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Chapter Text

Regardless of allegiance, they called it X-57. Twenty-two kilometres in diameter, weighing somewhere in the late sextuple digits of tons at the minimum, and formerly home to some three hundred and fifty seven souls. One-hundred and eighty-nine of those souls were Panoceanian, engineers and contracted labourmen of the Hyperpower, while one-hundred and sixty-eight were from Yu-Jing; loyal citizens of the State Empire.

The numerical divide was, according to the preliminary situation reports, at least half the issue. It had been almost half a century since the end of the Neo-Colonial Wars, but the scars ran deep. Yu-Jing didn’t trust Panoceania to save their people; Panoceania were similarly doubtful of their hundred-year rival’s good will. The result was a deadlock while X-57 rocketed toward the surface of Terra-Nova.

That was the other half of the issue, and the more pressing of the two. Four hours ago X-57 had been slowly drifting toward Terra-Nova, ready to link up to its orbital cycle for the long process of hollowing it out into a new orbital dock and shipyard. Cheaper than building from nothing in the void, and with the benefit of producing lots of mineral wealth to resell or repurpose as part of the station’s construction. Fusion torches, three massive propellant engines, had been used to initiate the journey. For three days of drift they’d been cold; now they blazed again, little red candles upon the craggy surface of the asteroid.

X-57 had been repurposed from building material to extinction event. If it hit Terra-Nova, the planet would die. The hijackers were unknown, as were their intentions. To Commander Shepard, the intent seemed rather obvious; someone was very, very upset about humanity’s progress in settling Terra-Nova, and would rather the entire planet be rendered inhospitable to life than allow that to continue.

Panoceania and Yu-Jing blamed each other, naturally, for all of four minutes until both realized how utterly nonsensical the accusation was. Both factions had settlements on Terra-Nova, they’d all but divided the world in half down the equatorial line. The X-57 impact would be a point of genocide, and self-inflicted at that. They had agreed that neither was responsible for the problem at hand; then they had resumed arguing over who would solve it first.

That was where Shepard came in. When the great powers of the Sphere argued and the mechanisms of bureaucracy froze up, SwordFor intervened. Bureau Aegis had confirmed available forces and sent the order for nearby ships to reply. The closest had been the Normandy. It carried a Section Spatha detachment of 20, the largest available unit ready for deployment within the timeframe afforded by X-57’s speed and acceleration. 20 would not be enough, the Bureau heads worried.

Then somebody, likely a Deva functionary assigned to the task of contacting the Normandy, had read the ship’s crew manifest. Captain David Anderson was the ship’s commanding officer; a trustworthy, able career officer with a spotless service record. But the name beneath his brought a breath of relief to those whose word decreed the mission ahead.

Jonathan Shepard. To his subordinates he held the rank of Commander, but within the long and storied martial legendarium of the Human Sphere they had a greater title for him. In Panoceania, in Yu-Jing, in the Haqqislamic faith and in the Nomad nation, they called him the Lion of Paradiso.

||Command and Intelligence Center, O-12S Normandy, 5.2 hours until X-57 impact event||

The sight of an Omega-type soldier in full battle regalia was equal measures inspiring and frightful; a towering vision of the human propensity to shield oneself from harm with plates and meshes of metal and polymer. Along those paths familiar was it cast, the upthrust gorget like the prow of a battleship rising from the molded shapes of the breastplate; the ribs guarded again by rondels in a golden yellow, the plates set along the thighs and the pauldrons edged in that same evening sunlight shade of gentle yellow, though the polymer which it outlined was a blue as rich as a summer sky.

The helm was the greatest departure from those knightly forms; it bore no cross nor corvid beak, nor indeed any opening which was not set about the neck. It was closed at the face, with two narrow nozzles alike to a gas mask which echoed the shape of those vicious dying days of ranked warfare, downthrust at a steep angle from the narrow grey chin; and above the monocular rectangle eye, unblinking and unflinching, observant of all which moved before it. There was the eye of the Bureau Aegis, justice which could not be blinded and indeed saw all.

There went Commander Shepard, monument of man’s mechanisms in war and peace, the blue and yellow gauntlet of justice inviolate. He passed through the CIC of the Normandy like a giant amidst common men, eight feet tall at the shoulder in the hulking vastness of his battle armour, passing by uniformed and void-suited bridge crew at their consoles and control nodes. The quantronic halo of his Omega armour was like a warship passing in the sea, an exaggerated and dangerous presence that was at once threat and reassurance.

“Commander,” spoke one of the two men assigned to guard the entrance to the CIC’s communications relay room, snapping to attention with his rifle held tight across his chest, chin high and eyes forward. “The captain is waiting, sir.”

“And the Turian?” Shepard’s voice rumbled through the speakers set into his helmet, and though the voice rasped slightly with that mechanical timbre it did not sound as a machine would sound. It was too warm, too personable.

“He’s been waiting longer, sir,” the man reported. “Been in there since we hit the relay in Pax.”

“Carry on, Private.” Shepard said, before the doors opened at a passive thought relayed through his neural link, allowing him passage.

The communications chamber was at the heart of the Normandy, tucked neatly behind the CIC between the two wings of stairs going down into the general quarters. The air was alive with signals, live links establishing to the comm buoys scattered across the Asgard system. Electric signals danced in the empty spaces between them, tiny wireframe traceries Shepard’s helmet turned into visible marks on space he could follow with his eye and his mind. He felt the link to X-57, cold and dead, cut off from the source. Threads of pale grey like tarnished steel extended from the small array of symbols that represented the asteroid facility, themselves fractured and spasmatic.

All of the links were tied, as if by electric thread, to the man at the centre of everything aboard the Normandy. Captain David Anderson, the venerable leader of SwordFor Unit 7. He was in his dress blues, a rich shade of midnight threaded with golden yellow at the ends of the sleeves and the hem of the coat. Shepard saluted, armour whirring and clanking, and Anderson matched the motion before gesturing to the bank of screens he stood before.

