Sol was a searing speck amidst the deep black void of space, drowning out the cosmic giants and far-away galaxies with its brilliance.[1] It shone like someone was blazing a flashlight through a punchout in a tapestry that had been hung upon the emptiness, tireless and brimming with its expansive gaze.

Earth was basking in Sol's radiance, so bright the continents seemed to be gleaming in unnatural colors, like the hue correction had been incorrectly set on a monitor.

Between the planet and its sun, a trillion stars twinkled.

Only they were not really stars. They were smaller, much smaller. Ranging from the tiniest grains of silica to the looming and shattered hulks of warships. The larger chunks tumbled end over end in the weightlessness of space, some of them miles long, as big as cities, and collided against one another in frightful and silent cacophonies, crumpling their already-twisted hulls and shattering them into millions more pieces to join the field of debris that ringed around the planet.

The ringed field was several hundred miles thick, and it wrapped around Earth like an elaborate noose. The field was more tunnel-like in shape, with gravitational offshoots manipulating its appearance like an elaborate cave system. It was completely artificial, made up of junk and debris instead of the cosmic dust that comprised the ones of Earth's planetary neighbors Jupiter or Saturn, and the detritus came mainly from the ruined ships that had been destroyed during the war, hollowed out by missiles or carved through by lasers. Gravity had nestled the multitudinous pieces of metal, frozen gases, and rare minerals into the banded shape around the planet. The great battle that had taken place here had seen the destruction of the greatest number of ships that many galactic beings had witnessed in their lifetime, turning the space immediately around Earth into a graveyard of cold steel.

Glinting just past the nebulous circlet was a massive station that was also trapped in Earth's orbit, a shade over twenty-five miles long, that had the shape of a segmented bullet.

At one point, the Citadel was once capable of housing over thirteen million souls with space to spare, but the damage it had accumulated in the years past had severely hampered its desirability within the region and now only could sustain half that number. The proclaimed capital of the galaxy had been plucked from its perch in the Serpent Nebula by the Reapers right before the last battle of the war, having been brought to Earth's orbit, where it had remained ever since, mostly because no one had figured out how to move the massive station, exactly. It was not like they had the horsepower to give the thing a push out of the system, considering the losses that had been sustained.

Ten years since the fighting had quieted. Ten years since the creation of the debris field, which had been given the local name of the "Folly." It had been given that name due to the treacherous nature of the field itself—the debris was so dense and congested that flying through it took skill and precision lest one would become pulverized by the constantly shifting pieces of what might have been the hull of a battleship, or the leg of a Reaper.

Navigating the field was so dangerous that pilots today took precautions to avoid it outright by taking longer routes that steered them clear out of the way of the zones where the debris was thickest. Traffic to and from Earth had become congested as a result of these limited routes that connected the planet with the rest of the galaxy, as every navigation lane was tightly governed, with each ship arriving or departing being assigned a specific timeframe to navigate the Folly. Failure to comply with traffic control typically resulted steep fines for the captain and crew to start.

The Folly was the system's largest superfund site due to its location next to the symbol of the seat of all galactic government, the Citadel, and because of its immediate proximity to Earth, the home of one of the key races that made up that government. An environmental remediation program had been setup a year after the Reaper War had ended. The Folly was not only a scar upon Earth, but a direct threat to the planet's economy—it only behooved the inhabitants of the planet that their government make a concerted effort to eliminate the effects of the debris field, or at least mitigate it.

Ten years had given way to little progress being made. Various governments had contributed to the fund, which was always in danger of being depleted, but the Folly still remained a nuisance for local travel. Multiple companies, some incorporating themselves specifically for the job at hand, along with various unions or organizations, bid or underbid for the rights to strip-mine the Folly alongside the efforts of the government, who raised money by offering mining permits to third-parties in an effort to speed up remediation efforts. The government offered a key incentive to the third-parties: anything they mined, they got to keep, with an exception of dead bodies that had been floating in space for years on end. There was a law in place that the dead had to be returned to the governments so that they could begin the process of bringing them home, finally putting them to rest. Complying with that law would net crews a small bounty for their services.

The loose rules were a boon for groups looking to strike it rich—a lot of money could be generated from stumbling upon usable resources that were floating around in the Folly. Unlicensed groups—factions that did not even bother registering for permits—were a common issue in the field. Piracy was common and enforcement lax. The Folly was a treasure trove, ripe for the plundering. That brought the opportunistic, as well as the unscrupulous, into the fray.

The sector of the belt that the corvette remained coved in was one of the less populated areas of the Folly. The sun cut the Earth into a crescent from this angle, the light of the lobed star looming over the surface of the world like a nuclear detonation.

The ship, the Tien Extremis, was a tri-wing design, with angular fins jutting out from the cylindrical design of the hull at every 120-degree interval. Three shrouded plasma thrusters at the back could provide pinpoint FTL jumps to damn near anywhere in the sector.

It was a ship that was built to go fast.

At the controls of the corvette, Ceraphan Kalinn, slithered a breath as she adjusted the overlay goggles atop her head. Her lanky turian frame fit perfectly within the custom molding of the pilot's chair as her fingers fiddled with the holographic controls upon the armrests, while her left hand manipulated a worn joystick. She wore a bright orange mechanic's jumpsuit, the top half of which was knotted at her waist, and a simple tank top that left her carapaced arms, gray as a cold predawn, exposed. She scratched at her neck, the tattooed insignia of one of her favorite racing teams adorning a bicep.

The goggles over Ceraphan's eyes glowed a cool electric blue, the surface of the glass emblazoned with holographics. "All right," she growled with a tight impatience. "Give me all you got."

There was no one else within the corvette that she spoke to, save herself. Her hands gently nudged her chair's controls and outside, past the trapezoidal viewport, a pair of grasping arms could be seen manipulating a piece of wreckage. The arms were connected to the body of the Tien Extremis, which terminated in complex clusters of pincers, suctions, and claws. The object they were now ferrying towards the airlock of the corvette was a massive bulk of metal, half-encrusted in ice. It had been plucked from the dead ship that lazily rotated in front of the viewport before the Tien Extremis, the gouged name of the Asphaltites still legible on the side of the impacted hull. A perfect rectangle had been laser-carved into the side of the cold warship from the lasers mounted upon the corvette's appendages, the edges to the breach having stopped glowing half an hour ago, offering Ceraphan a clear-cut route into the ship to retrieve her prize.

The turian set the arms of the corvette to run an automated route now that they were clear of any debris and she stood from her seat, stretching, and yanked off the goggles that had been over her soft yellow eyes. Her careful features flexed, the ruddy orange facepaint looking almost burnt in the low light, but the ring at her septum glimmered like a vein of gold within a lightless cavern.

Just past the viewport, in the middle of her stretches, Ceraphan arced a look over towards the part of the field that was closest to Earth. A swarm of drones, one or two hundred in number, scuttled past her view like glowing gnats. They appeared miniscule from this distance, but the turian knew that they were about the size of a magnetic cannon round. She could see fans of white lasers blink and twirl as the drones whirled through the sector, not intent on missing out on scanning every single scrap of debris in sight.

Ceraphan gave a sigh as she watched the drones flit and configure back into their swarm mode after they had finished cataloguing a good amount the floating detritus. If they were searching for something in particular, she did not have a clue as to what it was. But it also meant that this sector was not as empty as she had been hoping.

