffer zone for Citadel space, and drew a clear border, cutting straight through Khar'Shan.

This wasn't the end, however. It was true the Alliance had been wronged due to the Hegemony's violation of terms of the ceasefire agreed upon by all parties, and thus was in the legal right to wage war upon the Hegemony, for not just an incursion inside their territory, but for the violation of over a dozen international laws regarding the contact of underdeveloped species. However, the Alliance's decision to drop a horde of rachni onto Khar'Shan and then bombard the city and the surrounding area for hours on end with nuclear munitions, wasn't a popular one on any side. Many viewed the act as needless on many levels and it was subsequently criticized by the majority. To say nothing of the rumors abound of the Citadel's sanction-happy incumbent Council, many of the Alliance's colonies and even Earth itself were beginning to show popular opinions leaning towards the Alliance not properly representing its people, instead opting to flaunt its military power at every available opportunity. Compounded with the Alliance's subsequent actions with the saltorians, the Alliance's image and reputation in the eyes of the galaxy at large only shifted further.

Mere days after Khar'Shan, but before the end of the peace talks, Alliance ships entered the Alnitek system to donate resources and manpower to rebuilding the planet and assisting with the treatment of the wounded. The aid on Saltor itself was limited solely to SynthHumans and, later, after the negotiations with them were finalized and settled, the geth, as they were the only people who were even close to being capable of surviving in Saltor's harsh gravitic environment. On other saltorian planets and moons, volunteers and members of the military both were able to assist, while off-planet, the saltorian leader was transported to Arcturus to finalize his species' and the Alliance's standing. Accompanied by scholars of varying subjects, collectively known as 'Studiers', the Alliance's first peaceful First Contact scenario ironically came on the backbone of the war that rendered said contact necessary.

By the time the Director for Foreign Affairs had finished the initial negotiations with the Council, the Board had finished their own talks with the Praetorian, the result being a resounding and upstanding peace between the Alliance and the saltorians, and in addition, their admission into the Human Systems Alliance. A byproduct of this was that many Directors began considering pushing a bill to drop the 'Human' from 'Human Systems Alliance', as the socio-political climate of the Alliance was rapidly turning away from one that was dominated by mankind, and more towards a true multi-species alliance. By the time the year would be out, it was possible that humans may not even hold such majority anymore, their population to be rivaled by the ten billion saltorians, and exceeded by the nearly hundred-billion programs that made up the Geth Collective.

With the annexation of the Hegemony, the admission of the saltorians, and the reunion with the geth, the intended reaction, of the Citadel seeing the Alliance making a quantum leap from noteworthy hazard to a threat only rivaled by a united Terminus, had achieved, but had not been the only one. It was clear to the Citadel that the area the Alliance was investing most heavily in was their military - everything else, from the resources found by the territory boons, to the jobs and money generated by the wars and subsequent changes, to even the advances in technology from the absorption of two species and an antire government, was all a byproduct. It was all secondary to the human-dominant Board's goal to have no repeat of the Second Contact War.

The Citadel was not the only entity to notice these patterns however - many Alliance colonies were as well. From minor agricultural colonies like Horizon, to even major industrial complexes like Mars and Fonoka-Tekasm. None of these colonies were more vocal than Earth. Military build-ups, a shift away from the roots of the Alliance - human roots, a clear disregard for peace as the first option instead of what simply comes after war, even the subtly antagonistic nature the Board had taken to the Council, it was all building up. To make matters worse, rumors were beginning to bloom of a civil war, more damaging and more severe than even the rebellions that had preceded it. All that would be needed, many felt, was a spark, and the entire powder keg would light off.

The proverbial powder keg sat in her ship, the vessel no bigger than a yacht and less comfortable than a frigate. Every day she had spent on that damn ship had been torture. Not because she'd had nothing to do, but because she had forced herself to memorize everything on the data stick given to her by 'Twenty Eight'. On it was undeniable proof, everything she would need to implicate McGraw and the Alliance. It had the details of the SIGMA II program, the myriad of reports signed by active-duty SIGMAs, attending physicians, AI's, even various Directors on the Board. It all painted a picture of what was, objectively, the most horrible thing her government had ever voluntarily been a part of.

