CHAPTER ONE

Fourth Horseman

The moment Sam exited the Admiral's quarters, he took off running towards the brig. The magnificent and unbelievable story that Kara had woven had only brought up more questions than he had to begin with. The way that she spoke worried him, to say the least. It made his stomach churn. This woman in Kara's body didn't seem like his wife.

His Kara was loud, brash, rude, and completely like this stranger. This Kara held herself with a grace and poise that made her entire ridiculous story... believable.

The guards opened the door to the brig and it seemed to move remarkably slow to Sam's perception. He couldn't get inside fast enough. The questions were brimming in his mind and they needed to come out as quickly as possible.

The moment that the brig door closed again, Sam found himself watching this woman in Kara's body pace back and forth inside the cage, her face furrowed in frustration and anger. She payed no mind to Sam's entrance, but she might have been so wrapped up in her thoughts that she didn't notice.

"Kara?"

She stopped her pacing and whipped around to face him, almost faster than Sam could track, ready for a fight at a moments notice. She relaxed when she saw that it was him, her muscles loosening, and her blue eyes loosing their cold steel look. Kara was silent for a moment before giving him a grim smile in greeting. "Sam."

They stood there in silence for what seemed like an eternity.

Sam was the first to break the uncomfortable silence. "What happened Kara? You aren't acting like yourself. I want my wife back!"

Lips pursing, Kara looked Sam directly in the eyes. "Sam... I'm not Kara Thrace-"

"What do you mean?" Sam cut her off, "You were born on Caprica, and your mother was a complete bitch! You are my wife!"

Shaking her head, Kara turned her back on Sam. "I remember growing up in Caprica City, I remember Socrata Thrace, I remember marrying you... but I'm not Kara Thrace. I have all of her memories, but I am not her!"

"You see," Sam wanted to shout, to scream, to rage against the gods, but he tried his hardest to keep his voice even. Kara Thrace didn't respond well to confrontations, and something told Sam that this woman would take it even worse. "I don't understand that. You are her. You have her face, you have her face, you have her body! How are you not her?"

Turning back to face him, Kara closed her eyes. "The one thing you need to get through your head right now, Sam, is that I am not your wife. I might look like her, I might be her all the way down to my DNA. BUT, I am Commander Kara Shepard. I might have Thrace's memories, but that is all they are. Just memories. They hold no importance to me, like I'm watching someone else's life. And I have to say, Thrace's life sucks. I can see in her memories that she lived constantly on the edge, pushing everyone who could help her away."

Kara started to pace again in the cage, like an untamed animal, itching to be released. "I have faced things that you cannot possibly imagine, I've already saved the galaxy twice! The only way that I was able to achieve everything that I have is because of the team at my back. They are my family, and I left them in the middle of a war so horrible that entire arms of the galaxy have been wiped clean! I sacrificed myself for my fiance! I didn't want her to die at the hands of the Reapers, but instead of heaven, or nirvana, or whatever the hell kind of after life that I could have hoped for I find myself on this backasswards fleet being pursued by machines that I could rip apart with my hands, wondering if everything that I have accomplished is for nothing."

Kara grew cold, and Sam found himself backing up in recognition of an absolutely deadly predator. "I will do absolutely anything that I need to to get back to the people I left behind. I will rip this fleet apart if I need to, because in the grand scheme of things, 30,000 people is nothing compared to the lives that still stand to be lost if the Reapers haven't been stopped. I destroyed a solar system with 300,000 lives to stall them for six months, and I won't hesitate to do it again. I am a Citadel Spectre, and the galaxy is at war. It is my job to make sure that the races I have sworn to protect survive. Get that through your fucking head right now, or get the hell away from me."

With that, Kara dropped to the floor and started to do push-ups.

Sam couldn't get out of the brig fast enough. The woman inside of the cage was not Kara Thrace. She wasn't his wife.

#

It was the next day that Shepard found herself escorted from the brig back to the Admiral's quarters. This time only the President, Doc Cottle, and the Admiral himself were waiting for her. The moment that the door was fully shut, she found the interrogation began immediately.