“The situation’s improved somewhat, thankfully,” he said, voice a pleasing baritone that echoed with a sort of assured, confident authority. “Yu-Jing is actually sitting at the table to negotiate a joint response.”

“Panoceania?” Shepard asked, settling in his position a few paces behind Anderson, flanking the older man.

“Less enthusiastic, at least on the bureaucratic end; still, we’ve received a back-channel message from Colonel Kusari.” Anderson gestured to the video screens. “He has a unit of Akalis ready for a combat drop, politics be damned.”

“Yu-Jing are offering Tiger Soldiers?” Shepard guessed, and Anderson’s nod settled the inquisition silently.

“And a Fireteam of Liu-Xing,” he added. “Apparently the Invincible Army has decided to take this situation seriously.”

Shepard looked over the reports. Colonel Kusari was offering twenty Akalis, the Sikh commandos of their religious conclaves on Acontecimento; the Yu-Jing officiates were offering an equal number of Tiger Soldiers, already armed and ready for deployment. Two aeromobile assault teams; and then Shepard’s unit for a third target.

“The plan is to hit all three fusion torches with rapid insertions, prevent our unknown hostiles from rallying to reinforce any single point,” Anderson explained. “Then congregate and launch a combined assault on the asteroid’s command centre.”

“Do we have the specs on the fusion torch control facilities?” Shepard asked, and instantly Anderson waved a finger and the full 3D structure was floating in the air between them, projected on his helmet.

Standard prefab cube construct; first floor was a warehouse space, meant for storing supplies in heavy cube containers. Airlock access, two-stage entry hall, the main warehouse floor, then the upper promenade-like corridor into a back office space, accessed by a staircase built into the far wall. Classic Panoceanian design, mass produced and air-dropped by a bulk lander into place. Shepard had breached and cleared at least twenty just like it over the course of his career, as had most of his team.

“Control of the Fusion Torches is in the second story office, naturally,” Anderson said, before clearing his throat. “The timing will be tight, Shepard. Impact is in five hours, but critical momentum will be reached in less than three.”

“When can the Colonel have his men airborne?” Shepard asked, and watched Anderson blink-check his own message logs; he could see the older man’s personal geist flicker into existence, a little electronic avatar shaped like a demon from some old Earth comic book, before he forwarded the info to Shepard.

“One hour,” Anderson spoke the shorthand aloud as Shepard read the log. “It’ll be a close thing.”

“We can handle it, Captain,” Shepard assured him, nodding. “I’ll have the team ready for deployment in twenty minutes.”

“There is one other detail, Shepard,” Anderson said, before nodding silently to a corner of the room Shepard had idly noted seemed a touch darker than the rest. “You’ll have someone tagging along.”

The air shimmered, then the shadows faded. Armoured feet clanked on the metal floor of the room as a tall, avian shape advanced into view, personal camouflage unit fading. The shape was Turian; a torso like a ship’s keel, driving forward in a blunt wedge, with the elongated helmet and three-clawed hands reaching up to remove it. The face beneath was familiar to Shepard; his hand left the butt of his pistol, and he nodded.

“Nihlus,” he said. “Is this what you’ve really been up to, then?”

The Turian was unlike most of his kind Shepard had met, both in coloration and in attitude. His carapace armour of his face was a mottled red like old bricks, his facial markings a series of elegant white loops and waves that traced a sort of ankh-like shape across his face. His eyes were an acidic green, without any whites like all turians, unblinking and staring up at Shepard. His armour was an atypical Turian design, incorporating a more rounded and streamlined silhouette that put Shepard in mind of Haqqislamic supersoldiers or Yu-Jing Invincibles. The quantronic sigils and wires did not like the Turian, rebelling from his alien software and signals.

“Humanity has been under observation for this chance, Commander,” Nihlus said, his voice rumbling with that two-tone timbre all Turians spoke with, vocal and the sub-vocal. “I have long suspected you were ready; recently, I convinced the Council to consider the same.”

“That explains the needling on the back of my neck,” said Shepard, and he cocked an eyebrow skyward behind the mask of his helmet. “You’re analyzing me?”

“Evaluating,” Nihlus corrected. “The Council is finally willing to accept that perhaps, humanity is ready to join the Spectres.”

Spectres. Shepard called the name up with a twitch of a finger; the Turian translation was more directly “dark blade spirit” which seemed hardly promising, but he already knew the real name. Special Tactics and Reconnaissance, the Council’s right hand responsible for holding the gun, knife or treaty papers depending on the target. He also knew the meaning behind the evaluation.

“You want me as a Spectre?” he asked, and Nihlus shook his head.

“I think you have the most promise, of the twelve names your various governments put forward,” the Turian said. “Your record is almost spotless; and of course, your heroism at Paradiso is famous even in the furthest reaches of Council Space. Even among my own people there are those who have raised cups to the glorious stand of the Lion of Paradiso.”

Shepard’s hand twitched at the title, as it always did. But he held himself, nodding slowly.

“Who are the others?” he asked, but Nihlus shook his head.

“I am not at liberty to say,” the Turian said. “But none have quite the record you do. Regardless, I will be joining you on X-57; I wish to see your abilities first hand, both in combat and in command.”

He paused a moment, as if in consideration, then slowly extended a hand, the nearest thing Turians had to a palm facing downward. Shepard blinked, before extending his own hand and taking Nihlus’, turning it the right way around and shaking it once.

“It’s an honour to be considered,” Shepard said, and he truly meant it. He knew he’d made himself a known quantity in the Human Sphere, but he’d had no idea whatsoever that Citadel Space knew anything about him, let alone regarding him as one of humanity’s best.

Anderson, Nihlus and he spoke for several more minutes, planning the more exact details of the oncoming assault on the fusion torch control centre, before Shepard departed, leaving the two alone while he went down to the hangar bay and armory.

