A/N: I anticipate this section to be about 11-10 chapters long. In fact this chapter was about 27k worth, but I split it up to give you this chapter sooner.

Feel free to ring me up at my twitter account on flyawayn0w if you'd like for me to break down anything, or just drop a hello, love to have small chit chat.

Section 2-2
Keep Right

One week after Saren is beheaded, the Ardent Prayer emerges in front of the Citadel, a picket of Quarian ships in its wake, its slipspace portal timed to emerge at the same moment that the Quarians did from the relay. What they bring, however, is what the Council thought an impossibility.

The Citadel's defense fleet remains, Destiny Ascension the first to maneuver into place as the black hole of slipspace appears. What emerges however is not just the Ardent Prayer. In tow come Quarian flotilla vessels from the Admiral Keltac vas Malta, however more than that, held up by cable and lines, a decrepit black corpse of an ancient starship. No weapons are powered, no war had been declared, but the Ardent Prayer and its Quarian fleet come with a challenge.

Karonee's combat armor is affixed, and her half-cape, golden like wheat, swords that have not seen flesh in years affixed as she is making her stand before an entire Galaxy, on the orders of the Prophet of Destiny.

The Citadel's security forces and its fleet screams at them, but comms are shut off after only a second message is sent in response:

Expect us.

They entered through the Alliance docking ports, a wing of Phantoms escorting Karonee as she touched down in the Citadel and in her grasp she dragged an impossibility. No casket was given, no container offered. In two hands she held in two parts what had been a terrible thing, and as she touched down, the Prelate standing over her with a guard of her own troops, the Ardent Prayer watched on as it held the Sovereign, dead, below it like a captured trophy: proof of the deed, proof that it had been real. Sovereign's body was not the only corpse brought, however.

One last beast, one last corpse, one last proof.

Up those elevators Covenant troops followed Karonee as she dragged the Turian responsible for that last year of galactic turmoil, at least partly, before hollowed and diplomatic halls as the Galaxy looked on as audience. Shushed voices from the sidelines, C-Sec, unsure of what to do as Spectres present saw the impossibility, and the horribleness, of the Covenant brought not for their own gain, but rather, for the righteousness of justice in that galactic space. The Councilors, lined up at their stations, cannot stop the Covenant as they returned to the chambers and demand audience that they cannot disallow for what they bring.

Before the Council, Saren has returned in two pieces. Karonee drops him unceremoniously on the glass above the Citadel Garden, and his body cracks the glass, spindling out but holding as her left hand holds onto his head. She walked out, upon the platform which visitors addressed the Council, her conviction that of an entire empire, carried with holy writ, and she held his head up to all of them.

Seylu Karonee reveals from her cape, in her grasp, the head of Saren Arterius, more metal than flesh. A woman screams from the balcony, and the Turians cry out seeing a hero, although now disgraced, brought before them dead and dishonored.

As this scene plays out, Rannoch-Sanghelios is approached by the great Quarian-Covenant fleet, and soon, the Galaxy will be changed forever. But before those motions are carried out, Karonee, with her pride as an Elite, holds Saren's head to those that said they held power in that world. Her warrior's gaze casts across the Salarian, the Asari, the Turian, and each of them do not hide their impressions on their face. When they have all seen Saren's face long enough, she balks and lets his head fall on the glass where she stands with a thunk.

"I stand before great leaders, who have called for the death of one of their anointed, and yet it is we, the Covenant, that have dealt with this problem that has befallen this galaxy, of which we were not born of, and yet have to burden the responsibility of." She says, her half-cape flowing with the movements of her arms. Behind her, Sangheili and Jiralhanae stand together as the stave of the Prelate was held like a staff, grinding into the Council floor much like Karonee's words.

"We did not charge you with anything." Sparatus accused, his talon reaching out across the divide. "You think that you can act without the consent of of the entire galaxy?"

"The Galaxy does not consent to you." Karonee knows it true. She sees it in the Quarians, the Batarians, the pirates and the deserters who did not acquiesce to this power. Out of the corner of her eye she sees Ambassador Udina curl a finger at his chin, looking between her and the Council and over to Anderson, standing witness. "And what exists and what is done without your consent is perhaps the better path."

There, Saren lay dead, not because of the Spectres or the Council, but because of the Covenant. And yet…. "The Covenant takes the stance that Shepard was correct in her visions. We are not so unfamiliar with the idea of ancient gods, even if this Galaxy is not of our own." She gestured to the floor, to the bodies there and the body that remained outside those walls in the form of the black beast of eternal darkness now broken down and made into a shell of itself. "That is your Reaper. Shepard was right. You were wrong. What other falsehoods do you perceive of this demesne?"

The Council is speechless, but no words could be excused or conjured, or events put right again in which the happenings of the day, of the death of Saren, and what had been transpiring all over the stars could be made to make sense. Turmoil has come to the Galaxy, and who had spoken for it had been silent as Karonee rose her nose at them once and turned away.

In the year that followed the Council and the Covenant stood against each other, both in politics, and in the stars as Covenant ships broke borders held by Council lines, and Council ships and agents pressed upon the Covenant threads where they were unattended to. In it, the idea of cold war began to warm up in the lines of clandestine power struggle, and in between had been the Systems Alliance, in accord to both powers in secret, and in future prospects.

Shepard still gets someone to water her plants, but it's not because she's leaving Earth. "Good man, Yao." She pats her shuttle pilot's shoulder as they step off to Air Station Miramar, on its flat tarmac, a familiar shape before them in triplicate: Normandy-class frigates. The fruits of data that had come from her mission a year ago is seen on the Normandy fleet, with a good number of them waiting on Earth for their teams. It had only meant that they had ample opportunity to ferry all called up personnel to eastern Africa.

This had been the location of the infamous Top Gun program almost two centuries ago, and here aviators had been running to shuttles and frigates as a quantum comm device had been brought out to the shade of a hangar and Shepard stood before the holographic duo of Admiral Steven Hackett, chief naval officer of the Alliance Navy, and Amul Shastri, Prime Minister of the Systems Alliance.

She had known both of them well and made herself scarce around them in the year since Virmire. She respected Hackett, she could serve Shastri, but the feelings had soured, coming from a mission that she had felt set up on, and the secrets that they kept from her.

They knew about Mai, and her true nature. They knew about the Covenant.

And yet they did nothing.

A place in Hell was reserved for those who did nothing, but was Hell all the same and she was sure she'd be in a different lot there.

Still, while she was on Earth, alive, she had rank, service, and a duty to answer to them.

"Admiral Shepard, you are in two ways the only person on Earth we can rely on at this moment. Highest rank, and the only N7." Shastri is polite, but hurried in telling her, arms crossed, sitting in his desk on the other end from Arcturus Station. All the rest of the N7s she knew had been across the stars on the frontier, clearing the way for Human expedition efforts and answering calls with the Covenant in those unchartered wilds. "We will be having other N7s soon in place to assist, but for now, you are all we have. Is that understood, Admiral?"

In those eyes Shepard saw a man who had been willing to sell out one Humanity for his, and in that it had been a sacrifice too great. She could only nod, her blue officer cap on.

"Shepard. You've been out of the game for a while, but-" Any balming Shastri could do, Shepard did not want to hear. She could do her job.

"I'll handle the situation, Prime Minister."

Garrus had heard the small snap in her voice with it as he stood off to the side, his own gaze crossing between the conversation before him and the preparations of the Normandy ships out on the tarmac loaded with personnel and supplies. He himself had been in combat armor, and a sniper rifle, well calibrated to his own workings, had been on his back. No one had said anything about him, the lone Turian in that corner of the Earth, a Spectre no less, as he had been at Shepard's wing as if it had been natural. To him it had been at least.

Shastri had closed his jaw as Shepard responded, leaning back. "Okay." He nodded to himself. "We'll have reports forwarded to you as they come in. It's your show, EARTHCOM defers all priority taskings to you, Admiral Shepard."

She rendered a snappy salute as Shastri clicked out of existence in the holograph, leaving only quiet Hackett, arms behind his back, his face stone and cold looking at her.

Every time he had seen her, she saw his face and saw a man with too much to say to her, but unable to will them into actuality. Whether it was apology, for explanation, or to beg for forgiveness, she did not know, and she did not know if she could give her graces again to him. Here, Admiral Hackett stood before with lightyears distance between him and her, and still he could not face the woman that the Systems Alliance had cast down after promising her to the Galaxy, for the sake of all Humanity. He, in their secrets, had ruined their own stand against History in exchange for people out of time, out of place, who had damned a version of themselves. Guilt melted from his hologram, and despite it all, the world did not stop in sympathy.

"The 7th Fleet will be moving to Earth in the next few days. Admiral Hirano of the Enterprise will be cooperating with you with space ops for as long as this goes on." Hackett reported to her, and she nodded as well. She remembered the name from a different life. A million words left unsaid, and there was nothing he could do as he turned his cheek to her and the quantum comm had gone dead.

Garrus stood there, his mandibles clicking together, and saw behold the shame of the Alliance.

