A/N: Advance warning: this is a harsh, violent, chapter. I'll be looking at the batarian torture facility on Aratoht, and some of the experiences in Faith's past, including Torfan.

Thank you to Jay8008 for the immeasurable help with this chapter.


Faith scowled as a resounding crack echoed through her senses, and the thick clouds blocking out the stars above her head began to pound hard, warm rain onto her balaclava-clad head, spotting the lenses of her infra-red goggles.

The small readout in the corner of her vision told of the discomfort ahead. She was still two and a half kilometres from the facility. Two and a half kilometres of dark, dense plant life, not quite trees but not quite simple plants either, in the uncomfortably hot rain.

At least these leathers are waterproof...

Liara had arranged a transport to bring her to the planet, but in order to avoid suspicion it had not travelled anywhere near the facility; instead dropping her seven kilometres away: the closest the pilot - a volus trader who was carrying supplies to the colony, bribed by Liara - could get her without alerting the ultra-paranoid batarians that something was suspicious.

The thick flora surrounding her - invasive plant life designed to increase the oxygen levels on the planet - was an unwelcome reminder of her N7 training. Leading a small group of soldiers through the rainforests of Brazil with insufficient supplies and little sleep, defusing the tension of the men was as much a part of the test as the physical trial.

It seemed like a different time. There had been so little of her then: just duty, fighting, and an endless drive to do better. After the batarians burned her home, slaughtered her parents, enslaved her sisters and so much more of the colony she had retreated in on herself, not allowing anybody close. She used the memory of her mother, a gory mess where her chest should be; of her father, his head almost entirely disintegrated by a batarian's shotgun, to push herself to her limits and further, so she could save others from the same horrors she went through. She had been scouted for the special forces early in her career, after excelling both in her training and several assignments.

She hacked through a particularly stubborn patch of weeds with a machete she had brought for the occasion, the blade blackened to hide any shine, and thought back to her Alliance career... but always kept her senses aware, despite the darkness and pounding rain.

One of her first missions was a routine protection duty for a trading vessel, carrying important cargo to a colony in the Attican Traverse. Just eighteen years old, she was merely a soldier stationed on the ship, so the Alliance could claim their ships were protected. None of them expected action, the merchants did not expect action, Alliance command did not expect action.

They had been boarded by a pirate gang. The ship's engines were crippled, and a huge cruiser had pulled alongside. Faith had been terrified, as the ship shuddered when the pirates melted a hole in the hull to mount their boarding tunnel, as her lieutenant led the ship's small complement to fight them off.

Pirates usually demanded ships surrender their cargo under threat of destruction, but these had simply boarded, intent on wiping out the crew and stealing the precious metals in the hold... and most likely, the ship itself.

It was that day Faith killed her first foe. And second. And third, and fourth, and fifth.

None of the privates had seen real combat before. Their lieutenant was only a few years older than she was, and had seen action, but not anything like this. Tight corridors. Flickering lights. Breached hull leaving areas of the ship open to the vacuum. Panicked merchants. Vicious pirates.

The first was a batarian. The monster had shot one of her teammates, sprawling him to the ground with blood pumping from his leg. When the creature turned its gaze on her, unarmoured head scowling to reveal rows of filthy, pointed teeth, she had frozen. Everything she had been taught fled her mind, replaced by terror... and horror. It was one of the creatures that ruined her life, that pulled her into a galaxy full of pain and death that she had little wish to know. She had not seen a live one in person. Her arms would not respond. Her eyes widened. Her legs trembled and nearly dropped her to the ground.

For less than a second.

Her parents' ruined corpses flashed across her mind, and for the first time she felt the ice cold anger that was now a constant companion in the field of battle. Before he could bring his weapon to bear, she perforated his head with a rifle shot that landed right in the centre of his eyes, a rifle shot that sprayed the contents of his skull onto the wall behind him. Two more batarians, a turian and an asari fell at her hands that day, the latter breaking Faith's arm with a devastating biotic attack before falling to a barrage of one-armed pistol fire, before an Alliance warship had arrived and driven the pirates off.

She had been commended for her actions, for the ferocity with which she turned the tide of battle. Most soldiers, she learned that day, did not... could not, instinctively shoot to kill. Other than the briefest moment before the batarian, she had done so five times.

She was a killer.

It was something she accepted about herself with surprising ease.

Had she always been that way? One of those few able to take a life and not have their own destroyed by it? Was the rude little girl who was always coming home dirty, to her mother's chastisement and father's amusement, just a façade?

Or was it the batarians? Had they given birth to that killer, the day they attacked Mindoir?

