Chapter Text
"Miss Shepard, how would you respond to those who would say that technically you do not have, ah, human rights?"
"Well firstly I'd say anyone who wants to see a thirteen-year-old girl stripped of her rights probably shouldn't be allowed to work with children."
"Yes, I see."
"But for real, imagine you're on Earth one day and you see an asari - like, a regular asari from the Republics - walking down the street. She's not human. You gonna shoot her? You gonna say, you know, it's technically not murder if a human hasn't died? Good luck with that, you’re going to jail."
-Excerpt from Good Morning Alliance broadcast 19th June 2167
Strictly speaking Jane Shepard didn’t need to be on the bridge to prepare her report, but she preferred it. Sure, there was a terminal in the co-pilot's seat, and sure the Normandy didn’t actually require a co-pilot most of the time, but she could have done her paperwork from anywhere on board, just like the rest of the crew. Space was always at a premium on a ship underway, and especially on a warship, so she liked to take the chance to use an actual terminal instead of cramming into a corner somewhere and making do with her omni-tool. There was something of an unofficial hierarchy about who got the spare seat. Anderson, of course, had priority, and then Pressley and then Commander Alenko. However, the first two rarely needed it and Alenko had been busy lately with their turian passenger.
The crew as a whole had a tendency to avoid her, and they tended to avoid Joker in much the same way. It was still very early on in the Normandy’s shakedown run, and she was sure they’d warm up to Joker sooner or later. He was simply too chatty and, frankly, entertaining to ever stay lonely for very long. As for herself, she hoped they would but she was overall less optimistic. She guessed she couldn’t really blame them too much.
It was probably a difficult prospect, trying to make friends with the only asari in the Alliance Navy.
Immigration and emigration were, on the galactic scale, rare. Plenty of people moved around within their own interstellar nation, from one planet to another, and of course in every galactic power there was a constant flow of people from each overpopulated homeworld to each colony on bold new frontiers. Humans moved from Earth to wherever, just like turians moving away from Palaven and asari from Thessia. Naturally, plenty of people visited other nations on business or pleasure. Jane’s asari mother had been one of the relatively low number to move to the Alliance on a permanent basis, and even she’d gone back home after a messy divorce – Jane was thankful she’d been too young at the time to really understand what was going on.
It hadn’t always been easy growing up the only blue kid in town, especially with a mother in the military. Her time with her mom, whenever they could be together for more than a week at a time, had almost always been happy. Aside from the disagreements and arguments all parents and children put each other through, Shepard didn’t think she could have asked for a better mother. Friends, real friends, had been hard to come by – once she was old enough to spot who actually wanted to know her and who just wanted selfies with the alien girl, she started considering herself a lot less popular.
Other asari her age were only ever the daughters of visitors – on Earth for a few weeks with a trade delegation, a treaty of cooperation or other, less substantial things. They tended to consider her a curiosity just as much as the humans did – distorted accounts of what had happened had filtered through asari tabloids and into the wider galaxy. A faulty (or sensational) understanding of human divorce proceedings had painted the picture of Jane as the “Stolen Baby”, snatched from her real mother and raised by semi-literate upstarts on a filthy, polluted backwater.
Jane was a navy officer’s kid from Brooklyn. She’d gone to BAaT, and then the Naval Academy after that. As far as she was concerned, the only things she’d ever had from her asari mother were her biotic abilities, her blue skin and her middle name. It was those same biotic abilities that guaranteed her success in a navy that, given the choice, would probably rather not have dealt with her. Chief Warrant Officer Shepard, or more specifically Chief Biotic Specialist Jane Na’aira Shepard, had innate strength that rivalled an L2 with none of the drawbacks. From what she’d read she was at the upper levels of natural biotic talent even by asari standards, but she tried not to let that go to her head.
But all that was just so much history, and she always preferred to move forwards. Here and now, Jane was part of the crew of the Alliance Navy’s latest and most advanced prototype. For all that it’s a joint project with the Hierarchy Navy, Shepard thought with pride, I sure don’t see many turians around here.
As if summoned by the thought, their passenger strode onto the bridge. Nihlus Kyrik, live and in colour, was an intimidating specimen.
Joker sounded off his post-jump checks, even though the nav computer would have already recorded that data and more besides. Jane assumed it was for the benefit of the Spectre looming behind them, though he didn’t seem to appreciate it. After a brief stint of being unimpressed with Joker, Nihlus seemed to decide he had better places to be. He stalked back into the ship with the same grim purpose he had carried with him onto the bridge, and which he seemed to have always wrapped around him like a shield.