This woman, who had been the hope for Humanity in the new era of galactic community, she had been sacrificed for it.

Her dark green eyes had caught him staring, and again words unsaid hung between them as the world around them was of controlled chaos of military operation. Beneath the California sun, the world seemed burning and hazy. Her face softened, looking at him, a friend of distant origin and the closest she had in times since her failure. "Last chance to back out." She told him.

He shook his head. He had followed her to Virmire and did not back out then. "I go with you; you go with me when the time is right. Just like how it was."

She has little in the way of allies nowadays, and Garrus from day one had always been in her court. But still, even then, it sours. He had not wanted to, but he held that which was more important to her in his favor. He knew of her child. Still, as far as sins go, his was in the name of a wider mission she knew. She reached out and touched his metal shoulder and nodded before motioning for him to follow out to the tarmac where she had been the last to go out there of all the Systems Alliance forces the planet over to rally up and go out. Here, Shepard walked out again to a mission, and those that remained looked and saw that perhaps her legend was not yet dead as it had been in that last year, ushered by hushed rumors and disdain. Garrus, as he had always done, followed.

The three ships on the tarmac had been named after fronts where the West had fought for its History that brought them there today, the SSV Okinawa, the SSV Bahamut, and, at last, the SSV Ardennes. She had gone to the Ardennes, its well deck mouth opened wide, and like a distant memory, the two of them entered that dark space that had been a distorted mirror image of a different ship. Maybe, if she imagined, that her mission had been continuing forever, but that was not so as faceless Marines of a different regiment yelled out "Admiral on deck!". With a great stiffening a dozen men and women burdened themselves with salute, and she had eyed them all as she passed, rendering her own salute as she slid into the elevator with Garrus behind her. The elevators had been faster with these new model Normandys, so Garrus had barely the time to make comment on the nostalgia, on the surrealness of, after all this time, coming back to a ship that seemed so familiar.

Shepard knew where she was going. It's where all these missions started.

As she had found herself on the CIC deck, she looked out and saw her own ghost.

The captain of the Ardennes was not its CO, a man with a grey mane that she did not know the name of, but he did not dictate its path. He stood at the command stand, and as he saw Shepard he had affirmed it had been time to move, yelling out commands to a pilot, which she had affirmed and yelled out for people to buckle up. The commander of the Ardennes had been waiting for her in the same comm room where, on the Normandy, she had found Nihlus long ago.

Nihlus remained in Garrus's ear, and for him, the irony was not lost on him. She didn't have an earpiece for him yet, but she could tell that he spoke by the way Garrus paused and chortled once. Waiting there in that empty room with empty chairs standing before a focused map of Africa and where they were going was Cleft-Lip, Commander Lucy Cyma. His hair had been cut short, and he wore the armor of an N7 without its signage, the divot of his lip up into his nose giving the impression that his skull had always been peeking out from his face.

"Admiral." He greeted. "Mister Vakarian."

"Commander." She returned and Garrus nodded wearily.

"We've got… something."

"Yeah no shit." She spat, arriving before the holographic map next to him, her eyes crossing over the borders of African states superimposed over a live satellite view of coastal, eastern Kenya. As if a burn had been imposed on the screen, a dark hole, its center approximately one hundred kilometers from the coast and the city of Mombasa, eclipsing several settlements below it, most namely a town called Voi. The ridge of that dark circle had only touched out halfway between Voi and Mombasa.

"Two hours ago, a spatial anomaly appeared as you see it now over southeastern Kenya." Cleft-Lip started his briefing as all eyes were on the maps and the data on the screen. It had been midnight in Kenya now, and even then the hole in the dark was blacker than night, or at least deeper, a hue so distinctly without feature that it sucked in all ambient air around it. Lighting it up alone had been those of the artificial world around it. Kenya, and Africa, in the last part of the 21st century had become the ground of final cold war between the superpowers that had been at the time, and with the stakes on the resource rich continent came its development and industrialization for the sake of the world around it. They had been the last metropolises made before the future had come in the form of space flight, in the form of an ice moon breaking apart and revealing the Relays. It hadn't been pretty, but Africa had become part of the world and left as it had been for the last hundred years because of it. "As far as anyone knows we have had no events, operations, or projects that would've correlated to cause this at all. Nothing on the ground, on the planet, or even in the system that might've led to this. So, what we're looking here is, for now, something which has happened out of our control."

The fact that option at all has to have been clarified at all, it burns Shepard, but it was a technical need to be stated. What had happened was a, perhaps not natural, but not something put into motion by those who hid away in the shadows.

"First five minutes, it simply was, just like some cloud or some atmospheric phenomena we've never experienced before. But after that?" Cleft-Lip pulled a video, a street camera that had the town of Voi squarely in the foreground, with that giant black ball toward its back, people had filled out to the streets and traffic had grounded to a halt. The more rational had wanted to run far away from it but for those who couldn't or those that reckoned it had not been in danger, they looked up and on and curious. Then, as if a hidden wave, something had passed through the town at large like a pulse. In that part of the world sky car traffic was not as common still as the wheeled variety, but now, specifically, there had been none as in the corner of a frame for several frames a sky car had fallen, right into the ground and into an office building, setting it alight after its impact as one by one like falling leaves those that flew in the sky were knocked down, and those crowds watching from doorways and sidewalks ran for cover.

There were casualties, Shepard's green eyes were deeply set as more security footage was brought up and out, with each camera footage being represented on a map of the area. At the same moment, at the same time, those that had flown in the sky: sky cars, shuttles, automated cargo drones, all had come crashing down upon the land. Whatever had come forth that knocked those down had been, somehow, deliberate, for as a weather camera had observed, several minutes after, a single news helicopter from a local station still remained flying. Once had been a fluke, but another camera, that of a nearby livestream of local wildlife, also caught another helicopter that had been scrambling to survey the situation survive where shuttles had not. Again, and again the same story.

The last, highest video feed had come from a fishing vessel off the coast, hand-held cam looking out to the dark hole in the night. Then came the groaning, the panicked Swahili of those fishermen off camera pointing up to the sky the great large shape of a Systems Alliance cruiser plummeting to the sea between the fishing vessel and the coast, the great plume of white and sound that came as it settled still above water sending the fishing vessel off in its giant wave.

"SSV Kyoto was in the area on refit shakedowns. She went down with minor casualties to the crew and was able to set up analog communications with the next nearest responding Alliance asset: an ocean research vessel several further miles away. The Kyoto advises that all ships or vehicles with an eezo drive to stay at least three hundred miles away from the site."

"Three hundred miles?" Shepard had asked, the caution clear, and plainly shown: anything with element zero within it had been swatted out of the sky, their drives and mass effect fields taken down. "That's a specific number."

Cleft-Lip nodded. "It's the same number that's been distributed to our captains in regard to cooperating with the Covenant and the Ardent Prayer, their ship so as to avoid a temporary seize of their cores." It left everything else said but what had been happening, and Garrus was more than glad to clarify as all that footage zoomed out to a still image of that black hole.

"There's only one phenomenon that we've observed that does exactly that to eezo and mass effect fields." Garrus had spoken aloud, but all had the same answer.

Cleft-Lip nodded grimly. "A slipspace rupture." As was the terminology translated from the Covenant to Human tongue and the vernacular of the Galaxy.

"Is… Is this an attack? Some sort of weapon? Is the Covenant involved?" Shepard had surmised, always weary of the enemy in plain sight. Cleft-Lip shook his head.

"We reached out to the Covenant as soon as the Kyoto went down because we came to the same conclusion that this was of the same type of thing as their slipspace ruptures." He leaned upon the control board of the display in the comm room. "Taking them on their word, they've got nothing to do about it, and we're liable to believe it."

"Why do you believe them?"

This again, as would always be Shepard's place to question why, always. Cleft-Lip glanced from her to Garrus, and then Garrus and then back to her as his mouth turned shrewdly. "We have no reason not to, Shepard."

Still these secrets held in the open air, between people who could not confront them up and outright because of the today of them all. There would never be time and place enough for them to fully confront the enormity of a galactic genocide and who they harbored. But still, for Shepard, she must approach, even after all this time, after all that had been done to her.

"You have all the reason."

Every single word could've been pointed out and emphasized, and in that year since she had been defanged, Cleft-Lip had forgotten what it had been like, and he was the first example in that new year, of that feeling of encroachment of the word of Shepard.

"We have those matters in hand, Admiral Shepard."

Shepard had clenched her jaw, and that was that. But Garrus there, who had known all the better, had curled his fist as well. Out there in the Galaxy had been the heralds of an extinction event, and in their religious fury would bring it upon them. A threat, a danger, and the Alliance had seen it as a boon of cooperation. She lives in small parts knowing that one day, all would be revealed, even if it was not of her own accord.

Cleft-Lip continued. "We don't know what it is, but it is outputting the same type of disruptive energy that only one other force in this galaxy now has. What are we to think otherwise?" He paused. "We have our own analysts running, due to a recent infusion of cash, suffice to say, but regardless to say that we still need time to bring everyone up to speed on our end to make heads or tails of what's happening independently.