If so, they had come to regret it. The Alliance had quietly harnessed her hatred, sending her on over a dozen operations to combat batarian slavery and piracy - knowing she would fight them with a brutal ferocity, but also that she never lost her professional edge to anger.

And now she was sneaking through a forest on one of their planets, towards one of their horrific facilities.

Not to destroy them.

Faith wanted to. So very badly. She would burn the facility to the ground, for no more reason than its very existence.

As she finally caught a glimpse of the place, as her path crested a hill. At the bottom of a natural bowl lay a squat compound, several lights glimmering through the darkness. She could see it, in her minds eye. The flora in the valley burning, sending plumes of acrid smoke up into the rainy night. The facility reduced to rubble, its inhabitants crushed. She wanted to see it utterly destroyed, for all the pain the place had ever caused... for all the other suffering it represented.

Not today...

Gritting her teeth, she began the slow descent.


'Ugh... batarian filth.'

Faith tried to make herself feel somewhat better as she crawled through actual batarian filth. Thigh and elbow deep batarian filth, in a pipe with a three foot diameter.

They haven't even tried to develop modern sewage...

Infiltrating a building in the age she lived in was always a difficult task. Modern security systems, whilst they could be overridden, made traditional entrances like doors or even windows much too dangerous. Most had alarms and sensors fitted, with complex electronic locks that fed any opening to a central security server that a single failed hack would alert. Added to the incredibly tough materials used to make bulkheads and reinforced glass, she had only cast a brief glance across the bunker's above-ground entrances before scouting other options.

The pipe she was currently crawling through was the most obvious entrance, if the least attractive. It opened approximately quarter of a mile from the bunker, and though she had to use a substantial amount of her omni-tool's charge to summon a laser to cut away the metal grate, it was unguarded and without sensors. Evidently the batarians either did not think anybody could access their facility this way, or they hoped the stench would keep any intruders out.

The latter seemed more likely, as Faith, long used to the stink of battle and burning flesh and ruptured innards, forced down the urge to vomit once more.

At very least, the asari uniform was not porous, and the waste she was wading through was not touching her skin. She was already not going to be able to remove the fetor from her nose for days, the last thing she needed was the knowledge that the disgusting slush had soaked through against her legs and arms. No amount of showering could remove that kind of knowledge.

If she could not hijack a batarian vehicle, she would have to get her prisoner out this way, as well. Could she handle it? Alliance operatives were tough, and Shepard imagined that one who worked as a lone operative deep in batarian space was tougher than most.

But Faith also knew what batarians did to their prisoners. They had nothing even approaching a Prisoner of War code, treating anybody unlucky enough not to die like property, be it for labour, sport, or pleasure. Doctor Kenson would be in a terrible state, physically and mentally, when Faith finally found her.

Scum.

She had seen the very worst of the race, at Torfan.

She should have had the Alliance vaporise the whole damned moon.

They had already suffered heavy losses as they fought through the outlying buildings, with the batarians fighting for every step. Every building taken had been paid for in blood, and the brutality did not end there. The batarians had taken to setting traps as they retreated to the bunker at the heart of the compound; mines that shredded the legs and abdomens of soldiers who tripped them. The slavers purposefully designed the explosives and shrapnel to cause maximum carnage... without killing the targets instantly.

The wounded soldiers had been a drain on resources, and the mental health, of those left.

It had driven Major Kyle mad. He had tried to order a retreat after yet another man was reduced to a screaming mess of ruined flesh, doomed to a slow death as she and the others tried in vain to slather the remains of his legs and stomach with medigel, but after several minutes of Kyle frantically ranting into the radio at Command, Shepard had received a private call on her own personal comm system. She was to relieve the major of command, and not retreat. She was to see it through, and wipe the batarians out.

Faith had smiled grimly. Orders were orders.

The Alliance said that the operation was not only to wipe out the slaving operations in the sector, but also to rescue the hundreds of slaves they had on the moon, mining it for minerals deep beneath the surface.

She knew that was simply unrealistic. Batarians implanted their slaves' skulls with devices that not only placated any extreme feelings, leaving little more than an easily manipulated husk - the device also carried a small explosive that the batarians had little hesitation in detonating for any number of reasons... to stop them rebelling as an external threat approached being one of them.

The slaves were likely dead long before she broke into the bunker. But the Alliance could not be known to have bombed a building containing "innocents"... and the brass did not like bad PR.

So she led the final assault.

And in those moments, her life was once again shattered.

She had long since given up hope of seeing her sisters again. Of seeing her youngest, Grace, who was always smiling and laughing. Of seeing Joy, shy and bookish, with a devastatingly quick wit she was often too shy to show to those other than her closest friends and family.