There, after a slow but mercifully short elevator ride, he found his number two already busy organizing the troops. Lieutenant Kaidan Alenko cut a sharp figure in his battle raiment, the long black coat and blue armoured mantle of the Quantronic Intervention Unit framing his face. He had that old-world handsomeness about him, a square jaw and sharp eyes and black hair groomed close to the scalp. The biotic amp in his ear was already hooked to the rest of his equipment, a soft blue glow emitting from the wires running all through the fabric of his coat.

The rest of the men were in full hustle; the younger troops, largely Kappa personnel, were pulling on armoured body-sleeves and checking combi-weapon munitions, while the older Delta and Epsilon veterans were more methodical and calm. He saw Doctor Chakwas reviewing a list of combat drugs with Corporal Aldo, the other Lambda. Aldo was an engineer, technically, but with no TAGs or ground vehicles to support she’d found herself under Chakwas’ wing learning the functions of a corpsman.

The older woman looked up as he entered the hangar bay, the size of his armour and presence both silencing all in attendance. Before she could speak, one of the Kappas glanced up, then straightened up.

“Executive Officer on deck!” Sergeant Barrow cried the words in a stern voice, and as one the various O-12 personnel snapped to attention, weapons laying on workbenches and armour half-on. Shepard dismissed them with a wave of his hand.

“Carry on,” he intoned, helmet automatically pitching his voice across the entire hangar, before he looked directly at Alenko, at which point the helmet returned to normal modulation. “Alenko, report.”

“Five minutes to ready, Commander,” Alenko declared, holding a quick salute for a moment which Shepard returned. “Will we be arranging fireteams?”

“Kappas split into two Cores, Sergeant Barrow leading one and Jenkins the other, with Aldo and Chakwas in each.” Shepard instructed. “Chakwas with Jenkins’ team, Aldo with Barrow. Sergeant Handelmann can take Private Sadler on longstrike overwatch, and the Deltas can arrange themselves as a Haris.”

“Drop order?” Alenko checked, glancing sidelong at the trio of parachutist elites as they played rock-paper-scissors for the right of fireteam command.

“Preliminary terrain scans are telling us…” Shepard paused; he could both see Alenko’s encroaching question, and feel it coming on from the way the older man rapidly began flicking through various recent messages and updates.

“They haven’t sent us the full reconstruction?” Alenko asked, sounding distinctly annoyed.

“No,” Shepard confirmed with a shake of his head. “Yu-Jing is willing to collaborate with us on a military level, but they hold that X-57 is sovereign property of the Jade Empire.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Alenko protested, and Shepard nodded. “Sir, a hot drop into a combat zone with a total lack of area-knowledge is insane.”

“As insane as hijacking a Submondo mainframe in a collapsing space station while tethered to a corpse?” Shepard asked in reply, and Alenko’s mouth slid shut, an agitated frown still stitched in place. “I’m not happy about it either, but there’s not much we can do besides knuckle up and hit as hard as we can as soon as we touch the ground.”

Kaidan shook his head, and Shepard’s hand settled firmly on his shoulder. Kaidan was not a small man; six foot at the shoulder with the bulk of a career soldier only moderately lessened by his biotic metabolism, but in Omega armour Shepard had two feet and two hundred pounds on him.

“Keep your head up, LT; you’re not the one being watched by half of Citadel space,” Shepard teased, before walking toward the rest of his troops while Kaidan blinked and baffled in the background. “O-12, listen up!”

Every head turned and every eye opened. The Deltas ceased their bickering and fell silent, the Epsilons stilled and watched with cold eyes, the Kappas were all in a row staring at their commander. Doctor Chakwas had been with him long enough to smile knowingly, tapping Aldo on the shoulder to turn her gaze toward Shepard. He pulled off his helmet, and made sure to meet each and every one of their eyes as he spoke.

“In fifteen minutes, we’re going to drop into a kill-box twenty-two kilometres around,” Shepard said, his voice booming across the suddenly quiet hangar. “The entirety of X-57 is a free fire zone until the crisis is resolved and its course has been corrected. I want weapons hot, eyes up and heads on swivels, because intel has dropped the ball hard and we have no damn idea what is waiting for us on that rock.”

He saw some of them shift; the Kappas, mostly, younger and less experienced. For a few this was their first real combat drop; they’d done policing and security beats, a few had even been part of boarding actions before. Live-fire combat on open ground was something new.

“The situation is Code One,” Shepard said. “We are cleared for lethal contact. Today, each and every one of you has a license to kill.”

That put some fire back in the young ones. Typically O-12 personnel were non-lethal contact only, barring the Razor and Lynx personnel whose entire purpose was the termination of high-risk targets. Code One was the O-12 “shit has hit the fan” shorthand; the mission priority shifted from policing to military action, the guns came out and whatever had messed up badly enough to cause a Code One quickly learned why O-12 were the ones who decided what such scenarios were to be called.

“However,” Shepard watched the Epsilon pair in particular, especially Handelmann. “Not everybody down there is an enemy. Panoceania and Yu-Jing will have units on the ground; Akali Commandos and Tiger Soldiers. You have each been previously briefed on what both look like, so if you see a familiar silhouette, keep your finger off the trigger until it opens fire.”

He waved a hand and sent each member of the platoon two files, containing the data on their different allies. A few of the Kappas started reading right away as he said his next piece.

“You have each trained for this day for a long damn time. You’re humanity’s best, each and every one of you. That’s why you’re here, now, when we need you most.” His voice was firm, a practiced cadence; giving speeches was second nature to him, after all the publicity tours they’d sent him on after Paradiso. “That rock is going to kill a planet, and every soul on the ground, unless we can stop it.

“It’s time to do what you’ve trained for,” he concluded, pulling his helmet back on. “It’s time to save the world.”

