(Revised edition, updated August 2017)
02: BABEL
JANE
2183
"What happened here?"
Lieutenant Alenko's voice carried across the unnatural hush of the dig site, eerily amplified by the walls of raw hewn rock and the newly excavated geometry of the Prothean ruin. Even at a whisper, his tone cut through the quiet, startling Shepard out of her own thoughts. The Lieutenant had a point. This was like no battleground she'd ever seen.
Shepard struggled to believe that things were already this quiet planetside. Where was the fight? Where were the Marines? Given the absolute chaos of the distress call from Eden Prime, she'd expected to rush into a hot zone. Instead, the entire landscape was silent as a tomb. The colossal bogey still hung in the air, "Like the sword of Damocles," Anderson had radioed, but it hadn't moved an inch since the ground party's arrival. Seeing the hulking black shadow of it looming above, waiting, watching… was no comfort at all.
Here at the Prothean dig site, Shepard's meager three-man strike team was surrounded on all sides by natural grassy hills and the researcher's abandoned access ramps. Fish in a barrel, in other words.
With her assault rifle at the ready, eyes up for trouble, Shepard took a few cautious steps onto the jet-black dais that stretched in unwelcoming quietude across the center of the site.
Ominous. No signs of the battle they had seen in the S.O.S. Even more unnerving, the ancient Prothean Beacon had similarly blinked out of existence. There was no sign of it here at the dig site, its last - and only - known location. According to Kryik, the Beacon was the size of a weapons locker and weighed hundreds of kilos. Any attempt to move it would require ample time and careful handling. The Beacon's timely, conspicuous absence made Shepard's gooseflesh prickle.
Moving slowly, resisting the urge to stare at that alien monster lurking in the clouds, Shepard slid her eyes along the two rectangular spires jutting up one side of the ruin. Tall and smooth, they pointed in perfect parallel towards the cold morning sky, toward the bogey. Unsympathetic, she thought. The fingers of a prophet.
She'd never seen Prothean tech up close, only read about it when necessary, stumbling across a few asari university photo galleries while searching the Extranet for stupid things like: where do Keepers come from? What little she'd seen of Prothean architecture had always seemed to possess a disarming simplicity. All smooth surfaces and monolithic lines. More like sculptures than buildings or pieces of technology, Prothean artifacts were uniformly imposing, with no visible interfaces. As if their true purpose was lurking beneath.
Now, with her boots leaving print marks on a fifty-thousand-year-old ruin, Shepard felt minuscule. Wholly overwhelmed, able to touch and smell the last traces of that ancient, inscrutable space-faring civilization. For reasons she couldn't name, a compulsion rooted in her chest and spread throughout every nerve, pulling her onward to the center of the dais. Standing there, trying to resist that call to action, she felt the way the ocean must feel when pulled by the moon. In the unearthly quiet, it almost seemed as though the smooth, glassy stones beneath her feet were calling out to her from the wrong side of a mirror, whispering with closely guarded breath in some invisible dark.
"Something's way off," Alenko said, somewhere at her nine. "It can't be a ghost town already. Where are all the bodies?"
The Lieutenant sounded far away, a distance measured in klicks, in light years. His observations drifted past Shepard's ears, embedded in a scrambled message from another star system. She stared at the flat black stones beneath her feet. Felt as if the ground were rushing up to meet her, opening up into her, intersecting with her limbs.
The inaudible whispers grew more excited. She turned her head to listen, just a little more…
A rough hand closed around her upper arm and rattled her mercilessly.
"Commander?" Kryik said.
Thoroughly shaken, Shepard looked up. The Spectre was glaring at her, but the look was not callous. He wore his concern as an angry mask. When she met his eyes and nodded stiffly, he released her arm, satisfied.
"Sorry," she said, shaking her head like a wet dog. "This place, it's… I don't know. Wrong."
"The situation is bad," he said, settling his shotgun back into his grip. "Keep your head on straight."
"It's not that," she whispered. "We're missing something. A big something. No bodies. No Beacon. That - thing – hanging out in the sky like some kind of watchful god. And now this hunk of stone is trying to get inside my head." She cracked her neck, flexed the fingers on her assault rifle. "I don't trust this at all."
"Commander." Alenko, still at her nine, nodded his head thoughtfully. She noticed he was keeping his distance from the ruin, had chosen to eye it suspiciously from the ground rather than risk approaching. "There should be dozens of fallen infantry down here. Quadruple that for civilians."
On their rapid descent planetside, Alenko had reminded Shepard and Kryik of at least two units assigned to various security details around the central colony hub. Thirty heavily armed soldiers in the 212 Weapons Platoon should have been dug in at the Prothean dig site, ready for anything with mortar squads, plus assault and machine gun divisions. The slightly smaller 232 Rifle Platoon was meant to be patrolling the spaceport in preparation for the Normandy's extraction of the Beacon. To the last man, they were unaccounted for. Nearly fifty Alliance Marines MIA without so much as a trail of blood.