Most human slaves, the Alliance told her, in particular young females, were sold to rich batarians deep in their own space. For purposes that still had Faith's scars aching just to think of. At the time she had simply hoped - a horrific, disgusting hope born of desperation - that her sisters had either died or been driven mad, and were not aware of whatever they were going through.

But as she approached the final batarian holdout, the large facility that led down to the mines, the slavers had dragged a dozen human slaves to the roof, put guns to their heads, and shouted for the soldiers to stand down. Pretty human female slaves, to tug at the heartstrings of the soldiers, no doubt.

Entertainment, for the batarians stationed there, because they were far too skinny to work as labour.

Faith cast a quick eye over the slaves. They were all dirty, dishevelled, eyes cast downwards. Trying to put their plight from their mind, she looked back down to the attack plans she had sketched out. Their faces flashed through her mind. One in particular stuck. Second to the left was a young woman with blonde hair, and strong features showing through her pallid skin. Strong features... like her own. Little Gracie had inherited their father's blonde hair whilst Joy and herself took their mother's dark brown, almost black. Grace was only ten when they took her, eight years previously. The pieces fell together, all too slowly. Grace had become a woman... or a broken shadow of one.

It had taken her a second too long to realise.

It had taken her a second too long, to do anything.

It had taken her a second too long, because as soon as she looked up again, the batarians shot Grace. Put a pistol to her head and sprayed her brains across the woman standing next to her, who did not even flinch or look up from the ground, so deeply conditioned was she.

Something broke in her, that day. Something she was not even sure she still left after Mindoir burned. Some faint whisper of hope, of innocence, was extinguished and had her retreating in on herself even more than she did previously.

She still tried, until then. Made something of an effort to socialise, attempted to join in the banter as best she could.

She had even gone on a date with one of her fellow N7 candidates, before the training began. She could not remember his name... Hiroti? Hiroshi? He dropped out before he achieved N1, along with two thirds of the class. He was a nice man, but the date was a disaster - stilted conversation (she had no interests of note, no history she wanted to talk about), a bad restaurant choice, jokes she needed him to explain three times. But she had tried. She'd worn a skirt.

After Torfan she stopped trying, and started pretending. Pretending was easier. Jokes and conversation were easier when she approached them as mission objectives: to "bond" with her soldiers, make them feel more comfortable around her.

When the batarians had finished shooting the helpless women and began spraying bullets down to the soldiers hunkering in the previously batarian-occupied buildings, Faith Shepard ordered the attack. Three hours later, somebody called "Butcher" for the first time.

And because she had stopped trying, she only pretended to care.


Grimacing at the filth dripping from her arms, Faith summoned her omni-tool in the cramped space of the pipe, and felt a rush of relief. Only ten more metres.

She crawled the remaining distance, then once again summoned the laser-cutter on her omni-tool and began cutting away a large section of pipe from above her.

The metal fell down onto her, and she carefully shifted it before poking her head, mercifully kept out of the waste she had crawled through, out to inspect her surroundings. Just as she expected, she was in a dank pit, with no lights or signs of technology other than the pipe she, holding in a sigh as her muscles finally stretched out, quickly vacated.

Too much to wish for a pool or something...

It was a serious concern: the foul scent could well give her away if she was not careful, but to her dismay the only water she could see was clinging to the damp walls.

The green-ish tint to her vision gave the cave around her an eerie air. Batarians liked underground facilities, digging deep like worms, as if burying their filthy practices made them somehow less foul. Most batarian bunkers were built over a series of caves, in which they would keep supplies.

Brushing the worst of the foul sludge from her, she took stock of her surroundings. She was in one of the deepest caves beneath the facility, and a single exit stood appealingly at the far end of the roughly hewn cavern.

But first she had to make sure she was invisible.

She lifted the goggles from her face, and saw nothing. There was the tiniest residual light coming through the exit, but otherwise her cover was still good. Holding a hand to her face, she saw a faint glow reflected on it, but by shutting one eye, then the other, she could see it was from the machines in her eyes rather than those across her face, which were daubed in thick black war paint.

Why did Cerberus make them glow anyway?

Nodding to herself, she pulled her opaque goggles back on. She was as close to invisible as she was likely to get. She just needed to find a way to wash the filth from herself and she could begin scouring the prison for Doctor Kenson... and to that end, she had the weather on her side. The compound was made up of two separate buildings, and she had emerged in one whilst her quarry was in the other - she had to pass outside, and hopefully the pounding rain would cleanse her.

Just need to get out of this place first.

