Just a little thing I threw together from Anderson's interview in the DLC. There are no spoilers for it, though.
"Alright, ladies, I hope you all got a decent night's sleep last night. You're going to need it." The N5 paced before the two dozen remaining recruits. Lillith watched him closely, looking for any sign of what they were walking into. In the weeks since she'd first walked into the N-school she'd found that most of the officers in charge of their testing gave small things away. Jones, who along with Kipling and Casey had become something along the lines of a friend - or as close as you could come in in just a few weeks when one of you didn't have any downtime - had told her not to rely on that. She'd lucked out, she had said, and that eventually she wouldn't be able to prepare based just on the way people moved.
It looked like that day had come.
"We've tested your independence you're teamwork, we've tested your leadership, your ability to think under pressure. We've tested your resolve. We've tested your ability to work under fire, and how well you perform when deprived of any sort of luxury, including sleep. I know a lot of you are looking around and thinking that as a group you've done well. That yours will be the first N-class to have more than a handful of soldiers make it. Think again, kiddos.
"I know, also, that chances are most of you already know what you're walking into. Our training is hardly classified, though few like to talk about losing. I can tell you though, that no matter what anyone has told you, what anyone thinks they might know, even current graduates, it won't work.
"You're on your own.
"Drop is in ten minutes.
"I hope you're wearing clean panties."
Shepard looked around at her compatriots and thought about what he had said. Jones wouldn't say a word about what was coming up, and just grinned at her when Lillith asked. She considered asking the guy in the jump seat beside her, but reconsidered. She got along with nearly all the graduates at the Villa, as well as she got along with anyone, anyway, but her peers had come to hate her. With a few exceptions she'd surpassed them all in every test. Her head start at the beginning of their training had given her an edge later on – an ability to catch an extra hour or two of sleep when waiting for group drop offs like this.
She'd never had problems integrating with her teams before entering the school, but none of her peers wanted anything to do with her anymore. Which made group dynamics difficult, and group training almost impossible.
It would be difficult to show her ignorance under the best of circumstances, but with everything that was going on, not even considering her age, to do so now seemed impossible.
Out of the corner of her eye she spotted the pilot putting his breathing mask on. She watched him a moment, then grabbed her helmet and snapped it in place. There were a few chuckles from her peers, and she flipped up her visor.
"Pilot's preparing for a low-atmo drop," she said as the energy barrier went up between the back cabin and the cockpit, "I'd get your helmets on."
"They won't drop us without warning," a man near the back said, shaking his head, "it would kill us."
"As long as it's not zero-atmo, they'd have enough time to drop everyone with any sense and still be able to resuscitate the rest of you," she said with a shrug, "learned that in zero-grav training." As had the rest of them - or should have.
Half of the remaining recruits grabbed their helmets and put them on, double checking hoses and seals. Lillith lowered her visor and leaned back in her seat. At least a few of her fellow soldiers with her weren't complete dumbasses. She had been beginning to worry.
At nine minutes, 30 seconds, the airlock alarm went off.
The remaining soldiers glared at her while they scrambled to get their helmets on. The man in the back, the one that had questioned her, couldn't get the secondary seals to hold, and when the back cargo door opened, his was the only set of restraints that didn't flare with a malfunction light and send its passenger floating to the surface of a craggy asteroid.
The shuttle had gotten them close enough that the asteroid's gravity kept them from flying into the expanse of space, but not close enough to land them, at least not immediately.
A group of soldiers kicked in their suit burners, using the momentum to send them floating down to the surface of the asteroid. She saw a few others reaching for the buttons to do the same.
"Don't!" she shouted over the coms, her voice echoing with that of perhaps two or three others.
"The burners use the oxygen from your tanks to ignite. We don't know how long we'll be stuck out here," on of the other voices on the com said.
"Unless we start moving out of orbit, breathing is probably better than ground under foot," another added.
"This would be a really crappy way to die," Lillith muttered, unaware that her com was still on.
"I'll second that," came a laugh.
Through the channel there was no way to tell which of the ten or so people still in orbit around the large asteroid was speaking, and she didn't know voices well enough to put names to them. It was better than being alone though. Being trapped in the suit, floating in the void – though technically they were in a decaying orbit around an asteroid and not actually free-floating in space – caused her stomach to churn. The smell inside her helmet was nauseating, and the air filters could only clean up so much of it. The suit was confining. She'd had a strong dislike for tight spaces since the attack on Mindoir, and hardsuits were the epitome of tight, confining spaces. She pushed past the fear, and did her best to keep her breathing calm.
Hyperventilating would only get her killed.
"We need to come up with a plan to get out of here," a male voice on the com said.
"Do you know what we have to accomplish?" Lillith finally asked. Her ignorance could get her killed out here.