He turned back to Kaidan, only to see Nihlus shimmer into being. The quantronics in his helmet rebelled at the Turian’s presence again, briefly, before registering him as a friend. The Turian stared at him for a moment, before nodding approvingly and vanishing again before Kaidan could turn to see what Shepard was looking at. The LT looked back to Shepard, who opened a private communications channel with a blink and a twitch of a finger. Kaidan pulled on his helmet, and Shepard spoke.

“Nihlus will be shadowing me for the duration of the mission,” he said. “He’s examining my capabilities.”

“Why?” Kaidan asked.

“Apparently, O-12 put my name on a list of potential Spectre candidates,” said Shepard. “And today is the day they see if I’m actually worthy of consideration.”

“So where is he?” Kaidan asked, and then Shepard could practically hear him blink. “No.”

“Cloaked,” Shepard confirmed. “We’ll inform the rest of the team on the way down. Last thing I need is Handelmann putting an AP-T round through a Citadel Spectre’s skull because he thought my shadow looked funny.”

||X-57, Asgard System, 5 hours until X-57 Impact Event||

“Delta Unit, stand by for aerial insertion,” said Shepard, watching the corner of his HUD as the little blue dot that was their ship approached the green line demarcating the drop-height for the Delta Unit.”

“Affirmative,” said Sergeant Liuye. “Deltas, remember; this is a cold-rock drop, not a gravity well. Gentle on the thrusters, tuck and roll.”

The other two Deltas chimed in with their own affirmations, unbuckling the six-point safety harnesses and stepping toward the rear drop-door with weapons in hand. Liuye held her boarding shotgun in one hand, runnnig a thumb along the edge of the barrel in her usual habit. Corporal Whitman and Private Hosha flanked her, the former with Spitfire in hand and the latter touching one finger to the Panzerfaust anti-armour tube hanging from his belt.

“Rear doors opening,” the pilot warned, as red lights blinked on all over the carrier bay. “Insertion point is low. No drift. Our angle is pretty sharp, Commander.”

“Stay the course, airman,” Shepard said. “If OpFor has secured control of the main station’s air-defense guns, we’ll need to come in low.”

The pilot didn’t respond, likely focusing on his work. Shepard always appreciated that about Cortez; he was always intensely concentrated on the job at hand, and rarely complained about the difficulties intrinsic to his job. Some pilots just couldn’t shut up, like Moreau up on the Normandy’s bridge.

The Deltas all walked about halfway down the insertion ramp, before turning and facing into the dropship. The squatted down low, Whitman throwing a thumbs up seconds before they all leapt backwards, off the ramp and out into the void. They vanished from sight, before three small blue lights ignited in the moments before the ramp slid shut again.

“Airborne!” Liuye reported, her voice crackling more with the distance. “Commander, target sighted. We’ll be on the roof in thirty-sec. Visual track on hostiles, numbers unknown.”

“Affirmative, Delta unit,” said Shepard, unbuckling his own harness. “Hit the roof and find the entry point, do not engage until ground team has gone hot.”

“Copy that, Commander,” said Liuye, before the channel crackled as she went silent. Shepard switched to Cortez’ channel.

“Time to landing?” he asked.

“Thirty-three seconds, Commander,” Cortez replied. “I heard the Sergeant. Scans give me a low rise about half a kilometre north of the insertion point. I’ll put you down behind it, keep the guns off you.”

“Copy,” said Shepard, before switching channels again, this time addressing the ground team. “All units stand by for deployment, sub-thirty-sec.”

Thirty seconds passed in what felt like an hour, as everyone started unbuckling and readying gear. Shepard was up and standing at the head of the unopened ramp before most of the Kappas had managed to unbuckle, his multi-rifle braced over his shoulder. The heavy-riotstopper built into his left forearm was loaded with a canister of compressed adhesive and shock-absorbent foam. Behind him, the rest of the ground team was standing by as the dropship lurched and slowed, descending at a rapid rate.

“Ramp in five,” Cortez intoned. “Four… three… two…”

Shepard leaned forward, one leg in front, multi-rifle clamped to his hip and head down.

“One.” The ramp slid down and Shepard was gone, sprinting up the shallow rise to peek his head over the hilltop. He did see enemies in the distance, his helmet gradually pinging them as their humanoid shapes emerged from the shadow of the prefab unit. They seemed to spot him, opening fire with simple small-arms, though with little accuracy.

“Delta Unit, prepare to breach,” Shepard commanded, as his arms pumped up and down, his armoured boots leaving small cracked indentations in the stony ground of X-57. He was running at somewhere in the ballpark of 91 kilometers an hour, aided by X-57’s lenient gravity and the Omega armour’s incredible artificial muscle fibres. Normally, he wouldn’t push himself like this. But the clock was ticking, and he hadn’t the time to be slow and steady.

The distant figures of his enemies rapidly grew in size as he approached. Their armour was human-type, instantly liberating the Turians, Salarians, Quarians and Krogan from the suspect list. That left humans, Asari and Batarians, or some unknown new species. Only two of those made any real sense.

Shepard was moving fast enough that his enemies were having trouble squaring sights on him, blazing away with automatic weapons that missed him by a mile or pinged off the Omega armour’s potent shields. After less than 15 seconds he was upon them, extending an arm and blasting one off his feet with the impact of his vambrace against a skull. There was a savage crack as both his neck and his faceplate shattered, tumbling end over end in the asteroid’s dust. Shepard ducked low, dropping to one knee and bringing his rifle up. The multi-configuration was currently set to AP-Tungsten, which he snapped four rounds of into the nearest hostile.

The shots burned his shield to cinder, before the next burst ripped his front open in a spray of dark crimson, droplets lazily drifting toward the ground in the low gravity. The rest scattered, running for cover around corners or in the shallow door-well of the prefab. Shepard saw the rest of his team moving across the open ground, the Kappa units and Kaidan running to catch up to him, while the Epsilon duo set up on the hill proper.

