Disclaimer: I do not own or make any claim to the Mass Effect universe or the characters contained in this story, all of which are owned by BioWare and Electronic Arts.

Redemption: Come What May

Chapter 2: Making a Name

[AN: So, I got distracted.

Valkyria Chronicles was on sale on Steam and I decided to try it out. I was rather surprised with how much I enjoyed it, even if it did have a negative effect on my writing speed.

Regardless, here's the next chapter, I hope you all enjoy it. /AN]

Systems Alliance Carrier SSV Einstein (February 3, 2170, 0900 Hours, Ship Time):

John was fascinated by the Einstein, he'd never been on such a huge ship! He'd seen Dreadnoughts and Carriers before when they docked at Arcturus, but he'd never been inside one and now he was going to live on one for the next 18 months!

His mum was one of two XO's onboard, (a ship this massive required an enormous crew to run it, which required two Executive Officers plus the Commanding Officer to manage all of the shifts effectively) and his dad would be joining the Marine platoon onboard in a couple of weeks; he couldn't wait to have his whole family around for a change.

At the moment, he and the dozen other kids whose families were also stationed on the kilometre long ship were being given a tour; being told where they could go and where they couldn't, a rundown of evacuation procedures, shift changes, how to get things from the mess halls and what was expected from their studies. Okay, so overall it wasn't the most fascinating tour, but John didn't care, he was going to be living on an active warship! A Carrier! For the next 18 months! It was so cool!

After the rather long tour, he returned to his mom's cabin to make sure all his stuff was ready for school tomorrow. All things considered, it wasn't really school like he remembered from Arcturus, there were way fewer kids and they didn't have a proper teacher, not like Miss Hartmeyer, but they still got to learn stuff and they even got to choose what they studied some times; the teacher had called it 'self-guided learning'.

Flicking on his datapad, John opened up the book they were going to be studying in history in a couple of weeks. Herodotus' The Histories was a fascinating book, if a bit hard to understand at points, but once you stripped away the mysticism and less relevant tangents you had a very solid history of the Greco-Persian Wars; though, if he were honest, he kinda wished there was more detail about the military strategy used in the battles.

Settling into his small bed, he quickly engrossed himself with his reading.

Systems Alliance Carrier SSV Einstein (March 12, 2170, 1420 Hours, Ship Time):

A month later and John had mostly settled into life on-board a starship. He still missed the parks and nature domes that featured so strongly on Arcturus, but the extra freedom and the chance to be around his family so much more than made up for it. And the other kids were really cool too; they were just as interested in the ship as he was.

He was one of the youngest on board at the moment, being just shy of twelve, but all except for the oldest kids were taught by the same teacher, in the same room, so he got to know the eight other kids around his age quite well.

But as interesting as his schooling was, what John really loved about life on the Einstein was the time he could spend exploring the ship. Even five weeks after coming aboard, he still hadn't seen half of the decks.

He loved having the opportunity to talk to some of the crew at mealtimes and the class trip to the Fighter hangars was pretty much the highlight of the last month.

Watching the Marines train with his Dad was awesome and he'd even let him come down and see the armoury with him once, showing him how they looked after their gear; he even promised to take him down to the shooting range (just to watch, mind you) sometime after his upcoming birthday.

But his favourite place to visit were the engineering decks, all five of them. The air felt like it was alive on those decks, with the reactors and the enormous Mass Effect Core always running. There was something mesmerising about the core, about the way it pulsed and hummed, and John always liked to imagine he could feel the dark energy warping around it, no matter how stupid it sounded.

It wasn't long before he started to want to know more about all of the technology; what it did, why it was important, how did it work? His dad laughed and said he must have gotten it from his mum, but he found a couple of the engineers who were happy to give him a run-down of the systems. Soon, John became a regular visitor to Engineering, always curious. He did his best to stay out of the way (not that he always succeeded), but the engineering crew didn't mind as a whole and some of them loved seeing as kid who was almost as interested in engines and power systems as they were.

Systems Alliance Carrier SSV Einstein (September 24, 2170, 1945 Hours, Ship Time):

Classes were on break at the moment, so John had organised with a couple of his friends to play one of their favourite games. It was a real-time strategy game based on World War Two back on Earth during the mid-20th Century and it was one of a handful of games provided on-board for the crew to enjoy when they weren't on duty. For this particular game, the map was set in coastal France, near a small village. The recreation of the cool, wet climate was fantastic, with lush foliage dotting the field of battle and low, grey clouds laden with rain slowly marching across the sky.

He had challenged three of his friends, Hayden, Natalie and Kwan, to a 3v1 game. Hayden and Kwan were both pretty good players in their own right but Natalie was the real challenge. She was practically a chess prodigy and she was unbeaten within their class and even amongst the adults who had challenged her. She could read her opponents brilliantly and she knew every possible move set, but that only added to the fact that she was a really good at thinking up strategies and executing them.

John had never really liked chess, it was too static for him. He could still play reasonably well, but he didn't like how limited his options were with moves or units. He much preferred the dynamic strategy games, like the one he was playing now. He loved the way he could manipulate the battlefield and his units own strengths and weaknesses compared to his opponent's.