"How can we be sure that you're telling the truth?" President Roslin sat forward, her eyes narrowed. "All we have is your word and some video that could be faked."

Shepard stared at Roslin, once again wondering why she didn't just kill all politicians that she came across. It would have solved so many problems in her past. "I don't care if you believe me or not. The galaxy is bigger than your little problems, and I need to get back to it. If you can't deal with it, please let me know now."

The three colonials were silent. Shepard nodded in satisfaction.

"What happened to you?" Cottle was the next to speak. "I'm looking at your X-Ray's, and you should be dead from what I'm seeing. You've been rebuilt from the ground up, and I don't know how you're standing there alive!"

"I shouldn't be," Shepard glanced away. "Alive, I mean."

She took a breath before continuing. "Six months after Sovereigns defeat the Council had me hunting down Geth when my ship was attacked by what we later learned to be a race known as the Collectors. I died, and I was dead for the next two years."

"Then how are you standing here now?" Roslin questioned suspiciously.

"A pro-human organization spent those two years, and four billion credits rebuilding me." Shepard ignored the looks that the three gave her. "They brought me back from the dead so that I could fight back the Collectors. They had spent the two years I had been dead harvesting millions of humans from outside Council space."

"When the Collectors destroyed my ship," Shepard had to fight to keep herself from falling back into the memories. "I was spaced and sucked into the gravity well of a nearby planet. It was only because of my armor that there was even enough remains to piece me back together, charred as they were."

Roslin, Cottle, and Adama sat, digesting the information that the civilization that this woman in Kara Thrace's body came from had the ability to bring people back from the dead. The power and technology that must have been required boggled all of their minds.

"Do you really know the way back to Earth?" Adama asked the question that was on all their minds.

Kara was silent for several moments. "I can get you to Earth, but I'm not sure that you would want to go there. It is the center of the Reaper invasion at the moment."

"Take us to Earth," Roslin didn't seem to hear Shepard, or understand the threat that Reapers actually represented.

In her head, Kara debated on whether or not she cared enough about the Colonial Fleet to send them into the battleground that was Earth and her solar system. She decided that no, she didn't care. She had watched entire worlds, far more populated than all twelve colonies of Kobol, burn, their populations harvested and turned into a paste to construct new Reapers. These 30,000 survivors were nothing, expendable. Getting back to Earth to finish the fight was all that mattered.

"Get me star charts. I can plot the course." She knew that there would be people who condemned her for this far down the line, but it didn't matter. Shepard would be happy if there were people to condemn her in the future at all. Everything would be worth it if there were.

#

Actually plotting the course to Earth took a little under a week. It was only due to the fact that she had returned with the omni-tool that Shepard was able to do it at all. The little machine was a life-saver, and she doubted that even now the Colonials knew how powerful it really was. The journey itself would be approximately one-hundred jumps from their present location to get to the Sol System, and both Admiral Adama and President Roslin had decided that it would be a wise idea to send a scout first to make sure that that it wasn't just another wild goose chase.

It was only thanks to Shepard's amazing talent as a speaker that she was able to talk both leaders of the Fleet to allow her to go with the ship they were using as a scout.

The Demetrius was not a proud ship by any sort of means. A sewage processing ship, it was the only non-essential, FTL capable ship in the entire Fleet.

Kara found herself part of the crew with six other me and women from Galactica. The stench was horrible, and she could only imagine that it was going to get worse as time passed. Getting to Earth should only take around two weeks, barring any catastrophic failures. It was planned to meet the Fleet at a different location in a month and a half's time.

The moment they first jumped, Kara was already praying that she wasn't messing everything up horribly.

#

AUTHOR'S NOTE: As a note, I am writing Mass Effect technology from the viewpoint that they are advanced enough to make Artificial Intelligence, to create ships and weapons that would boggle us today, and to have created a burgeoning empire in the stars. I am playing up some of their technology and adding things that they lacked in the game, simply because it makes sense to me that they would have them.

Also, I absolutely wish that the Mass Effect 3 extended cut had simply been released with the game to begin with.