Chapter 45: Unlasting

March 30th, 2211, 0441 hours — New Thebes – Misthaven Maximum-Security Penitentiary

Data Corruption… Automatic Reconstruction Failed…Data Corruption….Profile Reconstruction Required…

(Spectre Operative 04272182-Cloud)

Currently en-route to the prison landing pad

The entire prison was silent save for the pervasive hum of its air filtration system and the cautious footsteps of the doctor and I. The scent of musk and formaldehyde and anti-septic continued to lay like a heavy blanket across the facility's numerous corridors. The lighting in the halls, dim but steady, were nonetheless more than capable of casting a variety of shadows within the cells, making them appear as if they were still occupied.

Curious, I turned to my companion. "So where are all the prisoners?"

"I do not know. Morder Zakiah rounded them all up yesterday evening. I heard he put them on a transport and had them moved somewhere."

I grunted. "He doesn't seem the type to try and minimize collateral damage."

"No, he isn't," Astrid agreed. "I believe him to be certifiably insane. He didn't used to be, but his mental health has dropped precipitously in the last few months. Frankly, I'm surprised Dr. Anders and Lieutenant-Commander Locke still keep him around."

"He wasn't the only one with a few screws loose in your outfit. Dr. Olivia Flanagan? She was also three sheets to the wind."

The doctor turned to me with a confused expression on her face. "I remember her. She was one of our leading scientists. She always seemed so nice."

"She had a weird obsession with me, stabbed me in the chest with a sword, and cut off my friend's hand," I said airily. The woman had been a whirlwind of impulsive obsession and fits of insanity. The scar she gave me on my cheek still ached from time to time with remembered pain.

Astrid's eyes grew wide with horror. "I am so sorry. Really, she never showed psychopathic tendencies of any sort."

"People can be really good at hiding who they are," I shrugged. "Anyways, she's gone now. Nothing but a memory."

We continued through the prison, heading deeper and deeper. We had passed by the cell block now and were passing through the bathrooms, the mess, and a few recreation areas. Between the oppressive silence and the small, telltale indicators that this place had once been filled with people and now was not, my heart was heavy with cautious wariness and healthy amount of trepidation. In all that time, we didn't pass by a single other living soul. Only ghosts walked these halls now.

A sign ahead caught my attention. I tilted my head at it. "Mind if I make a pit-stop?"

Astrid peered at the sign. Her expression changed ever so briefly as she saw where I intended to go, though I couldn't tell what it meant.

"Sure. The Medical Laboratory is where Dr. Anders spent most of her time. There should be an observation wing down there as well."

We turned and followed the sign towards a door at the end of the corridor. We approached cautiously. I kept my Predator pistol raised the entire time, ready for anything.

Astrid tapped her keycard on a reader and the doors slid open to reveal a laboratory. Machines whose functions I did not know lined one side of the wall. Another wall had a large holo-board mounted atop it. Beside the board was a door leading to another part of the prison.

Several lab benches ran the length of the room, filled with racks of test tubes and microscopes and other equipment I could not recognize. Everything looked clean and organized. One could hardly tell that this laboratory had been used recently.

I stepped carefully inside and looked around, weapon still raised. It appeared to be clear.

Astrid stepped past me and waved her hand over the lab. "Well, this is where she worked."

I lowered my pistol and cautiously made my way over to the machines, careful to record as much as I could with my armor's built-in camera. With my limited scientific background, each machine was virtually completely foreign and alien to me.

Astrid walked over to a series of small, empty cages over in one corner of the room. They looked like they could have been used to house lab rats.

"Dr. Anders spent nearly every waking moment in this lab, trying to figure out how to improve the Cerberus revival strain while studying the Cris'paii DNA," Astrid mused. "She was trying to isolate the specific portion of their DNA that initiated the physical recombination of the host and remove the parasitic characteristics. Without the revival strain, the Cris'paii DNA simply continues to replicate. It can still infect other carbon-based life forms, but when it does it does little else but eventually cause total organ failure. That's what happened to the victims of the Phenomenon."

As she talked I searched the lab, pulling open drawers and searching for secret compartments, but I couldn't find anything. The Project had very thoroughly covered their tracks. Were it not for Astrid's presence, I wouldn't have suspected that the prison had been their base of operations. Well, if not for her and the star-child hallucination that had led me here.

While she looked around, she continued to talk at me. "But when combined with the revival strain… it becomes something entirely different. Something more virulent… more malignant… and more dangerous. When combined with the strain, the Cris'paii DNA begins to aggressively seek out viable hosts."

