Shakedown
She likes the idea of a stealth ship, but the Normandy needs bigger guns. There's no point in being able to hide if you can't take out an enemy with one quick, surprise attack. Lighter plating could work too, if running was all right. Shepard's never liked running though. If you run, whoever's chasing you thinks you're afraid.
People say that confidence can make an enemy stupid. That's wrong. Confidence comes from knowing you're stronger. The only thing better than being stronger is being smarter. That's why Shepard is still alive. If you're smart, you don't run, you fight and you trick and you kill and you win and you stay alive.
Honestly, running is only all right if you're part of a gang. Then, you send out your quickest little to get your enemy's attention. Have him do something stupid. Look for food in a dumpster on their turf. Have a lookout warn him when they're coming, a signal the other gang won't understand. Have him run. Be waiting with more guys than the others have, and rocks, sticks, glass, sharp metal—whatever you can kill with. Expand your territory. Make everyone else afraid to fuck with you.
The turians helped build this ship. She isn't sure how she feels about that. She isn't sure how she feels about the turian Spectre that stalks around the hallways like he owns the ship. What she is sure of is that she doesn't like the way he's always watching her. Slavery's illegal on Earth, in Council space, but that doesn't mean there aren't slaves on Council-controlled planets. Doesn't mean there aren't slavers that hide down alleyways the cops don't care about. Doesn't mean you don't have to learn to feel when someone's watching you with too much interest. Unless you want to get sold to a pedophile or a mining company or something worse that Shepard doesn't know about but knows exists.
His eyes are very green. An alien shade of the color. It makes Shepard want a hat, even though she hasn't needed to cover her hair up to hide since she left Earth.
…
Captain Anderson is friendly, in a professional sort of way. Shepard thinks he is disappointed in her, but she doesn't understand why or how he could be. She does her job perfectly. She eats meals with Anderson and the turian, and stays quiet unless one of them asks her a question or she has a report to make. She stays out of his way so that he can do his job, and she makes sure his orders are carried out.
She is a good XO. She is precise, clever, quiet, and capable. She fights good. She fights well. Guns, knives, stealth, ambushes, distance, close-up—Shepard knows how to kill. She knows how to fix a ship. She knows lots of things. She knows she is not good for command; she has known she is not good for command ever since the Reds, but she is good if she has someone with charisma and flair to parrot out her orders. She has read about Machiavelli and Sun Tzu and Bismarck and a dozen others who knew that the best place to be is in the shadows, where it is safe and quiet, and thinking can happen. The limelight is for loud fools that turn to the dark for help and ideas, but pretend that the thinking was their own.
She is a good XO, and so she does not understand why Captain Anderson seems to think that there is something wrong with her.
.
Everyone knows about the famous Captain Anderson. How many times has he been a hero? How many medals have been pinned on him over the years? Shepard doesn't actually know, which irritates her; she likes to be precise. Still, the number of medals isn't an important detail. An important detail is that Captain Anderson has never been involved in a scandal. There's no deviant behavior he has to hide. He never killed just to do it. An important detail is that Captain Anderson's managed to avoid getting scars on his face. He is the sort of soldier the Alliance likes to point to and say, 'Look, this is who you will be if you join us.'
Shepard knows that that is a lie.
If you join, it's more likely that you will be like her old squad. You will be dead on Akuze, eaten by a monster no human had ever heard of before. The aliens didn't think to mention thresher maws.
She still hates aliens. Nothing has happened to her to make her think they are not assholes. That they would not kill all the humans, kidnap and eat all the littles if they thought they could get away with it.
If you join, it's more likely that you will be like Corporal Richard Jenkins. You will be stupid and loud, and you will think that fighting is about excitement and glory. You will be dangerous to the people on your side of a fight, because you won't understand that fighting is about killing someone else, making them dead before they make you dead.
Glory is another thing she doesn't understand. The only kind of reputation that matters is the kind that scares people away. That makes them afraid you will kill them, at a time they can't predict, in a way that will hurt more than they can imagine. That makes them believe you can't be killed, no matter what they do to you.
If you join, it's more likely that you will be like Captain Karin Chakwas, the Normandy's medical officer. You will talk about friends you never see from time to time. You will be smart and get promoted and be friendly and lonely. You will be busy. You will tell yourself that the way you feel is all right, that your work is important. You will watch everyone around you die.
The doctor reminds Shepard of herself, a little. Except instead of killing, the doctor fixes. People smile at her and like her. Shepard wonders if this is what she should be like, but decides she doesn't care. The doctor calls Shepard, 'my dear,' and is kind to her. It doesn't mean anything; she's kind to everyone. It's not trustworthy. No one likes everyone. The doctor must have secrets. Everyone has secrets. Secrets make people dangerous. Shepard resolves to keep away from the medbay.
…
The Normandy is going to Eden Prime. The official name for what they are doing is a shakedown run, but there are too many people aboard. Shepard wonders if the brass is stupid or if they just think all their soldiers are stupid. Anyone who pays attention will know that this mission is a mission, not just a test flight for the shiny new frigate.
The number of crewmembers that ask Shepard what is really going on is depressingly small. She never feels lonely until she is around other people, and she realizes how few of them can think.
She is smart, and she would not want to be stupid, but it makes her alone.
.
Corporal Richard Jenkins is from Eden Prime. He tells Shepard that he joined the Alliance because he wanted to get away from peace and safety and quiet. Away from parents who loved him and fed him and weren't whores, or addicted to drugs, or just evil, the way Shepard's parents probably were. Although who knows? If her mother really was a whore, her father could have been anyone. He could have been someone with a job and plenty of food, just looking for a thrill, because he had money for meds if he caught something from a streetwalker.
