Their descent had been silent and tense, which was not normal for them, at least not lately. In the past weeks they had talked and joked, the laughable incompetence of their opposition eliminating the usual tension of flying into combat. Now Shepard sat with her fingers interlaced and elbows braced against her knees and stared unflinchingly at the floor between her booted feet, her slumped shoulders and expressionless face made her posture appear almost relaxed at first but both people in the shuttle knew her too well to be fooled by it. She was too still, her jaw locked and shoulders hunched slightly forward as she applied her unwavering personal control over the many conflicted feelings raging through her. Out of respect for her meditations, they did not disturb the silence of the small vessel and stared out of the windows with feigned interest the entire way down to the spreading carpet of Mindoir`s arboreal forests.
"Scans indicate that little has changed about Mindoir since the last time you were here Shepard. However, I am having difficulty detecting the exact location of the stronghold here."
"The mountains do that. They're magnetically unique." Shepard ran her hand over her face and examined the garbled scans that EDI was sending her. Life signs everywhere, flicking in and out of existence, but localized into a four square mile area located just north of the border of the forest. She instructed the shuttle to set them down in one of the barren, rocky outcroppings among the trees and returned to her silence until the thud of metal on soil alerted her to the end of this long pilgrimage. As she stepped out of the small space and inhaled, her lungs suddenly full of the sweet aroma of fresh, wet earth she felt as though she had been on her way here a long time. Rolling her shoulders under the thick armour plates of her gauntlets she hopped down, her boots striking earth and grass with a soft thud. She moved forward, using the barrel of her shotgun to swipe away the curtains of shoulder-height grass that had taken over where the soil was too thin for trees. Small, sky-blue flowers crunched under foot as she surveyed the motionless woods all around them.
"Wow." Garrus commented, as the shuttle pulled up behind them, cradling his assault rifle in his hands, but not pointing it at anything in particular. He watched the shuttle as it pulled up over the distant tree tops, his mandibles twitching inquisitively. "How tall are these trees? "
"Two hundred feet on average." Shepard replied automatically. "It's not unusual for them to be taller though. Three hundred feet, four in the old growth parts of the forest, but those are in the low lands. They never stop growing, and they live to be thousands of years old." She felt like a travel brochure and shut her mouth, tapping at her navigational display. They were using the Normandy as a satellite to overcome the havoc Mindoir's strange magnetism was having on their sensors, EDI handling the immensely complex task with all the cool, easy efficiency of a master AI. At least it told her which way was north.
Garrus looked impressed, turning in a slow circle as he studied the rolling eternity of ancient behemoths around them. Thane was silent, as he often was, but his face communicated a similar sense of wonder at the sight before him. Nestled at the foot of the forest it was easy to imagine that it went on forever in all directions, the world cast eternally in twilight by the enormous canopy overhead. The departure of the shuttle had heralded the rise of the forests voice as well, a thousand strange creatures they could not see raising their voices among the distant branches.
"Word to the wise, the bugs run big here." Shepard`s voice was steely as she readied her M-6 with armour piercing ammo. The other two snapped out of their appreciation and became suddenly businesslike, bracing their rifles against their shoulders and taking their positions at her left and right. "And they bite hard enough to make it through Kevlar, and most of them have a wicked hive mentality that will bring a thousand of them crawling out of the ground the minute you crush one. I recommend leaving them alone and hoping they're in a similarly charitable mood."
"How big are we talking?" Garrus asked, his small blue eyes considerably less admiring as he squinted at the advancing tree line.
"There's one about the length of your arm." She glanced over her shoulder at him. "With pincers and a barbed spear they shoot at you from their mouths. Most of the others are smaller. Most." She turned back to the woods and heard him make a nervous sound in his chest. She would not have expected a turian to have a thing about bugs. They had always reminded her of some sort of warm-blooded mantis with their mandibles and hard scales and everything. She thought it wise not to mention her musings to Garrus, it seemed like the kind of thing that would be insensitive to say a loud.
"Charming place for a colony." He mused. "Not just the Terminus fringe, but the planet infested with living nightmares. Why don't we ever go anywhere nice?" He was trying to lighten the mood, she realized and gave him a strained smile in place of a thanks.