"Survive," a different person, perhaps the one that had seconded her wish to not die in the vacuum, answered.
"We'll survive so long as our tanks are full and then we're SOL. We're too far from a planet to even think about making it to one, not that even then it would do us much good, me thinks. We're constrained by how much oxygen is in our tanks. That hardly seems like a fair test," another person chimed in, killing the conversation. Talking probably wasn't good for their reserves anyway.
"An Anderson loop," Lillith suggested after they'd floated for a few minutes in silence.
"That's suicide! And we're too far from each other anyway! Fuck it, that's Shepard isn't it? You actively trying to get us all killed now?"
"I'm trying to get us all out of here alive! The loop would set up an oxygen recycler between our tanks. It'd triple the length any one of us could survive alone."
"Or empty all our tanks! How the hell to you propose you set this up while we're floating?"
"We're falling at different rates, depending on where we were strapped in the ship. As we pass one another, grab hold. We'll be connected before we hit the rock."
"The loop's never been tried!"
"The theory is sound!"
The Anderson loop had been proposed by David Anderson and a group of others about twenty years before. It involved linking the oxygen tanks between two hard suits through the CO2 filter used on toxic atmo planets. The filter was useless in vacuum, but it had been suggested that by hooking the two suits together, each would end up using the other's scrubbed air. The other's were right – it had never been tested outside a lab, and if done wrong would kill them all, probably before the shuttle could get back to pick them up. But it was better than floating around doing nothing and waiting for each of their tanks to fail.
"It's too dangerous," came the resounding answer from nearly everyone. A few burners kicked in and their floating group go smaller.
"What the hell are you?" she shouted, "Little girls?! Too afraid to go to sleep because of monsters under the bed? Grow a pair, the lot of you! This is a hold out. They want to see if we'll come crawling back before our air runs out. Only one person can win this with the rules they've laid out. I'm proposing we shove their rules back in their goddamned face, and you're too chicken to try it. None of you even deserve to be here!" That tirade had probably used up enough oxygen to keep her from outlasting anyone, but she was so sick of these people.
They came from comfortable homes, with loving families. Their first taste of death had been in the Alliance, and even then most of them had probably only seen the enemy die. Alliance casualty rates were fairly low, even in close combat situations. They trained their people well. But it landed them with a bunch of little children.
She fumed silently for near an hour before someone grabbed her arm. Whoever it was tapped their tank, and then the secondary hose line. The question was clear. The hour had drained almost everyone's tanks. The shuttle had come back and picked up a few people from the asteroid about ten minutes earlier. They'd entered a waiting game at this point.
She nodded, and unhooked her own secondary hose. It took some finagaling, a little wrangling, but they eventually had it hooked up.
Her HUD suddenly flashed that her CO2 filter had kicked in. She shot a thumbs up at her new partner, and they returned the gesture. Her oxygen tank reading began to go down more slowly, and the air took on a slightly staler smell, but where before her suit was giving her perhaps forty minutes before oxygen loss, it was now at almost eighteen hours. That was better than the lab tests.
Being trapped right next to another person, so close that they were almost touching, was unnerving, but she just kept watching the CO2 scrubber and smiling.
It had worked.
Nineteen hours, forty-seven minutes and fourteen seconds later – after landing on the asteroid and picking up a third in their group – the tanks finally fell into the red. The three had shuffled, crab-like, into a tiny crevice on the asteroid surface after the rest of their team had been taken off the rock. They'd made the offer, now that they knew the loop would work, to them all again, but no one would take them up on it. They'd slept in shifts, one staying awake to make sure that no one rolled over and accidentally pulled out a hose, but for all of them it was the most sleep they'd gotten in two weeks.
The shuttle came to pick them up well before the lower oxygen levels began to affect them. As one they popped their helmets off once the shuttle all clear light came one. All three of them were a mess. Sweat had their hair sticking to their faces, Lillith's, being longer, worse than her two male companions, and grime from being stuck in the suit for so long had built up a flaky crust on their skin.
"Impressed doesn't even being to say my feelings for what you did out there," a voice said from the cockpit. They knew that voice. Not personally, but all of the Alliance knew that voice. "I never actually thought anyone would stupid enough to try that. I didn't truly believe it would work."
David Anderson, first N-graduate, first N7, Alliance legend, stepped toward them.
"Normally, we have a finally test. I think considering the records you broke today, though, I can say it won't be an issue to welcome you all to being N1. We've already checked all of your other scores, and the decision won't be final until Friday, but welcome aboard."
Anderson shook the hands of the other two, and pointed them over to sit. He shook her hand, then leaned forward, "Someday," he said, "you will have to tell me all about how that worked."
It was the last time Lillith saw Anderson for six years.