She encountered no other batarians as she made her way out of the caves. She was not especially surprised: she was deep in batarian territory and she had not expected them to be actively patrolling the place. There was no threat to them here.

Or so they thought.

The silence throughout the caves was oppressive. Her footsteps seemed impossibly loud, despite her careful footing and the flexible material covering her feet. Her breathing sounded heavy and laboured, despite Faith knowing that it was nearly silent. Her heartbeat was a drum, beating against the walls of the caves.

She reached the end of the subterranea, and emerged into a large concrete room, crates lining the walls and a high roof that spoke of a warehouse. She stopped, listening intently for any sign of batarians. Liara's intel told her there were twenty batarian soldiers stationed here, and anything up to fifteen "other" free batarians, who occasionally came over from the colony as administrators, officials and the like. No slaves worked at the facility; it was used for adjustment of new captures, and the slaves themselves were shipped to the colony to work the mines. If she was lucky, most of the population of the compound would be asleep.

Despite the silence, and her thermal readouts showing that there were no significant lifesigns nearby, she stayed low, moving slowly and carefully through the crates towards the exit that provided the shortest route with the most cover to cross the courtyard into the prison - the exit she had memorised from the schematics Liara provided her.

Suddenly, she stopped in her tracks. She heard a muttering, in that deep, raspy voice the batarians had, and her goggles picked up a very faint heat signature. There was one, or at most two, batarians, not close, but nearby... most likely in the small, walled off security room she knew was close by her destination.

She cautiously continued her approach, and began to pick up traces of the words being muttered. There were indeed two of them, and they were talking about humans.

'...thinks the humans...'

'... damned... hate...'

As she got closer, Faith scowled as they ceased any useful conversation, and began talking about the relative merits of free women and slave women as sexual partners.

Partners... there's no partnership there.

Resisting the urge to burst into the small office and rip them apart, she ducked beneath the low wall below the window and snuck past, forcing herself to listen to one lament that while his girlfriend was more enthusiastic, she would not let him do some of the things he did to his slave - just in case he happened to mention something useful.

He didn't.

Monster.

'I don't do that stuff with mine.'

'Huh. I've heard about your little thing about your property. Don't see what the problem is, you own her. You're missing out, trust me.'

'I just prefer it when they're into it, you know?'

'Just tell her to be "into it"!

Monster!

Forcing herself away, she vacated the large building through a wide loading hatch, and after ensuring she was clear of any hostiles, allowed the warm rain to finally wash away the slightly crusting filth on the arms and legs of her dark uniform, scrubbing frantically with gloved hands as she crouched behind the loading machinery.

When she was satisfied that she was reasonably clean, and hopefully stench-free, she assessed her surroundings. There were a few bright lights illuminating the paved paths in the small courtyard, but otherwise the exposed area was a mess of hastily parked ground and air vehicles, untidy stacks of crates and vicious looking barbed wire. She could see a single batarian slowly patrolling the perimeter, currently across the courtyard from her, but his trudging footsteps, bowed head and holstered gun told Shepard that he was bored, and she could either evade or neutralise him with ease.

A pair stood by the main entrance to the facility, both in a security booth similar to the one she just passed, and though they looked more alert that the one patrolling, likely due to them not being out in the rain, they were facing steadfastly outwards, towards the vast expanse of Aratoht beyond the prison.

Sloppy.

She ducked into the shadows, and made her way over to the prison side of the facility.

They had not been sloppy at Torfan.

The compound was made up of a series of smaller buildings parading before a central, heavily fortified bunker that led down to the mines, built into the very cliff itself. The outlying buildings were relatively well defended, being mostly barracks for the slavers that plagued the nearby systems, and as first Kyle - and later Shepard - had purged them one by one, losing their own men at a rate the Alliance would have in any other situation deemed unacceptable, the batarians had retreated to the bunker, fighting with a viciousness that made up for the lack of finesse with pure brutality. Illegal weapons. Traps. Slaves strapped up with explosives and used as suicide bombers. All the while as the Alliance soldiers were peppered with sniper fire from the bunker.

Morale had been terrible by the time they cleared the final barracks. Kyle had been a charismatic leader, and the soldiers liked him.

They did not like the dark armoured N7 commando with cold eyes who had relieved him of command, voice dead and uncaring as she gave precise and clipped orders.

She had manipulated them. They should have been angry at her, at Alliance command, for ordering the ground assault. But she worked them into a fierce rage against the batarians, who were killing and maiming their friends, who were executing slaves because they were scared that the Alliance was going to win.