The door-well was the most critical, Shepard turning and moving toward it with his rifle shouldered. He couldn’t hear Handelmann’s multi-sniper fire, but he saw one of the hostiles peeking around the edge of the wall vanish in a burst of blood. Another opened the airlock, but before he could get inside Shepard was on top of him, grabbing him by the collar of his armour and dragging him back into the open, smashing him against the wall. He used his right knee to pin the hostile against the wall by back of his neck, turning and firing his multi-rifle at another foe who was peeking the distant corner.

The Kappa teams were closing the gap, combi-rifle fire silently rattling off of the walls and eventually putting down the hostile. Shepard turned and grabbed his captured opponent, dragging him into the airlock. The Kappas filed in after him, rifles up and searching every corner. Shepard pinged the door controls, which Aldo shut with a wave of her omni-tool.

The room flooded with air, and Shepard reached down and forcibly pulled the helmet off of his enemy. He was only partially surprised to see a mottled, four-eyed face blinking and snarling back at him, needle teeth bared in a predatory snarl.

Before the Batarian could speak, Shepard gestured for Kaidan, who approached with his para-baton in one hand, the end crackling with electricity. Several Kappas moved closer, always curious to watch the pair in action.

“Mind the door,” he ordered them, voice crackling through his helmet’s speakers, before grabbing the Batarian by the arms and slamming his back against the wall. “You; how many inside?”

“I’ll never talk, filthy human!” the Batarian snarled in reply.

A nod from Shepard saw Kaidan jam the para-baton’s crackling end against the Batarian’s stomach, leaving the alien writhing and cursing. Another nod and Kaidan withdrew. Shepard stared down the Batarian, who was blinking frantically.

“That was setting three,” he said, voice low. “Kaidan, how many settings does your baton have?”

“Seven, Commander,” the LT replied, his own voice distorted into a rasping whisper by modulators built into his blank-faced helmet. “None lethal… technically.”

“Go to five,” Shepard said, before leaning in close. “Unless, you’re ready to tell me what I want to know?”

The Batarian cursed at him in whatever language it was Batarians spoke, and Shepard nodded again. Kaidan jammed the baton against the Batarians ribs for a long five seconds, leaving the alien spasming wildly. Shepard’s HUD warned him that his hands were being exposed to a mild electric charge. By the time Kaidan withdrew his baton, the Batarian looked exceptionally queasy.

“How many?” he repeated.

The Batarian met his eye, or tried to; the monocular helmet of the Omega armour always made that a difficult process. He was technically staring at the bridge of Shepard’s nose, not that it was his fault.

“I…” the Batarian coughed, before his head fell. “Thirteen. Thirteen, damn you.”

“Thank you,” Shepard said, before releasing him and nodding again. This time Kaidan walloped the Batarian across the head, a flash of electricity rendering the alien unconscious. Shepard briefly wondered what Nihlus thought of that. From what Shepard knew of Spectres, they ran the gamut of options, from ultra-violence as the first resort to humanitarian policing.

“Private Genndav, restrain this one,” Shepard ordered, the Kappa rushing to obey with cuffs already in his hands. “The rest of you, stack up. I’ll take point. Alenko, are you inside the system?”

“Cameras are all dead,” Alenko replied. “But the office door is locked. Possible hostages?”

“Batarians would use the crates,” Shepard replied, before shouldering his multi-rifle, nodding to Corporal Jenkins to open the door. “Mind your fire.”

Then the doors opened, and Shepard was shot in the chest with a shotgun. Fortunately, his shield deflected most of the slugs. Unfortunately, his shields pinged and went into the red, meaning he was a few rounds away from being exposed to hostile fire. The Batarian carrying the shotgun had less than half a second to turn and begin withdrawing to cover before Alenko dumped two bursts of combi-rifle fire into his back, burning out his shields. Shepard shot him in the back and kept back, waiting.

Sure enough, the Batarian stumbled into the open, where crates stopped forming a corridor, and somebody else shot him in the side. Shepard winced; he’d figured the Batarians would have terrible trigger discipline, but such blatant disregard for friend/foe identification bothered him.

“Core One, enter at my six,” he commanded, advancing into the corridor when his shields began to hum back to life. “Core Two, stand by. Delta Team, breach.”

There was a sudden and muffled bang from above, followed immediately by the screaming of air rapidly trying to escape a depressurizing space as the Delta team dropped in through the new hole in the ceiling. Immediately after the last of them cleared the gap however, there was a strange sputtering sound as the hole was flooded with a rapid-setting foam that sealed the gap. Shepard’s HUD still warned him that the air pressure had dropped significantly, which was the least of his problems as the Deltas opened fire on the Batarians scattered throughout the facility.

The low-gravity endemic to the planet meant that they could easily drift to their preferred positions, using the thrusters on their entry-packs to all but fly through the air. Shepard tracked the blue tracers of Whitman’s spitfire and sighted a Batarian, who was frantically scooting around the corner of a shipping container to hide from the Delta’s withering fire. Shepard snapped a three-round burst at him, burning his shields and forcing him to duck low.

Behind him, the Kappas of Core One were filing into the room, filling the air with a steadily chattering tirade of combi-rifle fire. Shepard advanced slowly and carefully; in CQB, it payed dividends to check each and every corner in turn. The Batarians were completely off their game; these were slavers and raiders, not hardened defense teams. Most of them had probably never been shot at by professionals before. Shepard dropped another when he was stupid enough to run around a blind corner, before dropping to one knee and tagging another when he peeked the same corner. His head vanished in a wash of red, and Shepard bit the inside of his right cheek as he refocused.