"According to my map, there's a research camp just up this ridge, at the top of the ramps," Alenko said. "Maybe there are some survivors hiding out up there." He sounded as though he would have given anything to believe his own words.
Shepard nodded at the Lieutenant and then forced herself to step down from the dais, trying to shake off the feeling that they were being watched.
"Keep your guard up," warned Alenko. "This is a great place for an ambush."
The Spectre took point as the three of them carefully wound their way up the crude ramps that spiraled from the dig site. At the top of the rise, they were welcomed by a sight so gruesome that Shepard nearly gagged.
In the center of the research camp towered a mountain of empty armor. Eight feet high, stained with blood and attended by a cloud of local insects, it was a funeral mound of mismatched helmets, chest guards, and braces.
Staggered all around the hoard were rows of lofty metal spikes. They fanned out at random intervals, a razor-sharp jaw of dragon's teeth. Answering the terrible question posed by the pile of armor, each of those glinting spires had a naked body impaled on its point.
The Marines. The colonists. Hundreds of human lives reduced to an endless field of bodies, they hung in midair like terrible, motionless acrobats. Vivisected through the torso, their limbs dangling towards the ground, their blistered skin splitting over an internal web of alien tech, the victims scarcely looked human anymore.
Kryik didn't make a sound, but as Shepard stepped closer to his six, she saw that his mandibles were fluttering in alarm.
Then, to her nine, Alenko slipped and cried out: "Oh God, she's still alive!"
A patch of grass dug out under Shepard's boot as she spun to look, sending her skidding a few inches down the rise.
Two synthetic humanoid abominations were stripping the armor from a Marine, a young, dark-haired woman who was bleeding badly from the mouth and nose. At first, Shepard thought the soldier was in a dead faint, but then she twitched, cried out with a voice already hoarse with screaming, and swung wildly at one of her captors. When her fist met the inorganic chassis of one of the creatures, the bones of her hand shattered with a wet crunch that was audible from twenty feet away.
The Marine was half-conscious, stripped to little more than a torn under-suit, and only seconds from being impaled on a spike. She didn't seem to notice. Still fighting like hell.
Oorah.
Kryik raised his weapon, deadly intent written on his face. Clear as the chalk white of his familia notas: he meant to destroy these abominations at any cost.
"What are you doing?!" Shepard grabbed Kryik's wrist, throwing his shot harmlessly into the dirt. "Alenko! Fry them - NOW!"
Blink-fast, a disruptor arc flew from the Lieutenant's omni-tool. The smaller of the two creatures was instantly overloaded, blasted back in a shower of sparks and lightning. The other lost its shields with a glitchy howl, dropping the wounded Marine.
As the Marine fell to the ground with a limp thud, she gave in to her injuries for half a breath, spitting a ragged line of blood into the grass. A second later she was moving again. She lunged for the fallen synthetic and grabbed its weapon, rolling onto her back to discharge a barrage of energy slugs that dropped the second attacker almost instantly.
Clear to move, Shepard ran to the woman's side and fell to one knee, administering a sizable dose of medi-gel.
"Thanks for your help," the Marine said through a gritted jaw. "I didn't think I was going to make it."
Shepard was startled that the other soldier could talk at all - her mouth was so full of blood it frothed between her teeth. Luckily, most of her injuries seemed to be superficial bleeders, non-critical blows to the face and head. As the medi-gel began to knit her skin back together, she spoke with a bit more force. "Gunnery Chief Ashley Williams of the Two-Twelve. You the one in charge here, ma'am?"
Shepard nodded, once. "Commander Shepard, SSV Normandy."
Hearing Shepard's name, Williams stiffened and went white as a ghost.
Taken aback, Shepard studied the Marine more carefully. Looking for the usual bullshit, she found something far more confusing. Williams' dark hair, her compact stature, distinctive aquiline nose. The resemblance was uncanny. The Marine was a dead ringer for Lance Howard Williams: humanity's first interstellar pariah, the General who had surrendered Shanxi.
Shepard didn't remember General Williams personally. She'd been far too young. But his role in the improbable course of her life had always meant she paid extra attention to the photos of him that were shown in history class. There was one in particular that got a lot of rotation in Alliance circles: a grainy, posed image of Williams-as-traitor, stiffly shaking arms with Shepard's pari, both of their faces empty of real expression. It had always made her skin crawl.
The odds were astronomically out of proportion, but it wasn't the strangest thing that had happened today. Blinking away the shock, Shepard blazed on. Nothing had changed. "Are you badly wounded, Williams? How's your hand?"