They were partway through the game currently and he was in his element. He had wiped Hayden out twenty minutes into the (so far) two hour game, by eliminating his Command/Control units with an APC assisted Commando strike that blitzed passed his sporadic defences, and he was just now polishing off the last of Kwan's units and infrastructure after dissecting his attempt at a flanking manoeuvre and then driving a tank column up into his base.

All that he had to do now was eliminate Natalie.

Natalie had expected her team mates would fall, John was really good at this game after all, so she had built up her base defences heavily and focused on providing indirect fire-support for Hayden and Kwan's assaults, while preparing her units for a counter attack when John made his move.

Natalie had been planning on launching a strike against his base when he made his first major offensive, but since his first attack on Hayden's base had consisted of no more than two APC's filled with infantry, she didn't risk an attack when most of his units were still defending his base. When he moved his defenders up to support his mechanised assault on Kwan's position, she seized the chance and rushed her own tank formation up to his base, with a trio of fighter-bombers on station, ready to level any particularly dangerous defences he might have set up.

Imagine her surprise when her units swept into his base to find no resistance and little in the way of infrastructure.

John smiled to himself as he watched Natalie send her units right into his carefully prepared trap. Little did she know, he had left recon units along the roads to his base and he was glad to see that she had acted exactly as he had expected. Even now she was spreading her units out through his empty base, looking for any sign of his location. The other thing she didn't know, was that his infantry units that had been defending the base hadn't left to support the tank column (he had other units for that), they had left to lure her in.

Oh, and to clear the blast zone…

What none of his friends had anticipated was that John had abandoned his starting base and rigged it with explosives as he set up his actual base in a far more remote and defensible spot. He had arranged most of his units in a standard defensive pattern around the original base and that really should have been a dead give-away that he was up to something, John didn't really do 'standard' with this sort of thing, but they never picked up on his strangely normal tactics.

Natalie yelped in shock as she watched 90% of her combat units disappear in a grand sequence of explosions that ripped through John's false base, taking her units with them. She then stared in horror as an infantry force twice the size of her remaining battered and disoriented troops opened fire from concealed positions at her rear and put down the last of her soldiers. Her entire force that she had spent two hours building up and preparing for this assault had just been eradicated in under ten seconds.

Reflexively, she ordered her aircraft to carpet bomb the forest where John's ambush units had been, only to see all three of them intercepted by fighters and ground based mobile AA before they had gotten more than a third of the way across the map. With a sudden jolt she realised her entire base was all but undefended; her only consolation being that John's main force was still over by the remains of Kwan's base and would take a while to finish mopping up there and reach her position.

She waited for ten minutes, requisitioning more units with what little time she had left, but the expected attack didn't come.

After fifteen minutes, she had some semblance of an offensive force again to complement her now notable defences but still the attack hadn't come.

"What are you waiting for Johnny, scared a girl will beat you?" She goaded via the in-game chat, hoping to provoke some sort of action from him. Annoyingly, she didn't get the response she expected.

"Nope, I'm waiting…" She starred impatiently at the screen, waiting for the next part to come through and wondering exactly what he was up to, only to jump in fright as the crack of thunder roared through her headset and heavy rain sheeted down across the battlefield.

"… for that. Nice try, Nat."

She gasped in realisation as his plan finally unfurled. With the rain and lightning obscuring her unit's targeting, her carefully positioned ranged fire would be useless; his units could practically walk in under the cover of the rain and be right on top of her defences. Sure enough, artillery shells began to rain down on her base, sending her units into chaos and blowing apart numerous machine gun positions and pill boxes. Infantry, supported by tank fire rapidly moved towards her defensive perimeter. Her remaining units put up a valiant fight, inflicting heavy casualties, but that small hope was lost when the deep thumping of plane rotors became audible over the booming thunder. Suddenly the sky above her base was filled with parachutes as paratroopers rained down inside her sprawling base's perimeter, precisely eliminating defensive position after defensive position and allowing the rest of his units to push forward unmolested.

The entire assault was over in less than five minutes.

"Good game guys. Nat, your defences were way better than I expected, I wasn't sure I could actually get through them. See you tomorrow?"

She was still too surprised to reply, he had planned everything around how he figured she would react and then let the variability of battlefield sweep him to victory. She hadn't even thought of checking the weather, but he had built his plan around a thunderstorm!

"Nat?"

She had thought this would be a pretty easy game, three on one and all that. Plus he had never managed to beat her at chess.

"Hello? Nat, you okay?"

'I'll have to ask him how he did it at some point, maybe tomorrow,' she thought to herself and she was about to ask exactly that when she saw the string of somewhat worried questions directed at her.

"Oh, yeah I'm fine, sorry, didn't see your messages. Sure, cya tomorrow."

With that, she hastily logged out and climbed into bed, thinking about the game she had just played.

Little did John know, it wasn't only Natalie who had been impressed by his game. He didn't know that every game played on the ship's servers was recorded by the Alliance so it could be monitored. These kids were, after all, among the most likely to go into the military when they grew up, so having an idea of their capabilities at this early age was a huge bonus. And as one analyst settled in to watch another replay of the game, they couldn't help but think that it might have paid off in a big way this time.