The local quantronics were completely scrambled, the digital patinas layering this place almost incomprehensible. The Batarians had learned quickly to scramble the Mayanet whenever they hit a human target; there was nothing more frustrating than having one’s position exposed by a random civilian’s geist informing everyone around them that they could see the shooter. The logic-bomb method was rarely flawless, but a sloppy solution was better than getting your pirate raid livestreamed to the entire Human Sphere.

As it stood however, Shepard could barely manage to make out the presence of three unique haloes; three digital signatures, civilian in nature. He flicked an order to Alenko to clean up the local net, before snapping another burst of three rounds at a Batarian moving between boxes. His shots went wide, but this time Whitman followed his tracers and poured a baker’s dozen rounds into the Batarian, prompting a burst of red from behind his new cover.

That brought the reported tally up to nine dead, and Shepard was starting to hear an absence of gunfire. An all-call led to a general consensus that the main floor was clear, but that fell short of the earlier Batarian’s count.

“Rally on my position,” Shepard ordered. “Delta, high ground. We have four left.”

Delta clambered and boosted upward, onto the second-floor walkway. Shepard made for the stairwell, where he found Batarian number ten laying in a pool of his own blood, having caught a stray round in the neck. He hit the body with three rounds in the chest for certainty’s sake, before advancing up to the walkway, where all three Deltas were stacked up on the facility’s office door.

“Month’s pay for a damn bio-visor,” Liuye muttered, clutching a flash pulse in her hand. “Door’s locked, Commander.”

“Alenko?” Shepard asked, and after a moment there was a flash of green from the door’s control panel. “Thank you, LT.”

Shepard advanced, but before he could order the door open they beeped and slid open all on their own, exposing an unwelcome sight. He’d found the three remaining Batarians; and the three remaining humans, all of whom had pistols jammed against various parts of their bodies while the Batarians held them as shields.

“Careful, human,” the largest of the three, whose hardsuit was coloured a dreadful shade of light green, snarled. “We’ll kill them!”

Shepard didn’t speak. He kept his multi-rifle trained on the lead Batarian, while is geist tracked the positions of the Delta unit’s weapons. Narrow lines projecting probable projectile positions gradually tightened on the other two Batarian’s faces. Shepard took a breath. He thumbed the switch on his multi-rifle, the internal ammo-blocks rotating; he was firing phase-ammo now.

“Let them go,” he said, once.

The largest Batarian didn’t respond. Shepard waited a three-count, inhaled, then blinked twice.

He, Whitman and Liuye each fired once. His phase-round skipped through the lead Batarian’s shield with a tiny pulse of blue light, tearing through his exposed upper lip. The angle was clean, slipping up and through the base of the skull to perfectly sever the nerve cluster. Batarian and human physiology shared many details, particularly in the nervous system; Shepard’s round had effectively turned off the Batarian’s body, leaving him to crumple to the ground in a heap.

Liuye’s round required no such fancy precision; she was firing a boarding shotgun in Hit Mode, effectively shooting a thumb-sized slug at the sort of speed that would see it rip through solid steel. Her Batarian’s shield vanished in red at the same time his head effectively dematerialized in a gout of scarlet blood, pistol dropping from limp hands.

Whitman had the hardest task; his Spitfire wasn’t designed for single, overwhelming fire. Shepard needn’t have worried, however; before Whitman’s projectiles could even make contact with the Batarian, the alien was already dead. Nihlus, an ominous black shape cast in silhouette by the bright office lights, materialized in a pulse of blue light, pulling the trigger on a Paladin pistol half an inch from the Batarian’s head. The shield had no chance to trigger; the Batarian fell, Whitman’s rounds shredding his shields as he toppled headless to the ground.

The three civilians screamed and dove to the ground. Shepard breathed out. Nihlus looked at him, the t-shaped visor of his faceless helmet glinting in the low light. The Turian stared a moment, and nodded once, before vanishing again.

He and the Delta unit stood in silence for a moment. Then, unprompted, Whitman spoke up.

“Commander, with the fullest honour and respect due to a man of your rank and reputation; why the fuck isn’t he doing that more?”

“Just focus on the mission, Whitman,” Liuye said, before taking one of the civilians by the arm and carefully lifting him back up. “Commander, what about these three?”

Shepard reached down and grabbed the former lead Batarian’s hostage, lifting her back to her feet with two armoured hands. She was still whimpering and sobbing, her face a mess of tears, snot and unkempt hair. The familiar sight of blue and gold was clearly a comforting one, as she pressed herself against his armoured figure with a wail of relief.

“It’s alright, ma’am,” he said, his voice modulator cutting back on the usual mechanical growl as much as possible. “You’re safe now.”

“Thank you,” she mumbled. “I… th-they were killing everyone else, but they said… they were going to-to take us, to…”

“I won’t let that happen,” Shepard promised, holding her shoulder reaffirmingly. “Ma’am, can you or your colleagues shut down the fusion torch?”

“I-I… Simon could, m-maybe…” she mumbled, as the last of the hostages climbed up to his feet.

He was a plain-looking man, with streaks of grey in his short hair and beard. He looked Panoceanian for certain, likely of Australian or American heritage, with the pale skin and lean build of someone who spent much of their time doing labour-work in a hardsuit and low gravity. He blinked at Shepard, before nodding once.

“Simon Atwell, sir, chief engineer,” he said. “I can deactivate the fusion torch, but this rock has three.”

“They’re being handled,” Shepard assured him. “Go ahead, Mr. Atwell.”

The engineer returned to the office and got to work, sitting down behind the desk and hammering away at the haptic keyboard. The other two civilians were clearly in shock; Shepard sent them downstairs, to be examined by Chakwas and Aldo, before blinking open his comm-channel with the Epsilon duo outside.

“Handelmann, are we still clear?” he asked.

“Yes sir,” Handelmann replied, his voice a monotone hum through the comm-channel. “No hostiles in sight.”

“We’re about to turn the torch off,” Shepard said. “Stand by to make for the main facility.”