Hiding in plain sight: She wondered often what had happened to her AI in disguise, Cash had been helpful, ambivalent to his own existence and infinitely useful. No doubt his existence within the Alliance would've been buried deep, and yet useful all the same.

"What's the immediate, actionable intel from on the ground then?"

"It's more disaster relief than anything." Cleft-Lip nodded, gesturing to the screen and that portion of Kenya. "Local authorities are evacuating any city within this range, mostly by ground, but Alliance forces are standing by from African and Asian installations effectively, and you'll be getting humanitarian support from any assets disposable on Earth."

Shepard crossed her arms, nodding once before pivoting to Garrus. "Think the Citadel is gonna want to have observers on site for something like this?"

"You're looking at him." His snark came through, rolling his head, finally speaking. "Council pushed me a message before we got on the ship and told me to keep the pulse here. Asides from that, they have told me to extend a diplomatic message of "We will aid Humanity as possible in light of these events.""

Cleft-Lip had only sucked in his lip, annoyed, but nothing he could do about it. "Shepard," he called for her again. "As directed, it's your command when we get to Kenya. I'll be at your disposal. Been a long time since I've done field work, but I still remember how to be an officer." As much as he had been her jailer, he too had a role to play in the Systems Alliance. As long as those pretenses were down they could work together without too much trouble.

The rational part of Shepard had still been going in her head: the part of her that had been a legitimate commander of the Systems Alliance and charged to uphold order and the safety of the innocent. She had plans and options in her head already going, purely responses to what had been manifesting because of the anomaly, but none addressed it directly. Not that she had a choice too. Even in image, the black hole stared right back into her, and, in less than thirty minutes she would come face to face to it.

"Okay." Shepard had let her arms drop, nodding, officer cap on. "We'll need seabees out construction prefabs for housing camps, we can't displace that many people without giving them a place to rest, as well as patrols to lock down the AO. God knows we're not the only ones that could be curious about that… Garrus, you've always been that hunter-killer type, think you can help us out with that?"

"I think I packed my spare sniper rifle in my luggage." Garrus nodded once.

Shepard had caught the nod and returned it. "I know about the African rangers around these parts, I'm sure they can assist us."

"You think that's a good idea, having a Turian run around with locals?" Cleft-Lip cocked his hips, letting it touch upon the console with an eyebrow raised. The implication there had been plain. He didn't want Garrus involved at all.

"Spectre Vakarian here is here on his own volition and the authority of the Council," Shepard had started on as Garrus stood at attention, even if it dripped with a certain mockery. "I'd be glad to have his support."

Cleft-Lip had huffed once, looking up and down at the Turian before returning to Shepard. "Mister Vakarian, can we have the room?"

Garrus didn't want to make a seen, not as he looked from him to Shepard and nodded. "I'll be in the well deck, you know where." Where he was always: Right by the weapon benches. "I'll see if this crew is at least a quarter as friendly as the old one."

"Don't go hoping." She grumbled.

"Shepard." He responded to her with a shake of his head, stepping out.

It left her alone with Cleft-Lip, and the leash that she had been on had been remembered. "Air your concerns, Shepard, about the Covenant, frankly."

She straightened her form, her heels coming together even though she, an admiral, was talked to by this agency spook. "Nothing that hasn't been expressed in this last year."

Cleft-Lip had looked at her, nodding a few times before he had taken in a deep breath and spoke: "Kill recording. Authorization: Cyma Alpha-Foxtrot-Zero-Zero-Zero."

The telltale authorization chime of the ship's system recognizing Cleft-Lip's code for locking down and black lining any recording devices in the current room. The air had gotten still, stale, and heavy.

"You know me, and Commander Horne agree with you." He stuns her. He really does and nails down the point further. "Us, and a lot of the upper command structure of both the military and the civilian sector. It was probably the same with the Citadel on your mission, regarding the Reapers."

It takes her seconds to respond, stuttering. "Then what is the issue, why aren't we doing anything?" She cares not how they know, and in the end, the matter is never as important as the outcome when it comes to the truth.

"Don't be like that." Cleft-Lip had snapped. "Don't speak in generalities. You know what you want."

And because of that, Shepard cannot say. Because the option she believes in, yearns for, is one that is not one she would ask of anyone. It fights in her, like a wolf, beating at her heart and wanting her demons to take over. "An alternative." Is all she can force.

Hellfire, damnation: an Alliance fleet glassing the Covenant on Altis just as they had Glassed billions.

"What's the alternative? Chief Gul's option? I thought you wanted lives saved." Cleft-Lip leaned in as he sat on the console. "The Alliance cannot condone a judicial killing on hundreds of thousands." And yet had not the Galaxy done so before?

Her mouth moves for her on the mention of Mai. "Her entire Human race's blood is on the hands of the people we harbor now. How can we not do anything to hold them accountable?"

"This Galaxy is already on edge! What do we gain if we reveal this truth now? Here? And for what? Do you see the Covenant even now laying waste to colonies, of any race? No! They just freed Rannoch, gave the Quarians back their homeworld for chrissake! They are someone's saviors here."

They, a covenant of gods, had done as they believed and brought others along their path.

She wanted them dead. "The Alliance is playing with a ticking time bomb with them. Whether it's in a year, or in a generation, I can see it, I can feel it, the Covenant will turn on us."

"We have our contingencies." Cleft-Lip had been quick to dismiss. "We are not incautious, Shepard. There are… details, to the Covenant that they're putting up and out, of course." He muttered. "The Huragok, their Engineers, they say that they're an organic species, intelligent versions of species similar to the gas bags on Eden Prime, and that the hunt for their homeworld is ongoing, but to all of our indications they are not a naturally occurring peoples." He went on and on, a conflict within himself and yet… "The Covenant military prowess too, their recent history and how they say that they were embroiled in a religious civil war of some sort with a hostile force that may include other Humans. That is not something they've hidden and have openly talked about. But you know," Cleft-Lip pointed at Shepard, "And I know, that the severity of that "civil war" that "included" Humanity is not of the true nature of what it actually was."

The Truth was God. Of all of life's fundamental values the truth had been inscrutable and insurmountable and yet the truth of men was not the truth of the world. Shepard had stood in between, and it tore at her, standing there before a man who did not want the truth at all but the permissions of anything not condoned by it.

"If we know, why?" she asked, as if it could assuage all of her questions.

"Why what?"

"Why all of this. This cooperation at all?"

"Just playing the cards we've been dealt, Shepard. Same shit we've been doing for years, before me, and every government and agency spook since my time all the way back to the OSS." He spoke as if this had been all so easy to see, as if the Covenant were just another power in that Galaxy, and not what Shepard knew them as: the ultimate enemy, without regard for politics or the conventions of their world. "Slipspace itself is within our reach, and thus our ability to remove ourselves from this galactic game. The only thing that is holding us back is the material science that the Covenant no doubt knows is the case. Because the science is there, the application is there, but we need to create our own building blocks, and we still need their help for it." Cleft-Lip's hands had been grasping at the air as he spoke as if the future he spoke of was his to grab physically, and his to know and his to bring. It was so close, he could taste it, but Shepard had known what it was far beyond any could know.

After the Second World War, the industrial and scientific knowledge of defeated Nazi Germany had been pawed at by the victorious. Men of great technological and martial knowledge being spared for their crimes against Humanity, millions dead, and told to work for the West and East as they formed into Cold War. In the United States, Nazis had been brought there, and those Nazis with their knowledge made of military rockets and the knowledge of the Human body in space, were foundational in the establishment of NASA, and Mankind's journey into space. For all of the Holocaust and the crimes of Nazi Germany, the US, and all those that wanted, took their benefits from the accursed nation and thought nothing other of six million dead Jews and millions more taken by the Nazi war machine made by the men they wanted for their own.

Deal with devils had been built into their History, and they had been the heirs to that History.

"You can't undo what's been done, Shepard." The past was forever, and Shepard stood there quietly. "If there is anything close to an official statement on our unofficial knowledge, kept between us, the Admiralty, Shastri, and God, it's that tragic as it may be, we are not that Humanity. We cannot be a continuation."

"Then we're cowards." All of them. For her year of nothing on Earth, she knew what she had been then for her failure. But as she went, so did all those that knew.

Cleft-Lip stayed quiet for a long time after it as around the the hum of the Ardennes went on. Shepard always spoke the Truth truer than most, and here he had been told what he was.

He denied it.

"We're not judges, Shepard. We're only Human."

She was once told that she could serve as the entire trial, once, and anointed as so by the Galaxy at large: judge, jury, executioner. But it was a false title, for on the battlefield every soldier against all of his enemies had been that, and the responsibility remained.

They were all judges, but none wanted to bear a final verdict.

She wanted to, and for that she was silenced.