"When a host is found, the DNA triggers a sudden, rapid recombination of their physical forms into what we suspect to be a corrupted version of the Cris'paii. Our current theory is that the Reaper DNA somehow damaged the Cris'paii DNA or corrupted the recombination process. It is why so many of the creatures have synthetic attributes. The revived creature then goes on to seek out new viable hosts."

That would explain why the creatures were partially synthetic. Tubules, metal plating, synthetic eyes – those were all hallmarks of Reaper-made forces. Jaelen had told me that the DNA of the victims was partially Reaper, albeit "deactivated" to use his words. The DNA he couldn't identify? That must have been Cris'paii DNA.

I picked up an empty test tube and peered into it. Somehow, even in that sterile, fluorescent lighting it managed to glimmer like a rare gem. It seemed to whisper at me, promising things my mind couldn't comprehend or hear but my heart could.

I set it back down and shook my head. "And the Project thinks that they can somehow control it? I've heard this story before."

Astrid shrugged. "To be honest, we still don't know if Cris'paii DNA was designed to work like that or if it was actually something that the Reapers caused. The fact that the infected creatures have synthetic attributes just indicate some sort of Reaper corruption. It could also just be an unforeseen side-effect of the strain."

I dragged my fingers over one of the benches. "And you still think you can use it to bring everyone back?" I asked softly.

Astrid glanced over at me. "That was the intention, yes. We think that the Cris'paii DNA works to bring the original Cris'paii back. If we isolate the mechanism which they use to do so, we can apply it to other beings. We already have their DNA, its in the dead Reaper constructs still scattered throughout the galaxy."

Save us…

A vision of her came to me again. No, it was not the star-child. Soft, blonde hair cascaded down onto pale shoulders. Warm, blue eyes colored like young sapphires gazed tenderly at me, shining all the more brightly from the tears that streamed down her cheeks.

And she disappeared the same way as she always did. With the blaring of a horn and a flash of red light and the closing of shuttle doors.

I shook my head, clearing her afterimage from my mind's eye.

Save us!

That thought was so loud that it might as well have been shouted across the lab. I shook my head again.

"So… So something in the Cris'paii DNA might allow for a person's physical form to be reconstituted, but what about their minds?" I wondered aloud. "The human brain and consciousness is incredibly intricate and difficult to replicate. We've never been able to successfully do it – hell, we don't even know the complete anatomy of a human memory."

"Like I told you earlier, that was the Project's next biggest hurdle. We know that the Reapers had the technology to extract and transplant an individual's entire consciousness, so it is possible," Astrid said.

Save us!

That thought echoed again across my brain, and this time it did so loudly enough to actually hurt. I brought my hand up to my head with a grimace.

That motion didn't escape the doctor. "Hey are you feeling okay? What's wrong?"

She moved over to me and placed one hand on my chest and another on my forehead, trying to lift my head so she could peer into my pupils.

I shook her off and instead pointed at the door beside the holo-board. I couldn't explain it, but it felt as if the cries for help were coming from just beyond that door.

"I'm fine, it's just a headache. Where does that door lead?"

Her eyes followed my finger. The door was thick and looked hermetically sealed. A card-reader was installed on it.

"I believe it leads to observation," Astrid said softly.

I pushed myself off of the lab bench I had used to steady myself. "We're going."

She hesitated for a moment before moving to the door and producing her keycard once again.

The card stopped inches from the key-reader. "Cloud, before we go in there…"

"What is it?"

Her brows furrowed and she bit her lip. Astrid looked extremely uncomfortable.

"We… I… have done some bad things. Things that are completely unforgivable, even if we were trying to do them for the right reasons," she said quietly. "… I just wanted to say I'm sorry. I'm sorry I let it get that far."

The doctor looked deeply distressed, so I placed a hand on her shoulder. "Hey, its okay… What, you think my hands are clean? I've had to do some pretty bad things too. They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but everyone's walked it at some point or another. That's just part of being human."

She gave a weak nod. A tear slid down her cheek.

I patiently let her grapple with her feelings for a moment. "What matters is you're doing something about it now," I finished. I moved my hand from her shoulder to her hand with which she held her keycard. Gently, I pressed it down onto the reader.

The door opened with a hiss, revealing a small, dark vestibule lined with red lights with another door at the end. A standard decontamination airlock.

We stepped inside. The door slid shut behind us and the room began to fill with a light gas. After a few moments, the gas was drained into a several vents installed in the floor and the door ahead of us slipped open.

I raised my pistol and stepped in first.

The observation room was long and rather narrow. There were five or six hospital beds on one side of the room, with lab benches between the two filled with all sorts of medical equipment. Monitors, gauges, pumps… this part looked like it was designed to keep people alive.