"A few scrapes and bruises. Nothing serious. The others weren't so lucky."
Williams' right fist was turning purple, a lopsided mass of flesh that had already swollen to considerable size. That she had managed to fire the synthetic's rifle without passing out from pain was a matter of impressive fortitude, and she'd already earned Shepard's respect several times over. Even so, she wouldn't be holding another gun for a while, not unless she got back to Doctor Chakwas on the Normandy.
"Where's the rest of your squad?" Shepard asked, simultaneously pinging Chakwas to prep med-bay.
"We... we were swarmed," Williams said, still struggling to catch her breath. "They came from everywhere... I deployed the S.O.S." She swallowed. "I don't think... any of the others... I'm the only one left."
"This isn't your fault Williams. You've shown your grit today, Marine. Do you know where the Beacon was moved?"
"What? It's not at the dig?" Shepard shook her head. "Shit. Wasn't us. Those things... must have taken it." Williams gestured to the fallen synthetics with her swollen hand. "What in God's name?"
"Geth," said Kryik at Shepard's three, his sub-vocals thick with ice. He was staring at the rows of impaled human victims, the gears in his brain turning with visible force.
Williams laughed humorlessly at the turian Spectre, her eyes hardening. "Geth?" she said doubtfully, spitting more blood into the grass. "That's not what they looked like in Xeno-Anth 101. Nobody ever mentioned the spikes."
Alenko approached to give Williams a hand up, lifting her into a supporting carry, securing her uninjured arm behind his neck. As he steadied her, he wondered aloud: "The geth haven't been seen outside the Veil in nearly two-hundred years. Why are they here now? They've never been interested in human settlements before; why would they do any of this?"
Shepard had been wondering the same thing, but there would be time to answer those questions later.
"Alenko, the route back to the LZ should still be clear; get Williams back to Chakwas, ASAP." She addressed Williams directly, giving her a formal salute. "Marine, you've done a hell of a job surviving out here. Once Kryik and I have secured the beacon, I'll see to it that your fallen brothers and sisters get the burials they deserve. As soon as our CMO has you patched up, deliver a full report to Captain Anderson. We need to know everything you saw here today. Godspeed."
The black-brown cores of William's eyes warmed, but only just. She acknowledged Shepard's salute with one of her own, broken hand be damned.
"Aye-aye ma'am."
HANNAH
2157
Hannah never lost consciousness during the procedure, much to her great regret. The surgeon, Doctor Alvarez, required constant cognitive feedback to ensure he didn't "cross any important wires by accident." Hannah had been forced to lay quietly, holding perfectly still while a team of turian engineers and one frazzled human surgeon tinkered with her brain by way of her aural canals.
Finally, after several agonizing hours, Doctor Alvarez zipped Hannah's skull back together and switched on the implant. The activation seemed accidental. No courteous preamble. The curtained-off surgical suite, which was in actuality one small corner of an already overcrowded gymnasium, instantly became a resonance chamber.
In that instant, there were too many voices in Hannah's head. Too many sounds. All of them ricocheting to and fro, grossly amplified by the drugs. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to breathe the nausea away.
No use. Voices shaped like double-edged knives sawed jaggedly through her concentration. They garbled and flanged, speaking in tongues, a mess of technobabble.
"Full comprehension — time — unknown — unpredictable — the General—"
The voices were all wrong and inside out, a choir in each mouth. Words and comprehension swung past one another, two pendulums refusing to keep the same time. The pain in her head doubled up, the room swung around, and she heaved.
Somebody handed her a bucket and forcefully shifted her position, preventing her from choking on her own sick. Trying to ignore the smell at the bottom of that bucket, she focused on the nonstop alien utterances, keeping her eyes closed. Whatever sedative Doctor Alvarez administered, it had numbed the pain and kept her docile, but it had left her feeling groggy and dangerously stupid.
"Safe — hold the female — disorientation unavoidable — unknown — aural structure close to asari specs — human — unknown —"
Hannah tried to compress the disjointed string of phrases into a single line of tangible speech, but the effort split her brain clear down the middle. She clenched her fists around the bucket and tried again.
"Language parser needs more — calibrates to individual wave patterns — without more software tweaks — stabilize — tech fries monkey brains — keep the child — restrained."
She understood that.
Her eyes flew open, but the light of the gymnasium immediately blinded her. Undeterred, she lurched forward, galvanized with rage.
An enormous hand clapped down across her chest and shoved her back to the bed. Someone pushed her head to one side, forcing her nose-to-nose with one of the turians.
She recognized him as one of their field techs; his strange, raptor-like skull decorated by a smattering of orange markings. As he bent down to stare, his pupils narrowed at her with reptilian focus. He muttered something, his voice like a blast of sand to her face.