“Wonder if he’s heading to whatever private chat the captain is having with Alenko right now”, speculated Joker.
Jane guessed that seemed as likely as anything else. She made a vague noise of agreement and then turned back to her console.
“C’mon”, continued Joker, “Don’t tell me you’re not a little curious. They’ve got a Spectre and the guy from the recruitment ads on the same ship? That’s gotta mean something big.”
“Maybe that’s why Anderson’s here, they want a bigshot to keep an eye on the Spectre” she replied as she closed her file. She could tell when she wouldn’t get any more work done, and in any case it was nothing urgent.
Joker turned his chair to face her, “Ooh, that’s an angle I didn’t think of. Still doesn’t explain what he’s doing here in the first place, and what it has to do with our dear Alenko.”
“You’ve seen it too? I thought I was just being paranoid.” Jane had been wondering throughout the voyage whether Nihlus really was dogging Alenko’s every move, or whether she just happened to always bump into the two of them at the same time. It had seemed odd that their guest would take such a keen interest in the Commander – she doubted it was because they shared a taste in music.
Joker shook his head, “No such thing, where they’re concerned.”
“Come to think of it, why am I here?”
“Don’t get existential, Teach.” Teach, or Teacher, was a common nickname for Warrant Officers in the Alliance Navy. Unlike all other officers they were referred to as Mr, Ms or Mx. As this put sailors and marines in mind of being back in school and asking Ms Shepard or Mr Hussein for help in class, the nickname had arisen seemingly by universal agreement of crews across the fleet.
Jane scoffed gently, “No, why a biotics specialist on the shakedown run for a new scout frigate? We have one other biotic on this crew, and they don’t assign specialists to every little boat with a biotic on it.” She privately thought that it would be a good thing if they did, at least for the unfortunate souls with L2 implants, but the eternal lament of the military was that there just weren’t enough specialists to go around – so sometimes you had to make do.
“Maybe it’s not that specifically”, mused Joker, “Maybe whatever hush-hush thing they’re doing needs a Chief Warrant Officer for the paperwork, and you were the first one available.”
She shook her head, “Couldn’t be. We’re all specialists in something, that’s why we get to pretend we’re real officers. You know, bomb disposal techs are warrants.”
Joker paled, “Well, I’m suddenly really glad whatever we’re doing doesn’t need one of them.”
“But still, what could Nihlus want with Alenko?” pondered Jane, almost to herself. It was an easier question than what a Chief Biotics Specialist had to do with anything.
“Maybe Alenko owes him money.”
Jane made a wordless dismissive noise, but it was overshadowed by a familiar voice from behind them, “That’s not quite it, Joker.”
“Ah, sorry, Commander.”
It was indeed Commander Kaidan Alenko, the highest-ranking marine on board. Normally that would have put him at the level of a caveman in the estimation of the regular naval crew, but both Jane and Joker had gotten along well enough with Alenko in the brief time they’d known him so far. “Speculation about my finances can wait for another time. Shepard, you’re with me.”
“Yes, sir.” She followed him through the tunnel, as the CIC was commonly known and to the elevator that was already notorious among the crew for how damn slowly it moved. She was pretty sure it was on every officer’s report as something that would need to be worked on as soon as Normandy went in for maintenance, and if the rest of the class didn’t have something better she’d eat her regulation hat.
“Eden Prime has been hit by an unidentified hostile force”, said Alenko as soon as they were safely inside, “You’ve been attached to the ground team.”
“What the fuck?” she gasped, before belatedly remembering who she was talking to. Marine or not, he outranked her and he was high enough on the chain of command to make some real problems for her if she managed to piss him off.
“I know it’s a shock. Given the circumstances, I don’t need to write you up for speaking like a sailor just this once.”
She didn’t slump with relief, but she certainly wanted to. “Thank you, sir.”
“I’m aware of my reputation, Shepard. Stoic, by-the-book and a total stickler for the regs. But I do try to be reasonable.”
“Yes, sir. And… I’m sorry about earlier, that was unprofessional.”
“Gossip is always going to happen, especially on a ship this small. And I don’t think you’re the one who said anything out of line, so let’s just chalk this up as a lesson to be aware of our surroundings before we speculate.”