There was a good chance that the drones belonged to one of the larger mining outfits that operated in the Folly. The largest of them, the LB Group Holdings (referred to as "Elby" by the other salvagers), was known for employing particularly ruthless security contractors to enforce its claims to the various Folly sectors. Skirmishes were particularly common between the Elby contractors and the non-affiliates, which always ended in more debris being added to the field to be plundered after the violent confrontations had been thoroughly settled. Now Ceraphan had taken precautions to never encroach into Elby territory if she could help it, but she knew Elby had the unfortunate tendency of reaching beyond its designed zones if they thought they could get away with it. And since she was located within twenty klicks of the nearest border with the Elby zone, there was a good chance that they could take offense to her presence if they detected her. She needed to be quick and careful.

A thin ladder led down to the main level—Ceraphan nimbly headed down it. She was now within the galley of the Tien Extremis, which was outfitted with all of the industrial foodstuff appliances that one could ever ask for, though the turian only used a fraction of it.

The galley immediately opened up, directly to Ceraphan's left, her back to the cockpit ladder, to the cargo bay of the corvette. The bay was twenty meters wide and six meters tall, and it stretched from nearly one end of the ship to the other. Stacks of mini-ISOs had been piled in a corner, along where a miniature loader bot, slathered in orange paint, awaited its next duties. A makeshift gym had been erected in the other far corner from items that Ceraphan had scavenged all over the galaxy, which gave it the appearance of a collection of scaffolding. Artificial gravity was a wonder and all, but it had atrophic effects on a living body to the point where Ceraphan had to work on a regular exercise regimen lest her muscles withered upon her frame. And seeing as she was still young, she was keen to keep her figure intact as much as possible.

The airlock door was at the front of the cargo bay, a massive threshold that always blared klaxons and flared yellow warning lights whenever it was opened. Cerephan punched in the code to open it once she confirmed that the door beyond that led outside had been fully sealed. With a groan and a clanking of gears, along with the usual cavalcade of noises from crackling loudspeakers, the enormous airlock door parted down the middle and Ceraphan stepped inside to retrieve her prize after grabbing a portable welding torch that had been hanging nearby on the wall.

The hulk of metal that had been pulled in from outside—a neat and rectangular block of detritus—was lying upon a small railed trolley. The appendages that had pulled it inside the ship were now folded upon either side of the wall, like complex tenting. Ceraphan made a circuit around the trolley, studying her salvage. About the size of three lockers side by side, the find was slightly battered and dented, which could have been from the initial detonation that had killed the ship it belonged to, or garnered from the weathering force that was time.

Central radiator systems like this were old tech, as most ships dispersed generated heat through arrays placed along the ship's hull, but a ship with a centralized radiation capacitor had a greater consolidated quantity of lithium carbonate that it used to dispel the heat generated from the engines. Lithium carbonate went nearly a hundred credits per gram, and capacitors like these tended to have around twenty pounds of lithium carbonate in them.

If Ceraphan was lucky, she was looking at a million-credit lump sum right in front of her eyes. Tax free reward. She could see money in her mind and she had to try very hard not to squeal in anticipation.

Kneeling down, torch in hand, she found a panel that was encrusted with space dust. She applied a stiff and curved mask over her face, one that would protect her from the intense light the torch was going to generate. She primed the control on the torch, allowing the ignitable gas to flood the chamber, before she initiated the miniature ignition control.

A pulse of blue fire narrowed to a microscopically thin line. The torch felt like it was humming in Ceraphan's hand. Quickly, she aimed the welding flame at the edge of the panel, and was rewarded with such a thick burst of sparks that they seemed to combine into a wave of liquid gold.

Then, she started to cut.

Even half-full, you're still looking at a clean payout.

Enough for a fresh start. You don't have to worry about disappearing, anymore.

You'll be able to be… yourself.

It took about fifteen minutes before she had made a careful rectangular incision just above the panel of the capacitor. She waited until she heard the satisfying thunk of the panel shearing loose. She thumbed the control of the torch and the flame huffed out with a sigh, and she flipped up her mask, breathless and giddy. The area where she had been slicing was smoking, the outline of the cut still glowing a deep bloodred. Fumbling for a suction tool, she placed it upon the edge of the detached panel and depressed until there was a good seal.

Now, if her hunch was correct, the lithium carbonate canister would be attached to the other end of the panel, just inside. All she had to do was pull and the millions were hers.

So she pulled.

The panel made a grinding noise, offering resistance, before it finally relented and Ceraphan nearly fell onto her backside as she was quickly left with the canister in her hand, a dull gold thing that was a little bigger than the average thermos, bolted onto the underside of the panel.

Ceraphan was about to crow in victory and raise her arms to the ceiling in jubilation, when the dim lighting of the cargo bay caught the sizeable gash on the side of the canister. Heart in her throat, the turian got to her feet and turned her prize over in her hands. No… A large tear in the canister, the edges warped and melted from an intense heat, had been encrusted with what had looked like a dried white foam. The turian scraped the whitish substance with a clawed talon and rubbed her fingers together, the sinking feeling in her stomach growing almost bottomless.

"Shit!" she yelled as she threw the canister at the side of the wall, brutally rebounding it upon the surface. She sank into a crouch, holding her head in her hands, breathing heavily.

The foam had been the carbonate, she had recognized. And the carbonate could only have gotten into a foam-like state had it been exposed to an oxidizing agent—chlorates, nitrates, among others—of which there were plenty to go around on a spaceship. The damage had not been her fault. A piece of space junk must have punctured the canister years ago, allowing it to react to an oxidizer, creating a reaction and ruining its efficiency.

She had salvaged not even twenty credits of carbonate, in all. The day's events had led to nothing.

Somewhere, in the direction of the galley, a soft chime sounded to signal the latest full rotation of Palaven, millions of lightyears away.

She was now twenty.

Later that day—or night, it was hard to tell, as Ceraphan's circadian rhythm had been ruined long ago—she was fixing herself a meal in the galley while she had the newscasts blaring on a large holographic monitor just over the counter. The microwave dinged and the turian retrieved her tray of what had been freeze-dried meats and vegetables, now steaming and giving off a not-unpleasant smell.

Ceraphan glanced at the package the food came in, out of curiosity. There was no expiration date. There was no packaging date, either.

"Been sitting in a fridge for about six years, I bet," she grumbled. "Living the gourmet life."

She took her tray over and began to eat. The food was tasteless and had a soggy mouthfeel to it. For all the technology in the galaxy, no one had been able to master the science behind long shelf-lived food that actually tasted like it came right out of the cooking pan. But it was loaded with nutrients that were supplementing her diet, so Ceraphan could only complain for so long.

The Tien Extremis was close enough that she could pirate the news feeds from the remaining satellites that orbited Earth. The one channel that she was on displayed the familiar talking heads, the corporate stooges that parroted the bottom line of their sponsors instead of providing anything actually news-worthy.

"…and we'll continue to update everyone with the latest as this midterm election cycle continues to be called across Citadel space," one of the reporters, a human in a smart black suit, was saying effortlessly to the camera with an artificial smile upon her face that gave Ceraphan a bad feeling. "But the majority of votes have been tallied, and now the polls are calling for a victory for Firmament Omina, which is the first time in Union Eterna's history that the popular vote has gone for the conservative political bloc."

The woman's co-anchor, a human male, was nodding sagely as if he were agreeing with everything she was saying, as though her words were prophesizing the future instead of affirming that they were borne from a teleprompter. "No doubt this is a historic moment for Union Eterna, and for the rest of the galaxy. With a massive 64% of the vote going to Firmament Omina, this has been a clear message to the current ruling party, whom after two years of controversy, broken promises, and high inflation, have begun to reap the effects of governing a galaxy in absentia."