At the far end of the room stood several liquid suspension tanks, designed for individuals who had suffered full-body wounds. They were currently unoccupied.

Several thick, steel doors with windows stood across from the beds. I walked over to them and peered inside.

Behind each door was a padded, white cell. Each cell was furnished with a toilet, a small bed, and a desk. The cells were rife with signs that they had once been occupied. Some of the walls were smeared with dried blood from various species or covered in long scratches. One cell had a desk that was completely splintered. Bedding was torn, toilet seats were ripped off, and bits of cloth lay scattered across the floors of the cells.

It was nothing I hadn't seen before. I had fought against radical doctors who had experimented on people kept in rooms such as these, but it still managed to turn my stomach. Disgusted, I turned to Astrid.

"Who were these cells for?"

Astrid moved to stand beside me. "They used to be used for the prison's psychiatric inmates."

I scrutinized the rooms a bit more. "They look like they've seen repetitive and recent use though. Who did you keep in here?"

Astrid hesitated for a moment. I waited quietly and patiently for her answer.

"The Cris'paii DNA did not cause recombination in every host. Some managed to keep their current physical forms. Alice considered it to be a huge breakthrough in our understanding of the DNA."

Her eyes were drawn to the long scratches left behind in some of the cells and the dried blood.

"However, the DNA caused these subjects to exhibit certain sociopathic tendencies through a multitude of symptoms that varied in magnitude. Many saw figures who weren't there or had auditory hallucinations. Few oddly began to exhibit a weird savior-complex as well, except it… it sounds unbelievable but it manifested in the subject seeking to kill people."

An icy chill started at the base of my neck and quickly ran down my spine. Pricelle Devaris, the insane asari doctor from the Hippocrates who had killed her fellow crew members… What was it that she had said?

The voices, they tell me things… They told me that I had to save them, that I had to save them all…

I swallowed. "Anything linking these special cases?"

"All of them were biotics and nearly all of them were asari," Astrid replied. "Most biotics simply became one of the creatures, but a select few managed to overcome the recombination process. We're not exactly sure how or why. It's… It's… possible that they were infected by a damaged or different strain of Cris'paii DNA or it's the result of an unknown interaction between their biotics and the Cris'paii DNA. We don't know."

I caught a part of my own reflection staring back at me from the steel door. The metal with all of its imperfections seemed to twist it and warp it into something that was and yet was not me. I had always been pale, but my reflection looked almost bloodless. My reflection was thinner and more skeletal-looking, and the door made my eyes glimmer like two orbs that burned with unnatural blue light.

I screwed my eyes shut and gave a dry chuckle. A part of me had always known—had always suspected…

"And… and what ended up happening to these special cases?"

She shrugged hopelessly. "I am not sure. Alice must have ordered them evacuated, but their symptoms slowly grew worse and worse over time and we are no closer to figuring out what exactly made them special."

So that was how it was going to be then. But what did it matter really? As long as I could fight them I would continue to do so, and when the time came I would trust my friends to do whatever was necessary.

But I wouldn't tell them yet. I didn't want them to look at me that way. I didn't want them to worry.

A strangled sob pulled me out of my own thoughts. It was Astrid.

"Hey, what's wrong?"

She waved a hand and gestured at the room. "All of this! Every last bit of this! I'm supposed to be a doctor… I'm supposed to help people, just like my father did! It's all I've ever wanted. Instead, we killed people. Experimented on them!"

She punched the steel door once. I tried to gently grab her wrist but she was too fast. She pulled away and punched it a second time, and then a third. The fourth one left a small smear of blood on the door and her knuckles bloody.

"Hey… Hey! Stop it!"

She ten hput her back to the door and slid to the ground in a seated position, head in her hands. Tears rolled silently down her cheeks to fall onto the floor below.

"We accidentally killed hundreds on the Hippocrates, and when we discovered what it meant we decided to kill hundreds of thousands more. We were ready to kill every last person on this planet," she whispered.

She gestured again at the metal doors. "These were normal people before we came along. Not all of them were prisoners who had done bad things. They didn't deserve what we did to them, and after we experimented on them – after it became clear that they needed help – instead of helping them we stuck them in cages and just watched… we just watched."

Astrid looked up at me. There was so much pain in those eyes, so much anguish in her voice. "We just… we just wanted them back so badly. The Reapers…. They took so much from us… we were willing to do whatever it took to get them back. I just wanted to have my dad back again."

