She's down to her last heat sink but there's nothing to shoot at.
Devastation is hypothetically easy to patrol. No lingering resistance, no urgent touch-and-go first aid. Ashley looks into entrenched positions and through destroyed buildings and sees nothing worth saving. Easy. Her pace never slows.
It's worse than Eden Prime, worse than leaving Earth behind when the Reapers hit, on par with watching the original Normandy go down in flames with Shepard still aboard. It hits Ashley somewhere below the heart and above the stomach, flattening air into tight blades forced in and out of her lungs. The stench of death permeates her helmet filters like they're not even there.
She coughs anyway.
"Ma'am?"
"I'm fine." Ashley recovers. "Keep moving along the left perimeter along that apartment complex, we'll circle around this building and meet you by the Reaper corpse at the end of the street. Tag criticals and get whatever ID you can from the bodies. If they're alien, contact their command center."
"Understood."
They pick their way through the debris bit by bit, scouring the area for any signs of life. But the Reapers didn't take prisoners. Every corpse they find is cold.
"Ash, it's Garrus. Come in."
She signals a stop.
"Ash here. Go ahead."
"Priority one, change of plans from Hackett. Get to the turian supply depot, they have excavation equipment waiting for you. Then grab every able body you can find and head to these coordinates. I'm sending them now."
She looks down at her omnitool.
"Why there? Are we looking for something?"
Garrus hesitates.
"The Normandy collected them right before the Crucible fired."
"The Normandy! They're okay?"
"Hard to tell, it's recorded, not live. They broadcast one badly garbled transmission from somewhere beyond the relay, so they made it. But we haven't found any others if they made any. Damnit."
"Wait, they broadcast a message but it didn't contain their location? What else would they want to tell us?"
Garrus begins to click his mandibles softly together, a sound reminiscent of fingers drumming on a tabletop. His usual confidence is noticeably absent.
"Shepard's last known location. They got a bead on her a few minutes before the Crucible fired. It's our best shot of finding her alive."
Boldly they rode and well.
Ashley blinks and lowers herself into a crouch as the news washes over her. The marines behind her look at each other, unsure, as she squints towards the horizon. The Citadel, blown into pieces. Could anything survive that? So much has been destroyed, but Shepard's out there somewhere. Maybe even alive.
Into the jaws of-
Ashley picks her gun back up and turns her omnitool to intercept the widest frequency it can cover.
"This is Spectre Ashley Williams of the Alliance, calling any military or civilian personnel in the area. If you can still hold a shovel, get to this turian supply depot for immediate reassignment. Council authorization." She pauses. "Search and rescue op. Fifteen minutes before we head out with whoever we have. Everyone in this goddamn galaxy owes a debt, and we're going to start repaying it."
Into the mouth of Hell.
Thirty exhausted marines breaking into a full run on her command. There's something she never fails to take pride in. Even as they approach and her own pace gets faster, they keep up.
Shepard would have been proud.
Calling it a "turian supply depot" is a bit generous when they arrive, guns and armor clanking. There are some supplies, yes, but it doesn't look far off every other part of London except for the fact that most of the bodies scattered around are turian. The site is already crawling with white-robed aid workers cleaning up the debris, but the only thing Ashley has eyes for is the small fleet of recovery equipment waiting for her amidst the bustle. Good enough for a rescue.
Darkness is gathering on the city fringe, as she squints and tries to make some assessment of the time she's got to get started. Losing the sun will make this considerably harder. They'll have to get moving to make the most of the daylight left.
As they walk towards a half-demolished building, a familiar tattooed hand throws a hand up in a wave.
"Hey. Got your message." Jack crosses her arms, dried blood matting her ponytail and streaks of it on her hands. Ashley looks down at her own armor, battered to hell. The blue is peeling off in flakes, fluttering to ground.