"Abandonment of populist ideals, dissatisfaction of bailouts for large institutions, and disgust at naked acts of corruption were just a few of the reasons why working-class voters ended up casting for Firmament Omina. The inauguration for the new government is expected to take place in two weeks' time, once the results of the votes have been reviewed and ratified—"

"Spare me," Ceraphan grunted as she thumbed a control on her omni-tool, thankfully whisking away the image of the lady with her ersatz smile and her simpering colleague. She rested her head upon a hand, her eyes glazed over in boredom. "It's all the same game."

Ceraphan did not put all that much stock into politics these days. As a "displaced individual," per the government's determination, she had no voting rights, therefore she had little care as to which new regime was stepping into the picture. First it had been the Citadel Council, which had been dissolved almost immediately after the war and replaced with a supposedly more democratic body, the Union Eterna, which was the Council in all but name. No longer did the various races only have a single councilor to represent them, because they were now granted an allocated number of senators to devote to the legislative body based on an equation that took the absolute population and the number of civilized worlds under that race's control under account.

But no matter who was standing upon the podium, Ceraphan noted that there was the same amount of discontent from the people. The same amount of corruption from the elected officials. Bribery, lying, dangerous rhetoric, it seemed that the latest playbook from everyone trying to get elected was to try every underhanded trick in the book to attain their goals. There was no governmental oversight for that sort of thing aside from third-party watchdogs—after only ten years of ushering in a new government, those types of safeguards had not been created yet, and the various political parties were steadfast and united in their desire to not see them created at all.

She took a drink from her cup and gave another grumble. In the end, she already knew it was going to be people like her, people on the outside, who would be hurt the most. Firmament Omina ran on a platform of fiscal responsibility, but anyone remotely paying attention to their campaign goals would find out that they intended to achieve this "responsibility" by cutting funds to social programs that they considered parasitic wastes to the overall economy. Those programs included relief funds that provided post-war services—valuable aid for the people suffering from PTSD, for the ones that had been displaced and lost everything they had ever owned, and for the young ones who had lost their families and needed immediate financial support in order to maintain a normal life or at least survive.

Ceraphan knew she would be among those that would be impacted. The checks that had been coming to her account had been getting slimmer and slimmer with each passing month. I wouldn't need them if I was legitimately employed, she thought miserably. But they will run out at some point. I should have prepared a whole lot better.

Thinking of politics was just making her mad, so she quickly changed the channel to something that was a little more brain-inert. Fortunately, she quickly found a candidate, for she was soon looking at a feed showing a massive dreadnought three miles in length, low-slung and sleek like a longsword, in orbit over Thessia, according to the chyrons at the bottom of the screen. Fighters in victory formations seared by in close proximity, the lights of their engines mingling with the scatterglow of heat and radiation as their hulls scraped against the upper atmosphere of the planet.

"…and it will be noon in a few minutes at Thessia's capitol city, where the SSV John Shepard is slated to begin its highly-anticipated Victory Day display, which will be accompanied by demonstrations of its formidable weaponry, alongside spectacles by the finest fighter squadrons in the Alliance. The schedule is part of a galaxy-wide tour in which the dreadnought will visit every Union system…"

Ceraphan sipped her drink as she watched the cameras display multiple angles of the enormous ship—she took special interest in the four fusion engines at the back, the thrusters of which were wide enough to fit an entire light cruiser through them. A ship like that would have given the Reapers a run for their money—with those turret emplacements and batteries of nuclear missiles, it was hard to believe that anything else in this galaxy could stand up to it in such a fight and win.

It had only been a matter of time that a ship would be named after the famed Commander. It was only fitting that they gave the name to the most powerful vessel that had been created in this galaxy. Ceraphan wished she could have known the man, as did about nearly everyone in the galaxy, she supposed.

Commander John Shepard, the most famous person in the history of all history. The soldier who had figured out a way to beat the Reapers and had done so, saving the lives of the galaxy's inhabitants after months and months of grueling war. He had defied the odds across countless battles, always finding a way to win, even in the face of certain defeat. He was a true paragon of his race, and a physical ideal that not just humans could aspire to.

Ceraphan had remembered listening to the feeds as a child on her broken and scarred world, always tuning in at night, desperate to hear a report of the commander's accomplishments. With every victory, he had brought hope across lightyears, inspiring billions of people to stand strong against certain defeat.

The triumphs followed the commander across the many stars and worlds. There were many who had thought the commander to be invincible.

But immediately after his most crowning moment on the Citadel, the initiation of the Reapers' destruction, he had vanished.

Long and exhaustive searches had taken place in the aftermath of the war. Every fleet had sent out as many ships and bodies as they could muster to look for the man—they had known that his last position had been near the Citadel's base and that he had would have been there right as the Crucible had fired its fateful wave of energy, securing the galaxy's freedom. But all their efforts would be in vain. For years, the civilized galaxy scoured every inch of the station and every cubic centimeter of space within a thousand-mile radius of where the commander had made his last stand.

There was nothing. No trace of him, as though he had never existed.

On the screen, the videos had shifted over to an image of the commander himself: tall and proud in his dress blues, his hair closely cropped to his skull, a strong jawline, and piercing blue eyes. A few scars marked his appearance, but they were merely modest marks that hinted at the cosmic wonders he had seen, the conflicts and battles he had endured. It was the face of a soldier, one who was primed for war.

The screen was now reading out a list of the memorial services for the commander that were due to take place over the next month, across a number of Union planets. No body had been recovered, but after ten years, the number of people that were holding out to their hopes had dwindled precipitously. One could not deny the cruel logic that could only indicate the truth after so long.

John Shepard was not going to be found because there was nothing to find. He had died on that station, perhaps vaporized by one of the explosions. Ten years of nothing only deepened the wound that the galaxy felt, but it had only recently begun to scar over.

And for the rest of Ceraphan's natural life, she would raise a glass to the fallen warrior, along with every living being in the galaxy, hang her head in silence, and proclaim her undying gratitude to the man who had saved them all at the cost of his own life. It would give her a small comfort, at least, knowing how the man would be remembered. Parades on every civilized world would be held in the man's honor. Parties and celebrations, too. The streets of the rebuilt cities would overflow with people reveling in their joy of being alive, drunk and happy with an unknown future stretching before them.

A solemn smile crept across her face, or at least as good as one a turian could approximate. She finished her meal and drink, cleaned the silverware off in the sink, and headed towards her bunk. She undressed and clambered into the tight space, curling up into a ball, a thin blanket around her. The Tien Extremis was always cold—she needed to fix the central heating system one of these days.

After a while, she closed her eyes. A new day could only bring new opportunities.

With a crackle of smoke and a silver flash, the cover to the black box fell open, a few gray curls extending into the air from the sheared end.[2] Ceraphan immediately raised her torch, set it aside, and removed her welder's mask as her breath misted from her mouth in the cold cargo bay.

She reached inside the box, which she had just brought inside from a wrecked salarian gunboat using her ship's onboard grappling arms. Her sensors had picked up that the hull of the ship had been relatively intact when she had approached. As good a find as any. And salarians were known for stuffing their ships full of advanced tech. If there was anything of value, it would be in the black box files.

