CHAPTER TWO
"Thirty seconds 'til takeoff, guys! Hang on to your hats!" rang the casual voice of Trez over the passenger ship's intercom. Jack yawned and stared outside at the metallic shine of the stars. Wait a second, he thought, stars aren't metallic! Upon closer inspection, Jack discovered that right outside the station, there was a humongous grey starship, roughly shaped like a squid, that Jack had never seen before. His curiosity got the best of him and he snapped a photo with his omni-tool. He then began browsing the extranet for any matches to that design. Jack's face turned stark white as the results came up. The first suggestion wasn't an extranet article at all. It was one of his private extranet messages. It was an emergency Alliance news broadcast to all military personnel, telling everyone to flee the Sol system due to machine invaders called Reapers. And here I thought I'd never meet a machine I didn't like. Why haven't I heard of these before? he wondered in the back of his mind. The disturbing part was, included in the article was a picture of a Reaper destroying Vancouver, and the grey metallic shine of the Reaper matched almost exactly with the starship outside.
Jack hastily strode to the cockpit to confirm his suspicions. He rudely shoved his omni-tool's screen, with the emergency broadcast plastered onto it, into Trez's face. Jack thrust his finger towards the mysterious ship, which was clearly visible through the cockpit view screen.
"Do these ships look alike to you?" Jack urgently demanded, sounding a lot more brave than he felt. "Because if they do, we're screwed. Please, please tell me they don't look alike."
Trez's face flushed strawberry red, glistening with beads of sweat. His smile still hadn't faltered, but he obviously wasn't expecting this delay. He hesitantly opened his mouth to answer, but was cut short by a horrific metallic growl echoing from outside the ship. It rattled Jack to his core, and it was emanating from the grey starship. Unexpectedly, a shining red beam of light shot from the ship and blasted a gaping hole in Arcturus Station, creating a vacuum of air that would have no doubt left Jack dead if he'd been aboard still. Luckily, it hit the side away from the docking bay in which the Starliner was docked. Unfortunately, the thousands who died nearly instantly due to the absolute lack of air were most definitely not in the docking bay. There was no longer any question about it. Arcturus Station was under Reaper attack.
A blinding blast suddenly illuminated the star-studded horizon and Jack flinched, expecting another laser blast, but it was actually the nearby mass relay, which connected to the Charon Relay in the Sol system, being used. A modest-sized Systems Alliance frigate was thrust into the Arcturus Stream, and it wasted no time in ejecting no more than four escape pods. One, however, was grazed by another Reaper laser, which shredded Arcturus Station even worse. The pod spiraled out of control and briefly, Jack could see the panicked faces of the troops within. But only one managed to truly catch his eye: a young man in an N7 marine uniform with ragged copper hair and two different-colored, cloudy eyes: one blue, one violet. There was no doubt about it; aboard the plummeting escape pod was his long-lost cousin Kyle Martel.