'Because we will win! For too long these monsters... these cowards... have destroyed our colonies, enslaved our civilians, taken our children for their own sick pleasures. Even now, they try to scare us, by executing helpless women rather than fight us!'

She had not told them her own sister was one of them. They thought her heartless enough already.

'For too long, they've fled rather than face us head on. They use the tactics of a coward, and it ends today. We will prove ourselves worthy of the uniform. We will fight for those who can't fight for themselves. We will fight for what is right. We will destroy these creatures, wipe them from the face of this God-forsaken moon, and go home as heroes!'

Most of her men led a frontal assault, blowing a huge section away from the wall with high intensity explosives then slowly pushing forwards that way, drawing out the hundreds of batarians in the place. Meanwhile, she took the most vicious soldiers from the squad and snuck in through an underground passage she found in one of the barracks, and tore the place apart from the inside. They had stalked through the tight corridors like wraiths, slaughtering through those batarians not drawn to the frontal assault with brutal efficiency, the combat as much hand to hand as it was firefights due to the winding, labyrinthine nature of the facility.

When her small infiltration team had finally reached the munitions deposit, Shepard had given the order to blow it. Telling the distraction and infiltration teams to pull back, the explosions shook the very foundations of the facility, pouring fire through the corridors, rupturing supports and tearing the building - and the remaining batarians - apart. Afterwards, Shepard finally rejoined the distraction team. More than forty had been killed or seriously injured during Shepard's absence, to add to the dozens already dead as they cleansed the rest of the compound. The final count of Alliance dead or disfigured was eighty eight. None of those she led inside were hurt, other than Shepard herself, who was clutching one arm which had both a fractured wrist and a bullet lodged in the bicep.

The remaining soldiers were furious.

But they had won.


'They say the humans are going to destroy our relay.'

'Is that even possible?'

'I don't know. They've been swarming over the asteroid belt like insects for the last few months, but we could never find them. We finally caught the one downstairs when she was stupid enough not to hide a transmission.'

'And what, she told us that?'

'No, she's not said a word. It was on the transmission we picked up, something about "needing" to destroy the relay. Human scum. We should show her face publicly, and as soon as someone says she's Alliance we'll be able to give the humans what they deserve without their masters in the Council getting involved. It's state sanctioned terrorism.'

Faith, crouching by the doorway to a small room containing a pair of batarians playing cards at a table, listened in with fascination.

Doctor Kenson was planning to destroy the mass relay in this system. The very thought was absurd. Why would she do that? What did it have to do with the Reaper artefact she found? Was such a thing even possible? The relays were generally rumoured to be impervious, but Shepard knew that it was far more likely that nobody wanted to destroy them: if the Reapers had left indestructible alloys floating through space it was far too unlikely that nobody would simply dismantle one to take the technology for use in the military.

But the batarians apparently knew little more than she did. She was pleased to hear Doctor Kenson was keeping silent, but knew that also meant the methods her captors were using, would be getting steadily more extreme. She needed to hurry.

She briefly entertained the idea of neutralising the batarians in the room. They were no threat to her now, sounding as though they had just gotten off shift and were going to turn in for the night, but if she was returning with a prisoner in poor physical shape...

Her fingers curled around the hilt of her 8-inch combat knife, sheathed over her tightly strapped breasts.

It would be so easy, with her improved reflexes, to simply slip in and cut the throat of the one whose back was to her, then throw the blade into the neck of the other, severing his vocal chords, before they could even stand.

It was likely nobody would find the bodies before she rescued Doctor Kenson.

She had nearly talked herself into it when something stopped her.

What am I thinking?

She had been ready to kill the two batarians. For...

For what? Tactical advantage of doing so would be tiny, number of risks far exceed this!

She gritted her teeth and removed her hand from the knife.

Not today.

She crept onwards, quickly locating another staircase that led down. The prisons were always underground; they always kept their slaves buried.

She slowed as she reached the bottom, hearing more voices echoing through the dank building, but her goggles, now switched to a more clear, combat-ready mode rather than the infra-red, detected that the speakers were not nearby.

'She still not talking?'

'Not when I last saw her, but I haven't been to see her all day, been busy with the others.'

Others?

Faith's gut twisted. Of course there would be others here.

There was nothing she could do for them. She pushed the poor souls from her mind as she crept down the remaining stairs, straining to hear where the voices were coming from.

The stairs opened up into a tight corridor, as much reddish natural stone as hard, grey, unpainted walls now, with several doors on each side, solid metal, with light glimmering from the only open one; the furthest on the right. Just beyond, at the end of the corridor, lay another staircase leading down further to the depths. Voices continued to ring out through the open door.