Ceraphan grabbed the box and placed it across a pair of suspended supports so that it was propped up at the height of her lower ribcage. The ends dripped with melted icewater, for it had been encrusted when she had pulled it aboard the Tien Extremis, like so many of her acquisitions in the Folly.

She plunged her arm into the box and gripped a heavy handle and gave it a twist, popping off the panel that led to the electronics inside.

The first indication that something was wrong was when a spit of black dust immediately burst from the black box upon being opened. That was not supposed to happen. These things were supposed to be airtight.

Frantic, Ceraphan knelt down and shone a light onto the circuit board. Nothing but disconnected wires and piles of granules so black in color they could have come from a volcanic beach.

Abruptly, Ceraphan gave a shout of anger and despair and smashed the side of the black box with a hammer, knocking it off the supports and sending it banging to the ground with a frightful clatter.

The dust had been the silicon chips. After ten years of languishing in temperatures past negative 400 degrees, the chips had degraded to the point of disintegration. There was never going to be anything of worth in that ship that she could find.

Letting the hammer drop from her hand with a clang, Ceraphan bonelessly trudged over to a nearby bench and lowered herself onto it. She stared hollowly out unto the bay before her, looking at the destruction she had wreaked before she bent forward, as in prayer, and put her head in her hands as she listened to the agonizing beat of her heart.

She was going over the finances later that night in her bunk. She was wearing nothing but a simple tank top and some snug military-grade underwear, the thin blanket draped over her lower torso while her flat pillow was doing a sorry job at propping up her head. Tapping away at a tablet with a few practiced finger strokes, Ceraphan's mood was only getting worse the more time went on.

The fuel costs alone were eating a massive hole in her budget and that did not take into account the registration costs, maintenance and upkeep, docking fees, not to mention what she was paying for food and water and everything else required to keep herself alive.

But the fuel charge by itself was going to be the death of her, judging by the forecast outlook. The price of fuel had almost doubled in the last year and it was expected to spike further due to negative market reactions to the new regime in Union Eterna. She knew she was not the only salvage operator in the Folly that was hurting from the current economic situation, but she could not help but feel angry at herself over these past several months.

How many times had she salvaged a ship, thinking that she had finally been gifted by a stroke of luck and that she was on the verge of a major find, only for it all amount to nothing? Every failure meant a denial of income and a big red mark on her balance sheet from all the resources that she had expended for each fool's errand.

All she needed was one good score. Just something that could at least allow her to keep her ship running. If the next month turned up as empty as the last several had, she knew she would need to make some hard decisions. Sell the Tien Extremis? She'd just as soon as cut her own throat. Perhaps join an actual guild instead of relying on her own independence? While she did value her freedom, from what limited amount of it she actually had, there was certain inevitability that weighed upon her, knowing that she would have to go corporate at some point or another. Everyone sold out in the end, for all matters inexorably lead to problems of a financial nature.

She set the tablet aside and maneuvered herself upon the acceptably-comfortable bed. It took an hour for her to finally get to sleep, as she had been staring up at the ceiling of the bunk above her, wide-eyed and tormented with ominous thoughts. [3]

The new dawn on Earth was announced by the slow but pronounced rise of Sol just over the horizon, its glimmering light bringing life to the blue oceans, the ragged mountains, and the endless plains that marked the scarred completeness of the world before it.

Taking this miracle for granted, Ceraphan did not notice it. She had been hard at work for two hours already, arms bare as she maneuvered the Tien Extremis through a gap between two titanic warship wrecks, a pair of headphones on her head blaring a kind of music the humans called "rock," which had similar melodic structures to the popular music that was being played on Palaven, Ceraphan had noted. Though the instrumentation was different, the meaning behind the lyrics was not. Her goggle overlays translated the words into real-time for her and she would invariably sing along to the aggressive tunes.

"…I'm the runaway son of a nuclear A-bomb…"

Head bopping along to the tempo, Ceraphan pulled up a map of the local area with her right hand while she maneuvered the ship with her left. A screen popped up in front of her eyes. A golden blip was registering in a sea of fragmented spaceships some twenty klicks ahead after she had put a wayfinder pin on it. She had been tracking this little bastard for the better part of an hour now, trying to find a way through the labyrinth of the Folly to find it.

It was only from sheer luck had Ceraphan been able to detect this blip at all. Per the irregular intervals of the ping she was getting, she was reading an object somewhere in the Folly that was still registering power. She knew that she would have ordinarily not been able to detect such a thing, for her ship would have needed to be in the briefest line of sight of the item in question, and with the density of wreckage that so defined this field around the planet, it would be hard to detect for someone deliberately trying to find such a thing.

A powered device in the Folly—it sounded ludicrous.

But Ceraphan knew that she was not tracking another salvager, as all spacecraft had their hulls specifically designed to mute any electrical signals they were originating. This had to be something else. A ship whose crew had gotten spaced and the reactor was still online, perhaps.

There were so many possibilities and so many questions that Ceraphan needed to comprehend. But there was only one way she was going to find the truth out for sure.

She engaged the exterior lights to the Tien Extremis and the automated lamps swept across the enormous curve of a turian battleship, just two hundred feet away, cold and dead in the peacefulness of the void. It easily dwarfed the corvette and Ceraphan felt like she was nothing but an insect in the wake of the battleship's majesty. As a child, such ships could only fill her with hope and awe if she was lucky enough to set her eyes on one. She had thought they were invincible.

Shows what she knew—she now stared at the twin holes where pillars of plasma had boiled through the hull of the battleship and had hit the power plant. The Reapers had certainly done their work in shattering everyone's deluded illusions.

Moving away from the hulk, Ceraphan adjusted the trajectory of the Tien Extremis with a careful tap of fingers upon the controls. She glanced at the map again—she was closing the distance to the marker she had laid. Just a few more seas of debris the size of icebergs were in the way between her and her prize.

The map was also showing another potential glitch in her plan, though. According to the latest cartographic updates, the boundary to the Elby zone was only fifty klicks away in the direction of aphelion from her position. Ceraphan was already aware of how opportunistic the Elby mercs could be, considering their penchant for skirting their own borders. She needed to find what this blip was, retrieve it, and get the hell out of here as quickly as possible before she was detected.

"You're listening to Radio Second Termer," the promo to the pirate station proclaimed over the turian's headphones, "because the best things in life are free…"

At the same time, the map gave a sharp bleep. Proximity warning to her target.

Heart thudding in her chest, Ceraphan took the headphones away after turning them off, applying her full attention to piloting her ship. Clouds of dust and frozen gases swept by the angular viewport, the lights illuminating such a tangle of shattered metal it was as if she was observing a fractal hellscape inhabited by searing and sharp blades.

Tapping at the retro-rockets, the Tien Extremis smoothly glided above the obstacles, the main engines dark and quiet but ready to let loose at a moment's notice. There were a few pings from the hull as wayward bits of metal, the largest piece the size of a fist, bounced off it, but they only delivered scratches and nothing nearly hard enough to do actual damage to the ship. The tri-wing design of the Tien Extremis meant that Ceraphan had to get inventive when trying to skirt small gaps, but she had been flying the ship for so long that maneuvering was now second nature to her.

"Come on, come on. Just a little closer."

She passed around a crumpled bulkhead, an abandoned Trident fighter that its pilot had ejected from, a nearly halved carrier that had suffered a detonation right down the middle of its hull and caused it to look like it had ballooned before exploding, and…

…there.