"They stay in the forest mostly, they have a dependency on a nutritional compound in the wood. The only time we ever encountered them was on the way to temple, and that was part of the whole thing. Peril in pursuit of faith and overcoming it with patience and virtue rather than with violence." Shepard replied, the words gushing out with barely a flicker of conscious decision on her part. She did not have to turn around to sense their blank stares and realized that had probably been the largest and most complex detail of her former life that she had ever revealed to anyone.
"Did you live around here?" Thane asked. His voice was quiet, breathy, and despite all that she was engrossed in at the moment she could not help but feel a tingle in the skin along her neck where she had felt that voice whispering in a similar fashion just hours before. She did not let it distract her.
"No, probably not. Mindoir is a big planet, and a pretty major part of it is covered in these forested mountain areas. We colonized them because their signal-disrupting magnetism was supposed to keep us safe from pirates and slavers. Or, safer at least." The irony of her own words tasted sour in her mouth and she made a face. "There's hundreds of miles of forest on this planet, we're probably nowhere near where I grew up. It all feels familiar though."
Again, the feeling of their eyes on her. She decided it would be best to keep her mouth shut for a while and directed them forward, into the gloom of the underbrush with a few terse flicks of her hand instead. They obeyed without question, as they always did, and they all moved forward, ducking under the cerated fronds of a venomous fern and around a hive of fist-sized, twelve legged insectoid creatures in the process. By the time the trees began to thin and the meadows became visible, slopping up to the colder, rockier areas where the great forest stopped, her companions were significantly less impressed with the wonder of Mindoir`s forests.
"So there aren't any monstrous freak creatures up there?" Garrus asked. He had not spoken since she had pointed out the hive to him and his voice was still slightly hoarse. She could not help but grin at him as she nodded reassuringly. He glared at her. "Don't give me that look Shepard."
"I've just never seen this side of you before. All scared and vulnerable." She teased. She was relaxing slightly, the lines in her shoulders easing as she became accustomed to the familiarity of the planet. The clean air, the constant sounds of thousands of creatures feeding, fighting and breeding and the slightest hitch in the gravity that she could feel as nothing more than a lightness in her step as the burden of her heavy armour and weapons was lifted were all things she had forgotten she enjoyed. She had loved this place, she remembered now after so many years. As a child she had thought there could be nowhere in the universe more beautiful than Mindoir and its symphony of gargantuan life cycles.
He clicked his mandibles in her direction, a turian variation of 'fuck you' as she understood it, and she just grinned harder as they cleared the tree-line and she squinted up, over the stony meadows. The mountains were as strange as the rest of the planet, symmetrical ridges of stone swirling across their faces. Nothing moved, but slowly a frown creased the centre of Shepard's forehead and she turned to Thane.
"I need to use your scope." He handed her his rifle without question, glancing across the motionless grass for some sign of what was concerning her. Nothing made itself apparent, and as she lifted his rifle to her shoulder to peer at the distant pattern on the mountains it became obvious that something was wrong. Her face was an almost sickly yellow when she lowered the gun again and handed it back to him.
"Those aren't natural formations." She said, squaring her shoulders and taking a visibly steadying breath. "Those are farming terraces, man made for growing grain. Those specific terraces, are the ones that overlooked our colony, which must be just beyond that rise." She pointed east with her pistol, her voice sounding hollow and strangely flat as though she were straining to speak.
"Oh." It was the only response anyone could muster for a moment and then Shepard shrugged, as though the weight of her armour were suddenly too much for her to handle and motioned them forward again. They hesitated for a moment, and then moved to their proper positions at her side. As they made their way along the rocky ground, damp lichen and moss treacherously slippery under foot, Thane pulled close to her.
"Are you alright?" He asked quietly, his eyes flicking to her only once as he scanned the lifeless horizon.
"Yes." She replied. Nothing resembling emotion was working within her at the moment. It was likely that the pirates they were hunting had decided to reinforce the infrastructure of the abandoned colony to save time and resources rather than build their own base in the surrounding hills. It was most logical for her to go this way, to do a thorough sweep of any of the buildings that might still be standing before moving on. But with every step her body screamed at her to turn back, to get back in the shuttle and just run away. It was a feeling she had never in her life experienced before and it made her angry, spurred her on because of sheer stupid pride. She had never run away from anything in her life, and she was not going to start now when she most needed to be strong. "Stay alert."