Too close, too much noise. Hannah closed her eyes, overwhelmed, and felt her pulse stuttering.
Inches from her temple, she felt the turian engineer's holo-tool hovering. She knew those holograms could turn deadly in an instant. Accordingly, she froze, her breath darting out in quick, painful bursts. The hologram sizzled with unfamiliar energy; every trigger hair on her skin stood upright in responding alarm.
Unseen, a newcomer clamped another huge, two-fingered hand around the back of Hannah's head. Armored fingers creaked against her skull, holding her motionless for the scan.
Furiously, she opened her eyes. As soon as she did, Doctor Alvarez appeared, a syringe flashing in his hand.
No. No more sedatives, no more restraints; she was compromised enough already. With every ounce of feral survival grit she had left, she bucked and kicked and spit, but the turians held her down.
"Fuck you!" The sound of her own voice swam out in front of her, splitting into a million pieces and reforming into a bubble of mud. In the confusion, she tasted blood - she'd bit an already swollen tongue.
Alvarez looked at the turians and waved his arms helplessly. A disembodied voice called out from some unseen corner of the surgical suite. "No more drugs. Keep her conscious."
Hannah reeled. Was the speaker turian or human? It was becoming more difficult to tell the difference. Whoever it was, Alvarez stared, startled but comprehending. After a pause, the voice added, "She needs time to process the new stimuli. You've got to calm her down. Otherwise her brain really is going to melt."
"Shepard, it's all right," Alvarez said, handing off his syringe, removing his gloves with a sigh. "You're in shock. Your language center is totally overstimulated. Some of your lower functions have shut down temporarily. You can't stand up."
She hadn't realized she'd tried.
"Your inner ear is going to be on shore leave for a while," he said. "Take it easy."
"Jane," she grunted, unconvinced. She shook her head, knocking herself dizzy. "Where's my baby?"
"She's perfectly safe," Alvarez said, his weak attempt to placate. "Just like we agreed. I sent her off with a group from the volunteer nursing corps. They're passing out food now. She's right over there."
She remembered the discussion, was aware of the proximity, but still felt uneasy without a direct sightline to Jane.
The turian with the holo-tool finally backed off a few inches, but not before giving Hannah a long, evaluating look as if to warn, don't bite me, you crazy bitch. He grabbed a datapad from a steel table on the side of Hannah's cot, which he handed directly to Alvarez.
"Right," Alvarez said, loosening a rock in his throat. "Okay. I've got to ask you some questions to make sure they didn't knock anything upside-down in there."
The holo-tool hovered too close for comfort again - running a diagnostic, no doubt. This time Hannah allowed it, her fists clenching and unclenching as she tried not to shrink too far into herself.
Alvarez coughed and asked, "Name?"
Hannah squared the surgeon with as good a look of impatience as she could muster with half of her brain jiggling around like med-bay gelatin.
"Humor me, ma'am. This won't take long. Your full name please."
Before answering, she spat a wad of blood-pink bile at the doctor's feet. The turian engineer blinked in apparent shock, the stiff plates above his eyes rising by several offended-looking centimeters.
"Hannah Shepard," she coughed.
Alvarez frowned at his data-pad. "Age and date of birth?"
"Twenty-nine," she said, wincing."Born January fifth... twenty-one twenty-eight."
"What's your role here on Shanxi?"
She coughed again, rolling her eyes. "Managing the depot... supplies and logistics — 'til these bastards crushed my suppliers… nuked my convoy…" She paused to swallow what felt like a throatful of glass. "Now it's a little bit of everything. Whatever keeps the lights on."
"What's the last thing you remember before the procedure?"
Sedated or not, her memory remained perfectly clear - and so did her anger. "Let's see. Williams handed us to the turians in a handbasket... then he asked me to hold hands with the enemy and play nice. Told me I'd need an alien mind-control device implanted in my brain." She stopped herself, forcing a bitter calm. "And like some damn fool, I agreed."
Someone laughed. Just once, like a dog barking. Behind the cloth barrier surrounding the surgical suite, a massive shadow rose up, approaching in one long step. A turian pulled back the access panel, stepped slowly into the room. With his eerie silver eyes and that blood-colored pattern on his face, he was comparatively easy to recognize: the captain-turned-jailor, Albacus Regidonis.
He spoke quietly, returning Hannah's bald-face stare. "Is it working?"
The turian field tech replied, "Yes Captain, but only just. She's disoriented."
"Disoriented?" Regidonis said, stepping closer. "She looks like she wants to kill all of you with her bare hands."
She could still hear the strange dual-toned syllables of his language sliding around in her ears like rocks, but her brain smoothly replaced it with a deep, even baritone. He sounded like an old-world aristocrat. Some aesthete from an educational vid, the kind of voice that narrated dull, meandering surveys of antiquities. Hannah wondered how much of the effect was owed to the translation implant and how much of it was flat-out drug-induced auditory hallucination.