After longer than Jane would have liked, the elevator reached the vehicle bay. Alenko stepped out and she followed a pace behind and to the left, just as the regulations decreed – Alenko may have made a joke about his reputation for being hidebound, but he had earned it fairly and in any case this seemed a poor time to start getting lax about that kind of thing.
Alenko lead her to the Normandy’s lockers, and passed her a combat suit, rifle and sidearm. When preparing for a deployment, partitions extended from the hull wall to provide changing spaces for the ground team. For the first time in her life, that included Jane. The suit, in a miracle of modern technology, was quick and easy to change into once she had shucked off the outer layer of her uniform. She could hear someone else changing next door, and though they were still done before her she at least felt she hadn’t kept anyone waiting. She put on her helmet and cursed the design that nearly-but-not-quite fit onto an asari head without discomfort. If she had to wear it for longer than an hour or two she was going to have a killer headache for the rest of the day.
As she stepped out into the vehicle bay by way of ready deck, she found Alenko fully kitted out and Richard Jenkins with him as they waited to be briefed by Captain Anderson. She’d only briefly chatted with the young marine, but he wasn’t the worst jarhead she’d ever met and she was glad to have him with her in case this turned violent.
“What’s she doing here, sir?” asked Jenkins, and Jane prepared to revise her mental assessment of him down a few notches.
“What do you mean by that, corporal?”
“She’s a squid. I thought this was search-and-rescue, not babysitting.”
Crisis averted thought Jane. Nothing more than the marine’s inherent disdain for the rest of the navy, just as the real navy looked down on the marines in return.
Anderson nodded. “We believe the target of the attack was a prothean artefact the colonists discovered, one that may react to biotic abilities. Our warrant here will take a look at it before we hand it over to a lab for a closer examination. This artefact is the first priority, survivors are a secondary objective.”
“Understood, sir” said Alenko, looking uncomfortable with the idea that saving civilians would not be at the top of his to-do list.
Jane, for her part, was more worried by the way the colonists were already being referred to as survivors. Anderson was speaking as if a tornado had torn through their settlement, and the only thing to do now was dig the lucky ones out of the rubble and design a memorial for the rest.
The captain turned to her and continued, “Shepard, I believe this will be your first ground combat engagement.”
“Yes, sir.” She tried and failed not to let her concern show. Not only was she nervous for the same reasons anyone would be before their first deployment, but she was aware that Anderson had been a real advocate for her place in the navy. It had been controversial, and even if it was all legal under the letter of the law, there had been plenty of people saying the risks of letting an alien into the military were too great and so either the rules should be changed or just ignored altogether to keep her out. Anderson had stated publicly that if she could make it through training she should be treated the same as anyone else, and that voice had gone a long way to quieting a lot of the negativity.
If she acquitted herself well, she would consider it a personal victory. If she didn’t, she would embarrass herself in front of her biggest supporter; certainly her most important one outside of her mother.
Anderson stepped over to speak with her a little more personally and explained, “Your suit and shields are standard-issue for a marine support team, and your scores in training with a rifle and sidearm are both rated highly enough for deployment, no matter what corporal Jenkins might think. Not to mention, of course, your biotic abilities. Keep a clear head, focus on the mission and you’ll do just fine. Got it?”
She nodded gratefully “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
Nihlus put in a brief appearance, seemingly just to rub their faces in it that he was better at this sort of thing than them, and then jumped from the open hangar bay. She had to admit, it was a well-performed landing. She might not like the spectre haunting their ship like his namesake, but she’d have to be a fool to deny the skill and courage it took to drop from a moving ship still well above ground level and then immediately move away from the dropzone on foot.
Then it was their turn to jump, and while she felt she hadn’t screwed up too badly (she was pretty sure she’d feel it if she’d done anything wrong) she would have preferred a nice safe landing rather than a combat zone drop.
The place was a mess. Before they’d arrived the only thing anyone could seem to say about Eden Prime was how beautiful it was, how well-deserved its name, how much they’d like to retire there some day with a spouse, a nice house with a big garden and 1.5 kids. Whatever it had been before, now it was nothing of the sort.
A cloud of smoke hung in the air, drifting lazily from what seemed to be the main colony town. It reminded her of vid footage she’d seen of warzones and forest fires, and she belatedly realised she might be in a warzone. Whoever had hit the settlement might not be a band of pirates or raiders; they could be the advance guard of a batarian invasion for all she knew.
