Chapter Three: An Earth and a Fleet
Everything lay in ruins. What was left of the human city of London was a smoking crater filled with rubble and metal scrap. Soldiers had long since turned from mopping up leftover Reapers to cleaning up what they could, drop ships converted into cargo freighters. The air was full of dust, and smoke plumed upward from wreckage that still smoldered. A full month and they had barely been able to control the fires. In an effort to do this, the whole power grid had been shut down.
The sun had broken through the haze just that morning, casting golden light on a hurting world. Small blessings.
"Creator Tali'Zorah, we have salvaged what we could of the Citadel."
The Geth Prime stood over the Quarian, his height still intimidating in the newness of the alliance. His red paint was badly scuffed and flaking. Blast marks left his armor plating charred and dented, and a hole near his hip was shooting sparks. Fresh battle wounds were not a rarity, and Tali knew there would be more. Off in the distance, a lone Banshee shrieked.
Tali ignored the shudder that went through her. "Did you find any sign of life or organic remains?" The distinction had to be made. Comm feeds from Anderson before the Citadel's explosion implied there were hundreds—if not thousands—of bodies aboard.
The Geth's facial lighting dimmed and flickered as if it were meant to emulate some form of expression. "Negative. No vitals were picked up by scanners. No biologicals survived the blast. There was no evidence of Shepard Commander or Anderson Captain."
Tali hung her head, her shoulders drooping in disappointment. Ground teams had scoured the area around the Conduit in case anyone had come back. The Geth swarmed upon the Citadel wreckage the moment the explosions stopped, collectively understanding the priority Shepard's life held with the Reaper ships intact. It didn't matter that the Old Machines retreated. They still existed. And, somehow, the Geth were the only ones with any sense about them in the immediate aftermath.
The Geth's head plates expanded outward and readjusted. Tali had learned from observing Legion that such was as close as Geth came to raising eyebrows.
"You are sad at this news," he observed. "Why?"
"I just...hoped there would be something left. We prepared for the worst. We even downloaded all the research data on the Lazarus Project from the Cerberus base because...because it worked the last time." Her hands clenched at her sides. "A selfish goal. Now, all that data is with EDI, and she's lost, too."
"I do not understand, Creator Tali'Zorah. Shepard Commander is not 'lost'. She is with us."
Tali's eyes flashed up to meet the lights through the violet haze of her mask. "Are you being metaphysical, Prime?"
"It is not metaphysics. That implies reasoning within unknowns, attributing reality to the purely conceptual." His head plates adjusted again. "What I say is simple fact. Shepard Commander is with us. She exists in our collective memory." He raised his own hand, looking down to analyze the commingling of machine and sinew, flexing his fingers as if in experimentation. "What we lack is the genetic material to rebuild her."
"Fucking bitch!" Jack slammed another shockwave into the ground before making a running dive for cover. The Banshee was phasing her way in a ball of biotic fury and the human, as angry and frustrated as she was, knew better than to stay in one place for long. She charged from one pile of rubble to another, hoping against hope that the lightning-quick abomination would be more focused on a destination than a target. Sometimes they got lucky like that.
What pissed her off was that these things were still floating around. There weren't any more of them after the Citadel blew, but that didn't make them less a pain in the ass. The Banshee shrieked from the other side of the ruined courtyard, angry that her targeted prey was no longer where she'd anticipated, and Jack used that moment to swing her pistol over the pile of concrete she was hiding behind and take a few shots at the creature's head. Then threw a frag grenade for good measure. Then colorfully urged her teammates to "fucking take her down" before she could phase again. Pumped full of enough rounds to bring down the proverbial rhino, the Banshee screamed one last time before disintegrating into a pile of black ash.
Jack stood up when everything fell silent, checking her gun before holstering it. "Good work, everyone. Let's report back to Hackett and blow this hole."
They moved with what was left of Hammer, systematically clearing the streets of any remaining Reaper minions while a medical team moved behind to search for and treat any survivors. There was still so much work to do. London was huge, over a hundred miles at its wides point, and it was one of the most dense urban centers in the world. No wonder the Reapers had focused on it. Not only was it a rat's nest of humanity, but it had been a bastion of the Alliance, the hub of the global Embassy. The Reapers had thought they were smart, didn't they, Jack mused as she hopped into a truck and bounced along the broken streets of the city center. Fucking morons. Tactically sound but forgetting that you just don't mess with anyone—not anyone—on their home turf.
She heard a gurgling cry and looked up to see a bold husk charging them from the shadows. What it thought it could do against an armored truck, she had no idea...and didn't care. With an almost blasé gesture, she drew her gun, pulled the husk closer, smiling blandly as it hung there, helplessly in the air...then shot it through the head.
It had been a rough few weeks. The Citadel exploding, Shepard disappearing, the Reapers retreating while leaving the bulk of their minions behind—what that meant, no one knew. That said nothing for the morning Jack had woken up with the distinct impression that she had new tattoos, and she didn't remember getting new tattoos. Because she would have remembered. Especially if they were delicate, shimmery ones that looked like microchip circuitry. That would have hurt like a-
"Coming up on Hyde!"
The driver's voice jerked her attention to the front of the truck, and she staggered forward to the divider between his seat and the rest of the vehicle. She braced herself against the cold metal and narrowed her eyes to see through the dusty, cracked windshield. With all the chaos still going on in the city at large, Hyde Park had become a refuge, a massive encampment of survivors and occupying military from across the galaxy. For whatever reason, the remaining Reapers had preferred the stone and steel of the urban jungle to the swath of green grass, ancient trees, and deep water of the Serpentine. But no one was holding their breath. For as long as there were Reapers in any form, there was always a threat. They didn't know the numbers, didn't know the motivation in the Reaper ships leaving but the corrupted staying behind. Until the bastards were cleaned out or Shepard could be tracked down for answers, they were stuck roughing it and spending their days playing at war.
"Where's Hackett?" she demanded, spreading her feet for balance as they jerked and bounced over what had once been a stone wall.
"Comms have him at the Alliance basecamp, but he said to drop your team off here. Things are hot up that way."
Jack looked over her shoulder to the others, a few soldiers from the Alliance army and a couple of Asari commandos. It had taken what felt like forever to trust them. They weren't her students. The kids from the academy had been quickly pulled after the final push for the Conduit. They were better suited to helping protect the wounded further back while the Reapers were distracted. Jack had been moved to the front, providing barriers for the assault teams in charge of mopping up the stragglers. She'd put up a fight at first, but if there was one thing she'd learned from Shepard, is was that you sometimes had to do something you hated just to do the right thing at all.
Fuck, was she ever growing a conscience.
"Fine," she conceded eventually, watching as tents and barricades came into view. "Drop us off. But if things are so hot, Hackett would be smarter to want us with him. That Banshee has me in the mood to hurt something."
The driver smirked in the rear-view mirror. "Plenty of opportunity for that, ma'am. There's chatter that the north end of the Park is getting some action."
"Well, then, why don't you just be a good boy and take us there instead?" her voice was sweet and assertive at the same time. "I won't tell the admiral if you don't."
The smirk widened. "Yes, ma'am. The price for my silence is a pile of dead Reapers."
"That's too easy," she replied, a smile to match his. "Come up with something more exciting and you have a deal. In the meantime, just stay out of my way."