"Do you understand me, Shepard?"
She jumped. The alien knew her name. The goddamn spiky-headed alien aristocrat knew her fucking name. Her mouth was suddenly too dry for speech, so she just nodded once, nearly forgetting how.
"When was the last time you ate?" he asked, as if it was the most ordinary question in the world.
She stared at Regidonis with her mouth hanging open, unable to form a reply. This was a paradigm smasher. Not only could the aliens talk, one of them sounded like a pretentious snob. The sudden, incongruous knowledge filled her with childish curiosity too rampant to suppress.
Regidonis shooed away the orange-marked engineer stationed at Hannnah's bedside, then promptly filled his seat. His armored hand slid over the crudely stamped S.S.S. that was printed along the backrest, then he sank into the folding chair with a wince of cheap metal. Hannah blinked, once again struggling to consolidate reality.
From the exhausted slump in his shoulders to the curious tilt of his head, all of his body language was bafflingly familiar. Seemingly unaware that he was one of the first extraterrestrial beings to ever plant his ass on Shanxi Secondary School property, the turian rested his elbows on his thighs and leaned forward to peer thoughtfully into Hannah's eyes.
In weighty silence, he looked her up and down. Finally, he clicked the insect-like mandibles on his cheeks and called out over his shoulder to a subordinate. "Find one of the fruits. Makes no difference which one. If they can spare anything with protein, bring that as well, along with a packet of water."
The subordinate glared at Hannah with a universally recognizable look of contempt, but did as he was told and left the surgical area in search of human rations. Regidonis turned back to face his new human liaison. He waited until Hannah met his eyes before he spoke again, this time all business.
"We found the remains of one of your convoys near our landing zone. Fresh food and water. My troops are distributing a share of the supplies now, but we were only able to salvage enough for a few days. More, if we ration conservatively." His head lowered, eyes falling into shadow. "It looks as though all of your drivers were killed in the bombardment. The personnel will require replacement."
Yamata, Jones, and Barklay had been leading that convoy, one of the last attempts they'd made before comms had gone dark.
She'd known Mess Sergeant Yamata since Charon, when they'd enlisted together. Every Thursday when Yamata picked up the regiment's supplies, he'd bring over some dumb, half-destroyed toy for Jane. Lionel the little green dinosaur had been one of those haphazard presents.
Hannah stiffened, felt the rage boiling in her heart. So, it had come to this. The very last of her friends was dead. At least she had one grim condolence. The fucker to blame was inches away.
She lunged at Regidonis before she could think, going straight for his eyes.
It was no fight at all. He didn't even cry out in surprise. All hope of retaliation was cut off in one swift move as he enclosed her throat in the broad, two-fingered grip of his well-armored hand.
He squeezed.
She clawed at the vice around her throat, but he wouldn't budge for all the scratching in the world. One of her fingernails bent back, then snapped off against the ceramic plates of his glove.
A small sidearm eased beneath her jaw, the muzzle painfully cold against her skin. His monstrous face sank closer, silver eyes burning bright, a line of white teeth glinting inside his mouth. He had many, many teeth, sharp and thin as metal skewers. She stilled.
"Move everybody out of here," he said, voice dark. "This human needs a talking to."
Panic bloomed through her. A wildfire, turning her blood to steam.
She kicked with all her might, but the sedatives were still wreaking havoc on her nervous system. All she managed were a few pathetic flops. Her lungs began to burn, her vision spiking white and black. To her shame, she could feel the hot sting of tears pricking at her eyes.
Not like this. Not after everything else. She couldn't die like this. She refused to die like this. Dying was impossible.
She couldn't leave Jane alone.
JANE
2183
Shepard watched Williams and Alenko limp back toward the Normandy, then turned hesitantly to face the abattoir of the research camp, where countless impaled bodies blotted out the sky. Death on the air, fresh and sour. It was far too quiet.
"The spaceport is just up ahead," Kryik said, snapping her back to attention. "We should check it out." His head ticked toward the dragon's teeth. The only way there was through the bodies.
Shepard put one foot in front of the other, swallowing the dryness in her throat. She raised her assault rifle back to high ready and followed the Spectre as he began to delicately pick his way between the spikes. The dawn was still pale and the canopy of bodies cast a deep, murky shadow, making it difficult to see the terrain. Shepard fixed her eyes on the bright red suit lights of Kryik's armor, refusing to acknowledge that she was walking through a forest of the damned.
For once, she was grateful for his rigidity. There was a strict dutifulness in the Spectre's posture that dictated his every twitch. An obvious respect for the dead showed in the way he tiptoed beneath the victims, averting his eyes from their nakedness. All the while, his shotgun stayed raised and ready to fire. She recognized that control, that demand for civility and strength no matter the circumstance. At his most unflinching, Kryik almost reminded her of home.