She wrung her bloody hands. "And yet… even if I saw him again I wonder how I'd ever be able to even look him in the eye. I'm supposed to be a doctor. I'm supposed to help people, and yet I spat on that duty. Desecrated it. What would my dad think if he knew what I'd done? How could I ever be forgiven for this?"

She buried her head in her elbows. I took a knee beside her, my thoughts on my condition momentarily banished.

"Hey…" I said gently. "It's okay…"

"Is it?"

I sat down on the floor beside her and put my back against the steel door as well.

"You know, I lost my mother during the Reaper war."

Astrid looked at me and raised a hand to wipe the tears from her eyes. "I'm sorry to hear that," she replied. "What was she like?"

My throat seized up for a moment. Talking about her, even after all these years, was still so incredibly difficult. The words were thick and cumbersome. They held on tightly inside my mouth, refusing to come out.

"She was… she was…strong," I finally said. "Very strong. I was pretty young when I lost her, but I remember her being very assertive. She was beautiful as well. I remember… I remember she had light hair and really kind eyes."

In truth, my memories of my mother were like those dreams that seemed so real when you were having them but which you could actually never remember when you woke up. I was so young back then, and I didn't have an inkling as to how young I'd actually been. I didn't even have a real birthday, just an arbitrary one given to me by my caretakers at the orphanage.

The only real, concrete memory I had was that final one. All I could remember perfectly was her face and the look she gave me as the doors to the shuttle closed. I'd seen it a thousand times in my dreams. Throughout the years I'd force myself to relive that moment again and again and again just so I wouldn't forget her face. When I went searching for her with Elektra when I was a bit older, I'd base my drawings of her on that memory.

"We lived alone most of the time," I continued. "I don't remember the name of the planet or the city, but it was often dark and it rained quite a bit. I remember I was always thrilled every time we had a sunny day. I remember a really big clock tower."

I'd never bothered to learn more about where I'd come from. If I wasn't doing what I had to do to survive in the streets of the Citadel, any spare time I had I spent down at the docks where tens of thousands of refugees and travellers would pass through every day, asking whoever would listen if they had seen my mom.

"Where was your father?"

"I don't know," I shrugged. "I have no memories of him at all, and I don't remember my mother ever really talking about him. I think he left us before I was born."

"I'm sorry to hear that as well. What was your mother's name?"

I wrinkled my brow, trying my best to suppress the sadness welling up within me. That part was what haunted me the most.

"I don't know. I can't remember. She was… she was just my mother."

A silence fell naturally between the two of us after that. For a while we sat there together, wrapped in a shared understanding of each other's pain – the pain of losing someone who had been our entire world.

"So I know how you're feeling," I spoke again. "I know just how badly you can miss someone, how far you might be willing to go to have them back, and just how easy it can be to cross lines that you swore you'd never cross. Become someone you're not."

I turned to her and smiled. "But what you did doesn't have to define you for the rest of your life. Even if you can't undo the past, you can still change your future. You can still help create a better galaxy. It's not too late. By turning your back on the Project, you've already taken the first step."

Astrid smiled back. "The galaxy that my father believed in. A galaxy that wasn't filled with war and suffering. A galaxy where everyone helped one another instead of hurting one another to further their own agenda."

"Yeah," I said. We sat there a little while longer, the two of us dreaming about a galaxy that was better than this one and how we might ever be able to bring it about.

Could such a galaxy exist? Maybe. Hopefully.

I wanted to make her feel more at peace with herself, and by the looks of it I had succeeded. The look on her face now told me that she had learned to let go of her poisonous dream. She had learned to let go of her father.

But I on the other hand… I wasn't sure if I was ready to let go of my mother just yet. I envied Astrid. I envied her memories of her father. She at least had gotten to spend time with him, enough to know what he was like, enough to know what kind of person he was, and what she could do to make him proud. At least she knew his name.

The Project was… not evil necessarily, but misguided. It did have some people I'd consider more evil than not, but that was moreso just a function of being such a massive organization. When you gathered enough people together, eventually you'd find a few bad eggs whose actions might color your entire group.

In fact, most of the Project were probably people just like Astrid. Desperate people who dreamed about seeing their loved ones again. These people had then started down a dark path that just kept getting darker, led by people like Alice and Olivia and Zakiah. It was a path they couldn't turn back from, for they were held hostage by their dream.

The Project… they had set out to do something truly wondrous, and somewhere down the line they had ended up on a path full of dead bodies behind and in front of them. Bodies that they were responsible for creating. Somehow they had ended up as harbingers of death.

Perhaps there was a way to bring everyone back without doing what the Project was doing. If the Project could be convinced to share what they knew with the galaxy at large, maybe we could all work together to decipher the Cris'paii DNA's secrets without harming anybody else. Maybe I could see my mother again.