Africa had been in Shepard's memory from another her: the Shepard that walked the Earth. She had ridden the top of the continent across Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia before joining the many migrant families who had still been for over a hundred years now traveling the Mediterranean Sea for a European life. It had been a dangerous naval journey on a boat built specifically only for that journey and that journey alone, but she had made it, and of she, a white woman amongst those dark crowds she had stuck out when Italian police gathered them all up and flashed her privilege: ID and passport where others did not. She still had been stuck in detention for a week while they had sorted out her illegal crossing, but she was released into Europe all the same, leaving those migrants behind, and taking the guilt of herself with.

Their kind had been becoming less and less prevalent, for the solution had come in the advent of space travel: for those undesirable masses and those seeking a different life, they got different worlds instead. The very first colonies were filled with travelers and refugees taking contracts from programs that promised them land, and a new history, if they left Earth forever. Many took it, only to be thrust into hard labor that many colonies could trace their origin back to in their foundations.

Again, those masses returned to her, but this time exited of their own homes, the city of Mombasa and the town of Voi the largest hit, with numerous other smaller settlements affected as well. She knew what she needed to do to stop the humanitarian crisis brewing the second she had touched down miles away from the affected area of southeast Kenya, but all could be paused as she stepped out onto the makeshift FOB's landing pad and saw, behold her eclipsing the sky, the horizon, and perhaps the world, the an astral object take up the heavens above, even at a distance. Dark blue, impossibly deep, even against the night sky.

Helicopters, the design of which had gone back over a hundred years had been being trucked into the FOB immediately with any tracked vehicle for military and utility purpose, creating cacophony as those displaced crowds began to surround the FOB in the middle of the plains. It was a cold night, and even before the FOB had been set up, fires were set, blinking lights in the African ground as the ground shifted and moved by people's breath.

Only by the miracle of the universal translator had further chaos not ensued, but the benefits of modern technology had kept the worst at bay for now as Alliance ships landed or deposited forces and aid at the border of the operating area to a long African morning where the sun was late to activity.

When she had touched ground and shook off the initial awe of seeing what had been something unknown, if not an active hazard, never seen in the galaxy before, she had been thrust back into command with police commissioners, national guard commanders, local politicians, and eventually Alliance Officers being summoned or finding her as a command tent had been set up with appropriate implements. In reality, if this had been earlier in her life, this was the type of work she had hoped to be doing across the galaxy: responding to disasters and crises like this that didn't require fire and steel and the lives of men and women, but now, despite its bitter taste, she had been back into some sort of form.

Construction battalions from the nearest Alliance ships had been deployed first, with Shepard assuring local forces about immediate assistance from Alliance troops in terms of policing and managing the large crowds that had run from their homes, as well as hardy assurances to the politicians that the Alliance was not here to supersede local authority but rather was taking immediate steps as it may now to "partition the situation in such a way that all parties could handle them appropriately". Garrus had been nearby as she said that and had chuckled to himself before he and a squad of Marines had gone out into the night and made the travel over to Mombasa by old-fashioned truck to record and be first contact for what the situation on the ground had been.

The Alliance had descended from space to Kenya, and for the first time in over a year it felt, Shepard was heard from again. As the locals came flooding out, the Alliance came flooding in, nearly hand in hand with the local guards forces. One by one, officers of the Alliance came into her command tent as if in pilgrimage to see the officer spoken of so highly by all, who had gone to war in their name, and lost so much in return. Her image remained, her notoriety: the first Human Spectre. Not that it counted, but as they came filtering through to receive orders, they listened to her. All Cleft-Lip could do was bear witness and remember that who they had kept on a close leash might've been the first chance for Humanity to live for something more, better, grander, in scope and soul. She stands in the dark as the sun rises over Africa, and when light comes, she steps on top of the sand filled Hesco barriers that stand in for walls and looked at those that had come to her.

The void above them stays, ever looking onward like a silent God, but Shepard had long since worked on without the use of deities.

Piece by piece, person by person, groups and formations were made as prefabs from the construction battalions were assembled with haste, humanitarian aid groups also flying or driving in from abroad. To travel the Earth had been a trivial thing with the advent of eezo-assisted travel, but that final leg of the journey where the Alliance had advised all such vehicles to halt had been what the helicopters and the old military trucks from another era were for, a vehicle pool and landing zone quickly expanding as supplies were dropped off only to be loaded onto trucks to go outward to those surrounding crowds that numbered in rising thousands.

Tent cities, an entire town to replace a town, built up by the miracle of prefabs and Shepard's quick response in the Humanitarian skew as opposed to the military one.

As she stood there on the barriers, her blue jacket's buttons popped, she stood before a world, a History continuing. The old feeling arose in her: That chill that came through her as she looked out to her militia fighters and token Alliance troops on Elysium. The burn in her heart when she descended upon Torfan with an army seeking revenge. The cold of her bones as she lay alone, surrounded by an entire dead company of men and women, eaten up by horrible beasts roused by a more horrible organization. The sorrow, the rage, and the despair, of Virmire, and seeing a Spartan hold onto what was most Human of her, dying.

One year had not made her forget these things, but as the winds of the continent came to blow her red hair beneath her blue cap, she narrowed her eyes and remembered that she had failed, had faltered, from day one.

Out there, somewhere, was her child. If not in the stars, then of these people before her. That's how it always was, and that same desperate feeling of wanting to do her best because of that what-if rose, enkindled from the cold.

She stepped down from the barriers and went back to work. She needed to organize assistance from the neighboring nations, and Tanzania had been in a less than ideal situation to offer any.

All the while, Garrus, assigned to a space-duty squad of Alliance Marines who had been on the Kyoto when it went down, more familiar with Turians than others present, walked those streets of Mombasa below the darkness, even as the morning rose. They all had been baking beneath their suits, locked up for EVA work, due to the anomalous properties of what had been happening, unknown, the danger not yet seen or able to be taken, the city burning in places from crashed sky cars or other smaller accidents that came about. There had been those still living there in Mombasa, and in Voi according to other scouting groups, too stubborn, or unable to move for one thing or another.

That had been the first priority for any who had gone into those places: finding those that still needed help. Shepard's orders.

Garrus had another subset however, one that Nihlus reminded him of in his ear.

"That Human AI left me some choice survey data and historical readings about phenomena like this." Garrus had listened to his supervisor in his ear as he had set up one remote camera; the last in a series placed all around Mombasa. This last one had been in the Old Town, stone and brick surrounded in the other wards by steel and glass all so common in a city that went through the growing pains of the future. "This is a slipspace rupture."

Garrus nodded, looking up above him as down the block the squad of Marines were kicking in doors, yelling to see if anyone had been left behind. "But is it Covenant?"

Nihlus had been silent in his ear for several seconds. "I don't think so. It's too powerful, the readings are strong. Nothing like the Ardent Prayer's."

"Then what is this?" The question of the day, the hour, and the week to follow, Garrus asked plainly.

Of all the secrets in that Galaxy, they were secrets because they were kept by someone, no matter how singular or shadowy. They were a known quantity to at least someone, but with the arrival of the Covenant and a domain beyond that of the STG, the Spectres, and all those hidden hands, truly the unknown had returned.

The giant sphere hummed, and Garrus, hearing it, feeling it in his bones and his scales, could only describe it as the silent vibrato of nothingness, of space itself, looking up into it and seeing nothing at all. In the daylight, blue whips had curved off of its surface like the fires of the sun, but there had been no heat he could feel. Just darkness, swirling darkness, blacker than space.

Garrus Vakarian looked into the upward abyss, and nothing returned it as he walked those streets, alone, and seeing behold a Human city drained of itself, and left to ruin, even if it had not been occupied no less than eight hours ago. Overhead, the beat of Human helicopters went on below like birds, from their hulls were speakers in the local languages, yelling that all the area was being evacuated, and were being ordered to leave for their own safety. If they could not move on their own power, they were told to simply sit tight and try, in any measure, to try and call for it. He had left that, mostly, to the Marines, for he did not know how someone perhaps trapped beneath debris or simply disabled would respond to a Turian arriving. So, he had been left to the rooftops, looking down and around at signs of life, accounting.

It wasn't too different from his affairs in the Turian Navy. He had always been spotter or even marksman on deployments against pirates, but here textbook operations were all cast-off by the very presence of something otherworldly. He thought of Shepard, and her memories, her visions which had tormented her in parts small and large during their mission. He wondered if this type of dread, which was unmovable, had been what she had acted upon her entire time on the Normandy. This feeling, for all the power of the Galaxy and in him, by military might or knowledge or technological prowess, had meant nothing in light of this above them.

"You told me," He speaks alone, but someone is always listening. He hears the chirp that means Nihlus is tuned to him in his ear from his combat visor. "When I first took this job, that you'd see things that regular people wouldn't believe."

He had seen long forgotten colonies who had purposefully shut their communications down to the rest of the Galaxy regress in time, so far down that their children saw him truly as alien. He had been there amongst unchartered star fields chasing terrorists and runaway executives trying to run away to live one more day, even with their sins. Ancient ruins, future ambitions, all clash together in a Spectre's line of work, and he had to put the world one way, for he had been charged to.

