The Sword of Humanity
Chapter Three
There was an alien on his ship.
Commander Shepard knew unpleasantness; he had battled through grime and blood to get where he was, and he would gladly do so again given the chance, but everything had a limit.
There was a blue skinned alien, with strange horrendous tentacles sprouting out of her head, aboard.
And he couldn't kill it.
The Kill-Switch had been successfully implanted by Dr. Chawkas however, so even if the thing were to suddenly have a killing spree, he'd be able to put it down remotely. He'd have to get someone to clean blue-skinned alien blood from the spot, but that would at least be a finite problem.
They would rendezvous on orbit with the ambassador Udina, and he would then escort down on ground —and hopefully forever away from his ship— the alien. These were the times he realized that the Deep Darkness, for all of its strength in battle, held a single glaring weakness.
It was too slow.
He knew he was just being caustic; any other ship of the Solforce Navy would either take the same time or more to do the same track, and while their Pulsed Fusion engines weren't the top of the line any longer, they still were better than the old Fission ones.
He thrummed his fingers against the surface of his chair's palm surface, his eyes glaring murderously at the back of his flight lieutenant who was seemingly ignorant of his leveling glare. How could he be so calm?
There was an alien aboard.
And they couldn't shoot it.
He breathed in sharply, before standing up and leaving the bridge —one of the marines behind standing to attention and exclaiming his 'standing down' from the commanding bridge.
The corridors —straight and narrow as they were— now looked viciously constricting to him. He could hear it in the soft rumbling of the ship, propagating through the metal surface of the walkway he was on. He began to sweat, his left hand tightening against the handle of the sword at his hip.
It had taken all of his willpower not to simply burn the alien's things. Now he actually had to tell the alien it could freely walk into the forward mess hall and into the showers.
The showers…the alien would be sharing the showers with the marines.
He gritted his teeth in frustration.
"Play it cool, Shepard," he muttered to himself. "It's not Isis," he whispered. "It's not Isis."
Green skinned monstrosities bearing claw-like appendages and shrieking out angry-spouted words in their native tongue. Their Hive-Mind granting each soldier the realization of where everyone else was, making it impossible to just gun them down one by one. Thick skin and strong limbs that could tear apart a Marine within seconds if they made contact.
He led fifty men into battle that day, holding out the Spaceport as the civilians evacuated. He fought through unblemished metal corridors and shiny advertisement for new hair products. He tossed grenades and held his men at the logical chokepoints.
It was a manual tactic. It was a manual operation.
There simply wasn't an end to the enemy.
And bullets, eventually, always run dry.
He distractedly fingered the sides of the officer's pistol, at rest in its holster within his suit. He could just unbutton —or more likely tear open— his suit and grasp at the weapon within seconds. Yet…
Yet he had received his orders.
And to a soldier of Solforce, orders were the difference between life and death.
He took another deep breath, centering himself as he curtly pressed his palm against the side of the door, unlocking it.
John stepped aside as the doors slid open, a biotic flare emerging from within the room soon followed by a sharp cry of pain and the sound of flesh repeatedly hitting metal.
He waited another minute, hearing the soft gasps and whines of pain coming from within the holding cell before finally taking a step inside.
Sprawled on the ground and still slightly trembling, her eyes open and watery in a clear depicture of pain and misery, the Asari was looking at him with a pleading face. At least, he supposed the alien was pleading, their face was strangely too human for his liking.
"What did you do to me?" she croaked out, "It hurts."
"We embedded a mean to control your Biotic potential. A micro-transmitter is now directly between your third and your fourth vertebrae. Should anyone but Solforce try to remove it, it will detonate. Should you try and steal from Solforce, it will detonate. Should you try something like this again…" he gestured around the air, "it will detonate. It also transmits your location to the Ai aboard, so we know where you will be, always."
The alien closed her eyes as he kept on talking; he even used a bored tone, as if this was protocol.
"It can also unleash a light electrical discharge, which directly takes the energy from your own nerves to power up."
"Light?" she whimpered.
"Electrical discharges within one's own body are not generally pleasant," he remarked dryly. "Follow the guidelines, and this will all be over before you can realize it."
The alien slowly crawled on its back, its head now resting against the side of the cell's cot.
"Can…can I go to the bathroom?"