All of a sudden, a familiar sound split the moment in two and cut off my thoughts, pulling me back into the present.

"Shit, those sounded like a Corpser. They must have breached the prison," I said.

"What are we going to do?"

I got up and checked my Predator pistol. "We go down to the landing pad. My radio has been a bit buggy after the crash, but I should be able to call a shuttle from there."

I pulled Astrid to her feet and together we left the observation room. The howls were getting louder and louder now.

"This way!" she said.

I let her take the lead and I kept my weapon raised the entire time. Our only hope was to outrun the creatures. I was still not in any shape for a fight. My shoulder hadn't fully healed yet so I wouldn't be able to use my biotics fully, and I now had several fractured ribs thanks to the crash. We'd be dead if they caught up to us.

We soon found ourselves in a big hallway. Astrid pointed at a pair of wide doors at the other end.

"There! Up ahead! That will take us out onto the underground landing pad!"

We reached it with one last burst of speed. Astrid rammed her keycard into the reader. The lock mechanisms started up with a groan and the doors began to slide open.

Two figures were already inside, waiting for us.

March 30th, 2211, 0549 hours — New Thebes – Misthaven Maximum-Security Penitentiary

Data Corruption… Automatic Reconstruction Failed…Data Corruption….Profile Reconstruction Required…

(Spectre Operative 04272182-Cloud)

Prison landing pad

A ship already sat in the middle of the landing pad. About a hundred meters above us, the bay doors were already open. The sky was still dark, the morning rays just a few short moments away from penetrating that dark gloom. My breath came out in white wisps. The air still had that night-chill quality in it. It wouldn't warm up until the sun finally rose.

Two figures were already there. One was clad in N7 armor. The red and white stripes on his arm were pitted and dented, faded in some areas from the long use. He was tall, approximately my height, and he had medium-length, swept-back graying hair and a short, rough shadow of a beard. He looked to be in his mid-fifties.

The other was a woman in a lab coat, also in her mid-fifties, with graying hair cut just above her shoulders. She was halfway in the shuttle when she spotted us.

The N7 and I had spotted each other at the same time. Both of us simultaneously raised our pistols at one another. He was wielding an M-5 Phalanx pistol – the same one I'd seen him carrying aboard the Hippocrates.

"Thomas Locke," I growled. "Put down your weapon, it's over."

The woman stepped out of the shuttle and took a few steps toward us. Locke moved a few steps to the side, putting himself between us and her.

Locke completely ignored me. "Astrid, you're supposed to be on the Exeter! Are you okay? Did he hurt you?" he asked.

Astrid moved so that she stood beside me. "I'm okay Tom, he didn't hurt me. Tom… Alice… I've told him everything. You have to stop this. What we're doing is wrong, it's not worth it."

Alice? Was that what Astrid had called the woman? She must be Mordred then, Dr. Alice Anders – the mastermind behind the Project.

"I've got a platoon of Jaegers on their way. We've got guns ready to take you down as soon as you lift off. It's over. Surrender," I bluffed.

Locke's hands tightened around the handle of his pistol, but Alice stepped out of the shuttle and took her place beside the rogue N7.

"I've been looking forward to finally meeting you, Spectre. Unfortunately, the chances of you having outmaneuvered us are very unlikely. None of our other ships were targeted by your weapons and you'd never be able to move a whole platoon of soldiers this deep into the city without having absolute control of the air, which I'm betting that you do not have just yet."

I fought to keep my face from betraying my disappointment. The doors automatically closed behind us. It was just the four of us now.

I was going to have to try a different route then. "Astrid told me what the Project is trying to do," I said instead.

Alice crossed her arms. "And what did she tell you?"

"Everything. She told me that all you really want is to see your loved ones again. There's nothing wrong with that, nothing at all, but the cost of all of this is too high."

"You have no idea what its cost us to get this far. You have no idea… no idea at all…" Locke growled.

I turned my attention to the N7, starring daggers at the man with a cold fury.

"You're killing innocent people! Those people on the Hippocrates? They had families! families who loved them and missed them and would do anything to see them again! Same as the people on this planet. You don't get to trade their happiness for yours!" I shouted.

In my mind I could still see John sitting on his bed, waiting for Sarah to come back.

Astrid pushed forward, arms raised. "Stop this! Turn yourselves in! Tell the Council what you know, and maybe we can find a way to bring everyone back! A way that doesn't involve killing people!"

"It's not too late!" Astrid begged. "Listen, I know the two of you! I know the two of you are good people! You don't want to hurt anyone! You've both been consumed by your own grief, and I get it! Anyone would."

