Eidolon

The MSV Alcmene was a small Kowloon-class freighter. As Shepard and Alenko made their way into the docking bay, a bald dock worker used a large yellow exo-suit cargo loader to fill the Alcmene's cargo hold with medical equipment. The thud of the exo-suit's footfalls echoed against the cylindroid bay's walls. Shepard slowed her pace and looked up at the ship and its multi-compartments. Two workers were inspecting crates with Sirta Foundation logos. A few others were hunched over data pads. Several others, wearing bulky civilian environmental suits, were making repairs to the hull, multi-colored wiring exposed haphazardly as they labored over maintenance.

To Shepard it looked like people and objects were strewn about everywhere, no order. Complete and utter chaos. Like someone had shoved corn nibblets into her mashed potatoes and gravy or rearranged her sock drawer without permission. Her fingers twitched to begin pointing out the grievances and giving orders to shape up and toe the damn line. And stack those goddamn crates! Did civilians have no concept of neat rows?It took considerable effort to keep her mouth closed. A muscle ticked in her jaw betraying her inner turmoil. Beside her, Alenko grunted at what she assumed was his response to the attack on their organized lives.

Kowloon-class ships didn't have any armaments to defend against privateers. The ship looked just as beat-up as the one on Feros, which didn't help Shepard's feelings of unease – especially not after being confronted by that Westerlund news reporter. ("The eyes of Earth are on you, Shepard. Don't let us down.") She mentally shook her head, clearing it. Scanning the workers with her odd-colored eyes, she looked for the captain, a woman named Hilary McIntosh. Shepard hoped to identify her by clothing, but thus far wasn't having much luck. Civvies. Had she really lived like this at one point in her life? How had her parents managed?

A tall, lanky woman saw the two marines and made her way over with a slight limp in her gait. Dressed in a khaki overall ensemble, the only thing that made her stand out against the rest of the workers was her light-colored head of hair. She wore her wavy, flaxen hair in a thick tail on the back of her head. Shepard started at the hair color, catching herself quickly. The last she'd seen a human with fair hair had been on Feros. Before that, the last blonds she knew had been Jenkins and Gerry. She wondered briefly if she was cursed to know fair-haired people who perished before their times. Shepard refused to count Carpenter on her list of "Blonds I Know" – Carpenter had been known to dye her hair green or pink on a whim so Shepard doubted Carpenter was a true blonde. And Carpenter was too damn lucky for her own good.

"Commander Shepard, Lieutenant Alenko," the woman welcomed them with a large smile, her blue-gray eyes glittering. She reached out and gripped Shepard's good hand. "Captain Hilary McIntosh. It's an honor to have you on board."

"Captain." Shepard nodded her greeting and set about finding out what the accommodations would be like. She studied Alenko out of the corner of her eye as he greeted the captain. His profile was sharp and confident, one corner of his mouth pulled into a slight smile, the lines about his eyes creasing. Shepard's heart thudded, out of place a second, before it settled to its normal rhythm. He put down his bag, adjusted Shepard's bag on his shoulder, and shook McIntosh's hand.

"You tell me if I'm going too far."

She swallowed. She had wanted to tell him that he wasn't going too far, but that was a damned lie. What had she been thinking by flirting with Alenko and encouraging him to begin with? First and foremost, there were regs. She'd made the mistake of breaking them once before. Splitting with Gerry had been painful. Casbin had reopened old wounds and created others that had yet to heal. Gerry and his team. Le Souef. Guo. Dawson.

God.

Dawson.

Thinking about it was still a raw, lancing pain. Shepard felt certain Liara had shared the memory with her, churning it around like drift wood in a storm. She hadn't figured out how she felt about that or if she was supposed to feel anything. Dr. Chakwas was right, she knew Liara better than she knew Alenko at the moment and the asari only been on board two weeks and had almost no interaction with her. She gritted her teeth.

The Commander took a few calming breaths, compartmentalizing to examine and speak to Liara about later and keeping her face a façade of neutrality. Her eyes scanned the chaos without really seeing anything as Captain McIntosh gave them permission to board entering with them through the cargo hold and moving past the stomping yellow cargo loader.

Shepard had told Alenko about her family. Ugh. Why? Talking about Mindoir just wasn't something she did. As the years had accumulated since the Raid, the sharp pain in her chest had subsided to a dull ache, but it was still there. It would never go away. Opening up to him hadn't helped or made her feel any better about it, but he'd been curious and she'd wanted to satisfy his curiosity.