"At your leisure," he replied carefully taking a few steps backwards and leaving the small cell. The room was two meters per two —more than enough to calm down rowdy marines, and at a moment's notice tranquilizing gasses could be unleashed within— and that by itself was a luxury the alien didn't seem thankful for. Well, she was going to be glad she'd be able to use the bathroom without having to really leave the room.
They had given her a prison cell after all.
One corner of the room slowly lid apart, to reveal a chamber pot.
It was enough to make the alien scream obscenities again.
"This treatment is intolerable! It's uncivilized! I can't believe the council—" the girl screamed just as the hydraulic doors closed on their own accord, preventing the alien from stomping outside.
The commander still heard her however.
"Edi?"
There was another scream. Silence soon followed, interrupted by the whimpers of the alien.
After a few more minutes, the Commander heard the flush of the toilet.
Two seconds later and the doors slid open again, the alien's face a mess of blue and slightly darker blue eye-lids with tears streaking down her cheeks.
So the alien could cry like a human.
"Why are you doing this?" she whispered. "Wouldn't it be better to just…send me to sleep and wake me up once we arrive?"
"No," he retorted curtly. "I have my orders. I am going to show you around. You will follow, in silence."
The alien did not answer, but she did slowly nod and wipe away the tears. He gestured for her to follow, and then began to walk alongside the hallways to where the forward mess was.
"Four meters from your room to your right, is a magazine storage unit," the Commander quipped in while pointing to a black hydraulics door. "Anything you see is color coded and you can only access the nice red areas, understood?"
"I'm not a—"
The alien quieted herself within seconds. Her face blossoming in pain as she clenched her fists. "This is no better than—"
Her arms jerked sharply, forcing her body to slam against the side of the corridor.
"Edi can keep this up all day and all night, for all three weeks of your stay with us," the Commander smoothly interjected. "Given time, I'm sure she'd be able to find the correct electrical stimulus to have you dance."
"Commander, the number of impulses required would kill the subject the ninety-eight percent of times."
"Oh? You're lucky then," John added as he smiled to the alien. "You won't be forced to dance. Now, when I ask you questions, I want a 'yes, sir' or a 'no, sir'. I hope for your own good you know which is the proper one for the situation…do you understand me?"
The alien looked at him warily by now, before finally biting out. "Yes, sir."
"Good! Shows that you aliens can be trained properly," then John simply gestured for her to stand. The alien wobbled on her feet and bit back another reply. She followed…no, it followed him through the metal walkway towards the forward mess hall. As they went by, he couldn't help but feel her gaze wandering as some sort of…violation of the ship.
This was a Solforce Dreadnought, this was his ship, not something an alien should be seeing from within.
The forward mess held metal tables fused with the floor, as well as benches. There were a few marines off-duty talking between them and playing cards —old maid, of all things— but as he entered one of them stood up, soon followed by the others.
"Commander!" they all exclaimed at the same time.
"At ease men!" he snapped back curtly.
"This is the forward mess," he turned to the Asari who had shrunk once more on herself at the sight of the four two meters and half genetically engineered marines without their suits. "This is where you'll be eating your meals."
"Is our biological consumption compatible?" she asked out without thinking, before closing her eyes and standing in wait for the pain. She hesitantly opened her right eye, and then her left, as no pain seemed to be forthcoming.
"It is," the Commander replied. "We can turn back now," he added before carefully making his way around the alien and back the same walkaway they had gone through once. The alien followed dutifully, scampering to keep up with his ample stride.
The man descended through what looked like a manhole, forcing Liara to actually squint at the thing before carefully grasping at the metal bars protruding from the sides of the ship. One foot after the other, she successfully lowered herself on the lower floor.
"This are the forward quarters," the Commander remarked. "Down that way is the Command Bridge, where I will be when I'm not through that door," he hissed slightly as he pointed to where his door was. He was following orders, and that was all there was. "Unless it is important, don't disturb me."
"I can access the bridge?" she inquired then with surprise.
"On the bridge Edi has enough cameras to always check what you are doing," John supplied. "And without an Omni-Tool you will not be able to hack into our network," he remarked. "You'll be given the data we have managed to already acquire from the Prothean beacon, and you may study it at your leisure."
She breathed slowly then, nodding.
"Yes, sir."
"Good," he spun around, moving towards the bridge with the Alien right behind him. He wasn't going to wonder why the Director had tasked them with this, but the com buoy just outside the citadel had been clear on the mission.