If she had grown up like that, with peace and safety and food and family, Shepard thinks she would have stayed in that place. Unless it is food and warmth that makes you stupid. She knows it isn't. She knows she would have been smart, would have been mostly the same as the way she is no matter how she was raised. If she admits that though, she feels angry. Anger is useless because it make you stupid, and Shepard knows that she can't change anything about the way she lived when she was a little.
Corporal Richard Jenkins does not seem at all distressed when they learn Eden Prime is under attack. Shepard did not recognize the outline of the ship that they caught on the distress call that some ground-pounders managed to transmit off the planet. It was big. Very big. Everything on Eden Prime looked like it was burning.
If the place she had grown up in was burning, Shepard would not mind. But she grew up in hell. Parts of it were always on fire. All of it was disgusting. The clean, safe parts most of all. The parts that pretended that Shepard and people like her didn't exist. That they were far away, imaginary, not real, someone else's problem. Shepard hates everything about Earth. She never wants to go back there. She doesn't care if it burns.
Corporal Richard Jenkins called Eden Prime a paradise though. It looks like it could have been one. Safe and clean and small enough not to have slums. Only humans. The kind of place Shepard would want to retire to if she thought she could figure out how people live normal lives, lives outside gangs and gutters and the Alliance.
If she had wanted to work with the turian Spectre, Shepard would be upset that he seems so eager to get away from her. She doesn't waste time on being offended by the fact that he thinks he could move faster without her and her team. Aliens are like that, careless and self-centered, and stuffed with smug superiority. Afraid of everything humanity has contributed in such a short time. How would the Spectre feel if he didn't have medi-gel, she wonders? Humans made that. Most of the drive core tech came from human engineers: turians mostly contributed to aesthetic elements of design. Not that the Council would ever admit that. As it is, she says nothing when the turian Spectre takes off on his own. If she becomes a Spectre, will she be free like that? If her candidacy depends on the turian's evaluation of her on this mission, how will he evaluate her if he doesn't watch her work?
Corporal Richard Jenkins thinks that Spectres are exciting heroes. He would like to be one, she can tell, even if he doesn't say it. Even if what he says instead is that Shepard would make a good Spectre. She is hard to kill, like a Spectre, he says. Like a cockroach, she corrects him. It shuts him up. It makes Lieutenant Kaidan Alenko laugh. Shepard stares at the lieutenant. Where was the joke? Cockroaches live in the worst places on Earth. They are small and fast and hard to kill. Shepard is like a cockroach. She shares more than sixty percent of her genetic code with a cockroach. Aliens are not even built from the same proteins.
If she didn't know that the tech in the Prothean beacon was more valuable than anything else on Eden Prime, Shepard would try to go back to the ship. Something is wrong on this planet. She can feel it, the way she felt the maw, the way she always feels danger. Animals do that, she read once, somewhere. Animals sense the wrong before it comes. Shepard doesn't like animals much—especially not dogs—but they rely on their instincts in a way that makes them better at surviving than humans are. It's good to be like an animal sometimes.
Corporal Richard Jenkins dies screaming. Strange drones shoot him full of holes. They take down his shields too quickly to be based on any kind of Council-approved tech specs. This is why humanity should stand on its own. The aliens will hold them back and leave them defenseless when bullies learn new ways to kill. And bullies always learn new ways. Bullies don't let the fake rules people create stand in their way. Anyone who lets the rules make them stupid deserves to die. The Alliance should wake up, before they all wake up dead. Like Corporal Richard Jenkins.
…
Lieutenant Kaidan Alenko checks Corporal Richard Jenkins' vitals and shakes his head. He closes the other man's eyes. He breaks off a dog tag from the chain around Corporal Richard Jenkins' neck and tucks it in an external pocket of his armor.
"He was just a kid," the lieutenant says. He sounds sad. Did he know Corporal Richard Jenkins well? Shepard didn't. It is too bad that he's dead; the team is weaker now. What's the point in sadness? Age doesn't matter. Soldiers die. Idiots die. Corporal Richard Jenkins was both. Better him than Shepard. Better him than Lieutenant Kaidan Alenko. They are both higher ranked. Smarter. More skilled. More valuable.
"Stay focused," Shepard says. She is busy, prying one of the drones that attacked them apart. There is information she needs here.
"What were these things?" Maybe the lieutenant isn't as smart as Shepard has been giving him credit for being. Maybe he is only smart enough to know it is better to keep his mouth shut most of the time. He is asking stupid, pointless questions. How would Shepard know what these drones are? Can't he see she's trying to figure that out? Doesn't he know that when she knows, she will tell him?
She stares at the circuitry inside the drone. She needs a closer look. "Stay alert," she orders. She takes off her helmet and glares at Lieutenant Kaidan Alenko when he fails to shoulder his gun and watch for more hostiles. He stares back at her, then blushes suddenly and remembers to be a soldier.
Shepard studies the wiring and the circuit boards as closely as she can. They are beautiful. Elegant in a way that is smoother even than quarian design. Clearly, quarian-based tech, but taken to a new level.
"Geth." She is certain of it. It is unlikely, but it is the only rational possibility. "There are geth here." Maybe guided by the quarians, but that's doubtful.
"Geth?"
Isn't that what she just said? Shepard sighs and slips her helmet back on. She stands and unclips her gun again. At least geth are different.