Alice and Locke glanced briefly at one another. I carefully watched their eyes as they did so. I could see in them a shared determination— a sense of resolute certainty mirrored in both of them. They would not be swayed.

"Astrid…" Alice began. "You know as well as I do that the Council would never sanction this. If we don't do this, it will never happen. If we want to see our loved ones again, then its up to us. No one else."

Astrid looked visibly deflated at the woman's words.

I took another two steps towards the two, prompting Locke to step forward as well.

"You think you're the only ones who lost someone? Everyone lost someone to the Reapers! I lost my mother to them! It still doesn't give you the right to do what you've done!" I shouted.

Like a sudden thunderstorm, in an instant Locke's electric-blue eyes flared up in a maelstrom of fury and wrath.

"Don't! Don't talk to me about loss! You know nothing about loss!" Locke roared.

The N7 began to shake with fury. I'd never seen him so emotional. In all our past encounters he had always seemed so composed – so unflappable. The man before me now… he seemed like a completely different creature. A different beast.

"I lost my wife!" the N7 cried out. "The woman I've loved with every fibre of my being from the day I first laid eyes on her! I lost a child – a child that I didn't even get the chance to hold! I lost everything to the Reapers!"

As he spoke, the N7 positively radiated rage as if it were an energy. My grip tightened across the handle of my pistol as I prepared for an attack.

"I wanted to go back to Earth after the Reapers attacked…" he continued. "I wanted to go and find them! Protect them! But Shepard stopped me. She told me that me that I and the other N7s would be more valuable fighting in other theatres, slowing down the Reapers and buying time so that she and her crew could find a way to stop them. 'That was the best way to beat them', she said. That was the best way to protect my family."

The N7's whole body seemed to shake as he continued to speak. Whether it was from rage or remembered pain I couldn't tell.

"And so I did. I fought the Reapers with every fibre of my being. I put my life on the line again and again and again. I lost more friends than I can count and saw more death than anyone should ever have to see. On Eden Prime I saw a thousand marines disappear in an instant beneath the red light of a Reaper capital ship. On Noveria, many chose to walk out one last time into the icy cold instead of being captured by the Reapers."

As he continued to speak, tears rolled down Locke's face.

"I lost a part of me that I could never hope to regain. I lost count of how many nights I lay awake, afraid that my wife wouldn't even be able to recognize me once this was all over."

The rogue N7 shook his head. "But in the end, Shepard was wrong. By the time they finished the Crucible and activated it, it was too late. The Reapers ravaged Earth and I never saw my family again. Shepard had been wrong, and I lost everything," he spat through gritted teeth.

He jerked his head at Alice beside him. "And when Alice presented Shepard with her discovery of the Cris'paii DNA – presented her with this one, shining moment to make things right, to bring everyone back…. Shepard once again said no. She said it was too dangerous. She said that if we were to continue down that path, we would jeopardize the entire galaxy – jeopardize everything we fought and sacrificed so hard for."

"And so I was left with nothing. So don't talk to me about loss, boy. You have no idea," Locke growled.

Alice raised a hand and laid it gently on the N7's arm. The gesture seemed to calm the man down, reining him in and dispelling some of the grief that threatened to overwhelm him.

"Spectre, you said you lost your mother," she said to me. "We've made a new discovery – a discovery that can change the balance of the galaxy. A discovery that proves it can be done. I can bring her back," Alice said calmly.

Despite knowing who she was and what she had done, somehow I found myself believing her. I didn't think she was lying to me now.

The woman silently stared at me. Her gray eyes seemed to bore right down into my very soul, peering into its darkest corners – into every nook and cranny. They seemed capable of reading my heart's softest whispers. It's secret desires.

"Just let us go. Or better yet, come with us. Help us."

What did they see?

"Together we can bring her back."

The sights on the Predator pistol began to waver. I blinked stupidly at them. It took my brain a few moments to realize that it was my hands that were shaking.

Tears began to fill my eyes too and the shaking intensified. I bit back a sob. They could bring her back. I could bring her back. That last time I saw her… it didn't have to be the last time. We could have more time – more moments to spend with one another.

The barrel of my pistol wavered and dipped ever so slightly, and Alice's eyes began to fill with relief.

"No!"

That word pulled me out of my head and back into the present.

Astrid stepped up beside me. "Alice, look at what we've done! Look at how many people we've killed! Hundreds of thousands, dead!"

"I know you miss your family," she continued. "I know Tom misses his wife. I miss my father too. I wish every day that I could see him again. Back then, I used to dream about what we'd say to each other when I finally saw him again."