"So is the overgrown smurf sexy?" a voice commented from the helm of the ship, as Lieutenant Moreau kept on his gaze towards the radar and indicators of the ship's engines. He hadn't turned around, only heard the marine's exclamation near the door —he hadn't even stood to attention.
"She's blue Lieutenant," he retorted ignoring the look of surprise at being talked of —with her present nonetheless— by the two men. "There is no sexy in blue."
Somehow, John could feel the eyes of the alien settle on him as he sat down at his chair and popped open from the palm shelf a small disc. He inserted it into the Omni-Tool that the alien had been given and then handed it over to the thing.
"By the way, Lieutenant? The overgrown smurf is in the same room as you right now."
Jeff stammered as he spun the chair around, standing up with visible embarrassment.
"Sir!" he exclaimed. "You could have told me!"
"Excuse me," the alien asked then, her eyes travelling to the flight lieutenant. "What is…a smurf?"
"Ah, yeah, about that," the helmsman of the Deep Darkness was flustered as he sort-of stammered out an apology.
"They're…I mean I'm sort of sorry about it, but they're children cartoons where there are these small blue creatures who live in the forest, and there's this big bad mage who wants to eat them but can never catch one."
"Goddess, it sounds like the story of Elc the angry Elcor and the smart Pyjaks…and I was compared to one of such creatures?" she cocked her head to the side. "Is that…a compliment, in your culture?"
"Ah well yeah! Yeah it is!" the helmsman nodded frantically.
John ignored them, holding himself from reigning in Jeff's blatant attempts with the alien. He knew the helmsman was going to be trouble. He suspected everyone down to the engine room knew that Jeff Moreau would be the first to try and befriend the monstrosities in blue skin. You just couldn't 'not' like the helmsman of the ship, and even if you could he'd still find a way to worm into you all the same.
He knew the only reason the flight lieutenant wasn't accused of Xenophilia was because of his medals during the Isis campaign.
And to think that, in another less-technological universe, he might have never even held a rifle or piloted an assault shuttle…
The man's Vrolik Syndrome was some sort of drunk tale he used to talk and boast of. The sickness had been discovered in the womb, and the ensuing genetical tailoring had brought out a perfectly healthy baby.
Still, he had 'dodged' the bullet of being forced on a chair for the rest of his life.
"We can talk more at…dinner, lunch?"
"Breakfast, Lieutenant," Edi commented calmly. "It is in two hours."
"Oh, right!" Jeff grinned cheekily. "See you in the forward mess then, Miss T'soni!"
John gazed for just a second more at the alien leaving the bridge, and immediately turned on the tracking sensor and the cameras. The blue skinned freak of nature entered her cell the next instant, closed the door behind her and then crumbled on the ground crying and slamming her fist against the pavement.
He closed his eyes for a moment, and when he reopened them the alien was in a corner, huddled and holding her arms around herself.
Its arms around itself.
The alien was a thing, not a human. It didn't matter what her physiognomy was, or what she believed herself to be. The thing was an alien, a monster, a non-human. The thing wasn't on the ship to make peace talks, but as a mean to an end for Solforce. That was the only reason he had accepted her onboard.
He knew duty before pleasure.
John hardened his glare as he opened up the messages of the com buoys that had neatly piled one after the other. The first thing he did, he opened the Black messages.
A list of names, surnames, medals assigned appeared on screen with the pictures of the recently deceased the Ais declared he should be saddened for. People like one of his classmates during the military training or of one of his fellow crewmen when he served upon the Cruiser Xenos or the Destroyer Devastation. The more names popped up, the more he knew that eventually he would run out of friends.
Not that he had talked to any of them in the last five years…
He filtered the messages to those who held the surname 'Shepard'. It wouldn't work with the maternal side of the family, but at least it would give him some peace of mind. Two names bleakly beeped on the console's screen.
Hannah Shepard, Fleet Admiral and assigned to the Tarka quadrant, died at age fifty-nine after the explosion of the Command and Control SFS Dreadnought Honest Flag. Relation to receiver: mother.
Michael Shepard, Fleet Admiral and assigned to the Zuul quadrant, SFS Command and Control Dreadnought Last Guardian boarded and status unknown. Assumed deceased or enslaved. Relation to receiver: older brother.
His left hand slammed on the palm shelf as he closed his eyes shut and snarled. His fist slammed again, once more, until he abruptly stood up and stormed out.