He said nothing in response, just nodded and fell back a few steps. She could feel his eyes linger on her, however briefly, and tried to ignore it. She did not need sympathy right now, sympathy would be the thing that tipped her from anger to despair. She needed to be angry at the moment, needed the hard, brutal intensity it gave her. There would be time for softness later.
They paused as the first outlines of old buildings appeared around the bend of the hill. She called halt with a raised fist and dropped to one knee, noting defence turrets and a few lazy looking batarian guards smoking cigarettes as their rifles leaned against the wall beside them. Shepard made a sound of disgust, wondering if she was ever going to meet a pirate that was not an idiot and invited Garrus and Thane to take position with a wave of her arm. Six bullets for six guards. Not one got so much as a finger on their weapon before it was over.
"Good work." Shepard muttered into the radio as they began their advance. The defence turret swivelled around to target them as they entered its sensor radius, but Garrus was already raising his omnitool and an explosion of blue sparks preceded its loud explosion. From further down the narrow street came sounds of shouting. Shepard dashed into cover behind the nearest house, her M-6 drawn up against her chest and peered down the shockingly familiar street. She could almost see her old life interposed upon the present, the shadows of people etched over the decay of nineteen years of neglect. She signalled that there were two more turrets and advised a cautious advance before they surged forward with the quick, single-minded synchrony of true soldiers.
The second turret was down and the third was dying before the first counter wave reached them, a rabble of disorganized amateurs with assault rifles. They stood too close together, but did not seem to be working together in the least bit. A well placed shockwave sent a handful of heavily armoured batarians flying like rag dolls, where sniper shots picked them effortlessly out of the air. In less than a minute eight men were dead and the final turret exploded with enough force to send a piece of itself crashing through an intact glass window. Shepard tapped at her navigator and then remembered that it was not working. She looked up and down the street and then shrugged.
"This way." She ordered. They went.
The next wave had an officer, an older looking batarian missing one of his upper eyes. As he screamed at his men to get into formation Shepard hit him with a blast of warp energy and Thane followed with a single deadly shot to his unhelmeted head. Any semblance of order dissolved as he crumpled to the ground twitching, and the three attackers resumed their effortless slaughter. It was silent, gruesome work, each of them knowing the other so well that verbal orders and confirmations were a waste of time. They killed like one being, moving up through the street toward the heavily reinforced building that had once been town hall.
"Three combat turrets, crammed in behind tank cover." Thane reported as they dove into cover to escape a barrage of bullets. There was a dull whistle and thudding geyser of fire from the corner of the wall they had disappeared behind and he sighed. "Two combat turrets and a rocket turret." He corrected himself.
"There's a back door. Let's check that." Shepard reported, beginning to circle the house. There were no guards outside, the majority of the force having most likely retreated inside relying on their nest of machinery to do their work for them. The two men followed her, around the reeking pile of garbage the pirates had simply piled up a few feet away from their base of operations and heading around the back of the building. A woody vine with large bluish leaves that smelled faintly like dry mould was growing up the side of the building, completely obscuring the windows and, they discovered after a bit of probing and tearing, hiding the back door. Shepard laughed low in her throat. "Every moment that passes I hate pirates a little more."
She broke the door open with one well-placed heave of her shoulder and they emerged into a musty backroom, sparsely furnished and defiantly modest in nature. The dust on the floor was thick and almost untouched, it muffled the sounds of their feet as they made their careful way through the old building. Unlike most places built in the last thousand years or so, the houses on Mindoir were made of stone, and it felt different to walk in them again now that she was so much older. Had the rooms always been this small? The ceilings always so low? They seemed almost claustrophobic to her now.
There was only one squad, a nervous rabble drawn up in front of the main door behind the turrets, so forward focused that they easily eliminated all their rocket troops within ten seconds of engagement. As reinforcements funnelled down the stairs Shepard could not pass up the opportunity to slap out her grenade launcher. As she went down on one knee in the centre of the hall, the unwieldy machine balanced on one shoulder, Thane took point behind her, covering her with rapid bursts from his SMG while Garrus hung further back still, belly to the floor and put his sniper rifle to good use. A single grenade was all it took to disperse the group choking the centre of the stairs, fifteen men vanishing in an explosion of gore and stone chips. Those outside of the blast radius back pedalled furiously, trying to get back to solid footing as rotten mortar crumbled from between the cut stone stairs and they began to slip away underfoot. As they slipped and fell she unloaded another grenade among them, cries of agony erupting and then dying as Garrus snuffed them out one by one.