Her map was going haywire with the frantic bleeping and Ceraphan silenced it. The object floating in front of her was now fully visible—her scanners were also making schizophrenic leaps and twitches on her screen. No doubt in her mind that this was what she had been searching for this morning.

The turian brought up a control and a portion of the viewscreen zoomed in. Ceraphan blinked as she studied the object on her screen. Nestled in a cove between a cadre of destroyed troop carriers, it was partially cylindrical in shape, with a rectangular base, about three meters tall. Near the base, a small red light pathetically winked in and out of existence—low power. But Ceraphan instinctively recognized the shape of her find. She had seen them many times before, but never used one herself. [4]

Cryo pods were stalwart technology, if not outdated. The first colonists in space had used them, before her people had discovered the mass relays, which had been the only way that her race had spread among the stars for a time. Cryo could stall a person's lifespan across a multi-lightyear voyage, rendering them in a state of suspended animation, awakening on the other side of the galaxy with no debilitating symptoms other than those that approximated a hangover.

Today, cryo pods were used nearly exclusively by medical personnel these days to transport critically wounded patients to facilities that could treat them if they were in a state that only gave them a small timeframe in which to live. Apart from that, there were not that many practical reasons to use one at all.

"You are kidding…" Ceraphan was about to pound her armrest in frustration, but thought twice about it. Cryo technology was valuable, considering that there were not very many firms developing it these days. And hospital groups around the galaxy were still suffering from a dearth of usable technology. A pod like this could be sold to them at a discount, but Ceraphan would still make a tidy profit out of it.

It was not much, but it was something.

Switching her controls to the grappling arms of the Tien Extremis, she saw the limber appendages swiftly move into view just past the glass of the canopy. Her entire body tense, a headache began to burgeon as she focused all of her concentration into maneuvering the arms just right. Mess up a movement, and she could end up damaging her prize beyond repair. She had done that too many times when she was just starting out as a salvager—she knew she had to take things slowly and deliberately, despite the time crunch she was facing.

She made sure that her fingers did not move than a millimeter necessary on the controls as she deftly guided the grasping arms towards the cryo pod. She monitored the digital readouts, which were indicating just how much distance left was between the end of the appendages and the pod itself.

Ten meters…

Five…

Two…

"Gotcha!"

Green lights across the board as the clawed extensions found purchase on two anchor points on other side of the pod. Ceraphan let out an exhalation of victory, allowing herself to relax in her seat. The moment of jubilation did not last very long, as she ran cross-checks to ensure that her payload was indeed secure. Upon finding nothing that would indicate to the contrary that the retrieval had been botched, she initiated the recall function to the grasping arms and watched as they began to reel in with the pod in tow. There was a rumble throughout the Tien Extremis as the airlock door, just below the cockpit, opened to accept the catch—the arms would gently place it upon the railed cart like all the others, allowing Ceraphan to easily maneuver it within the ship once it was inside.

Once her displays were confirming that the airlock door was sealed and the appendages fully retracted did Ceraphan start to get out from her seat, eager to give her newest acquisition a once-over.

But before she could fully extricate herself, her proximity alert began to loudly blare, startling her and causing her to look out the canopy at the same time multiple beams of light shot into the cockpit from outside. The turian gave a grunt and sagged into her seat, a hand thrown up to protect herself from the glare.

The glass of the canopy polarized, revealing three brutal-looking trawlers that had maneuvered directly in front of the Tien Extremis. They were all a flat matte gray and had been outfitted with defensive turrets upon the exterior of their hulls. All of them bore the same insignia on their wings, one which no salvager in the Folly was liable to forget.

"Elby," Ceraphan grimaced.

Her comms began to crackle in the next second. "Unidentified ship, power down all systems and prepare to be boarded. You are trespassing in territory claimed by LB Group Holdings. You will surrender all acquired cargo and submit to any further search and seizure as dictated by our investigative squads."

Ceraphan was frantically consulting the map, confirming her thoughts that she was most certainly not in the territory that these guys were claiming. As she had thought, she was still in a neutral zone, yet to be negotiated by the various companies that bid for salvage rights here.

But as everyone already knew, Elby did not give a shit about borders.

She hit the transmit key with a shaking hand. "Touch my ship, and I'll make you regret it. You have no jurisdiction here! Under the Alliance Charter 4903, I am within my rights to proceed with my operations as—"

But the Elby stooge managed to override her transmission. "The Alliance doesn't exist out here. They can't police all of space, let alone their own gravitational boundaries. Last chance, unidentified ship. Shut down all shipboard systems, with the exception of life support, or we will open fire and lay claim to your salvage by force."

Ceraphan's eyes narrowed and her breathing began to crescendo in intensity. It had been worth a shot, even though she knew she had next to no chance of talking her way out of this.

From the brief puffs of accelerant that were pluming from the two ships that flanked the middle one, increasing their separation, Ceraphan saw that the Elby frigates were moving into prime firing positions. Already, her infrared sensors were showing that their weapon emplacements were warming up.

She already knew they were not keen on taking her alive.

Her hands began to steady themselves on the controls after she had buckled herself into her seat. She told herself not to be afraid. Fear was just a choice. There was another she could make. She pressed her back against the molded spine of the chair and sucked in a long breath.

"Don't make us waste the ammo. You're outnumbered three to one. The smart thing would be to—"

Whatever the smart thing was going to be, Ceraphan most decidedly did not take that course of action, at least in the eyes of the Elby frigates, when she slapped at the controls to engage both her main thrusters and the maneuvering jets of the Tien Extremis at the same time. G-forces grabbed her and hurtled her against the side of the chair painfully, her eyeballs momentarily touching her skull as they sunk into her sockets for a brief moment, but it was a fresh pain that tampered down the thrill of the adrenaline that surged through her veins, and in the next moment, as the Tien Extremis shot through a jagged opening in the middle of a bisected battleship, she crowed over the comm, "Then come and get me!"

The drive core of her corvette thrummed and sent her hurtling through the maze of twisted metal and debris. She screamed past sheared decks and detached mass driver turrets, passing by the segmented hulks almost as if a great god had carved out cross sections of the ships in the belt.

Her computer rang a shrill warning as it detected the Elby ships immediately moving into hot pursuit behind her.

The Tien Extremis rocked as an explosive round detonated just aft of its thrusters. Ceraphan was thrown into her restraints hard enough to bruise the cartilage under her natural plating. "Damn it," she gritted out. Violent blasts were now sparking and expanding in front of her and making new holes in the cauldron of debris that encompassed the Folly. Ceraphan had to twist and dive to evade the fire, making quick decisions as she spotted offshoots in the congested space. One wrong move here and she would be cosmic dust, her ship doomed to drift with the rest of the relics around Earth.

She urged her ship faster and the Tien Extremis responded to her call. The tri-wing corvette entered a spin, which confused the tracking systems of the missiles that one of the gunboats had launched at her. The spiraling trails of heat from her thrusters mingled into a swerving blur, causing the missile's targeting to veer off course and into the side of a derelict Reaper destroyer.

Ceraphan used the explosion as cover and maneuvered her ship just underneath the expanding blast. The temperature sensors skyrocketed, but she ignored the warnings for now. On the other side of the detonation, one of the Reaper's legs was still attached to the main spaceframe, which she deftly dodged using her retro-rockets.

The explosion was still in the process of conflagrating and, in their blind rage to catch Ceraphan, the first gunboat powered through the fire and chaff at full speed.

They never saw the leg of the Reaper on the other side of the explosion until it was too late. It was too close for them to maneuver away.