As they cautiously rounded a corner in the path, Jenkins was suddenly lit up by gunfire from some unknown source. Reacting before she could think consciously, she reached out biotically and heaved him back into cover. He landed rough, and she was pretty sure he’d broken something, but it was better that than getting carved up by his attackers.
Commander Alenko opened up with his rifle, and she followed suit as soon as she was sure Jenkins wasn’t in immediate danger. The drones were pretty sturdy for what they were, but didn’t seem designed to stand up to sustained gunfire. Once they were dispatched, she looked back down at her wayward squadmate.
“Jesus, Shepard” groaned Jenkins as he struggled to his feet and leaned against a rock, “you scared me there.”
“I scared you?” she exclaimed incredulously, “I thought you were dead, you fuckin’ moron!”
“Shepard!” said Alenko sharply – not quite snapping, but close to it, “Keep it together.”
“You’re right. You’re right. Sorry, sir.” She took a deep breath, “Jenkins, are you good?”
“I’m not running a marathon any time soon, but the HUD says I’ll live.” He was breathing heavily, but didn’t sound like he was in immediate danger.
“You mobile?”
“Uh, gimme a sec, I think it’s – yeah, I am now. Painkillers.”
Alenko nodded. “Alright, cover our six from here on. If you can’t keep going, tell me instead of being a big man. Don’t want you dropping in the middle of a fight.”
“You got it, sir.”
“Oh, and give us each some of your gear. I know the armour takes most of the weight, but let’s not take chances.”
“Sure thing. Shepard, you any good with grenades?”
She hadn’t had specialist explosive training, but it was a poor biotic who couldn’t fling something small and dense over a good distance, and Jane was no poor biotic. “I can throw ‘em pretty far.”
He held out his hands, full of a slightly worrying quantity of high explosives, “Merry christmas.”
Alenko turned to move out, and then paused. “Oh, and Shepard?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Good job getting Jenkins out of trouble. Gonna MID you for that one.”
Jenkins chuckled, “Bet that’ll make Terra Firma real happy. Horrible space monster saves nice, upstanding marine!”
“Sounds good,” replied Jane, “So where’s the marine?”
Alenko gave the drone wreckage a once-over, but didn’t seem able to glean anything from their remains. It wasn’t long after that until they met their first survivor, a marine in the white armour of a colonial garrison running for cover as she was attacked by vaguely humanoid robots of a kind none of them immediately recognised. Even as they moved forward to assist, more of the strange robots impaled still-living humans on giant spikes, like a scene from a gothic fantasy. With the combined firepower of three marines and one warrant who was quickly learning how different ground combat was from training and sims, the synthetics were swiftly cut down.
Alenko stepped forward to greet the survivor as Jenkins caught his breath and Jane looked at him dubiously. She was still pretty sure he shouldn’t be running around, but obviously the situation called for all hands on deck. She could only hope he wouldn’t do himself more harm by staying mobile.
The survivor turned out to be Ashley Williams, a Gunnery Chief in the 212. Shepard wasn’t entirely sure where that put her in the chain of command, but trying to dredge up marine formations quickly took a backseat to Williams’ revelation that the synthetics they had been fighting were geth. It was a strange feeling, to fight an enemy that had been a kind of galactic bogeyman since before humanity had achieved heavier-than-air flight.
Alenko nodded, as if the reappearance of the geth was only a minor wrinkle in their mission. “OK, new plan. Williams, you’re with us. You know this place, so we’ll need your help getting around.”
“Yes, sir!”
Jane gave her a cheerful smile, and Williams startled. She rolled her eyes and asked “What, couldn’t tell before?”
“I had bigger things on my mind”, replied Williams testily as their makeshift team forged on ahead. Given the rest of her squad had been killed in front of her, Jane figured she was allowed a little snippiness, “You weren’t a fuckin’ robot and I didn’t look too hard after that.”
Upon cresting the next ridge, they found the digsite where the beacon had been discovered. Unfortunately, the site itself was all they found. Williams was unsure if it had been moved by the scientists attached to the colony, or by the geth themselves. Unsure of what else to do, they pressed on.
The camp located near the digsite, just a couple of cabins overlooking a scenic cliff edge, became a place that would haunt Jane’s nightmares for years to come. There were more of the corpses on spikes, and as they approached it became disgustingly apparent what the spikes were for. They lowered and the bodies, alight with alien implants, raced towards them and got far too close for Jane’s liking before they were cut down. The idea of what might happen if one of them had managed to get to grips with her made her want to throw up, and it was only with a concerted effort that she managed to keep it all together.
