Chapter 2

Kaiden entered his apartment on the Citadel, fairly nice one in the Presidium, comfortably small. He actually inherited the apartment from Council Anderson when he moved. The rent was a bit more than he wanted to pay, but it meant he had a private place instead of staying at an Alliance station when he was on leave. After that mess on Horizon they were threatening to ground him, like they had to the rest of the original Normandy crew. His friend had joked that if the Alliance screwed him over at least he knew someone in Cerberus would take him in. Kaiden hadn't found that humorous.

He had tried, and failed, to convince his superiors that Cerberus didn't appear to be working for the Collectors, since they had helped repel the attack. But since Shepard and her crew hightailed it out of there before any Alliance reinforcements came it looked shady. She was on the verge of being declared a traitor and being arrested.

His terminal was showing a new message, and he grimaced. He'd been waiting for news from the Alliance on when his leave would be over, they must have decided what to do with him. A lot of good soldiers got stuck pushing papers, and he wasn't ready for that to be his fate. What good was it being a biotic when all you did was paperwork?

He fell into his chair and opened the terminal, preparing himself for the worst. He opened the new message without even pausing to look at who it was from, but when he realized it wasn't from the Alliance his mouth went dry.

It had been nearly a month since Horizon and the message he had sent to Shepard. He had, for the week after that, checked his terminal several times a day waiting for something, anything, until he had finally given up. He read the message so fast he missed most of it, and read through it several times until he was sure every word had been clearly read.

He felt strange, almost light, as he tried to read between the lines. Something was wrong with the message, the tone of it. Maybe it was just his own head obscuring it, but something didn't feel right.

She cared enough to send this, even after all this time, he thought. But why now? What does she mean that she didn't want to have to write like that?

"Damn you, Shepard," he muttered, getting up from his chair and running out of his apartment.

Councilor Anderson had gotten the message seconds after it was sent, pure luck that he was sitting at his desk when it came in. He had already tried dozens of passwords to unlock the information she had sent, and had sent Ambassador Udina in his place for his afternoon meetings so he could continue working on it.

His assistant notified him that Commander Alenko was requesting an audience with him, and he paused in his work. "Let him in," he said.

He didn't stand when Alenko stepped in, just motioned for him to have a chair. "You stopped Andy from contacting me when she came to see you," he accused.

Anderson frowned and nodded, "We both have our suspicions about Cerberus, and your mission had to stay classified, especially from them. She understood…did she contact you?"

Alenko nodded, "Yeah, I just got a message from her."

Anderson let out a breath and looked at his terminal, "I'm working on something, Alenko. I need help. Help from someone who knows Shepard better than I do."

"What do you need?" he asked.

Anderson showed him the message. "Its password protected. She sent it to me, something she thought I would guess but so far I've been dumbfounded."

"In preparation…" Alenko muttered, "That doesn't sound good."

Anderson nodded, "My mind is going same place yours is. Reaper invasion. But until I get this damn file open I don't know."

"Why send this over the extranet, where anything can be picked up, instead of coming here to hand it to you?" Alenko asked, and felt his body go cold.

Anderson's thoughts followed his, "She doesn't think she'll make it back to the Citadel. She wanted to make sure Cerberus wasn't holding all the cards if she wasn't there."

They brainstormed over the next few hours. Trying team member names, names of ships she served on, that Anderson served on, planets she visited, codenames for top secret missions, but they didn't get through.

"Maybe we're thinking to hard about it," Alenko said, sitting at the Councilor's desk with his feet propped up. "She sent this to you, it has to be something you know. Probably something few other people know. Maybe it's something that doesn't even deal with the Alliance."

Anderson frowned and shook his head, "I consider Shepard a friend but we were never really social. Has to be something…" he's face slackened slightly, "No, it has to do with the Alliance. I'm so foolish, I should have thought of it immediately."

"What?" Alenko asked, ready to put it into the terminal.

"Special Forces training. She was so damn proud of that N7 when she graduated. Not smug about it, just proud as hell," he grinned. "That's the one thing we had in common, we survived that damn training."

"N7 doesn't work," Alenko said, trying it.

"That would be too simple," he said, standing up and pacing. Something was there, years ago. It was in the back of his mind, hiding from him, but he would find it. He would draw it out and snatch it. "Guerrilla."

"Gorilla," Alenko muttered, "Like…ape?"

"No," Anderson said, and spelled it out for him. "Guerrilla warfare. It was a term used for small groups of combatants, years ago on Earth. They used special forces, military tactics and small teams to combat much larger forces. It fell out of use sometime in the earth twenty-first century, and was usually used by civilians fighting their governments. Guerrillas aren't heroes, usually considered terrorists. But some fought for the right cause, fought for their people when their government abandoned them. N7 training is more than just learning how to shoot straight, we learned military tactics from all times in history."

Alenko's feet dropped from the desk, "That's it!"

There were thousands of pages of data, starting right at the beginning of Freedom's Progress.

"Go to the last, the end," Alenko said.

Final mission report was filed by Joker. Describing how the Normandy had been ambushed by Collectors while the ground team was gone. It was omitted how he was able to retake control of the ship (EDI had omitted her presence in most of the reports, the Alliance and Council did not need to know that an AI had been created and was being used), but that the last order given by Commander Shepard was to plot a course for the Omega 4 Relay.

"There is a scan on the Reaper IFF, we can replicate it and go in after her," Alenko said.

"Not in time," Anderson muttered. "They would have hit that relay hours ago when we were still sitting on our thumbs trying to figure this out."

Alenko put his hand to his forehead, "How will we know what to do next? If she makes it or not?"

Anderson shook his head, "Even decrypted this is going to take days to go over. Even if everything was perfect, I don't think we'd be ready for an invasion. Make yourself a copy, keep it safe. Don't do anything rash, though. If we have any chance, we're going to need to understand and verify every piece of this information before deciding what to do with it."

Kaiden walked slowly down the Presidium, making his way to the Wards. He tried to imagine what she was up to at that moment. If she didn't make it through the Relay he could picture the Normandy twisted and crushed, collapsing in on itself while being sucked into a black hole. Or exploding as it got pulled into a stars gravity. If they survived it…what would she be up against? Just how large was the Collector threat? Being outnumbered was never a threat to Shepard, but everyone had their limits.

She was a war hero, no doubt in his mind. But she was still human. She made mistakes, she had weak spots. Because of her accomplishments everyone wanted to put her on a pedestal, make her out to be some immortal symbol. All he wanted…was to see her again.

He was back in his apartment, packing a bag and watching his terminal. He had tried to send another message, just asking her to let him know when she made it back. The extranet bounced it back to him, they couldn't find the recipient.

He got on a transport vessel going to Illium. From there he'd get another ship to take him to Omega. If there was a shot in hell that she could make it there, there was another one that she could make it back. He had doubted her on Horizon, suggesting that Cerberus was using the Reaper threat to manipulate her. He wasn't going to doubt her this time by losing hope.