Chapter 1: Elegy
Out of the night that covers me
Black as the pit from pole to pole.
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
The first thing you need to know about me and Shepard is that he made me what I am. Yeah, C-sec trained me, and the SPECTRE branch development program put an edge on me, but the only question I ever ask when I'm faced with a problem is "what would Shepard do?" Since he died, I find myself asking the question a little more. These days, I'm not always as sure of the answer. When the Normandy came apart under the guns of that damned alien cruiser, Shepard did exactly what I would have expected of him. He saved everybody on the boat, and faced the consequences himself. And I let him down. Every one of us on his ground team knew that he'd be sure he was the last man to an escape pod, but somehow it never occurred to any of us that he wouldn't make it, that he was mortal, like the rest of us. Every one of us would have died to protect him, but none of us did when we had the chance.
I pop back up over the rail, spot a krogan and three vorcha moving gingerly onto the bridge. Three rounds later, I drop back down into my resting position, jack a fresh heat sink into the weapon, and close my eyes for a moment. I haven't slept since the day before yesterday, and I feel stand inside my eyelids when I blink.
When I see what happened afterwards, when I see what the council did once he was out of the way, I realize that the loss of one of us, of all of us, would have been a fair trade for him. And I think we all knew that. We knew that we were all guilty survivors. We all dealt with it in different ways, of course. Kaidan went off into some secret project, burying himself in work. Wrex left for Tuchanka, and hasn't been heard from since. Maybe he died in some pointless fight over money, or respect, or a fertile female. Tali was a wreck - I don't think she slept for the last week before she left to go back to the migrant fleet. Poor girl always had a thing for Shep, though I doubt she'd ever have told him, especially with the way he and Liara were. And Liara... Spirits, the poor girl lost her mind. She got herself a survey ship and went looking for his corpse, even after the alliance gave up. Apparently she was on Omega for a while, but she was gone before I got here. I heard a rumor she's on Illium working as in information broker these days, so maybe she's finally moved on. And me, I tried going back to C-sec. It didn't work out, of course. When you've fought enemies on the scale of Saren Arterius, on the scale of Sovereign itself, it's tough to accept how little impact a single well-behaved officer of the law can have. I tried the SPECTRE development program for a while too, but it was clear the council wasn't going to take anyone "tainted" by Shepard's "obsession" with the Reapers. One thing led to another, and eventually I wound up here, on Omega, finally making a difference, one extrajudicial execution at a time. Even now, I can't say I'd do it any differently if I had the chance. I've made my choices, and I'll stand behind them. Except that if I coulddo it again, I'd definitely have stuffed Shepard and Liara in a pod together this time, and gone to get Joker myself.
My visor pings, telling me that one of the remotes has been triggered, and I stop my musing for a moment to drop a pair of salarian infitrators who thought they'd sneak by while I was out of sight. Amateurs.
And, of course, that's why I'm here, in an old warehouse on Omega, in a hopeless tactical position, armed with nothing but my rifle and a huge stack of thermal clips. Among turians, when an member of the Hierarchy goes to meet their ancestors, those who knew him take on obligations of service to the state. We select some task to carry out in honor of the life and achievements of the deceased, something to carry on or conclude the work of the fallen. When Shepard's life ended among the fiery, shattered bones of the Normandy, I incurred an obligation that I knew no one being could possibly discharge. What can one turian soldier do to make up for the loss of a light that burned as brightly as Shepard? What deed could bring light to the dark places of the universe as he did? To what state should I render my service? He meant so much to so many people, races, planets. And so I wandered, lost and angry, seeking some way to atone for my failure, to bring honor to the name of the best of my friends, the best of all of us.
Mechs, again. I activate the armor piercing algorithm I painstakingly worked out over weeks of trial and error. I've gotten good at this, and there's a certain moral clarity to killing robots. The visor shows me where to aim, and I fire with metronome regularity until they're all gone: one round punched through the turbulent whirl of the field junction to collapse the shields, the next through the CPU to shut it down for good. Rinse. Repeat. They add to the growing pile of detritus. Soon they're going to have to call in their biotics to sweep the bodies and wreckage over the edge again so they don't have to clamber over them to get to me. This'll be what, the third time now? The varren down in the lower levels must think it's... what's that human holiday Shepard told me about? The one with all the presents?
Now, just when I'd given up, it seems that the spirits have finally made clear to me the path to redemption. I'm finally honoring Shepard as he deserves. I don't know if he'd appreciate the way I'm doing it, but I know he'd respect the gesture. And after all, there's a certain symmetry to this as well. I'm doing what's necessary, fighting the good fight, and I'm not going to make it out of here alive either. And in the end, maybe that's kind of the point.