He entered his room and screamed, repeatedly swinging his fists against the metal bulk of the wall close by.
"Commander, your chances of breaching the hull are theoretically and practically impossible, may I suggest an alternative?" the Ai piped in suddenly, as the door of Shepard's room closed.
"No," he muttered. "Just get the VR ready for the Assault on Isis scenario."
"Commander, I have noticed a decrease in productivity and an increase of alcoholic consumption each time you complete the scenario. Might I suggest 'Kittens and Dogs' as a possible VR scenario?"
"I need to shoot things, Edi," he snapped back at the thing. "Not pet a cat or throw a ball at a dog!"
"Yes, Commander," the blue ball of Edi's face disappeared back into the hologram projector, as the door of his quarters slid open again.
John Shepard didn't need animals to pet or play with.
He needed aliens to shoot at.
Cerberus Operative Lawson.
"So it is a no?" the Director asked calmly, his fingers tapping slightly one against the other. "Are you sure?" his voice didn't show the hint of an emotion, but she knew better than to believe he was anything but outright furious.
"Then I think our trades are over," the communication interrupted abruptly, the man returned his gaze to her. She tightened her hands on her Datapad, her gaze wavering slightly as she tried a nervous smile. She could act as the most flawless of operatives on any field, but she simply couldn't in front of the Director of Solforce. It was more than just him being the Director of course, or the fact that his entire body was a trove of pheromones and psionic altering fields designed specifically to make any living being strangely more…appreciative, of him.
It was the simple fact that the man was eying her with the harsh and stern glare he probably would have given to the 'trade' partner, whoever he, she or it was.
"The Quarians refused to be genetically altered into humans," the Director commented. "They refused the offer of a genetical re-tailoring of their entire immune system. We could have made them human, their DNA held surprising similarities with ours…but they refused."
"Should we send a fleet to hunt them down?"
"No, that would put them on edge," the Director shook. "We'll wait until they approach a system already guarded in the Terminus area. One with a jammer to prevent leaks to the outside. We'll give the council the usual excuse."
"Law ten," she nodded.
"Project Immunity was a failure," the Director remarked a moment later. "Michael Shepard's kill switch activated within two minutes from capture."
Miranda remained quiet.
"Project Cross-Fusion failed," he added then. "Subspace and Mass Effect do not mix."
She did not say a word.
"The other projects are still functional, and we received confirmation of Projects Ravaging Horde and Subject Zero."
The repeat of the same surname on her Datapad made her narrow her eyes for a moment, before she reopened them briefly. "Am I to assume we are enrolling another Cerberus?"
"Commander John Shepard," the Director of Solforce said then. "The survivor of Isis and the butcher of Mjolnir," he lit another one of his cigars. "All that he is missing is the purpose."
"He was assigned to an escort duty recently towards Eden Prime and the Prothean beacon…didn't we already acquire the relevant information from it?" she bit her lip —her and her way of asking out loud the questions she was thinking about.
"Yes, we did," the Director remarked. She felt like a child in front of such a man, who seemed impassible in the midst of all the chaos around the Solforce sector. "The beacon was damaged however, and repeated usage held negative effects on the user. You will bring the change of orders personally to Commander Shepard on Eden Prime, and we will see."
A message flashed briefly on her datapad's screen. She opened it calmly and read through it.
"I understand," she pressed her lips thinly. "Baptism by blood?"
"I'd rather call it rebirth, through the fires of a phoenix."
The Director of Solforce remained quiet then, taking a slow calculative puff of smoke before resuming his work. She accepted the silent dismissal and turned to leave, only for his voice to cut through the air like a whip.
"If he fails, Miranda," he added then, "kill him."
"Yes, sir."
And then she left, just as the notes of Mozart's requiem began to sound across the Director's office. The Confutatis piece of the funeral song of the century old composer rang through her ears as she took the lift down, to the shuttle bay.
She bit her lip as she scanned through the Datapad. Out of the entire Shepard family, the numbers were now down to five.
Before the end of his induction into Cerberus, she was sure only one name would remain.
His.
Author's notes
Another chapter.
More happiness.
Everyone is friendly.
Everyone is happy.
Some questions are answered. Some aren't.
Some are made.
Isis is a Solforce Colony. If Mass effect has a similar named colony, belonging to another race, then it doesn't matter.