"You'll learn, Vakarian," Nihlus started in his digital buzz, "That what will stay you the most are things beyond even your power."

Down the street, a sky car had careened into a convenience store, and although the fire had long gone out, there had been no one there for the bodies, for the Marines were the first there to try and discern what had happened there. Garrus looked down with his scope at them, and a biotic, try as he might, could not summon his own powers to dislodge the car, but there was no urgency. Garrus looked into the car, and in the half-burnt husk, two men were dead in there, bent against steel and metal by g-force and impact. Three more individuals, a woman among them, were brought out from the convenience store by the Marines.

Unknown realities, but consequences manifest of their own reality. Someone's brother, someone's son, someone's mother. Of all they did not know, and of all the divide between Man and Turian, this tragedy Garrus understood as the bodies were brought out from their own private calamity and left to process for others that would come.

He looked up to the sky one more time, and then he went on.

He became a man out of place, if he could be called a man in that world. He walked those dusty streets wholly alien, because he was alien, and if there were mysteries to unravel he did not think he was the right person to put them together. The world was wrong; all worlds were wrong, something he had been aware of in small parts until, at the end of Shepard's mission, he had been brought before the Council as his father looked on, disapproving, and told to do as she had done: vindicate justice amongst the stars both beneath their jurisdiction and not. In that year he had flown out himself on his own missions, his own tasks, and put down men and evil the same because it was what was required of him, but in each of these missions the tragedies that created them rose up and out.

Garrus Vakarian descended upon worlds a Spectre, but no, there had been other names for him now.

If all the worlds were wrong, so he had been too now.

Garrus Vakarian walked the streets of this world new, Mombasa quiet, waiting for different others to walk those streets that would never come.

Spotlights in morning darkness painted the street, and they passed by him to parts other, attached to their helicopters. Red light, from an automated street sign, paints his face as he walks those roads, and he looks up at it:

KEEP RIGHT.

If only it were so easy.

Five million displaced residents. That was the measure which Shepard was dealing with, a number only clarified and brought to her on day three of her station there at FOB Alpha. Mid-summer in Africa and the world was scorching, and all the ACs and all the fans that were creature comforts in other places became necessities there as she became like the generals of old who fought on that continent, still in uniform but barely as she sweat beneath dark rooms and tents.

Three days in and at least a plan was put: a mass migratory effort had been summoned up to be supported in eastern Africa, vehicles which hadn't been slaved to eezo based locomotion or movement had been summoned from all warehouses on that side of the world and brought to Kenya on Shepard's order, and with those vehicles entire depots were set up around the FOB detailing locations that those displaced could go to be housed by family, or at least attend to other options. What became an incident area relegated to southeastern Kenya had become an operation that took to all of Kenya and even beyond.

There was no timescale, there was no more knowledge in those three days about the why of things than when it started. All Shepard could do was mitigate what happened around the black hole that was above.

Truck or busload at a time, those displaced masses, sorrowful or confused or simply unknowing of their own feelings of having lost their homes for what feels like an indeterminate amount of time, were shipped off to other places, slowly, but millions were a number that could not be attended to in three days' time alone, not a week, not even a month maybe.

Those that wished to go back into Mombasa or Voi or the other towns in between were turned back away by the Kenyan military with the Alliance Forces, Garrus among them as well, tracker as he could be for those who thought to go back in and try to get what they could not bring at first.

If it was a battle's thinking that Shepard had thought of, this battle was going to go on for far longer than any battle she'd ever fought.

The President of Kenya had finished off his affairs with her in communication, she standing before a video screen in her command tent and laying out plans that she had made and hoped that the local government would assist with, and he, likewise, alerted her of his own misgivings, his own needs to manage the affairs of his country in light of what was happening.

"You'll get what you need, Mister President." Shepard said with a nod, hands held behind her back. "The Alliance will be sure to allocate resources to each of your metropolitan areas in light of this influx of the population. Trust me, we have experience with this in the colonies."

The President behind his glasses nodded, the brown desk he folded his own hands on filled with paper reports and folders. He paused for a moment as if considering the subject, and then spoke of it:

"When the Covenant came to Earth," Shepard's hands behind her back tightened in their own hold, nails biting into her palms. "They came first here to Kenya, to the plains where you stand now, to see where Humanity came from. I can't help but think this might be yet another start to things."

She grits her teeth to anecdotal words and wonderings of the President. "We'll worry about the future when it gets here, sir."

"Of course."

"I'll have an officer posted to your office feeding you hourly reports as they arise. Otherwise, you're free to go through my liaisons for any other assistance."

"Thank you, Admiral Shepard." The President nodded, and the feed blinked out.

She was not alone in that room. As always, Cleft-Lip was there. He too had been dressed down in the heat, but he had been busy, at the very least. He had been handling inter-service organization, between the Alliance Navy and the Marines and the logistical apparatuses all the way up to the Admiralty. "The Enterprise and her battlegroup are at least a week out." He reported. "Admiral Hirano was pulled off of a presence patrol forward of the Quarian Corridor."

The Quarian Corridor: the space lane and collection of Relays that connected Rannoch-Sanghelios to Human Space, and then the wider Galaxy at large. It had been busy, chaotic even, with supplies and commerce passing from the Galaxy to Rannoch and the needs of a planet that was being reclaimed, and the Covenant who now had its own navy and task forces. Originating from Altis, the Corridor was patrolled by Alliance, Covenant, and Council both, not against pirates, but rather, against each other in silent grate.

Shepard nodded at the report as she breathed out tiredly, turning around simply going to the table with its digital map, a live view from above of those visible masses sprawling out like ants surrounding her very FOB, which had been growing from FOB to makeshift airport almost as quickly as the tent city around it had been developing: every five minutes another five tents were put up, but it'd never be enough, because not all could leave the area to other parts of the country.

For the first time in a hundred years helicopters from another Human era had been on constant rotation in and out dropping off supplies and people, her fleet of several hundred with dozens of make ranging from military to civilian constant through day and night, and suddenly the pilots of the Alliance had to be trained on them, as well as parts and fuel not usually prevalent, made in high demand again.

A task force, even, in Saudi Arabia across the gulf had been put together by her and told to go to those backgrounded oil fields and the still existent royal rulers there and told to partition a portion of its oil supply for the effort here.

Shepard needed anything and everything, for in that whirlwind she was building her own overnight nation not of political need, but rather that of survival and housing of a population.

Her cadre of officers had become at least a hundred strong, comprised of nearly every Alliance officer on Earth who had been there for shore leave, summoned up because the bulk of the Alliance military had been star bound, assigned to the colonization effort that had been ramped up.

The Alliance would do as it was ordered and she was now in a position to order the Alliance in all ways but in the way she wanted, but her own troubles, as it had been always in this duty, were put asides as she crossed her arms and looked to Cleft-Lip. "Any updates on the Anomaly?"

As was the black hole was being officially referred to now.

Cleft-Lip's face contorted in annoyance, because as a man of intelligence services, he had no further intelligence further of it. "Nada. We sent drones through it, and none of them come back, but it is a permeable surface." They had sent a drone connected to a wire from below the anomaly, Garrus had been on site for that, and that drone too had been lost to it, but the wire it was attached to had been cut cleanly, red hot. The same burns as observed on the Long Night of Solace by the SSV Perugia over Altis when it first appeared. No definitive conclusion could be made, but it was a start.

Alliance scientists had been on the ground, the only ones allowed into Mombasa below the Anomaly. It was too early for anything to be discerned, and yet all yearned to know.

"And the Covenant?" She spoke of them generally.

"The Ardent Prayer herself is inbound, a week after the Enterprise. We've been forwarding them data and we've had a rather fruitful dialog about it. They think they have an idea what it is."

"Of course, they do." Unusual creatures with unusual knowledge that she shared. "When they come they're yours to deal with." She ordered Cleft-Lip, and he affirmed.

"Probably for the best."

On the fifth day a shooting broke out. The tent city that had arisen had been given a grid-like designation structure: stark white against brown plains, and even the animals that had once roamed there had been displaced themselves. The shooting was over food, as it usually was. One family fighting for more scraps. More food was always on the way, and more food was available, but never enough at one time, as was the age-old tale of logistics and transportation not being able to fully accommodate.

One man had been shot by an Alliance Marine and not less than five minutes later as a medic was stabilizing the man, shot in the gut, the Marine still there as his squad on policing patrol secured the area around, Shepard had appeared.

"Admiral!" The Marine who had shot the man rose at salute and attention, his squad leader had tried to intercede but with one brush of a hand Shepard shook her head and he had been dispersed to simply keeping the area secure.

"What happened here?" She asked. She did not carry a weapon, her hair tied into a low chignon bun.