Shepard steeled. If she could survive her final night on Mindoir, barely sixteen and green with fear, she could summon her goddamn pride and make it across this hill. She talked to Kryik's back, sounding much calmer than she felt. "Have you ever seen anything like this before?"
"Not on this scale," he said in a thin voice, not looking back. "I've had my eye on a few scattered reports of strange geth activity outside the Veil, and I've been suspicious that he might—" He stopped to feel his way across a wide tangle of wires, thick as tree roots. "I had no idea he'd taken it this far. I didn't even think it was possible. The destruction, it's catastrophic."
"Are you saying you know who's responsible for this attack? You knew this might happen and didn't warn us?"
"Shepard, believe me, if I'd had intelligence that could have prevented this wholesale slaughter, I'd have shared it with you in a heartbeat. I'm as blindsided as you are."
Through the mess of spikes, she caught her first glimpse of the spaceport. A cluster of docks sat abandoned at the bottom of a steep hill alongside a freight line. The train had been built over a small ravine on the far side of the storage area, and a half-loaded car was quietly parked on the tracks. From this vantage point, she could make out the whole stretch of crates and supplies. No beacon. Her eyes scoured the set of parallel train lines; one of the cars was missing. Whoever had stolen the payload had probably escaped that way, and Kryik knew who it might have been.
He came to a hard stop and held up his fist. Shepard had a spare instant to wonder why, then she heard a thin, metallic squeal at her back. Turning to look, she saw the rows of spikes beginning to descend, bringing wave after wave of impaled bodies back to earth.
"What the—"
One of the corpses moved. Then another.
They twitched and sparked, peeling themselves from the spikes on their own power. Dozens of mutilated, half-human machines shimmied onto the ground, the cracks in their skin flaring with streams of lighting-blue cybernetic energy. One by one, they fixed their lifeless, glowing eye sockets on Shepard and Kryik.
In vicious unison, they screamed. The sound dragged across every inch of her skin, flaying her alive. Her gun twitched in her hands, she knew exactly how many rounds she was carrying, and she didn't have enough, not by half.
"RUN!" Kyrik shouted, already sprinting down the hill.
She did, as fast as her legs could carry her. She barely kept herself upright as she flew down the incline, the dewy morning grass slipping dangerously beneath her feet. Kryik was taller by a foot, with long predator's legs designed for running at high speeds. In moments he was well ahead, nearing the train platform. He turned to slow up for her.
"Shepard!"
She heard the monsters at her back, knew they were getting too close.
"The train!" She used the last of her breath to scream, "GO!"
He hesitated for an instant, then bolted for the transport. There was a small patrol of geth troops guarding the train, but he knocked them back with a few well-placed shotgun blasts and sprinted to the controls on the far end of the long line of cars.
Shepard, meanwhile, was too slow.
She felt five human fingers clawing at the armor on her left elbow, dragging open the seal and slicing her flesh. She couldn't help it, she turned to look. It was still human, it had to be a colonist, a Marine. She couldn't just…
The face was emaciated, hair burned away, flesh so thin it was almost transparent. Scraps of skin had been stretched over the electrified bones, little more than a black-blue weave of flesh and cybernetics. Impossible to tell if the victim had been old or young, male or female. All of the softness that molded a person out of clay had been ripped out and replaced. It was nothing more than a husk.
It opened its mouth to scream. A storm of sparks tangled across its skin, sucking energy right out of the air, right out of Shepard's lungs. She ripped her arm back to somersault down the rest of the hill. When she came back to her feet, she had a concussion grenade firmly in hand.
Just as she lobbed the grenade into the advancing horde, the husk discharged its energy attack. There was no time to dodge for cover. The combined explosion threw out a rippling shock wave that flung her clear over the dockyard railing. With an unforgiving wham, she landed on the hard metal tiles of the loading zone below, tasting blood.
The explosion had put a dent in the husks, but not a big one, and they continued to pour down the hill, the distance rapidly closing.
Dizzily, she rose to her feet, willing the horizon to stop teetering to and fro. Kryik was standing on the nearest car, having already doubled back all the way from the far end of the train to rescue her.
Her right knee seized with a pain so sharp that she stumbled, almost tripping over her own feet. Definitely strained, possibly broken. She headed for Kryik, but as she limped by inches, the engine shuddered to life and pulled the train away from the platform with a slow lurch. The pain gave her double vision, but she bit through it and ran. Head spinning, heart skipping beats, ears full of the sound of countless human husks screaming at her heels, she ran.
Kryik held out his hand, frantically waving her aboard.
"Shepard, jump! I've got you!"