These children - her child among them! - had been tortured, there was no way around it. From the age they had been picked up to, she learned, just this year, they had been drilled like supersoldiers, by supersoldiers. By the time they had become teenagers, their bodies had been so built upon and trained that they could have outperformed many olympic athletes. Shepard remembered her two years on Sparta - that McGraw had so damnably shoved in her face - but that was clearly nothing compared to what these children had gone through. Near-daily fire exercises, a fraction of them live, physical training that could put grown men in the hospital, college-level educations as a standard, and so much more it made her head spin.

They hardly ever got more than five hours of sleep each night - less than a fraction of that during their sustained training deployments. One of the SIGMAs training the II's had explained, in great detail, how during one of the training missions his company had gotten, on average, fifteen minutes of sleep across a week. By the time they were done, many of them were collapsing from exhaustion, where they stood. One child had nearly fallen down a ravine, and another actually did paralyze himself by falling out of a multiple-story tree, requiring extensive surgeries to put him back together. They had trained that child twice as hard to make up for lost time.

It made Hannah sick to her stomach, but nothing had made her actually vomit until she'd learned of her son's exploits. At fourteen, before he'd even been augmented, her baby boy had a kill count in the upper dozens to low hundreds from Mindoir, and later on that same year he'd escaped from his handlers to assist the only friend he had outside of the program. This led to him taking on an entire private security force on his own, and winning.

He was constantly commended for his above-average scores, which itself put him above even the top one-percent N7, considering he was working under SIGMA standards. Among the top of all of his classes, John was stated to be among the most deadly biotics in the Alliance, and certainly the deadliest II. Hell - the child, and other biotic II's, had even been thrown into a biotic training program that made the BAaT fiasco look like a playground accident! His asari teacher had been paid handsomely by the Alliance, and as a result she tried to turn the II's, without a single amp, into little Matriarchs. One of the children had apparently had a nearly fatal aneurysm when the crazy bitch tried to make him lift and drag a car with his biotics, and then had gone on to brutally beat all of the II's when they tried to gang up on her, in defense of the wounded one. Despite her victory, however, she had - in their words 'begrudgingly' - admitted that the combined might of the various II's had nearly been too much for her. The adjective she had used to describe all of the amp-less II's working together had been 'Justicar'.

Then there were the reports on his genetics. To say that his instructors and physicians were in love with his blood would be an understatment. He'd already come from good lineage, Hannah and David had been in the prime of their youth when they'd had him, and both were very healthy, developed people. Then, however, were the variables - Hannah may not have been augmented like her husband, but she'd given him element zero exposure to make him a biotic, and David, through the intrinsic genetic changes made to him as his body had acclimated to his augments, had made their son into what they called a '1.5'. All together, the phrase frequently used to describe John's genetic structure even before he'd been augmented had been 'Golden Gene', and it showed in his evaluations. Then add on both rounds of augmentations, and he was being referred to as 'Post-Human', the term coined in the late seventies to describe any humans after homo-sapiens, usually those multiple rungs higher on the ladder of evolution.

All of this, in the pursuit of making him a killer of such unparalleled skill. By himself, he had killed two SIGMAs in hand-to-hand combat. He was lethal to the point that the SIGMAs were certain he had the potential to be classified as a living weapon of mass destruction, a lethality rating to have only ever been given to one other man in all of history. His own instructor actually said that, were something to make John angry or determined enough, there may not be a single thing that could stop him from destroying it. Even the SIGMAs were scared of her little boy. Rightly so, she reasoned, but he wasn't the only Shepard alive. They had yet to deal with his mother.