'Not like a human to last so long. They usually squeal like the animals they are after a few hours with Trugsk. She's held out for days.'

Faith felt a hot anger at the words. What horrors had these scumbags inflicted on her? Would there be any of her left? Enough of her to live a normal life?

Enough of her to tell me about the Reaper artefact?

She hated herself for the thought, but it still lingered.

Teeth clenched together, scars burning as the thick turian warpaint sank deeper into her exposed flesh, Faith approached the open door, and used a small mirror to look into the room as she crouched just outside of it.

Again a pair of batarians were sitting at a table, and she caught sight of several bottles scattered on the floor. They were facing each other, both with their sides to the door.

Her sneaking past unnoticed would not be easy. She might have to distract them with a pebble tossed to the back of their room, or-

'I've gotta piss, think the human's thirsty?'

Monster!

The other made a non-committant noise, and before Faith could retreat more than a few squatted steps, a batarian appeared before her.

She froze.

He was just inches away. She could count the threads in his dirty brown trousers. She could smell him, the foul scent of his species causing her nostrils to flare. She tightened her grip around her knife; she was not likely able to draw one of her guns in time. She would slash the tendons in one leg, grab him as he fell and break his neck. If she was lucky, she could hurl the knife to kill the other before his call alerted anybody else: she guessed all of the closed doors contained sleeping batarian soldiers.

But the batarian did not react. He simply stepped past her without looking, and clumsily stumbled down the stairs.

Looks half drunk...

He had not seen her.

A quick check with the mirror showed that the other batarian was leaning back in his chair, stretching with his eyes closed, and Faith did not waste the opportunity. She crossed the door and descended the stairs, senses now totally alert to any sound, any tiniest flicker of movement.

The tunnels had smelt increasingly foul as she descended: like the stench of fetid waste like such as she had crawled through with an undertone of unwashed bodies, and rot.

But as she came out to the final level of the facility, the sensation hit her with an almost physical force. The stink was immense, and Faith's heart began to pound at the sight before her. The batarian she followed was walking unsteadily towards a small door at the far end of the cave... but the cave itself was a nightmare. It was wide, wider than any of the tunnels she had passed through yet. The roof was dripping wet, the air thick and full of the taste she had come to recognise as despair, the same she had encountered at a dozen raided slaver compounds. Body waste. Sweat. Diseased flesh. The lingering remains of forced sex.

The walls were lined with cages, large constructions that could almost be portable living quarters for manual labourers, with enough room for tiny cots, toilet facilities and some personal effects. But these were not for free men and women. There were no beds. The solid walls were of sharp, rusting, corrugated metal, the doors heavy bars secured by large manual locks: a psychological cage, as a forcefield or electronic lock using plastic-based compounds to make the door would do the same job, as much as a real one. There were eight on each side of the room, and from her position Shepard could see most of them were occupied.

All of the occupants were non-batarians. All of the occupants were shackled, unmoving, eyes looking to the ground. All of the occupants were either naked or draped in rags, sitting next to buckets overflowing with their own filth.

Everything came back to her in a rush.

It had been like this at Torfan.

After she had gathered her men and treated the injured as best she could, she raided the mines beneath the destroyed bunker.

What she saw there, cemented her feelings about batarians for the rest of her life.

Hundreds and hundreds of slaves. All of them dead, bleeding from their eyes as the batarian control chips had been detonated.

Judging by the tackiness of the blood, they had been dead for hours. Since before they had launched the final assault, at very least.

Long enough that none of the soldiers who died in the assault on the bunker, had needed to, because if they had known this was all they would find the soldiers could have pulled back, and the Alliance could have bombed the disgusting place into non-existence.

But they had orders.

And they had a cold-hearted N7 commando leading them.

There were so many. Nearly every species, even other batarians, packed into small, dirty dorms. Fallen where they stood in the corridors. Dead, still clutching mining tools. All with blood seeping from ruined eyes.

Some of the soldiers dropped to their knees and began praying. Some cursed angrily. Some railed at her, for not being fast enough to save any of them.

Shepard did not let emotion touch her, and radioed in that the mission was over. The batarians were defeated.

The memory flashed across her vision as she saw the broken people in the cages around her. They were still kept in filthy and humiliating conditions: they were undergoing conditioning.

So when the batarians began to show the littlest bit of kindness; clean clothes, warm food, real bathrooms, it seemed like the world to the, by then, easily suggestible slaves. Then the process would begin in earnest, wearing them down until there was nothing left other than a mindless need to please their masters.

Heart torn between a deep sadness and a burning anger, Faith stalked across the room towards the batarian slowly making his way towards the door at the far end, she felt her cold detachment begin to slip.