The captain had told them that helping survivors would be a secondary priority. Shepard wondered why that thought had occurred to her, until the truth struck her like a hammer. Where else could the geth have got the human bodies to make their perverse ghouls? She hoped with every inch of her soul that the people who had been turned into those things were truly dead, that there was no trace of consciousness left inside them to suffer.
“Shepard, you and Williams will come with me. We’ll head forward double-time and either secure the beacon or – hell, figure out what to do when we get there. Jenkins, you stay here and coordinate the survivors. When you’re all sure there are no more stragglers coming, follow on after us and try and get everyone situated in the main colony. Got it?”
“Yes, sir!”
They moved out, and Jane hoped Jenkins wouldn’t be set upon by anything else. If there were no other camps nearby apart from the main settlement, that should mean he would be safe from any more of those techno-ghouls, at least, but she didn’t know what else the geth might have up their sleeves and she was sure she didn’t want to find out.
The sight of the enormous geth ship taking off nearly stopped her in her tracks. Commander Alenko, she noticed, didn’t seem as shocked as she or Williams were; perhaps he was just that stoic or perhaps he’d had warning in advance. They met a few more survivors, who were sent back to Jenkins after being divested of the proceeds of a smuggling operation they had been running out of the spaceport. Jane was glad not to be in Williams’ shoes when that came out.
In the midst of the human colony (and Jane had seen how the colonists they’d found hiding had looked at her, Eden Prime was very much a human colony) the body of Nihlus Kyrik seemed a strange sight. Stranger still was the story another smuggler at the dock told them about another turian by the name of Saren, seemingly a friend of Nihlus’ who had murdered the Spectre in the midst of the attack. Even if Eden Prime had had a turian minority population, which Ash assured them it did not, a geth onslaught was surely not the time to settle whatever personal enmity the two had.
Their next surprise was almost disappointing in how mundane it was after the gruesomeness so far. The geth had planted bombs around the train station, in just the same way any ordinary terrorist would have done. Fortunately, they were simple demolition charges and not anything specially made for the task. It wasn’t until Commander Alenko had disarmed them all with judicious use of his omni-tool that she remembered her idle comment to Joker back in the cockpit; she’d have to tell him about the bombs later.
The thought was chased from her mind as their team gained access to a plaza overlooking the colony proper. It looked like it had been bombed from orbit, and the fact that the enormous geth ship had already left seemed like small comfort in the face of such destruction. Blessedly, miraculously, the prothean beacon itself had been left in place. It seemed to be perfectly intact, so Jane supposed either the geth hadn’t been after it or they had already gotten whatever they wanted from it before they left. She guessed she should probably hope for the former, but that would just raise the question of what it was the geth were after. At least trying to steal the beacon would have been understandable.
She heard Commander Alenko contact the Normandy to confirm the beacon’s location dimly, as if from a great distance. The beacon itself was consuming her attention, speaking to her in ways that non-biotics could never have understood; ways that even most biotic humans would not have felt as keenly as she did. When she realised what it was showing her, she started to wish she couldn’t understand it either. Visions of war and death on a scale she never could have imagined filled her mind, people dying in masses so great that she stopped being able to quantify it. Vast crowds mown down in the streets by gunfire, or reduced to shreds by orbital bombardment, filled her mind’s eye until death was all there was.
She thought her feet might have left the ground but it didn’t matter, none of the physical world or the geth or Eden Prime mattered. All that mattered was the desperate horror of the protheans who had constructed the beacon and filled it with the doom of their race. She struggled to comprehend as she saw scenes spread across years and decades of grim, violent extinction. Vast ships, or perhaps synthetics that might as well have been ships, descended upon dozens and then hundreds of worlds and razed them to the ground. Every towering city was laid low, every valley was filled with the corpses and the ashes of untold millions. Ships of desperate refugees were burned to atoms as they fled. Glittering stations flared beautifully, horrifically as they were cast down to the planets they orbited. Rescue missions arrived too late, only to be lacerated by the weapons of the giant ships that had destroyed the cities. There was left only silence.
She staggered, and once again she was on Eden Prime. Commander Alenko and Williams were each staring at her; Alenko like he thought she might be sick and Williams like she thought she might explode.
“What was it?” asked Commander Alenko gently.
“The end”, she gasped. That was all she managed before passing out.