Another explosion warped throughout the field, this one jarring the corpse of the Reaper so hard that it began to enter a slow spin. The crumpled gunboat expelled all of its atmosphere in a microsecond before it burst into a million pieces.

"Serves you right," Ceraphan spat as she watched the ship disappear off her scopes, forcing her quivering gut feeling down knowing that things were getting serious and people were being killed.

The radio was now clamoring in several different languages on how Ceraphan was going to be tortured in many creative ways, but the turian quickly switched to a different frequency. She was going to focus on piloting herself the hell out of this mess.

She adjusted power to the engines and the Tien Extremis drifted around the curved edge of a derelict asari dreadnought, the same model as the famed Destiny Ascension. The other two ships followed dutifully, momentarily losing sight of her around the sleek and graceful warship. But as Ceraphan flew just mere meters from the surface of the dreadnought's hull, her drift had her directly facing the curvature of the ship and she had a brief thought that quickly formulated into an idea.

Ceraphan pummeled the control to her ship's point-defense cannons, which popped out of hidden panels along the corvette's hull. Auto-controlled, she quickly sent a command to fire her weapons in a raking motion directly in front of her, shooting directly into the behemoth in front of her.

Ordinarily, it would be impossible for such small-caliber fire from PDCs to even put as much of a scratch into an asari dreadnought. But for one that had been hollowed out from the inside, its shields long dead, the frame left to languish in the deep cold and darkness, her ship's weaponry was perfect for the job. Hundreds of scattered rounds immediately punched their way through the dreadnought's outer layer, expelling massive pieces of the ship's length as if she were peeling a fruit. The dreadnought's exfoliations had nowhere else to go except up and away, adding an additional layer of obstacles between her and her pursuers.

The closest Elby frigate had finally closed the gap just enough that it started to fire at the Tien Extremis. Cannonfire columned up and down the hull of the asari dreadnought, just missing one of the corvette's wings.

However, the frigate had been so hell-bent on getting close to Ceraphan's ship that, when the Tien Extremis had sheared off the pieces of dreadnought hull, there was nowhere left for it to go, no time for it to make an emergency abort.

The gunboat hit the reverse thrusters and tried to turn away, but it slammed into one of the ejecta that Ceraphan had shot away, shearing off a wing-mounted thruster and slicing open a hole in its side, bleeding element zero in a glowing cloud of radiation. The now single-engine gunboat began to helplessly enter a deadman's spiral, missiles and burst fire uselessly chugging away from the ship as its enraged pilot fruitlessly tried to recover, but a fault in the electrical system soon cascaded into the fuel lines and the ship vanished in a brilliant display of pyrotechnics, the concussion from its detonation sending out a sphere of pressure that scattered the rest of the Folly's debris in its immediate vicinity, like an invisible bubble had suddenly sprung to life around the brief flower of flame.

Ceraphan did not declare victory just yet, because the final Elby frigate, apoplectic at the destruction of its comrades, fell back into firing range and let loose with its cannons, the Tien Extremis squarely in its sights.

White flares scattered across Ceraphan's vision as her pursuer's autocannons tore up space all around her ship. Pieces of shattered bulkhead melted and evaporated, and her ship shuddered with each near detonation as if she was passing through a wave of heavy atmospheric turbulence. She was thrown this way and that, making grunting noises every time her restraints dug into her body. Her stomach gave a churn as the horizon of the Folly spiraled just outside of her vision, but she narrowed her eyes and tried to power through the vertigo.

Her body already felt tired. She was strained to her fullest extent. No doubt the Elby ships had called for reinforcements. She needed to end this immediately or she would be overwhelmed and would have no chance to escape at all.

To prove that point, one of the rounds from the gunboat just skipped over the Tien Extremis' leftmost wing. Razor chaff sheared by, tearing at the mounted solar panels and ripping at the atmo maneuvering fins. Too close. An inch to one side and she would have been piloting a two-winged craft after that.

She looked at her targeting computer. The last gunboat was still on her tail and was closing, but keeping enough of a distance to not fall for the same tricks that its cohorts had.

Somehow, she knew what the Elby ship was going to do right before it did it.

Her eyes twitched her display, which displayed a readout of the enemy ship. There was a surge of heat from one of its missile tubes. Her display was able to identify it as a Python Howitzer, equipped to seek and destroy the closest source of heat in the area.

Her fingers were already on the controls when she saw the gunboat fire the Python.

Half a second later, Ceraphan cut the power to all systems and the last thing before she initiated the cutoff switch was to send the ship swerving in a drifting arc, just underneath the swerve of a riddled Alliance cruiser, out of the Elby ship's line of sight.

The missile shot forward, leaving behind a miniature blueshift streak from its propellant.

But instead of arcing towards Ceraphan's ship, it instead veered off in a strange trajectory, maneuvering itself upward, through a cluster of shrapnel, almost exiting the Folly itself. But it curved back down, down, down, in reverse direction, as the Tien Extremis had vanished from its sensors when it had hidden behind the wreckage and now it was going back to the one heat source that it could filter out within the field of debris.

Return to sender.

Whether or not the pilot of the Elby ship had realized what was going to happen, perhaps mesmerized by the smooth arcing of the missile, it made no effort to evade and the projectile smashed directly into the cockpit, detonating, and blew apart with a multicolored burst of rainbow flame before the inferno was whisked out after expending all the available accelerants, leaving nothing but cooling dust behind.

Ceraphan had flipped the systems to her ship back on by then, having seen the pulse of light fuzz just behind the ship that she had used as cover for the Tien Extremis. Reengaging the radio, it was ablaze with chatter from incoming ships—the Folly was blocking her sensors in such a limited area, but she knew that she was probably going to have additional company in the next two minutes.

It was time to go.

Deftly maneuvering the corvette towards the thinnest portion of the Folly, Ceraphan hit the pulse thrusters and was yanked back in her seat with the cool pressure of g-forces. She hardly had to make evasive maneuvers to dodge pieces of the larger debris and soon she was clear, out into open territory with only the planetary glow now to soothe her.

The coordinates for her FTL jump were already punched in. She hit the auto-direct function, watched as the stars rotated into place like a great mechanism, and soon she saw nothing but a realm of purple streaks as the Sol system vanished around her.

She sagged in her seat and felt her heart unclench like a giant fist had ceased gripping her insides.

The turian just stared at her latest find in the cargo bay, after the cart it now sat atop had wheeled it in from the airlock upon its stout rails. The Tien Extremis was still in FTL and would be for at least half a day until they reached the far side of Jupiter, further out in the system. She walked around her latest acquisition, a hand to her chin, studying the pod intently, watching as it faintly wisped frozen gas into the air, which was starting to melt after having been stuck in space for so long.

Scanning lasers from the ceiling were bursting out fans of cold electric blue, scouring over the pod and soaking up any information at the atomic level. A nearby readout was showing that the degradation of the pod itself was consistent with it being languid in vacuum for at least ten years. So, it certainly had not been dumped here by anyone before the end of the war and now.

"What were you doing out there?" she murmured to the cryo pod as she went to a knee next to it and brushed away a layer of space dust. "Where did you come from?"

The batteries on cryo pods were meant to last hundreds of years, but there would be retrogression if, for instance, a pod would be subject to the vacuum and extreme temperatures of space. An environment like that would reduce the battery's efficacy to about a tenth of their natural life. And judging from the slowly blinking red light near what Ceraphan determined to be a control panel, there had to be only a few days' worth of power remaining.