It was silent in the small hallway as Shepard stood up, slinging the launcher back in place and cracking her neck.
"Amateurs." Garrus grumbled.
"I know." Shepard agreed. She took another deep breath and put her hands on her hips and surveyed the blood-spattered carnage of the main hall. "This is the biggest group we've taken out yet. Hopefully this will piss someone important off."
Garrus stared at her for a moment and then sighed, rolling his shoulders. "Whatever you say, Shepard."
As they headed out, picking their way through the bodies and parts of bodies littering the floors and headed toward the main room where voting and town council meetings had been held when she was a child Shepard could hear the rumble of panicked batarian voices. She activated her barrier and broke into a run, tucking her shoulder down and smashed the wooden door off its hinges. As she turned to the first of the remaining batarians there was a pulse of dazzling white and then the smell of ozone. She swore, shielding her eyes and throwing a ball of furious biotic energy at the nearest silhouette. It sent the batarian engineer that had been crouched over a computer console smashing into the wall behind him, the back of his head making an unpleasant crunching sound as it met stone. Thane killed the other occupant with a blast of warp energy complimented nicely with bullets. They were suddenly alone.
"FUCK." Shepard swore, tearing off her helmet and staring at ominously dark, unresponsive circuits. She tried to access her omnitool, only to find she could not even pull the damn thing up. "FUCK!"
"Indeed." Thane replied placidly, tapping at his own similarly dysfunctional radio. She glared at him and glanced to her other companion, hoping against hope for a miracle, only to have Garrus shrug helplessly and swore again, vicious and filthy.
"Fuck." She spat, resisting the urge to throw the stupid helmet against the nearest hard surface, which happened to be the corpse of the batarian she had just killed. "Shit. Fuck."
"Indeed."
Shepard rubbed the back of her neck with one hand and placed the other one on her hip, still hooked around the chin guard of her helmet as she took a few deep breaths. This was not a problem. Radio transmission was down, but Garrus was pretty good with tech. He might be able to salvage something. If all else failed, after four hours with no communication update Miranda would lead a team to investigate their disappearance anyway. There was really nothing to worry about. Except that of all the fucking planets it could have happened on, it had to be MINDOIR that they were stuck on.
"Okay. Let's search this place. Hopefully we didn't give them a chance to fuck us by frying all their systems when they started losing." She was standing straight and purposefully again but did not sound hopeful. Batarian battle custom was to do just that.
A scan of the facility revealed an amazing amount of red sand, Shepard's mood brightening considerably at that, and she remarked that one of the larger gangs had probably been using this organization to smuggle them across the fringe systems into Citadel space. It did not reveal a single piece of working electronic equipment, however, and that killed any excitement the prospect of pissing off major criminal organizations may have had sparked in her. She sighed, abandoning the last cold and dysfunctional circuit board and stood, putting her hands on her hips.
"Well, I guess we've got some time to kill." She remarked with a helpless shrug of her shoulders. "We might as well burn these drugs while we wait for a pick up."
They found a barren patch of rocky soil a few hundred yards from the house of slaughter and spent the next hour moving over sixty kilograms of red sand out of its various semi-intelligent hiding places throughout the building. Shepard found dry paper and some wood and started a little fire in the centre of the bundles, and before long tongues of red fire were shooting along the cloth wrappings, consuming the foul stuff and throwing up clouds of acrid black smoke. Shepard retreated to the edge of the meadow and stared down, over the rows of ramshackle buildings that had once been her home. After a moment she felt a presence at her side and turned to see Garrus standing beside her, looking at the same things and seeing... she wondered what. For her everything here seemed so important, so grand and full of meaning. To him it must seem like every other shitty little colony they had run into out here.
"Are you going to be okay?" He asked finally, turning away from the view of dirty, overgrown streets and looking at her instead.
"I'm fine Garrus. Really." She replied. It was not all a lie. She honestly was not feeling much of anything right now, other than a seething confusion and frustration. What joke of the universe was it that pirates should wind up here out of all planets in the Terminus Systems and in her old settlement of all the places on Mindoir? Had her father been here, he would have called it karma. She recoiled at that thought, it was riddled with too many emotions that were already much to near to breaking her stoicism. Now was not the time for the kinds of thoughts they would bring. "You don't have to worry about me."