“Affirmative,” said Handelmann. “We’ll be ready.”

Shepard vaulted over the walkway’s guardrail, half-floating to the ground in the low gravity. He passed by Chakwas and Aldo examining the injured civilians, before reaching Jenkins. The young corporal was standing guard by the airlock, clearly still running hot from the firefight, shifting his weight from foot to foot and holding his rifle tight against his chest. Shepard touched him on the shoulder.

“Commander!” Jenkins jolted, but his finger stayed off the trigger. “Nothing to report, sir.”

“That’s a good thing, corporal,” Shepard said. “Listen; I’m leaving you and Core One to guard this facility. We have the X-57 project’s head engineer here, and he needs protection.”

“What about the main facility, sir?” Jenkins asked, disappointment in his voice audible even through the modulation of his helmet’s speaker. “It’ll be where the fighting’s thickest. You might need Core One.”

“We’ll have Yujingyu and Panoceanian special forces backing us up, Jenkins,” Shepard assured him. “And I need someone I can trust to keep these civilians safe. You’re up to it, I know you are.”

That put a little energy back in Jenkins, who stiffened up and saluted very primly before turning to check on his new charges. He didn’t even wait for dismissal, which hardly bothered Shepard; he was already gesturing for Sergeant Barrows and his Kappas to prepare, prompting the older man to call Aldo over. The Deltas fell in line behind Shepard shortly thereafter, with Alenko waiting by the door.

“Whoever sold them this logic-bomb must’ve been charging a premium,” the LT noted, the fibre-bundle cables connecting his collar to his back glowing with a blue-purple light as he explored the local Mayanet. “It’s really scrambled the network. Commander, I don’t know if I can clear the debris without a few more hours to sort everything out.”

“Leave it for Bureau Toth then,” said Shepard, as the rest of the units sans Core One filtered into the airlock. “We need to focus on getting this rock back under human control.”

“Batarians.” Alenko shook his head. “You don’t think this is an attempt at starting a war?”

“No,” said Shepard. “MO is too similar to a standard pirate raid. These aren’t Hegemon troops, they’re raiders. Whoever’s in charge just has higher aspirations than trafficking in human lives.”

“Like ending a few million of them?” Alenko asked.

“It looks that way,” Shepard said. “Once this is done, I’m sending a file to Bureau Trimurti. We need to put some actual legal pressure on Kar’shan, or this is never going to end.”

“The Council won’t go for it,” said Alenko. “They already blame us for the Batarians quitting the Citadel completely.”

“We drive out their snakes and they don’t even call us saints for it,” Shepard sighed. “I’m sending the report anyway. We can’t let them keep trying this.”

“I’m with you Commander, I am,” said Alenko, before reaching out and touching Shepard’s vambrace. “But I don’t know if now is the time to be planning any big political plays. You’re under evaluation, remember?”

Shepard sighed. Alenko was right, which was a common enough occurrence that he really ought to be used to it by now. The airlock finished depressurizing and allowed the O-12 team outside, where Handelmann and Sadler were already waiting. Neither looked even remotely impatient, just another benefit of the genetic tinkering every Epsilon underwent upon being assigned to the unit.

“Still no word from our allied elements,” Shepard noted, after beckoning for Sadler to lead them out. He blinked a new channel open. “Shepard to Normandy, this is Commander Shepard to Normandy. Do you read?”

“We have you, Commander,” Captain Anderson’s voice crackled softly on the speakers. “Status report?”

“First torch is dark, repeat, first torch is dark. Three civilians recovered, all alive and in good health. Thirteen hostiles neutralized. Enemy identified as Batarian, sir. Repeat, Batarians are on X-57.”

He couldn’t hear Anderson’s long sigh, but he could hear the weariness in his voice when he next spoke.

“We’re getting reports from the Panoceanian detachment that they’ve successfully shut down torch three, Shepard,” Anderson said. “But the Invincible Army hasn’t said a word. Torch two is between you and the main facility.”

“Are we updating the operation, sir?” Shepard checked.

“Affirmative, Commander,” said Anderson. “Figure out what has the Yujingyu staying quiet, and provide assistance if necessary. Then advance to the main facility and put a stop to this madness.”

“Affirmative, Captain,” Shepard replied. “Commander Shepard out.”

Shepard checked the tacmap, pulling the projection up into sight. Torch two was another fifteen minutes north; a slight diversion from the northwestern direction of the facility, but near enough to count.

“Change of plans, people,” he called over the unit’s shared commlink. “The Invincible Army might be in hot water. We’re heading for torch two to see if they need any help.”

“The Yujingyu can’t handle their own problems?” Liuye sounded bitter, which didn’t surprise Shepard in the least; she’d grown up in the Jade Empire, and experienced the many wonders of its tangled and vicious bureaucracy firsthand.

“If we were facing danger, we’d hope for the same from them,” Shepard said. “Unity and cooperation, remember?”

Liuye sighed, but didn’t speak again. The rest followed suit, silently marching toward the distant torch. Its red glare was visible before the rest of the facility, an ominous glow on the horizon growing brighter and larger with each step. They came to the foot of the last hill between them and their target.

“We look before we leap,” Shepard said. “Handelmann, Alenko, you have point. Check the situation and report back.”

The Epsilon and Cyberghost both nodded, advancing up the hill silently. Neither was equipped with anything so advanced as Nihlus’ camouflage package, but both were trained in cover and concealment, with Handelmann in particular being notorious for his ability to appear where you least expected him. Shepard was fairly certain the man had figured out how to move through the Normandy’s life-support vents, which was a somewhat alarming concept he had yet to figure out exactly how to address.

Both crested the rise slowly and carefully, weapons in hand. Handelmann peeked first, then Alenko. Shepard tapped into Handelmann’s helmet-mounted camera, the Epsilon’s geometrically shaped geist welcoming him with a quiet blip. He stared at the sight before him for a long moment, before blinking the footage away.