But then, that meant…

Ceraphan depressed a button and the panel popped out on a hinge. A tiny screen coughed to life behind the panel and displayed an unfamiliar insignia, along with the software version, as it slowly began to boot up.

It took another minute for the diagnostic screen to settle in, but once it did, it just displayed a series of flat graphs, upon which Ceraphan could decipher as at least three different readouts. The axes to the graphs were abbreviated, but her eyes were focused on the topmost graph, which seemed to subtly blip up from its otherwise horizontal trajectory every fifteen or twenty seconds.

And Ceraphan knew what a heartbeat looked like on a monitor quite innately.

She stood up in shock, the lamp behind her searing a starburst pattern just off of her crested head.

These bio-readouts… they meant life.

Life inside of the cryo pod. It was unbelievable and crazy to think of that someone had survived for so long out there.

Regardless of the number of questions that now occupied her brain, Ceraphan forced herself to focus. She was not a salvager. Not today, at least.

Today, she would be a savior.

"I have to get you out of there," she whispered to the pod as she quickly backed away to grab all the tools she required. [5]

starring
JOHN SHEPARD
TALI'ZORAH VAS RANNOCH

The generator whirred, filling the cargo bay with white noise, as Ceraphan hefted the atmospheric tubes from where they had been coiled around the reel near one of the stacks of crates. She had zipped her orange jumpsuit back up and had lowered the interior temperature of the craft so that she would not overheat.

From a panel on the side of the cryo pod, the turian had popped open another cover that revealed a juncture terminal, which had plugs and ports for a variety of different cables and tubes.

Ceraphan got to a knee and fitted one of the hoses into the ports, which maneuvered into place with a satisfying series of clicks. Supplemental oxygen engaged, judging from the green halo LED that ringed around the port, expelling a quick burst of gas, accompanied by a swift hissing noise like air escaping from a dirigible. She inserted a thinner tube into another plug, next to the oxygen hose, which also registered a secure connection. Now that the exhaust was secured, she could begin the process of equalizing the atmosphere within the pod with that of her ship.

She ran back to the main terminal of the Tien Extremis and, grabbing a power cable, inserted one end into the ship using the universal plug, and moved over to the pod so that she could connect via that plug as well. With the pod's battery at critical, it would need an external power source to begin the warm-up cycle. It would also need the additional power to rouse the subject from sleep by stimulating their heart with a controlled current.

The turian set a timer for twenty minutes, trying to pace herself. There was no use in going fast if the occupant's life was at stake. She had time. This could be done deliberately.

The pod itself was strangely shaped. Ceraphan had seen a few relics in the museums back on Palaven back when she had been smaller, but they had been sleeker and far more compact than what was now occupying her ship. This one was boxier and looked as if someone had fused a rectangular block with a cylinder. Upon closer inspection, she could see that the excess area was actually a storage unit for IV nutrients, fluids, and even oxygen. Strange. Cryo did not typically require such nourishment. A body's metabolism was brought to near zero while in cold sleep, so there would be no need for supplemental food or air. She would have to consider that later.

But, now that she was taking a closer look at the cryo pod, she could now observe multiple imperfections in the structure of the pod. Dents, scratches, and remnants of ice scarring. Some of the panels looked to have been fused together, either from the extreme heat or cold. Out there in the Folly, this thing had taken a beating. It was a miracle that this thing had survived from floating out there in that maelstrom. This occupant had some damn luck, whoever they were.

It meant, however, that Ceraphan was going to have to find out a way to repair some of the damage so that the pod would open smoothly once the thawing process was complete.

She did not worry yet. There was still time.

and introducing
CERAPHAN "CERAPH" KALINN

Sparks splattered across the ground from the turian's arc welder, the precious flame scoring the composite metal of the pod. Her motions were slow and technical, offering the barest graze over the damaged seals that had been altered by cold space. The welder made a spitting noise, like a cobra, and left a dull red line across her target like fiery scars, cooled from fiery yellow.

It took an effort for Ceraphan to keep herself composed and still. Cut too deep into the pod and she would compromise the interior atmosphere or slice into the life support. The fact that the interior of the ship was heating up from her efforts was not helping her constitution all that much, either. But, with a determined effort, she slowly applied a two-handed grip on her welder, and carefully moved it, like an artist would with a paintbrush, across the scarred metal like it was her canvas.

Globules of molten metal, encrusted from ice and time, finally softened and bled like pustules, dripping open across the seal gaps and removing the obstructions from the pod doors.

Ceraphan let out a breath. Her efforts were working.

She continued, alone with her thoughts.

based on "Mass Effect" by
BIOWARE

A display had been plugged into one of the pod's diagnostic ports and Ceraphan was crouched to the side of the pod, tablet in her hands as she downloaded the data from the memory bank

In five minutes, she had managed to clone the contents of the cryo pod's limited hard drive onto her tablet. Still continuing to crouch, she activated the troubleshooter with a few careful finger taps, which was the automated process that examined the pod for any damage she could not see or issues that the occupant was relaying upon her device. Fortunately, the pod was reporting that nothing had imperiled the cargo within and that the opening mechanisms were registering green signals across the board. All very good signs. The awakening process had started just fifteen minutes ago—a fine mist of neurochemicals had been seeping into the pod, which were completely safe to breathe, but would induce brain activity upon registering in the body. The temperature was also being brought up slowly, to not damage any tissue cells from rapid rethawing.

But there was one system that had raised a fault upon her tablet. Ceraphan blinked and gave a concerned grunt as she booted up several submenus to try and track down the source of the error.

Her heart began to sink as she found the screen that explained everything. The electrical current generator that was responsible for inducing metabolism stasis—the device responsible for slowing the heart rate of the occupant while—was reporting a total failure. When going into cryo, the sleep cycle was reliant on the generator to produce a current counter to that of the occupant's heart rate, thereby stopping it and nullifying the body's metabolic cycle.

Whoever was inside had never entered full cryogenic stasis. Or the system had failed sometime in the last ten years. With their metabolism still active, they would have continued to age while they floated out there.

Ten whole years.

Ceraphan felt dizzy and she ran a hand along her forehead. She looked over at the pod. "Oh, Spirits," she whispered, her heart going out to the person inside and what she was about to do to them. "Everything's going to be so different when you wake. Are you even ready for what you're going to see?"

But now the pieces were starting to fall into place. The pod had been outfitted for an additional supply of oxygen and nutrients, after all. The occupant had been provided all of the necessary items for long-term cryo. So had this pod's spacing been an accident, or had there been deliberation behind it?

Idly flipping through the contents of the pod's hard drive, Ceraphan suddenly stumbled across a folder marked "Vid." She opened it and found that there was a singular video file inside. From the file size, it was low quality and only lasted ten seconds. What was a video file doing in the hard drive of a cryo pod, anyway? These pods had wireless shipboard network receiver installed, ostensibly to receive OTA firmware updates to its software—could it be that it had simply plucked the file from the cloud by mistake? Her confusion helplessly spiraling, Ceraphan did all the necessary virus checks before her tablet pronounced it clean, and she swiftly engaged the video to play on the screen.

As expected, the quality of the video was terrible. Filled with film grain so dense it was akin to peering through a hailstorm. It was a fixed perspective, mounted upon a wall, looking down at what appeared to be the bay of a carrier. So, this was a clip from a security camera on board a ship. The metadata did not indicate which ship it was—either it had not been added or had been wiped, but there was no information to make a determination on that.