"Maybe not, but I do anyway." He replied, turning to face her head on. His small blue eyes were bright, active with emotion that quivered through his mandibles. Had she been better with turian facial expression she might have been able to tell what it was for certain. At the moment though, it seemed like a very genuine concern. "You always say that you're 'fine' when anyone asks you how you feel, always, no matter what the situation and to be honest Shepard it's not a very good lie. You said you thought of me like family, and well... it's the same for me. So I worry. If I don't who will?"
"I don't need anyone to worry about me." She insisted, as he crossed his arms and stubbornly remained concerned. "Really. I'm not... I'm not fine with what's going on right now. But I'm dealing with it, the same way I've always dealt with it. I've been an orphan the entire time you've known me, Garrus. These feelings are nothing new."
"Shepard." Thane's voice, hoarse with sudden emotion, interrupted them and they both looked up. Up until that moment he had been staring out across the northern meadows with studious concentration, giving them their privacy and perhaps meditating as he often did in the small lulls in combat they were provided. "There's... something here you should see."
His voice filled her with subconscious dread as she skirted the mounting fire, leaning away from the clouds of odorous smoke wafting off and stared down the slope of the hill, into the small gulch that preceded the beginning of the mountains steep rise. For a moment she saw nothing but tangled vegetation, but her mechanical eyes adjusted themselves, her corneas rotating and she saw with sudden clarity the ridges of skeletons clustered there. Human skeletons.
"Oh." She said softly. Something cold was slithering down her spine, making goose bumps rise across her back. As she continued to stare she realized that the entire swath of thick vines and roots growing down there were poking through a massive pile of human bones. Five hundred and twenty six people had lived in their little settlement, and though she knew that many of them had been taken by the slavers rather than killed outright it seemed to her that there were a lot of bodies rotting down there. "Oh... that's... oh..."
She turned and walked away, not looking at either of them, and headed past the town hall they had made into a slaughterhouse. She was not entirely sure where she was going, as she disappeared over the knoll and headed down into the familiar streets. She just knew that she was going away from THAT.
Garrus and Thane stared at each other for a long moment, each of them twitching with their need to go after her. The fire continued to rage, too large to be left unattended and they both knew it. After a moment Garrus nodded in her direction and sighed.
"Go on then. I guess I'm glad she has someone else that cares." He said finally. Thane nodded his thanks and left, jogging over the stony earth as Garrus sat down and pulled his rifle into his lap, beginning to clean it more out of habit then necessity. The thick smoke rising from the towering inferno coloured the sky with smears of rotten black and grey.
"Siha!" Thane called after her, as she continued to make her way through the overgrown streets. None but the most hard-packed of the dirt roads had remained, the rest of the once immaculate streets had become crowded with weeds and grass long ago. She paused in front of her grandparents house for a moment, which gave Thane the time he needed to catch up with her. "Siha, I'm sorry."
"It's not your fault. I would have seen them eventually." She replied, staring at the line of Hindu blessings carved above the doorway. She had not read Sanskrit in almost twenty years, and she fumbled over a few of the words as she tried to remember what exactly they said, but in the end nothing could wash the memory of their meaning from her mind. He came up beside her, staring up at the inscription and then back to her.
"What does it say?" He asked quietly. The usual 'are you okay' seemed a tad overdone at this point. She very obviously was not.
"You have only the power to act, you do not have the power to influence the result, therefore you must act without the anticipation of result without succumbing to inaction." She recited, smiling to herself. "My grandfather carved it there the day the house was finished. He meditated on it all day, every day. It was very… inactive of him." Her laugh was humourless and brief.
"Meditated?" Thane looked baffled by the idea of humans doing anything so calm and sedate and it earned him another one of those cold, humourless laughs. It made him flinch, slightly and she shook her head as she turned away from the familiar doorway. She knew what she would find inside, nothing of any value beyond self-inflicted emotional torture.
"Yes, yes, even humans can sit still and be quiet occasionally. We meditated a lot here, and prayed and did yoga which is pretty much just a combination of those two you do while bending your legs into a pretzel and breathing deeply." The bitterness of her words left a foul tang on her tongue and she grimaced faintly. "That was all we did here, meditated, prayed and farmed. Sometimes in the winter we would go to school, which was a room in the town house where an old woman read to us from the Vedas and taught us the mathematics we needed for building drainage ditches and barns. Prayer five hours a day, four of meditation and yoga, six in the fields and the rest of the waking hours spent cooking and cleaning and mending. That was my entire life here."