The Marine had joined a long-running family of those that had to answer Shepard. On the ground, the man, who wore a linen shirt cut now at his midsection, an Alliance medic with shears having done away with it and now digging into his guts for the sliver of a bullet, groaned meekly. By his side was a knife, not of the medic, but his own. Shepard knew the answer before the Marine answered: That they had been distributing food from the last supply drop for that section, and that one man, whose family had been five children large, had asked and begged and threatened for more from his neighbors in that overnight town, and when he had been denied, he had gotten violent. The onlookers remained at the barrier of Marines providing security.

When they came to respond the man argued, and the Marines had told them that there could only be so much to go around.

In his rage, the man charged, and he was shot for it.

Shepard could not turn any disappointment to the Marine, who had been shocked as much as anyone, who wore his own displeasure on his face as he refused to look away from the man as he bled on the ground and the medic worked on him. He would live, but there were always more victims born of violence.

"Where's the family?" She asked with concern, and the Marine had gestured to the tent just nearby, like the thousands of others that had been going up.

Above, the Anomaly looked on, disappearing only as Shepard had entered the tent.

They were all pilgrims then, Kenya in its history not unused to places like this. Further north of where FOB Alpha had been Dadaab, where for nearly one hundred years in the 21st century it had been a refugee city of Africa, where those of Somalia had come to try and escape the violence there. What had been envisioned as a temporary settlement had become a city unto itself of plastic sheeting and funding from the world's charity, not enough for itself. The prefabs the Alliance had provided were dorm-like in nature, this particular version sporting two beds stacked on top of each other, but not big enough for a family of six: father, bleeding outside, and mother, fearing and despairing, four children of ages ranging from three to eight on the ground or sitting on her knee quiet and tucked into her.

She wiped her feet on the rubber mat built into the structure, all white inside but stark and barren, only two bags worth of belongings in a corner not yet unpacked save for the bare necessities as if the family did not expect, or rather hoped that this place would not become permanent for them.

She kneeled down before the mother and her children and spoke softly. "Your husband is going to be alright."

The youngest child, wailed once before his mother tucked her further into her breast, looking at Shepard so painfully. "I'm sorry." She spoke of Shepard.

"Don't." Shepard said softly back. "We'll take care of everything, just tell me what you need. Because if it's what you need, I'm sure that everyone else is also hurting for."

The mother spoke in her native Swahili, but the universal translator in Shepard's ear had told her true: That for even if food was consistent, it wasn't quite enough for her children, who had been sued to getting those three-square meals a day, and that they were growing.

Shepard knew of the food situation from others, of course, her officers and then the workers in the NGOs that came to Kenya had all said the same thing: More was needed, in every sense, and although she had trusted all of her officers and all those aid workers, she, compelled by gunfire, came here to hear it firsthand because it was what her soul needed. The requests she had made to all that listened in command and over the wire to all organizations that would listen, but she knew that she needed to see it, to hear it, to witness it.

In borrowed memories, hunger arises. A planet, far away; New Jerusalem calls and ignores the hunger of a mother and her daughter, and for that the daughter became something else entirely. Of these children, all of them held the face of a Spartan to be as if that was their tragedy.

"Shepard," The mother spoke to her, for all knew her name. "We need your help."

She held her children close, and Shepard remembered days ago, in her office in Coronado.

Garrus was not party to the blackmail, but he still delivered it, and for that she doesn't think she can forgive that transgression of her friend, but in that deliverance had been a feeling she had never felt before. She had not known the feeling of a mother, worrying for her child, and in that refugee camp and of all the places displaced by the Anomaly, there were parents worrying for their children in a way she had never known until she had been forced to remember that yes, not only had she herself been a mother, but she had a child out there at risk.

A selfish request, maybe, to ask for more in a time where there were many to feed, but Shepard understands. She understands more than anyone would know.

She looked from child to child to child, and finally at mother. "I'm sorry." Shepard instead spoke to her. "We'll do better."

She checks on the man as she leaves, and the medic says, even as the man sits in pain, that he'll live. Maybe shitting in a bag the rest of his life, but he'll live. The world and its circumstances are more enemy than its players, and for that, she looks out to the Marines to settle the affairs here, and she walks her way back to the FOB. She walks alone, through those crowds: a solitary white woman surrounded by the dark masses, but she is not differentiated from them in that movement to those going and to those staying, trying to claim tents and refuge or places on vehicles to take them from that place. Only when those realize who she is, and the fire in her eye, do they step aside, and try as some Alliance Marines to escort her they are left behind.

She had been a woman who came from space, after all this time. Nearly a decade of space duty and all that was asked of her, and she had forgotten it in only a year. Here she remembered, stepping on the QEC device in her command tent and dialing a number of a ship enroute, priority access.

SSV Enterprise didn't keep her waiting.

Taken in her quarters, Admiral Hoshi Hirano appeared.

Admiral Hoshi Hirano had been the last generation of her family born on Earth, Japan, for her own children had been born in space, Navy brats on Arcturus Station. She was a sharp woman, dark hair, eyes nearly black in color with an upturned lip. Before she had been an admiral, she had been a simple captain, five years Shepard's senior.

They were, to say the least of it, acquainted.

SSV Enterprise was enroute, but Shepard could request certain things of it.

"Admiral Shepard." Hirano greeted. "Wanted to get acquainted earlier?"

"Hello Admiral." Shepard nodded back curtly. "A little bit, but I have a request to make of the Enterprise that will require a slight detour, but I'll clear it with Hackett."

Hirano didn't pause. "I'm listening, Shepard." There was trust in her voice that Shepard had been pained to hear, but there were many like her out there.

She eats with Garrus during the single meal she allows herself a day in the business, and he makes sure to take the time off of his duties, his self-appointed patrols and recon for the Council, to meet with Shepard. They talk about everything but work, and the work they've done, and the world that they have helped create. They talk about topics that came from the old days it felt like: of family, of working with the Hierarchy and being in the Navy. They talk of fathers and their absence and their own duties and between them grows more an understanding that they, a Human and Turian, were more alike than different but that itself never needed any clarification at all. Admiral Shepard has her dinners with Garrus Vakarian, and in the middle of Kenya that is not the strangest thing that is.

"I tried, taking on a crew, like you did." Garrus says as he finishes his drink. All of his food had to be shipped in from metropolitan centers around Earth where Turians were known to visit, and indeed on the landing pad some days she would see Garrus conversing with them: Turians who had come to live on Earth and had their resources, who wore modified Human clothing and spoke the language of Man as best they could. They are visitors and leavers for Garrus's sake. Garrus nods at himself and Shepard dips her spoon back into her stew. She doesn't want to eat, listening to this. "I did, got myself a ship, almost like the Normandy, a freighter, rather, modified by a smuggler that I had dealt with early on in my Spectre career."

It was named the Canorea, he told her, named after a bird, known to the Titans of Palaven, who ferried message to message from distant continents and brought the Titans together, and when she died drove them apart.

"I had myself an outfit of ten men and women, and I had found them in a way not so different than how you found all of us, Shepard. One by one, on mission, a few of them were fellow Spectres too. A pirate. A Batarian. A Volus even. We worked well together, and for several months we thought ourselves the best at what we did, and I thought that… well, I just thought I would've done you proud, seeing how I was flying around the Galaxy doing what you couldn't. Maybe there was just a little Turian pride there but… It started, sooner rather than later, a few months in. No one spoke to each other, really, outside of the kind pleasant things that coworkers do so. At first it was because we were all so tired after missions we'd often just crash in our bivvies or bunks, and that was that and we'd be off to the next distress signal or mission or directive. But… then we slowed down on missions for a while, and we were left to our own devices and just." Garrus began to be distant. "It started when one of them left, a Turian, like me. Her brother had been dying a slow death those last few months and she had been on the team for money, but we didn't know why. No one knew. She told us she was getting off on the next port and that her brother had been dying and she had finally gotten enough money to care for him and, when the time came, care for his affairs. When she left, after that, a Human I ran with, a sniper by the name of Reese, he disappeared one day when we were on long observation over a smuggler camp. I found out later he had been summoned back to his colonial home to take command of the guard there, because his colony had a civil war brewing on it."

He told her of those trials, tribulations, personal problems that seemed all too familiar to her.

"I didn't know what they were dealing with. I didn't know who they were at all, in the end, so we all split and…" He sighed, and left it unsaid but answered in Shepard's mind and understanding.

"It's not enough to just believe in a mission." Shepard had spoken a truth. "You gotta believe in each other."

On his plate the crumbs of the meal he had finished remained, and he looked down on them before looking up at her. He nodded, he understood, but hadn't done it himself. Garrus Vakarian was not Jane Kennedy Shepard.

He excused himself, and Shepard followed into her own bed soon after.

One week on, and Shepard does not have sleep or reprieve proper for her, but it is enough in that she takes after the Da Vinci-style of waking: As in, when she can, regarding not for day or night because the situation around her and the Anomaly was not considerate of a twenty-four-hour cycle.