In the view of the camera, maneuvering across the floor of the bay, were three lanky figures pushing what looked like the exact cryo pod model that was now sitting in her ship. The bad resolution coupled with the fact that the poor lighting aboard the ship in the video clip meant that Ceraphan could not make out any faces, or species for that matter. The figures were bipedal, but there was no good way for her to tell if they were turian, human, salarian, or any other species that had a similar build. The dark and blurry figures were wheeling the pod near a shielded opening in the floor, the kind of opening that attack fighters would be launched out of from an overhead rail system, but she couldn't be sure of that as well. They appeared to be conversing with the other, judging from their hand movements, but there was no audio in the file for Ceraphan to make out what they were talking about.

At about the halfway point in the video, the scene suddenly changed. The lighting within the interior of the ship shifted and blaring red fixtures began to flash in rapid strobes, causing the crew in the bay of the carrier to pause, caught off guard.

Two seconds later, the image heavily jittered and Ceraphan saw the rightmost bulkhead suddenly bulge inward, and a great knifehead of wreckage speared straight through the anodized steel. The brief moment of terror before the impact must have been a proximity warning. Walls and beams suddenly crumpled inward as the breached ship could not contain the damage. The structure was collapsing; the atmosphere escaping.

The figures that had been ferrying the cryo pod had been sucked out of the ship in an instant when the barrier to the launch window in the floor had failed. The cryo pod offered a scant moment more of resistance, before it too was plucked out and whipped out into the void to join the lifeless bodies that were in the process of freezing into popsicles.

There was a searing burst of flame as something detonated within the ship. A ball of fire rushed towards the camera. Darkness.

The video had ended at that point.

Ceraphan tossed the tablet atop the cryo pod as she stood back up in a daze.

Questions upon questions to consider. From what she could glean from the footage, it had looked like the ship that had originally borne the pod had not meant to suffer such a cataclysmic accident. No doubt they had piloted too deep into the Folly and had paid the price when the claustrophobic field had closed all around them, offering no escape.

"But… why?" Ceraphan whispered as she returned her gaze to the pod, unable to keep her most pertinent question to her own head. "Why were you even here at all?"

written and edited by
ROB SEARS

WAKE_CYCLE: COMPLETE
NEUROLOGICAL_ACTIVITY:NORMAL
RESPIRATORY_ACTIVITY: NORMAL
CIRCULATORY_ACTIVITY:ERROR 44 – PROCESS INTERRUPTED
EXTERIOR_TEMPERATURE:70 FAHRENHEIT
OBSERVATIONS: NUTRIENT DEFICIENT; MUSCULAR ATROPHY; FREEZER BURN

[OPEN POD? Y/N]

The readouts from the pod had only compounded the worrying sensation that Ceraphan had felt up to this point. The occupant was certainly not healthy, but they were not in such dire straits that their life was immediately in jeopardy.

But their life was going to change regardless, as Ceraphan's finger hovered over the control on her tablet, the one that would unlock the vaulted cylinder. She felt like her mind had splintered in different directions, hesitation overcoming her. Her pulse was soaring—she had never done anything like this before. There had been no manual for her to consult, what if she had messed up somewhere in the awakening process? A part of her was telling her to not unlock that cryo pod, for some primitive belief, buried deep in her subconsciousness, feared that everything was going to change if she did so, and perhaps not for the better.

She felt as if she was perched upon a tall ledge, with nowhere for her to take a step forward, and only a shrouded mist and an endless drop awaiting her. Her throat felt like it was closing, brought on by a nameless panic.

But her mind cleared when she allowed logic to power herself through into lucidity. To hesitate was to betray her own instincts. There was someone inside this pod and they would die without her intervention.

She could not allow that to happen.

Ceraphan made sure to position herself in front of the pod, which was now situated at an incline against the wall of the cargo bay.

Looking down at her lit tablet to make sure her finger was aimed in the right spot, she now glanced at the pod when she firmly stabbed down upon the button to unseal it. [6]

Heavy locks thudded. A tight burst of white gas suddenly hissed from the seals of the cryo pod—carbon dioxide deposits.

Lights within the interior of the pod brimmed to life, soft and white.

Then, on disused hinges that creaked so awfully the sound could shatter glass, the doors slowly extended and then folded open like a chrysalis revealing the efforts of its labor.

Heart in her throat, Ceraphan crept over to the pod, which was still expelling a thick white gas that flooded to the floor and swirled around the turian's feet.

On her tiptoes, Ceraphan edged her head just over the open pod doors and peered inside.

In her wildest imaginations, she had been visualizing something like an ancient turian warrior, clad head to toe in resplendent green armor, weapon at their side like they could spring into battle at a moment's notice. Or like that Prothean that had been unearthed on Eden Prime and had joined the final attacks against the Reapers, awoken from their eternal slumber with the sole duty to bring about the revenge of an extinct race.

Whoever was occupying the pod did not match Ceraphan's dreams.

They were human, with pale skin from being cut off from natural light for so long. They wore a thin medical gown, their hands and feet bare. IV tubing ran into both arms and, trickling conduits of clear fluid and blood, alternatively. Ceraphan was not very good at determining the age of humans, but this one looked to be significantly aged. Their hair was shock-white, and had grown out in cryo down to their neck, parted and wavy. They had an unkempt beard about their face, the same color of snow, the length of which made them look wizened.

Hesitantly, Ceraphan ground her teeth as she moved over to call out to the man. Quietly, so as to not rouse them from sleep quite so dramatically. She was about to whisper something out when she noticed something curious about the man that gave her pause.

A big pause.

The facial structure. The slight scar at the forehead. There was something so familiar about this man that it was driving Ceraphan absolutely crazy. She wracked her brain all the way down to the core, certain that she knew this man from somewhere.

And when it finally hit her, her head raised upward, her eyes without focus and dilated, her hands numbly dropping to her sides, she murmured, "By the Spirits…"

At the same time, she saw the man's eyes flare open.

In the pod, the occupant made a shuddering gasp, and his body writhed several times as he coughed to clear his airways. He made a bone-chilling cry of panic and agony, startling Ceraphan terribly. The man's hands clutched at his chest, which were ridged as though he was attempting to burrow through his own chestplate, then tried to grasp the sides of the pod to haul himself out, but he had already expended what little strength he had.

He fell back into the pod, shuddering and spluttering. Exhaustion fell upon John Shepard like a hammer and very soon he was back in the realm of unconsciousness, leaving behind the speechless turian who had saved him.

AFTERSHOCKS

A/N: I've always wanted to write about a female turian as part of the main cast of a story at some point or another. With Ceraphan ("Ceraph", as she'll be going by), I'm definitely intrigued to developing her character further as we all go on this journey together.

With the prologue + chapter 1 released, the rest of the chapters will be uploaded on a two-week schedule.

Playlist:

[1] Opening
"Overture"
Daft Punk
Tron: Legacy (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

[2] Ceraph
"Into the Breach"
Ben Prunty
Into the Breach (Original Video Game Soundtrack)

[3] Frustrations (Source Music)
"Search and Destroy"
Iggy & The Stooges
Raw Power

[4] Discovery and Pursuit
"Opening – The Matrix Resurrections"
Johnny Klimek and Tom Tykwer
The Matrix Resurrections (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

[5] Resurrection Montage
"In NICAM STEREO Where Available"
woob
Ophora_exe

[6] Awakening / Outro to "Salvage Sui Generis"
"Cortex"
woob
Overrun_exe