Damn it. She liked being around Alenko, talking to him, hearing his opinions. She wasn't about to deny that. He was a good soldier, a good leader. The control he had over his biotics was enormous. She suspected it had something to do with Vyrnuus. More than what he had told her. Whatever had happened out on Jump Zero had burned him badly.

And what about Therum? Had she imagined the moment between Alenko and Williams?

She wondered if Gerry had gone through the same doubts before he'd finally given in and had asked her to dinner.

Why was she agonizing over it? Regs were regs. They were there for a reason. Getting involved with Alenko was an overall bad idea. Shepard couldn't afford to be distracted by romantic notions. Her control would crumble, not to mention her command. And what if something happened and she had to either leave him behind or he had to leave her behind? Shepard's already irritable mood took a nose dive. I am not losing another person on this damn mission. There was too much at stake. They still had no clue as to how find the Conduit or where to even begin. Not to mention her heart could be on the line.

God. She didn't want to think about that at all. There were definitely bigger problems. Saren. Geth. Finding the Conduit. Stopping Saren from bringing back ancient machines to wipe out civilization. It was on them.

On her.

And besides, she didn't know how Alenko was going to react to the information Hackett had sent from the investigation. He trusted her now, but once he read the report, would he simply brand her a murderer of her squad like Internal Affairs had tried to do before the Admiral and Captain Anderson had backed her command decision?

The tour of the ship was brief. Kowloon-class freighters were designed with mass production in mind. Essentially, if one had seen the interior of one Kowloon-class, one had seen them all even if the modules that made up the ship were as customized as the Alcmene. One of the ship's modules had been converted strictly into living quarters with four small 'state rooms' for passengers. A mess hall and galley was across the corridor in another module. The module even contained a small rec room. The Captain's quarters were portside forward. The crew's quarters were starboard forward.

"We've got vids and stims," Captain McIntosh told them as she pointed out the rec room. "Exercise equipment. The passenger module has a central head."

"What about medical facilities, ma'am?" Alenko asked. "The Commander has a shoulder injury."

"We've got med kits stocked with medi-gel, anti-biotics and stimulants in the galley and a small AutoArt, but it's nothing as fancy as a medical bay on a military warship," McIntosh said. "We're do-it-yourselfers, so we rely heavily on the VI if someone gets injured enough to need the AutoArt."

Joker shuffled out of the room he'd claimed as his own. "Commander, they have leather seats on the stim unit!" Shepard shook her head. She was never going to get in a good stim now.

It was three days later when Shepard finally ordered Kaidan to review the data from the Admiral with her. The Alcmene had just begun discharging its core at a fuel depot in orbit around the grey hydrogen-helium gas giant. Four months on the Normandy had spoiled Kaidan. They still had about a seventeen hour flight to the nearest relay to Arcturus after discharging. The Normandy would have already been docking at Arcturus by now.

The comm chime pulled his attention away from a drool-inducing post-apocalyptic vampire crime-fighting musical vid starring two elcor, a quarian and a hanar. He stretched and answered, "Alenko."

"Lieutenant." Shepard's voice startled him and he sat up straight.

"Commander?"

"My quarters, please."

He swallowed and agreed, slipping on a shirt and tucking it in as he left his room. When he walked into her quarters, she was sitting at the room's only terminal, the image of a woman in Hahne-Kadar armor pulled up on the holo. As he neared the screen, he took in a breath of air. The woman looked familiar. So familiar that Kaidan felt uncomfortable. He knew her from somewhere. He studied the holo intently for a moment. The woman had long, wavy red hair, but her skin-tone belied her hair color, prompting Kaidan to believe she'd dyed her hair. Her skin was smooth and a few shades darker than his own bronzed-tan skin. Several scars were prominent on her face, an especially jagged one started on her forehead just above her right eyebrow and swept across the bridge of her nose to under her left eye. Her eyes were dark and fathomless, the outer edges tilted just enough to make him wonder if she was from one of Earth's Middle East or Western Asian countries or had the ancestry. Her face was long, lips lush.

"You know her," Shepard said finally. It wasn't a question. It wasn't an accusation. She merely made a statement.

Her words were calm enough that the hair on Kaidan's arms prickled. He looked at Shepard. She looked back. He sighed. "I can't place her, Commander. I feel like I should know her. She's familiar. Her eyes…" His eyes moved of their own volition back to the eyes of the woman in the holo. "Who is she?"

"My old squad mate," she replied.

"The one who attacked you?" Kaidan wet his lips. He'd seen this woman before. He wracked his brain, trying to force himself to remember. Had he served with her before? Was that why the Admiral had been adamant that he accompany Shepard? Was he supposed to give her advice? Or was he going to be testifying against her? The sudden thought made his blood run cold, and he swallowed. No wondered she'd backed down when he confronted her days ago. What an idiot he'd been. Embarrassed and somewhat irritated that the Commander didn't want to go over this any sooner, he took a breath and released it and crossed his arms protectively.