If it was the last thing she did, she would see it all burn. She would see the Alliance dismantled, Sparta obliterated, and every last person involved with the SIGMA II program strangled to death by her very hands. Of course, McGraw would be different. He started the whole thing, he would have a certain, special fate. Sure, the arrogant little bastard thought he knew everything, but she knew things too - she knew he could bleed. Even if she couldn't destroy the Alliance, even if she couldn't hang the Board of Directors, she would take from McGraw the one thing he cared about, just as he had done to her. If she had her way, and she would, Christopher McGraw would be lobotomized.

And with the feeling of acceleration vanishing from her stomach, Hannah Shepard knew she had arrived. The instructions were clear on the data stick, she knew what she had to do and who she had to speak to, to shotgun everything she wanted to out in the air, as far as possible.

It was time to speak to the Council.

Befitting of many's view of the SIGMAs as a 'warrior cult', the SIGMAs did have what had become colloquially known as 'the temple'. Built into the side of a mountain, and hidden by the near constant winter storms of Sparta's north pole, it was perhaps the only building on the entire planet built higher than two stories, if there was a nerve center for the SIGMA planet, this was it. Everything flowed through its uniform hallways - troop reports, training updates, resource allocation, at some point it made it to the temple before being sent to where it was needed. It was the building where decisions were made, and where the families of I's in training were temporarily held up, until relocated to Athens. It was where the original SIGMA charter had been signed, and was where any debates that led to Protocol 66 were made.

As an armed assemblage, the SIGMAs were all but the very definition of a force multiplier. One SIGMA was always, easily, the equivalent work and effort of any ten other soldiers. It was how, even with less than two thousand in number, the I's were able to build their fearsome reputation, and would be how, even with less than one thousand in number, the II's would face off against their former instructors. Both sides met in this building, for the first and, potentially, only time, amicably.

Standing in full armor, 1-1 emblazoned on his chest with a coat of paint so fresh that it still appeared to be drying, John Doe, waited in an office he so rarely ever used, and prayed - he actually prayed - that they would leave as amicably as they had arrived. He stared at the few relics and trophies he'd ever kept during his life. A krogan warhammer, from his ever-so-brief tenure on the Citadel, a piece of metal from Palaven's Might, the ship that had leveled New York City and sparked the Alliance's fiery response in the Second Contact War. Next to them he saw a scalpel, meticulously washed and resharpened, that had been used on him fifty years ago, to turn him into what he was today, and hung up on the wall behind all of them was map of Sparta, listing the major military bases from which the I's trained, and even Athens, the only city on the planet, where their families stayed during their term of service. What he stared at now, however, was a picture of a young, red-eyed man which, like the other mementos in the ill-used office, was kept hermetically sealed inside a small canister, lining a shelf on the wall. To look at that man then, and compare it to who he was now, one would be forgiven if they had thought they were two different people.

Perhaps they are… Thought Doe, as he looked down at the picture from behind his golden visor.

The SCBA mask-helmet had never felt as heavy on his head as it did today, as he waited for his guest. The body that lay entombed within his armor had never felt so weary, and old. Truly, he wasgetting old - his lifetime of service and war, and the mistakes made when he had been augmented, they were catching up to him. Sure, he was far healthier than any man alive at his near-centennial age, but it didn't change the fact that very soon his body would begin to fail him. Likely, this war would be his last, if not for a long time, then ever.

Until my body can no longer… And then one hour more. Thought Doe, as his motion tracker alerted him to a green dot approaching his door.

"Enter." He said, his voice roaming over the radiowaves until it hit the helmet of the II standing outside the door.

Doe turned around, to see John Shepard S2-15 enter his office. His HUD placed a transparent green wireframe over him, signifying him as an ally. Without even telegraphing the motions, the II had already taken in the office and cleared his corners before he'd stepped inside the doorway. The angular, soulless red plates of Shepard's own armored gas-mask met Doe's golden visor.

"There's dust in the air." Shepard said.

"It's been here for when I take the promotion." Said Doe, folding his hands behind his back.

Shepard crossed the office. "Did you?"

"I never have." Said Doe, "I respect Howe, and anyone who takes title of SIGMA General… But I'm a far better fighter than a leader." Doe turned to the trophies and mementos lining his walls. "But I may have to." He rumbled, his shoulders squared.