"Jack. Glad to see you made it through." She's never been overly fond of the instability that Jack lives and breathes, but there's no denying she's come a hell of a long way. Speaking of which- Ashley looks behind Jack and sees a dozen curious faces trailing Jack's every move. "And your kids did too, I see."
"Yeah, thanks to Shepard's damn meddling. Got them support roles bolstering front ranks instead of throwing their asses into the fray all at once. Anyway, lemme know when we're heading out. I want to make sure a couple of the kids can thank her in person."
"I didn't say who-"
'Please, as if the Council would send an all-call for someone other than Shepard. We wouldn't all fucking be here for anyone else, either. Learned that much just from watching you. Didn't need to be on the Normandy for us to matter. Anyway. I'm done leaving debts unpaid." She waves a hand behind her, and Ashley looks past and sucks in a surprised breath.
The entire galaxy is here.
Well, in representation if not in number- she half-way expected the entire fleet to arrive, given the usual results of Shepard's calls-to-action- but there's some of every species propped up by a familiar wall of Alliance blue. A salarian repairs a krogan's armor. An asari stands side-by-side with a vorcha. An elcor readjusts a mounted cannon on its back.
She can almost see Shepard's smile.
A depleted salarian squad comes up to her, one of them extending a burnt three-fingered hand as he removes his helmet. Their expressionless faces manage to look as tired as Ashley feels.
"Major Kirrahe, STG. Nice to see you again, Spectre Williams. We're ready to do whatever we can."
"Thank you." She looks around at the rest of the wordless assembled mass around her. They tilt their faces up for instruction. "The rest of you, what can you do? I don't recognize any of the equipment here, but if it can help us find Shepard we'll take it. Fill me in."
An asari commando presses a bandage to her forehead as she speaks. "Matriarch Aethyta heard your broadcast. She sent us all here- anyone that was left of her squad. Most of our heavy tech is damaged, but we'll do our best. If that doesn't work, our biotics can lift anything short of an actual Reaper. We won't let you down."
"Arlakh Company. You know me." Shepard's krogan-son. Grunt smacks his fists together and growls low in the throat. "We can break things. Now where's Shepard?"
The turian beside him coughs. It was a shock, at first, to learn how Shepard had managed to bring the krogan and turians into an alliance unheard of for a millennia. No one person should have been able to wield that kind of influence. Shepard had managed it with old friends and a demon in the form of a thresher maw.
"Um, what he said. We're General Victus's former squad. The Commander helped us back on Tuchanka." He says, making nervous shuffles away from the krogan. Grunt squints at him. "Anyway, uh, most of the gear is still operable and we have explosives. Small bundles for precision work. Just…erm, we've got orders not to let the krogan touch them."
"Heh. Coward."
"Aria ordered!" A vorcha hisses, holding what looks suspiciously like the controls to an Atlas mech. The mech has been stripped and put back together in strange but dig-worthy ways. She can only hope it does what he believes it does. "No Reapers left! Need return favor!"
Everything has already been loaded onto repurposed tanks. A path is already blasted through the rubble. Ashley's never been so grateful to see a Mako in her entire life.
"Yeah, yeah." Jack mutters, impatient. She gnaws at a knuckle despite the blood. Ashley remembers first meeting her on Horizon, scrawny and feral and altogether horrifying. Now she's another one of Shepard's success stories. They all are, in a way. "Since we're all introducing ourselves, apparently, these brave little shits and I aren't finished kicking Reaper ass yet. We're not going to let them get Shepard."
Garrus's directions are still flashing on her omni-tool.
Ashley looks at them all, this small army, and wonders for the millionth time what compelled Shepard to push her away from that beacon on Eden Prime three years ago. The Commander's predictive powers. Whether any of them actually understood Shepard's calculus before doing anything at all.
Ashley Williams will not fail Shepard before she has a chance to find out.
She puts her helmet back on. She tries not to think of what the mass of the Citadel must feel like, balanced to a single point on a single human chest.
"Got it. Let's move out."