These monsters had done this to so many people, tortured them, humiliated them, broken what made them people, all for the demands of their sick culture, a culture that deserved nothing more than to burn.

She pulled out her knife as she closed the distance.

There was no room left for subtlety. Whatever lay beyond the door ahead would die, and she would take whatever was left of Doctor Kenson out of this horrific place.

Shepard grabbed the top of the batarian's head and ripped her knife across his throat, hard and deep enough that she nearly decapitated him right there, hearing the blade drag across his cervical vertebrae with a tiny squeal. He made no sound other than a soft thump as she lowered his body to the ground.

She felt the heady battle rush fill her body, and with no further hesitation she pushed the door ahead of her open. Three batarians stood before her, facing away, standing around a small, naked, shivering form chained to the floor.

Doctor Kenson.

Faith took two quick steps forward as all of the batarians turned towards the disturbed door.

None of them managed to speak a full word.

'He-'

'Wha-'

A reverse-gripped slash tore open the throat of the one in the middle. He span and knocked the one on the right to him to the ground, both collapsing in a pile of limbs and spraying blood.

The other took a step backwards, raising his hands as Faith reached out and grabbed the coward's collar. Angling the knife, she pulled his chest forward onto the blade with a deep growl. As she ripped it out, serrated edge tearing apart his flesh, a warm wetness splashed across her face and she turned to the final, fallen, batarian, whose four disgusting eyes were wide with fear as he tried to right himself, slipping in the blood of his comrade, and the filth of his interrogation room.

Faith dropped one hard knee onto his chest, pressing him to the floor and brought the butt of her knife down on his hideous excuse for a nose, feeling her artificially bolstered muscles flood with power.

His face collapsed.

Threat neutralised.

She snapped her gaze up to Doctor Kenson, who was looking at her, eyes wide with as much fear as the batarians she just butchered.

'I'm getting you out of here.' Faith's voice, even muffled as it was by the balaclava, was cold, as she tried to keep the rush from overwhelming her.

'Behind you!' Doctor Kenson's voice was croaky - she was clearly dehydrated, but she spoke with admirable strength - and at the warning Faith spun on her heel, seeing the drunken batarian's partner from earlier standing in the doorway, weapon hanging at his side in a stunned stupor. Not hesitating, Faith lashed out her knife arm, and milliseconds later her blade was embedded in the creature's chest, and he dropped to his knees, blood bubbling from his mouth.

Faith stood and walked over to the batarian. As she stood over him, she caught a glimpse of herself reflected in his eyes. Clad in black leather, head encased in a pitch dark balaclava, all of her exposed skin was daubed in thick black war paint, and soaked in batarian blood. Her eyes were covered by faceless goggles, but she could see the angry nanites were glowing through even the tinted lenses.

'What... are...' the batarian spluttered, spraying a mist of blood into her face as she knelt before him.

Faith leaned in close, and used a finger to yank the balaclava to under her chin, allowing her lips freedom to wrap around the hissed words.

'The Butcher.'

Faith ripped out the knife.


Dead slaves weren't the only things Shepard found in the mines. Twenty six petrified batarians were found cowering in an office, unarmed and unarmoured other than dropped stun batons.

They surrendered.

Faith's soldiers led them out of the compound.

They weren't gentle. Three were missing teeth and another had a broken arm by the time they hauled the dismayed batarians out into the ruins of what used to be a well fortified bunker.

She had them kneel before her, hands on their heads, as her remaining soldiers - all still furious with grief and rage at what they had been through and what they had seen in the mines - kept weapons trained on them.

Faith walked to the batarian furthest on the left, injured arm dangling uselessly by her side as she clutched a heavy pistol in the other.

'What was your role here?'

He spat on her.

The crack of her handgun echoed through the silent ruin, and the back of his skull vaporised as a small, smoking hole appeared in his forehead.

She walked to the next batarian before the first's body had even slumped to the ground.

'What was your role here?'

'You can't do this human, I know your laws-'

Again, a gunshot shattered the silence.

She walked to the next. 'Do I need to ask again?'

The terrified batarian shook his head frantically.

'Don't say anything Shavrik, I'll kill you mysel-' Faith nodded to the soldier guarding the batarian who had spoken up, and he executed the slaver with a cold smile. She had done a good job of riling them up, but it was the batarians themselves who filled her soldiers with this bloodlust.

'Shavrik, you seem like you're smarter than your friends. So, I'll ask again... what was your role here?' She spoke clearly, allowing a small hint of feigned sympathy to touch her voice.

'We're the herders!'