Astrid gave a sad smile, a smile that shined through the tears that now streamed down her face like warm rain.

"In my dreams I'd tell him that I missed him and that I loved him. I'd tell him how happy I was to have him back."

The tears grew stronger. "But I'd also tell him what it had cost. And in my dreams do you know what he'd say to me?"

The doctor swallowed. "He'd say to me that I should have let him rest. That no matter how much pain I might have felt at his passing, it didn't give me the right to hurt other people. He'd have told me that I should have let him go – forge onwards into the future instead of holding onto the past."

"We can't change the past, no one can. We just have to learn to live with it, and to learn to find joy in the future," Astrid finished.

I looked at her and I marvelled at how brave Astrid was. The Reaper war had left a deep legacy of pain in each and every survivor of the war. Even after twenty-five years, that pain was still strong enough to drive even the best of us down a dark road that promised to beget even more pain and suffering.

But maybe we could turn back. Maybe we didn't have to walk down that road. Astrid had learned to let go and forgive the past in spite of how badly the past had hurt her. People like her… they were the hope for a brighter future. A future where the galaxy could finally begin to heal.

The barrel of my pistol rose, and this time I trained it squarely on Alice's chest.

"This ends here Dr. Anders. The project is finished. No one else will die because of it," I said.

Locke immediately moved in front of Alice. "This is just the beginning. I won't let you stop us," he replied firmly.

Our eyes met and were suddenly locked in place, and the two of us let out a long exhale. Astrid and Alice both quickly stepped off to the side.

We opened fire on one another almost simultaneously, sprinting towards one another as we did so.

Four rounds from Locke's pistol tore through my shields while a fifth grazed the meat of my right shoulder, having been somewhat deflected by my armored pauldron.

I had managed to squeeze off four rounds too, burning through his shields as well. My last shot was a bit more accurate, burying itself into the older man's bicep and causing a spray of red blood to arc out onto the floor.

Locke grunted in pain and activated his omni-shield, blocking the remainder of my bullets. He tried to adjust his aim with his pistol one-handed but the wound in his arm had slowed him down, allowing me to raise a hand and produce a biotic shield to catch the remainder of the bullets in his heatsink as well.

Even that simple motion caused my shoulder to scream painfully, and I knew that I still wasn't in a good enough shape to use my biotics offensively.

Both of our heatsinks overheated at the same time, and since none of our hands were free to replace them it'd be a while before the two of us could shoot again.

I dropped the biotic barrier and took the opportunity to lash out with my boot at his pistol in a swift, quick kick. It caught it and sent the weapon spinning away.

Locke grunted and thrust the bottom-edge of his omni-shield violently towards my face. I moved to duck it but it was a feint. The edge of the shield instead swept down my arm and tore my pistol from my hand as well.

With the two of us now disarmed, we began to fight using our favored close-quarters instruments. I produced one of my talon knives and, while keeping my wounded arm and shoulder close to my body, began to lash out in a series of kicks and slashes at the N7.

Locke did the same with his arm as well. Blood streamed freely from the wound but the N7 paid it little heed. He wielded his omni-shield with frightening proficiency, displaying a masterful balance of offence and defense. He'd use it to deflect my strikes and counter-attack at blistering speeds that I was only barely able to avoid.

I fought hard, but I'd been fighting hard for weeks now and that effort had exacted a debt that was now screaming to be repaid. Despite being younger and fitter, my breathing was becoming more and more laboured than Locke's. My strikes were a whirlwind of flashing steel and metal but he was spending less energy than I was in deflecting them, and it showed.

I landed after a particularly powerful roundhouse kick that was wasted on the N7's omni-shield. Beset by the exhaustion, I waited a moment too long to dart away.

Locke drove the edge of his omni-shield into my right thigh, cutting through where the armor was weakest and slicing into my flesh. A stream of ruby-red blood poured out of my thigh to join the blood already on the ground. I let out a pained scream and dropped down onto one knee, waving my knife to try to keep the N7 at bay.

The N7 dodged my knife with ease and sent a boot into my chest, knocking me onto my back. The motion made the pain of my fractured ribs flare up as well. He pinned my knife-hand with one boot and jabbed edge of his omni-shield into the joint of my wounded shoulder. I let out another scream of pain.

"You can't win this. Give up," he said.

I stared up at him in angry defiance. His electric-blue eyes were filled with both cold fury and pain at the same time, so similar to my own. His eyes met mine and he stared back.

The entire hangar was silent in that moment, allowing all of us to finally hear the creatures howling just outside of it, drawing closer and closer to us.