They learned more in that one week: That the nullifying pulse which cancelled out any eezo related mechanism, down to the flesh and blood of those biotics there, had been going out at an exacting interval. Five minutes a pulse would come out invisibly running at a speed that could be reliably tracked that cancelled and stuttered mass effect drives and eezo in its completeness all too like the way the Ardent Prayer could. Whispers were said with those who knew of the the Covenant and its slipspace capabilities and the way that they could wield this wave, and perhaps that the phenomenon had been the same, but the Covenant, in sparse messages, said that it had not been responsible and was making their way to Earth with haste. But that was at least still two weeks out from where they were, and Shepard did not care for their answer.

In one week, the Enterprise and her battlegroup would arrive for security functions and now more, but as she awoke that day by Cleft-Lips ushering in her command prefab, having long gone from tent to plastic walls, she was told that an old friend was visiting and further orders from Arcturus were coming through.

In the morning, SSV Fallujah landed upon the Earth, and she was alerted to its presence. It was a battle-worn vessel, Normandy-class, but far dirtier than her Normandy ever got, and if she wondered a reason it was discarded as the well deck ramp was lowered and out from it was her mentor.

Alec Ryder returned to Earth.

Still a Commander unto himself, but it was no surprise to him that Shepard, even with the circumstances, ended up an Admiral. He walked down those steps solitary, basked in the armor that she had once worn that held the number of her trade: 7. His helmet had been tucked beneath his left arm, leaving his right available to render salute. "Admiral."

"Commander." She responded, saluting him down. The old man had been a father to her. She had had many fathers, including her own flesh and blood, but if there had been any in that life that put her upon her path, happy as she was when it started and fulfilled, he had been that, molding her into the person that could take the life she lived by training and regiment.

The steely coldness of Alec Ryder had still been there, and between them, a companionship that got odder still, day by day, year by year, as now Shepard had found herself in the place that he had: pariah, accused of crime, and knowingly doing so, for the sake of a greater good. For him, that had been his wife, and his crime had been the propagation and research of AI. Yet he was still a soldier, and in that time soldiers were needed and he did not get to fade away.

"I heard the Andromeda Initiative fell through." Shepard greeted and partly consoled. With a curt nod Ryder affirmed.

"The frontiers here in the Milky Way that just opened up were too enticing for the investors of the project to not follow through." The silence, the wind between them. His shoulders stretched and straight faltered slightly. "I guess I can't run away from all of this."

"You never can." Said the student, learned now of life and its turns in a way that had ruined her completely.

Alec smiled, his face, stone and unmoving, faltering, sighing, extending his right hand out. "It's good to see you Shepard."

She took it and shook once strongly. "Especially on better terms this time."

He had been the one to take the Normandy from her in the end. He had been the one that transported her back to Arcturus Station, and then the Normandy to parts unknown for other missions, other debriefings, before it was placed beneath the command of Kaiden Alenko and he put on a mission on a Normandy-class of his own, out in the new frontiers of Human colonial expansion, like law men of old.

On that IM service, made and inhabited by only N7s, he had told her in one message what he really felt: He had been sorry that he was the one to do it.

A year had gone by, and Alec Ryder returned to her on a mission.

It was Cleft-Lip who had alerted Shepard of Ryder's arrival, so of course it had been a mission. Supplies had shown up for the landing pads in the week prior to which she couldn't identify save for that of the Normandy-type frigates, and she had only known because she had been well accustomed to one and its manifests. The Normandys that had shown up to deposit assets and personnel from California had all been recalled to space duty, so the fact that one had been returning had sat in Shepard oddly until it had shown up and bore her mentor. Crews there had been ordered to load up the Fallujah, and gear and kit meant for wild, heavy contact had been carted up the ramp as she and Ryder went into the command building. It had been quiet that morning, but still ever busy with the organization of the city around and the Anomaly. Ryder hadn't even taken a second look at it as he walked from ship to building.

Cleft-Lip had his own office in that building prepared for him, and it was he, standing by it, that beckoned the two in with his fingers. He had supposed to have been in Singapore and negotiating over cargo ships to help with the recovery of the Kyoto, but orders above her had taken precedence.

He shook hands with Ryder briskly and greeted Shepard with a nod, as he usually had done.

"Commander Ryder, I'm sure you're well aware of what you're here to do?"

"I was instructed by your counterpart with the bionic eyes." He spoke of Sunglasses with a nod, with ire not hidden.

"Good. Means we can brief the Admiral here."

"You brief me?" Shepard had tilted her head. "Only orders I take are from up top."

"Normally true," Cleft-Lip shrugged. "But these are need to know, and Alliance Intelligence takes precedence over usual chain of command."

Shepard stayed quiet, only nodding before looking over to Ryder for explanation.

"I have direct orders from the Admiralty and Shastri to take an advance team through the Anomaly."

She waited, considering her words and all that Ryder had said. "How do we know we can go through it? Every drone that's been sent through hasn't come back."

The science teams had been giving her reports from each go through, and she had read each one until they all became the same: failure to evaluate. For all that they knew, it hadn't been a portal as much as it had been a sink of a void akin to any black hole, but obviously that didn't seem to be the case.

"In that last batch of drones that were sent through they were equipped with a certain type of quantum entanglement link, derived from my… research, on SAM." Ryder explained, and Shepard had known what he spoke of. She was given the briefing on SAM the same as any other N7 in case of a containment breach; a matter or issue that had been the reason why Ryder had been disgraced as he was. The AI known as SAM, an AI which directly integrated on some level with the mind, had been his downfall, and yet he had only been too early. She wonders if Ryder knew now, of Cash, of what she did, and she had imagined that he had, but the Old Man had been long accustomed to the world being imperfect. If he cared, he couldn't show it. If he cared, it was a care he wouldn't show the Alliance for damning his wife. "Basically this quantum entanglement link is, regardless of any other connection, is connected to itself on one end or another, and if one end is destroyed the other should be as well. The links were underneath observation these last few."

"And they weren't destroyed." Shepard surmised.

"Correct." Ryder had said as if he had been her teacher again. "And, given that by all accounts that this is all but identified as something analogous to the Covenant's slipspace, we sent a drone through with new technology that we've developed in the last year."

The Covenant was very careful with what they had shared with Humanity, but they shared on still, just in bits and pieces: colony locations, filled in dots in equations and technological problems. The Alliance, and quite very possibly the Galaxy at large, had been doing all they could to progress with what technological standards they did in light of the Covenant: who had been over three centuries ahead. They, in themselves, were answers to questions not put up yet, and Slipspace had been the goal.

"It's still live, transmitting even, but with a signal so weak and the telemetry is out of whack." Cleft-Lip further elaborated off of Ryder. "It's giving us some hokey coordinate data that's placing it outside of the Milky Way."

"No visuals?" Shepard asked.

Cleft-Lip shook his head. "Only very basic telemetry, and those drones are still dying just by distance, loss of connection, battery drain or something. Can't recall any of them back either. About half a dozen."

Between the two of them, once model N7s, Alec had been unemotional like the rocks he had been in love with, tokens from the Earth he walked, same as her. She had worn her heart on her sleeve, and most of the time that heart had been loving and understanding.

In that, she worries for him.

"Sounds like a one-way trip." Her concern was stated, unavoidable. Ryder closed his eyes and took in those words, nodding several times to himself.

"Almost every order in our line of work is, Shepard. This is no different." He dismissed. Cleft-Lip had hardly made any notice of it save to quell her doubts:

"The Fallujah is outfitted with the manifold technology of a Slipspace drive. This technology was also attached to the drones that we sent through that have not broken their link. Trust me, while you've been handling the Humanitarian issues here we've been busy trying to get a read on what the hell the Anomaly is."

"And to do that we're gonna be sending a ship through when all else has failed?"

"Not complete failures, Shepard." Cleft-Lip reminded, but it was hardly a consolation. "Sometimes that's all you need."

There's an explorer within Ryder that beats him back as an N7 soldier. It shines so brightly in him, it was what he had held onto in the same way that Shepard had been told she held onto the hope of people, the belief in other people.

"You forget Commander Ryder here took a one-way trip before, and by all accounts that changed the course of Humanity." Ryder had been through the Charon Relay with Grissom himself, and when he had broken through that barrier on the other end the entire Galaxy opened up. "We're pretty confident that this will be much of the same, so why not get a veteran?"

She's not sure if it's hubris in Ryder's unreadable face, but it's a look all the same that she worries about deeply, intensely, not as a superior officer, but rather as someone who had learned and cared for this man. She knows this feeling well; it's the feeling that came on every one of those battles where she knew that someone would die, last evoked during Virmire.

"Orders are orders, Shepard. You know how it is." Ryder had tried to pacify the concern in Shepard's face that had been arising, "I've always existed at the edge of the frontier, and me and my crew understand that."

"I'll come after you." She says out, and her voice is different. Her voice is younger, resolute, powerful. Cleft-Lip looked away, uncomfortable. How pure her intentions that burned him.

"I know you will, Shepard. It's why I don't mind going." And how confident Ryder had been for it.

Cleft-Lip couldn't be in there anymore. "Shepard, make yourself available for what the Fallujah and Commander Ryder need. His mission commissions just before first light."

The Alliance spook fled his own office, leaving the two N7s alone together.