Shavrik's companions groaned angrily, but no more of them spoke.

'Herder...' she rolled the word around in her mouth. 'And what does a herder do?'

'We make the slaves work harder! Please, don't kill me! I have a family!'

She turned away from him, feeling cold anger course through her veins. A family?

Faith had a family, once.

She looked to her soldiers. 'Our orders were to destroy this facility and stop slaving operations in the sector. It seems there are still slavers alive, so our mission is not yet complete.'

Shepard turned, and pointed her pistol at Shavrik's forehead, who immediately stumbled backwards, stuttering futile words of peace.

'Open fire.'


Doctor Kenson was truly a tough woman. Shepard could see more than one fresh scar and burn across her body, covering a map of previous injuries that put those on her old body to shame. She placed the woman at around age sixty due to the silvery hair and lines around her blackened eyes, but she was in excellent physical shape; the clear starvation not detracting from the bands of muscle, still tight as rope, underneath her waxy skin.

She handed the doctor a pair of tubes filled with nutrient paste packed with stimulants, used by soldiers in the field who needed a quick boost, which would hopefully assuage the worst of the malnutrition and get her on her feet. Whilst she was eating, Shepard set to melting away the chains holding Kenson to the ground. The Alliance operative had room to move, but not a lot, and the woman's skin was soiled with both batarian blood and unknowable filth.

After Kenson wolfed them down, she fixed Shepard with a steely glare. 'I heard what you said to that batarian. Are you-?'

Faith silenced her with a hand, then glanced around the room and spotted a camera in one corner. She destroyed it with a quick pistol blast, then pulled off her balaclava and goggles.

'Commander Shepard? Thank god!' Kenson's icy mask broke for a second, a strange look in her eyes. Faith knew she must look a horror: covered in batarian blood, thick war paint and angry scars, but she needed Kenson to know just who she was and why she was here... and why it was so important.

'It's not Commander any more. I'm here as a favour to a mutual friend and we both know why.' She glanced up to the ruined security camera. 'We need to move; I don't know if anybody was watching that security feed.'

Shepard took a deep breath as the final chain was cut, and tried to soften her voice. 'Are you ok to get out of here?'

Doctor Kenson looked down at her starved, scarred, naked body, but the gaze that fixed Shepard's a second later was full of steel and the same burning rage she saw in the eyes of her soldiers at Torfan. The desire for revenge.

Better that than having her broken...

'I'll live. Let's move.'

Shepard nodded to the batarian whose face she had caved in. 'Take his clothes. I'll scout the exit.'

Without any further ceremony, Shepard left Kenson to dress, pulling on her goggles and headwear once more. She would not allow the batarians to identify her if at all possible.

As she left the small torture room, a small voice to her side drew her attention. 'Please...'

She looked, and saw a human man clutching at the bars of the cage holding him, eyes sunken and beaten, skin thin and papery.

She could not save them all. Getting one person out would be tough enough, and Doctor Kenson was a hard woman with military training.

This man was beaten, nearly broken. He could barely stand, in his tight confinement. He would sabotage her chances of escape.

'Please!' His voice was slightly stronger this time, eyes beginning to glimmer with a tiny hope.

Faith dropped her head, feeling the cold, hard, anger burn away in an instant.

She always felt so helpless when people asked her for help. She was no hero. She didn't know how to make everybody's lives better, how to save them. As bad as she felt for the man, when she looked at him, she did not see a person for rescuing. She saw a distraction, to her own mission.

But could she just condemn him to live this horror, when he was not yet broken to his masters' will?

No.

The batarians would not be allowed this person. He would not suffer such a fate. If she could not rescue him, she would do him the second greatest mercy.

She unholstered her silenced pistol. Not the one carrying tranquilizer rounds.

The man's eyes widened, startled, but only for a second. He dropped to his knees, closed his eyes, and clasped his hands together in prayer, a tiny, sad smile on his face.

'I'm sorry,' Faith whispered, before raising the gun and shooting him through the forehead. A mist of blood, and the man slumped backwards onto his feet, before toppling to the side, smile still formed on his lips. The muffled shot echoed around the room, echoed throughout her very being. Another death. Another life taken, all hopes and dreams and loves quashed out in an instant. To add to the hundreds she had taken with her hands, to add to the thousands she was responsible for. So much blood that she was steeped in it. She raised a hand to her eye, frustrated when her glove touched only the hard lens of her goggles.

Killer.

She looked around, and saw the other slaves were all watching her.

One by one, they dropped to their knees, just as the man had.

With an infinite sadness wrenching at her heart, Faith granted them all their final wish.