The hollowness had returned to her voice as she made her way down the street, staring at everything and not really seeing it. She was looking back in her mind, back to a time when everything had been so different, so full of life and colour that it was hard to imagine had been real. In its decomposing state everything seemed so leeched, devoid of the vibrancy she remembered. She wondered if her memories of the blissful tranquility she had felt here were even real, if they were some fantasy her mind had cooked up after years on the streets, after Torfan and after death. Everyone always talked about the good old days, after all, while no one ever seemed happy in the present. Her memories of Mindoir could be just a continuation of that pattern.
"This was a cult?" Thane asked, sounding shocked. He looked around the small, silent buildings as though seeing them for the first time. Dusk was gathering on the horizon, and the fading light made the shadows darken like bruises, everything coloured sinister shades of grey and blue. She laughed and shook her head, either in answer or to alleviate the tension gathering in her muscles it was hard to say.
"People called it that. We called it a religious commune. Maybe they mean the same thing." She stopped again, staring up at a house that looked quite similar to all the others. A smashed window, a broken door sagging off its hinges onto the collapsing porch. It looked treacherous, unsafe, but she pressed on, climbing the steps and picking her way carefully through the patches of rot and powdered wood until she passed inside. Thane followed her, not sure if that was what she wanted but not knowing what else to do. "But our cult was nine thousand years old, and had no fat old man controlling us with drugs or charisma. We were in this life for a higher purpose, and the way we lived was just a reflection of that."
"What higher purpose?" Thane asked as she looked around the fanatically humble room, furnished with nothing but a low table and set of washing basins against one wall. To the side, three low doorways led into the bedrooms. It all seemed very rustic and agrarian. All but the skeleton sprawled across the floor. He took a slight step back as he saw it, but Shepard just walked closer, pushing open the broken door and stopping in the centre of the tiny bedroom.
She shrugged. "I don't know. Enlightenment, I suppose. Nirvana. The concept doesn't translate well from deed to words, but in the end I guess we were just looking for meaning. Why are we alive? Why is anything alive? What is our purpose? We thought God had the answers." She picked something up off the floor and Thane moved closer, realizing it was the pieces of some crude clay structure that had been smashed beyond recognition. There was also another skeleton in here, and a collection of mouldy, broken wood against one wall.
"It was all so clear…" She whispered, more to herself than to him. "If you followed the laws, the divine laws, it was supposed to be clear." Her hands began to tremble and the pieces of clay dropped, falling between her boots and crumbling all the more, nothing but dust now, dust among dust.
"What was supposed to be clear?" He asked, drawing closer to her. She looked up at him, her eyes glowing brilliant orange in the dim light.
"Everything. You do no harm to the world, because violence only begets more violence. You do no harm and no harm will find you. That was the way it worked." Her voice sounded coarse, slightly angry as the looked over at the skeleton sprawled against the wall. The stone floor underneath him was stained black with old blood, and Thane could see from the shape of the head that it was a batarian. After so long it was hard to say exactly how he had died, but the shattered pelvis probably had not helped anything.
"And then I killed these men, in this room where I had worked so hard to be good and pure and everything became suddenly murky. That one would have raped me. They both would have killed me. Even the Bhagavad says that you can kill in self-defence and suffer no negative karma. But when I killed them, everything changed." She shook her head, slapping dust off the palms of her gloves and sighed. "I thought coming back here would make things clearer, at least. I don't know why I thought that, but I did."
"And how do you feel?" Thane asked quietly, putting his hand on her shoulder to try and comfort her, try to do anything that would make something about this easier for her. Under her blond hair her face was pale and drawn, her lips drawn tight into a grimace of constant pain. She shook her head and he placed his other hand on her shoulder, forcing her to face him. "What do you need?"
"I need to be alone." She said, finally, looking up at him for a moment before she turned away, looking down at the featureless block of grey stone that had been laid against the far wall. He said nothing for a long moment, just stared at her with eyes she could always feel, even when she could not see them.
"As you wish." He said, after a long moment. And, as ever, Shepard was alone.