"It didn't have to be like this. You could have joined us. Together we could have brought everyone back. Alice could have brought back her family. I could have brought back my wife. You could have brought back your mother," Locke said, his voice edged with sorrow.

I kept my eyes locked with his. "I have to let her go…You have to let her go too," I croaked.

A metallic sound drew both of our attentions. Astrid had grabbed my pistol off the floor and was levelling it at the N7's chest. "Tom, stop! Let him go!" she said.

I turned my head. "Astrid no! Don't!" I yelled.

Locke turned to her and gave her a long, blue stare – one filled with sadness. Astrid's hands trembled.

A single shot suddenly rang out. Echoing in the vastness of the hangar bay, the sound seemed to last forever.

The pistol fell from her hands. I watched in horror as Astrid suddenly dropped to her knees, a pool of red blossoming on lapel of her white lab coat.

And suddenly I was back on the Hippocrates, watching helplessly as someone else I had grown to care about died in front of me.

"No!" I screamed.

"Tom! It's time to go!" Alice cried out. The leader of the Project had one foot on the shuttle. In her hand she held a smoking pistol. Locke's pistol.

Locke looked at her, then at the fallen doctor, and then back to Alice again. The N7 nodded and stepped off of me. He ran into the shuttle and towards the cockpit. Within moments the doors began to close.

I stared at Alice's face as the doors closed. Rage filled every ounce of my being, every fibre in my body. She just stared back at me, her gray eyes apologetic and filled with sadness at having killed someone she had considered her friend.

The doors finally closed and the shuttle began to lift off. It passed through the open hangar doors above, disappearing into the fading darkness and hurtling away from the city of the dead, leaving the two of us alone on the landing pad.

The howling grew louder now, as did the horrific scratching sounds. The bay doors wouldn't keep them out for long.

But I didn't care. I slowly dragged myself over to Astrid.

I gently turned her over. She was still alive but her breathing was becoming more and more laboured as the pool of blood beneath her grew larger and larger.

She slowly raised a hand. I grabbed it and squeezed it. With her other, she reached up and tugged at the thin metal chain around my neck.

Out popped the small data drive from beneath my armor, the one she'd filled with the Project's secrets. She tapped it weakly with a finger.

I grabbed the drive and squeezed it tight, nodding to show her that I understood. As I did so, tears clouded my eyes, blurring my vision. "I'm so sorry… I'm so, so sorry…" I said.

Every breath became more and more of a struggle from the dying scientist. Finally, she mustered enough breath to speak one last time.

"Not… your fault. Forgive…" she whispered.

And with that last word on her lips, she died.

I looked up into the sky. The sky was just turning into morning now, taking on a bright-red hue with streaks of blue.

When I looked back down, Astrid's eyes were still open, and I could see that sky reflected in them. The early morning sky was still filled with stars, motes of light that were slowly fading as the sun rose into dominance. I wonder if she'd managed to catch one last glimpse at them before she left. One last look at the place where'd she be going.

The scratching and howling rose in a furious crescendo as the creatures came closer and closer to breaching the bay doors, but I didn't care. A thundering boom suddenly erupted in the sky above me, but I still didn't care.

Instead I reached out with a bloody glove and closed her eyes. I then closed my eyes and waited.

A loud thump caught my attention, cutting through the howling and the scratching and the shrieking.

I opened my eyes and saw a large spool of cable land a few feet away. The cable ran all the way up to the top, disappearing beyond the hangar doors.

Five armored figures suddenly leapt down from the top of the hangar. Small jets flashed periodically as they descended, each of them flaring the most brightly right before each figure finally settled down onto the floor of the hangar.

All five looked to be turians. Four of the figures were wearing what looked to be turian havoc armor. The fifth was clad in a familiar, battered set of dark-blue turian ghost infiltrator armor with silver trim. A vindicator assault rifle was slung over his back and a massive, modified black widow sniper rifle was cradled in his arms.

Upon catching sight of me, the figure in the infiltrator armor slid the sniper rifle onto his back and dashed over to where I still lay, clutching the hand of the dead woman.

He pressed a button on the side of his helmet and the back of it bloomed outwards, allowing the turian to pull it off of his face. It was Cade.

My friend dropped to his knees beside me. "Spirits Cloud, what happened? Lieutenant Vakarian, call for an evac shuttle! Tell them to prep for two casualties!"

"Roger that!" one of the havoc-troopers replied.

My friend pushed me onto my back and began to smear medigel onto my wounds. As he did so I refused to let go of Astrid's hand.

"You're going to be okay. Everything's going to be okay…" Cade said quietly.