She leapt, flinging both arms wide open, barely managing to grab hold of one of Kryik's hands before the husks closed in. Her unbalanced weight fell all at once into the empty ravine, slamming Kryik to the floor of the train. She saw his eyes widen as he struggled to keep his grip. One of her shoulders threatened to dislocate under the strain, but he held fast. With a shout of exertion, he heaved her up one-handed until she was close enough to grab the lip of the train car. Groping over her armor until he found solid purchase on her back plate, he finally managed to drag her dangling body to safety.
Behind them, the husks flooded mindlessly over the stony edge of the ravine, falling like leaves into the darkness below.
HANNAH
2157
With little patience, Doctor Alvarez and his small team were ushered by rifle-butt from the surgical suite. Hannah watched them retreat, her eyes wide, hoping one of them would snap, fight back, cry out - anything except abandoning her to a turian captor in her weakened state. She couldn't even stand.
The moment Hannah and Regidonis were unobserved, his hand loosened on her throat. Despite the small reprieve, he didn't release her. His gun stayed fixed beneath her jaw, the muzzle growing warm against her skin.
"You need to respect a few things about your situation, newcomer," he said, so close she could smell him, all metal and ozone. "I am not the alien in this room." His gun knocked against her chin. "That would be you."
She held very still and waited for whatever was coming, saving her strength.
"Furthermore, you need to respect a few things about me," he said, voice lowering. "I am no butcher."
She saw little splinters of gold netted in the flashing silver of his eyes. Aside from the power behind his stare, his expression remained incomprehensible; a face that reminded her of nothing so much as tectonic plates shifting beneath the earth.
"In a moment," he said, "I am going to release you. Before considering another outburst, please remember that I happen to be holding the finest hand cannon Armax has ever produced... and you are unable to walk."
He stared at her, waiting for something. Not knowing what else to do, she simply held his gaze.
The gun dropped away at long last, giving Hannah room to breathe. Regidonis sat back and holstered his weapon before rubbing his neck, looking as though he'd been strangled himself.
From the covered door came a curt, "Permission to enter?" which Regidonis swiftly answered: "Make it quick."
The subordinate who had been sent for rations bowed through the curtain. He deposited an apple, a few thin strips of jerky, and a sachet of clean water. After a telling pause, the officer gave his captain a stiff salute then left as unceremoniously as he'd entered.
Regidonis considered the rations for a moment, then turned his knife-sharp eyes on Hannah. "Your body is at risk of atrophy. Doctor Alvarez informed us that you must have been giving most of your rations to your child, saving almost nothing for yourself." His voice sounded haggard, exhausted. "Rest assured: I made certain she was not passed over."
With a flick of his wrist, he summoned a holographic imager and began a playback of Jane. The vid showed her ferociously setting upon some kind of porridge, washing it down with a fruit-flavored electrolyte solution.
Hannah reached out to touch her daughter's face, but her fingers ghosted through the holo and knocked against the hard plating of the turian's armor instead. She set her fingers into his arm in a killing grip.
Calm and slow, he stopped the playback and said, "She is quite safe. I will bring her back to you as soon as you and I come to an understanding."
He held out the packet of water and patiently waited for Hannah to take it.
Offering food and water moments after offering her the business end of his gun. Holding Jane hostage under the pretense of feeding her. These were either the overtures of a master manipulator, or the signs of an honorable soldier making the most of a bad situation. She wasn't sure which possibility was more disturbing.
With creaking fingers, she released the holographic imager and snatched the water from his hand. Whether she was meant to be his double-agent or his sex slave - or some twisted combination of both - she would find a way to live through it. But there was no denying that she had barely eaten in a week, and starvation was an enemy she couldn't destroy with brute force alone. She slumped back into the cot and drank.
The water was clean, the first real hydration she'd had in days. She hadn't realized how thirsty she'd been until the first drops passed her lips. She drained the packet in seconds. Regidonis, always watching, immediately produced more water from his own supply, pulling a field ration from the interior of his suit. She pierced the seal and drank, half expecting it to taste like brimstone, but it was water, plain and simple. Vaguely metallic from the ration pack, warmed by the heat of his body.
He offered the fruit next. She bit into it so eagerly that her teeth caught her own lip, drawing blood. She didn't care; as the sweet juice sloppily dribbled across her chin, she moaned out of pure relief.
"Good," he said, nodding. Once again, his body language seemed too familiar to be real. "Get your strength back up. You'll need it."
While he watched, she devoured the rest of the apple, then set into the jerky. He waited until she was completely finished, then leaned forward.
"I appreciate that you have taken an enormous personal risk today," he said. "As of this morning, you are conspiring with the enemy, and with your own child's life on the line. Your distrust is well-earned - I can respect that." In a much quieter tone, he sad, "Hannah Shepard, I need your immediate assistance or a great many people are going to die."