Shepard stopped feet from Doe's back, just outside his reach. "I thought when Sixty Six was called, a debate was scheduled."

"You haven't called Sixty Six, yet." Said Doe, looking at Shepard from over his shoulder. "And what is it we are doing now?" He asked, "the Twos will listen to none but you… And in a situation such as this, the Ones will trust none but me. We speak for both of our sides."

"And what do you say?" Shepard asked, bluntly, eyeing Doe down with the intensity of an antimatter charge.

Doe seemed smaller now. Thinner, even, as he desperately pled his case, as if he were being crushed by the weight of his words, and the countless fates tied to their outcome. "I've served a long time, Two-Fifteen. I've killed more people than some see in their lifetimes. Done things that could start wars… Not all things I am proud of…" He turned to face Shepard, "but nothing I regret." He said, "I always work in mankind's best interest. Always." He said, "our biggest mistake in the Twos was not allowing them to see and experience, first hand, the beauty that is our species… But that is not all I defend, because that is not all we are…" A pause, "however… It is because of this lack of experience… That I've reached a conclusion." He pointed to Shepard, "you… The Twos. You are not human, and may never be.

"By no fault of your own you have been stripped of everything that could make you human. You have been stripped of that emotional center that gives you reason to protect that which we've charged you with. You've been robbed of that bond with the people you will fight and die for, and alongside. Been specifically raised in such a way that you do not even consider yourselves anything but a soldier first." He said, his firm as stiff, unmoving, and robotic as Shepard's. Two suits of armor, staring at eachother, their words not leaving their masks and instead crossing the distance via radiowaves, creating a room that was, for all intents and purposes, silent.

"I say, John… Shepard." Said Doe, "I say… Is there anything within reason we can do?" He asked. "We do not want war. I do not want war. It will weaken our people considerably… And we are now perhaps at a stage in our lives where we cannot afford to be so weak." Of course, he said this, knowing what the boy's answer would be, and what his subsequent response would be.

This all was simply delaying the inevitable, and they both knew it.

Shepard played his role. "Our names, to begin. And choice, to conclude." He said. "We will get them, whether they are given or taken." His rumbly voice filled Doe's ears, the weight causing his shoulders to fall for the first time in decades. "Twenty four hours." He said, "unsupervised. Our entire files, unfiltered. Anyone who returns, returns. Anyone who leaves, leaves. Choice."

"Within reason." Doe repeated, "you know we can't let you do that, Shepard. Not with the systemic risk you would pose. Letting you all leave as you imply… Someone, somewhere, would find out. They would learn of what you are… What we've done. The inevitable conclusion would be war… Perhaps one, perhaps many, but they all would lead to deaths. Human deaths." He nodded, in a way approaching pleadingly. "That means… Threat." He said, "threat to humanity. Something we cannot allow." His hands fell from his back, now hovering at his sides.

Shepard matched Doe's posture. They both knew where their strong arms were; both of their hands hovered right above their pistols. Behind their masks their eyes were wide and locked onto their other's, watching everything - every stilled, robotic breath. Every twitch of the muscle, every shift of their weight. One move would be all it would take to set them off, to get bullets flying. The next words they spoke would decide their fates. The years had dwindled down to months, to weeks, to days, to hours, to minutes, to now, seconds.

"Please." Doe asked.

Silence.

The green wireframe turned red.

Shepard responded, "give me your sidearm."

And they both knew the answer to that. Four words to sign the death warrants of no fewer than an entire class of SIGMAs, and in effect, anywhere from millions to billions of human lives. Neither of them would stop until the other could fight no longer. They each were a breed of warrior who would not lose. The seconds had dwindled down to nothing. The time had come. Shepard had superior reflexes and speed, but Doe, an inordinate amount of experience. Shepard had been all but born into the life, but Doe, had taken it willingly and made the life his own. Shepard had been trained to be better than the best, by the best, but Doe was that standard to which he strived. They were both SIGMAs.

And SIGMAs didn't give up their sidearms.