"You know, I'd always knew you'd outrank me one day, Shepard." Alec Ryder had been uneasy himself, but not because of her, or the world around him. His uneasiness came from within, and it was not an uneasiness the man, rigid as he was, could never shake out of him as he aged.

Maybe it had been the year in relative solitude that had degraded Shepard's bedside manner, her tact, but in times like this she imagined nothing would change; for the Shepard that was was what she felt like as she looked up toward the man who she had known as far more terrible in battle, but instinctual in his motives and morals. Here, he had been shrunk, cosigned to some place that he didn't belong.

She knew the feeling well.

Cleft-Lip's desk had been barren of anything that showed who he was; it was all work, all reports, all stuff to do. He had been as the Alliance needed to be him: an asset, and that had been the fate that the Alliance, or indeed any force like them, wanted of its people. It was all assets and advantages, regardless of the moral implications.

"It's not what you told me in during training." She tried to blunt his attempt at casual conversation, evoking the memory of a meaner Ryder, one that spat down on all the recruits of the N program for their own good. Where they trained, deep in the Amazon, the sun had only been half as hot as his training regimen.

It'd been a long time since Ryder took his own ways that he put upon other people.

He had been called Old Man for a reason, but he did not want to stop.

The terminal beeped idly with notifications and alerts in that room, the smell had been nothing.

They drifted to the outside of the prefab, back to the tarmac and the night that had been over them all. Here, now, they had been equal in ways horrible, and thus their only reconciliation in each other, even if opposed to the events as happening.

They sat in that FOB, looking up at the night, avoiding the dark hole off to the side that had been the cause of all of this.

For his efforts, and for her own, they spoke silently of stories in that past year: She, the domestic life of California, and he, what it was like to be out there on the frontier as they each held within them a part of what they could never have. Soldiers they were both, not only in career, but in their hearts. For they both had been at war long with themselves.

Ryder spoke of the first time in that new world he had seen the Covenant respond to a Human colony coming under attack by thuggish pirates, and how they came down on a Quarian ship with their Covenant shuttles and how they razed everything but who they came to save, and save the Human colony they did. He spoke of how the ire in their eyes was saved by orders from their superiors, and how they had hardly talked with the colonists, leaving a ruined world with fires to keep it.

Shepard spoke of the dogs of San Francisco lost of Human ownership who ran along roads that no longer kept cars, in between the legs of those who walked it. They were free in the truest fashion, despite in a jungle of legs and Man and a city that would swallow them up. She watched those dogs run from her spots in cafes and balconies, and she wondered if she were a dog on a leash.

Ryder spoke, precautionary, for all the worry in Shepard, that to be delivered to her base were to be quantum attuned crystals that were connected to partner devices on the Fallujah, and that they had a sequence to them: If all three were broken, that means the Fallujah had been destroyed. If only one had been broken, it meant that the Fallujah had gotten to where it had been going and was proceeding with investigations. If two crystals were broken, it meant to send help. This too had been the fruit of his research, and no thanks had ever been given to him for it.

Shepard, then, figured he tell him too of what she had been: A mother.

That she had given birth to a child at a time in her life where she could've been so much more, and that she gave the child away into the stars and every day since a part of her has always regretted it. She told Ryder, a father, a husband, that her ultimate failure had not been as a commander but rather as a mother, there on Virmire. For there she had given up on the Galaxy that her child had been existent in, and who she wished nothing for the best, and there she had failed another daughter of Man who had so much taken from them, and yet was asked to become nothing more than the ultimate soldier.

In his low consideration in the night Ryder is silent, as if he had already known of Shepard's secret that she held to herself. Maybe he already had, maybe he didn't, but what mattered was that loss had been shared between them.

"Do Scott and Sarah know?" Do they know that maybe their father would be going to some place where he would never return.

"No." He answered.

"Is Ellen…?" Shepard didn't want to ask a deeper question. She knew what had befallen her.

Ellen Ryder had been the woman who put her biotic implant in, for what little she had used it in the years prior, but past that, she had known her well by way of Alec, after her training. If there had been any she envied in that life, it had been her, and if there had been any who she might've entrusted to the knowledge that she herself had been a mother, it too had been her.

Alec says nothing, and Shepard could not to bear what it meant.

Romantic love does not come easy for Shepard, not for the fact that her love of the world, of the people in it, had been unequal, and yet too great for her alone. She did not love in ways accustomed to those her age because she had no time for it, no worthiness to its majesty. She believed in love and its power and had seen it ruin the world and save it just the same.

A woman, a wolf in the dark, stays besides the bedside of a man all but gone.

A man, who broke the peace of the Galaxy and conjured up unusual, artificial intelligence, stands alone without her.

"Somewhere, out there, might be something that could've helped her."

"Beyond the Anomaly?" Alec shook his head in much the same way that he had at her during her training upon wrong answers.

"No, Shepard." he says, looking out upon that void. "The world to come."

Born out the events the day and their actions, the world to come had always been there to define by that underlying principle that defined all of their lives: mass effect. In the future, as Alec hoped, there would be reprieve, salvation, saviors. He just needed to put the world on its path to get there.

It had worked for him so far, for Shepard had been there.

They stayed in silence like that for a long time in the night, the stars above myriad and still for as long as those who would look for them. They both looked up to those stars and their once future promises undelivered, and still they remained.

"All the stars," Ryder had spoken to her quietly, sitting on a palette of ammunition meant for the Fallujah, left unattended for on that tarmac, around them the world was alive of people and the wind. "They're the same. No matter where you go."

In all the turnings of all the worlds in the Galaxy, the stars might've appeared different in their position and place, but at the end of the day, they were still existent, and out there, had been what everyone had been looking for in their individual journeys between their light.

Alec Ryder would go looking for his nameless ends still. Even if it killed him.

Shepard clenched her jaw and looked at his profile: this man, who had been her teacher, who had forged her, beat her into form, who she had her life to thank for.

"I delivered the news to all of Hitman's families. Wrote to them if I couldn't be there physically. Least I could." She strained. The only thing she could do for all of them at that point. She's written letters, pen and paper, the flag of the Systems Alliance bundled with them, by hand. Ink ran from the tip of a ballpoint pen because that was the only way she could dignify that part of the process of informing loved ones of their loss if she had not been able to go to them directly, and even then she wrote a letter, because if she met with those families she could not rely on her own words. As she rose in rank, larger came her deployment, larger came those that had entrusted their lives to her and her orders, and naturally the wider pool meant the larger likelihood of death. Her time as QRF had weighed her greatly with her casualties, but of all the letters she wrote, of all the grieving she had to do, the worse are the ones that felt caused, not by enemy action and the providence of battle, but rather by her own failure and her failure alone. She could fly out, avenge eighty men and women by gunning down Cerberus scientists and operatives. That was easy. Easiest thing she could ever do. Harder still when the cause, she knew, deep in her bones, was herself. "Don't make me write yours too."

Hitman had been Ryder's unit, and she had ended up destroying it because she didn't put Saren in the ground, and she couldn't get to the root of Mai soon enough. She didn't see how ruinous it would've been to have her lose. She didn't see what it meant to try and save one more person, even the most heinous.

Her failure, her death.

Some of Hitman's families were thankful. Some had damned her, yelling hellfire and curses to her in messages that Adelaide had tried to filter, but Shepard had dug up to listen, to hear the pain of. But the worst were the ones that said nothing and left her.

Tracy O'Neill's daughter had been silent when Shepard arrived at their suburb home, so perfect and idyllic, and changed their lives for the worse.

That night of she almost took herself to the bottle again. Almost.

The last time that had happened she ended up with child.

Here she had been, a year after her greatest failure, and she starts it all over again: begging a man for his life.

If Ryder delivers ruin to her for it, he does not mean it.

He says her name, and then tells her a secret.

When Alec Ryder leaves, it is with little fanfare, and it is done in the morning darkness, just before the sun rises. The Fallujah hardly makes a sound as it lifts off with a full platoon of Alliance explorers with Ryder at the helm. She tracks it, engines like pilot lights, from her FOB, all the way out to the Anomaly. Only other scientists keep her company observing it all the while, this clandestine mission. The Fallujah bows slightly in its flight path, circling around the Anomaly once before it goes in at its midsection with barely a sound, barely a whisper. The fact that it flew in on its own power despite the cancelling effect had been great, and it filled Shepard with partial solace that maybe things would be alright for her mentor.

The Fallujah disappeared into the dark, and, with nothing more to say, nothing more to do for it, Shepard nodded to herself that all would be fine, and she had work more still to do, and little time to get some sleep while she could.

One day later, housings, the size of vending machines, are brought into the ops room and those officers there are briefed on the mission Ryder went on and what those crystals mean: they were incandescent, blinding, connecting to nothing but itself across an impossible distance as they float in glass. Shepard's eyes remain on them the entire day until, twenty-four hours after the Fallujah has left, one crystal shatters like sugar glass.

She sees Cleft-Lip smirk, either at her or the world around him, and the work goes on.