Perhaps he'd failed to notice, or just didn't care, but a great many people had already died on Shanxi.
Hannah narrowed her eyes, waiting for his terms.
He said, "I would have preferred to avoid risking a civilian with this job. And you, sole caretaker of a young child… But General Williams assures me you have ample military training and an admirable record; that you can handle a crisis." A pause, as he dragged a hand across his face. "So be it. In the interest of peacekeeping, I have decided to give you the same debrief I gave your General."
He was silent for some time after that, apparently searching for his least treasonous path forward. Eventually, with great care, he said, "When your people materialized from dark space, it looked like the second coming of the Rachni. We had to act."
Hannah's narrowed her eyes even further. By every account she'd heard, the turians had fired first. Beyond that, a month-long orbital siege seemed like an excessive first response for a treaty violation - a treaty that humanity had never been party to until Williams surrendered.
Regidonis absorbed her heated glare, raising his hands. A familiar gesture of hopeless, exhausted surrender. "Not how I…" He tried again. "None of this…" He looked into her face. Whatever he found there, it stopped him short.
Quickly, he looked away. "Of all the fleets in all the universe, your people had to catch the Blackwatch—" Hannah's translator implant lagged around an unfamiliar idiom, then offered the closest human equivalent: "—with our pants down."
She couldn't help it, she snorted back a laugh.
He froze, entire body stiffening "You truly have no idea how far this reaches, do you?" His face was harder to read than ever. "This is no laughing matter. Without exaggeration, I can tell you that the Hierarchy Blackwatch is one of the deadliest fleets in all of Citadel space."
Whatever that meant, she believed him. She'd seen his soldiers: precision in every breath.
"No matter how harmless your intentions, the timing of Relay 314's activation could not have been more catastrophic. The Tenefalx - my command - just so happened to be escorting several experimental frigates on a shakedown cruise... and hosting a general. We were running top-secret operations in a dark system, then the relay lit up: a dozen alien ships pouring forth with guns primed and ready. You must understand..."
The captain stilled, staring past Hannah's shoulder. "We had to act..." He repeated the words in a dying voice before lapsing into a deep silence.
She watched his jaw shift. Between his mandibles and his cheeks, an angular gap showed off his slender teeth. His navy-blue tongue lay immobilized at the bottom of his mouth, speechless. He lowered his eyes to his hands, staring as he flexed his long, thick fingers back and forth, back and forth.
Just now, Regidonis looked more vulnerable than Hannah felt. Most of the things he'd said made little sense or none at all, but she devoured the intel as hungrily as the rations. Impossible to know when she might get the chance to wield this information in self-defense.
Slowly, he gathered himself back together. When he spoke again, it was with redoubled steeliness. "Personally, I suspect humanity to be little more than a tribe of uplifted monkeys who had no idea what they were toying with. I see no reason for us all to grind each other to dust just yet. Not before we get some real answers. Are you with me, Shepard?"
Her name coming out of his alien mouth again, now in the context of collusion, made her shudder. She didn't answer.
He sighed. "Let me make myself more clear."
He reached for his sidearm.
She refused to flinch, but she couldn't budge her eyes from the muzzle, either.
He turned the pistol over in his hand, studying it. "My father awarded this to me when I earned my first command. It has been passed through generations of my family - wielded by legionnaires... a general or two... even a primarch. I never discharge this weapon unless I am absolutely certain that my bullet flies with honor."
Looking her dead in the eyes, he said, "According to the endorsements of several of your military superiors, you are capable of making the same distinction."
A sharp breath, then he stretched out his arm and offered Hannah the grip of his own gun.
One instant of stupefied silence - but only one - before Hannah snatched the weapon from his hand and slammed the muzzle squarely between his eyes. Those bright, uncanny eyes of his, which gazed at her so unflinchingly. Always staring, as if he could see straight through her.
If this Blackwatch bigwig didn't give Jane back immediately, Hannah Shepard would be the last thing he'd ever see, transparent or not.
Unbent, even with a gun in his face, he said, "You have a choice to make. If you think killing me would be the best way to end this war, your bullet is honorable, and my weapon is yours."
Out of the corner of one eye, she caught the fearful clenching of his fingers against his thighs. "But if you kill me, I cannot protect your little Jane from what would come after."
He'd learned her daughter's name.
She hesitated. A long enough pause for both of them to know he'd already won, but she kept the gun raised a moment longer, if only to shield her pride.
"What do I need to do?"
Original words and phrases:
- Tenefalx: Wielder of the Night-Scythe.
Words and phrases courtesy of MizDirected's turian dictionary:
- Familia notas: The colony markings that turians wear on their faces.
- Pari: Dad