Shepard gestured for him to sit and propped her good arm up on the terminal's console, leaning her chin into her palm. She glared at the woman on the screen as Kaidan took a seat in the chair Shepard had arranged before his arrival.

The light of the holo flickered across her pale skin as she spoke, venom in her voice. "The one who attacked a group of unarmed civilians for no apparent reason."

"You intervened," he assumed, breaking her glare and drawing her attention to him. The look in her eyes unsettled him. He tilted his brow, looking at her uncertainly. "Didn't you?"

Not protecting civilians didn't sound like Shepard at all. Even on Eden Prime, when the directives had been to secure the beacon and ignore the civilians, Shepard had made sure the civilians they did encounter were safe before pressing on.

She nodded, her lids slipped down over odd-colored eyes in memory as she moistened her lips before speaking and meeting his gaze. "Not before she let off a singularity more powerful than anything I've ever seen and killed six of them."

Holy Hell. That was a high body count for any type of L3 singularity he had ever heard of. Were they certain?

"Most L3s aren't powerful enough for singularities, Commander," he stated, his body rigid with tension, his brain fighting for an explanation. L3s didn't go crazy. They just didn't. L3s were stable because they couldn't amass the same amount of power L2s could and the L3 implant's wiring didn't interfere with the brain's electro- and neurochemical functions like the L2 implant did. Singularities took a powerful amount of control. It wasn't something the Alliance taught regularly unless it was Army SpecOps or Marine N training. Hypothetically, an L3 could do it. But to kill six people, even without armor or protection, would take a hell of lot of energy and training.

"She was an N and an L3R."

He looked at Shepard sharply, drawing his hands into fists in lap. There had been thousands of kids in the BAaT program. He narrowed his eyes at her. "I didn't know everyone at Jump Zero, Shepard," he said, his voice edged with steel, defensive. "My little circle of friends wasn't all that big to begin with. Less than fifteen of us. By the time Vyrnuus—At the end of the program there were less than that."

"Kaidan," she said gently, sitting up and staring at him intently, "you really don't recognize her?"

He shook his head, trying to remember everyone in the little group that had formed around Rahna. He remembered Rahna, with her dark eyes ringed by thick lashes, dark hair and heavy eyebrows, and the way she would look at him from across the way as they said their nightly good-byes. ("See you in the morning, Kaidan?" "We saw each other this morning already." "Silly. Tomorrow morning." "Morning is good.") The memory made his heart catch inexplicably and focused his thoughts elsewhere. Rahna was gentle, quiet. She had had plans to become a chemical engineer once they graduated from the program. She had wanted nothing to do with the military.

There were other girls in the group. They'd feared Vyrnuus as much as Rahna had. None had attracted him like Rahna with her quiet strength. He listed off their names in his head and tried to remember the shape of their eyes, the set of their noses.

"I think I might need a hint, ma'am," he said finally as he drew a blank.

He couldn't shake the uneasiness that had settled in his gut. The woman had a wild look to her: battle-hardened with bleak determination shining in the muddy depths of her eyes. Who was this woman? Was she from a different circle, and he'd seen her in passing? It had been sixteen years since he'd seen anyone, and he'd been deliberate about not keeping up with any of the students since then and only focusing on maintaining control and maintaining his sanity. Jump Zero and Vyrnuus' death had nearly paralyzed him. It had taken a few years for him to even try to use his biotics, the look on Rahna's face haunting him until she'd faded to a dull memory that could only be recalled with clarity during nightmares.

Shepard let out a breath of air. "Alright. So you don't know her. FleetCom thinks otherwise." He made to protest, but she held up a hand. "That's fine. It makes it easier if there are no attachments." Kaidan made a rude noise and crossed his arms petulantly. A suspicious line formed on Shepard's lips pulling taught the scar there.

"There are no attachments from BAaT, Commander," he assured her.

She gave a nod of approval and continued, "The best Intel can come up with is that her last name before she changed it to Jones was Mihaljević and –"

Kaidan gasped at the name, a sharp intake of recycled air. It couldn't… No. God, no.

"Oh God," he whispered, his brows drawing together in an agonized expression as he stared intently at the woman in the holo.

The eyes. The eyes were the same, and he'd dismissed it at first glance. Something he'd thought he'd never do. How could he? Holy Hell.

"It's Rahna."

The blood drained from Shepard's face.

Alcmene: Heracles' mother