“Shit,” he said. “O-12, get moving, and watch your fire. This is now a rescue mission.”

Chapter Text

||X-57, Asgard System, 4.2 hours until X-57 Impact Event||

Commander Shepard crested the hill with his multi-rifle already shouldered. Down below him the Yujingyu detachment of their little allied-assault were dying in the dust, half a dozen orange-clad bodies strewn across the field already. The ground was pockmarked with craters, what looked like subsurface detonations.

“They landed in a goddamn minefield,” Whitman muttered, before realizing he was on unit-wide comms and muting himself.

Indeed it was. The remaining Tiger Soldiers were scattered across the open ground, most of them laying prone in the dust to shoot from some small modicum of cover. It seemed as though a few had managed to cross the gap; Shepard saw one wrestling with a Batarian, knife in hand. Another had managed to reach the doorwell, where they lay bleeding in the cold atmosphere.

“O-12,” Shepard said, pointing to the facility. “Weapons free.”

He advanced more slowly here; a full-tilt sprint across a minefield felt like an excellent way to get blown to pieces. His armour was sturdier than the medium-strength hardsuits of the Tiger Soldiers, but not enough to survive a detonation which left a crater twice the size of a man. His multi-rifle was good out to 730 metres on average, at least when he was loading AP-T, but that didn’t mean it was accurate at such ranges. He fired in short, tight bursts, trying to force the Batarians down into whatever scant cover they’d managed to set up before the Tiger Soldiers’ arrival.

The Yujingyu had been savaged already, but their spirit seemed strong; upon seeing the blue and gold of the advancing SwordFor, the majority of them rallied, resuming their interrupted fire.

“Lieutenant, can you track the mine locations?” Shepard asked, but before Alenko could answer there was another flash of orange as one unlucky Tiger Soldier triggered a mine.

The explosion didn’t seem especially mine-like; the blast was largely directed downward, propelling broken ground upward in a shrapnel-blast of jagged stone and dust. Shepard shielded his faceplate with his forearm, feeling shards of rock no larger than fingers pepper off his armour and shields.

“That was no mine,” Liuye said over the comms. “Commander, orders?”

“Sir,” said Handelmann. “I recognize the pattern. These are blasting caps, for earthbreaking. The Batarians must have them set to proximity detonation.”

“Why the hell can mining charges be set to proximity detonation?” Whitman asked.

“Lieutenant,” Shepard repeated, glimpsing Alenko ducking low out of the corner of his eye.

“Thanks to the logic bomb, I can’t track their exact locations,” the older man grunted, one hand on his helmet. “Ugh… I can try to track the signal emissions, and guide you all through the safest passage. It’ll take me a minute to set up.”

“The Yujingyu don’t have a minute,” Shepard replied. “I’m closing.”

“Commander?”

Shepard ignored the Lieutenant’s worried reply, taking off at a sprint again. The gravity of X-57 was low… low enough, perhaps, for him to simply jump the minefield. It was a risky bid, but the Omega armour was designed to amplify his every motion, and here where everything was a fraction of its intended weight, it seemed likely he could clear the gap. He had no idea where the blasting caps were buried, or even where the field began. All he could do was guess.

Shepard breathed in, breathed out, and jumped.

He left the dusty earth of X-57 in a single smooth burst, aiming to arc himself up and over the entire minefield. He’d started his jump running at around ninety-seven kilometers an hour. Whether or not that was enough, he had no idea; any talent he had for mathematics ended at ballistic trajectory and velocity, and even that was eighty-five percent his geist and helmet processors. Whatever the case, he’d built up plenty of momentum, and his armour’s reinforced servos and fibre-bundles were more than capable of propelling him up and over the open ground.

He was met with two issues; the first was that, airborne, he couldn’t seek any sort of cover from enemy fire, and as such was little more than a giant flying target. For the second, he couldn’t risk firing his rifle or the kinetic energy generated was likely to shorten his jump significantly. This left him effectively defenseless as he hurtled through the air. On the bright side, the Batarians were under enough fire that he wasn’t overly concerned about their ability to shoot him down.

On the dimmer side of things, he’d miscalculated his jump angle, and instead of dropping down directly in front of the facility, it looked like he’d instead be landing in the middle of a cluster of Batarians. Shepard sighed, retrieving his multi-rifle as he began his long, drifting descent. He was less than fifty metres distant now, well within the rifle’s effective range.

Two of the Batarians ended up looking up when his shadow fell upon them. One was wearing a transparent faceplate; Shepard watched his thin lips move, no doubt trying to make some kind of statement, a warning to his fellows. Shepard sighted and fired, shredding his shields, before dropping with both feet on the other Batarian’s shoulders.

His weight bore the Batarian to the ground, the shield-less Batarian stumbling backward. Shepard raised a foot and stomped, crushing the downed Batarian’s faceplate, before flicking three quick shots into the other. A third fired at him from behind, shots winging off his shields and draining almost half their energy. Shepard twisted and dropped, the last of the Batarian’s salvo flying overhead as he dumped two bursts into the centre mass, shredding shield and armour. The last of the four rushed at him, a long curved knife in his hand.

Shepard rose and swayed away from the first cut, getting one hand on the knife-wielder’s wrist and wrenching him forward. His feet left the ground in the low gravity, leaving him without a foundation as Shepard raised his elbow and brought it down, slamming the Batarian against the dusty ground with a clean hit to the back of the neck. He used his boot to finish it; the sensation of the neck giving way under his heel was dreadfully satisfying.

He turned to the main fight, seeing the Tiger Soldier with the knife knelt triumphant and bloody over his enemy’s throat. Shepard fired over him, forcing another Batarian back into cover behind a few scattered boxes. He spared a glance right and saw the rest of his team advancing slowly through the minefield, gesturing to the scattered Tiger Soldiers.

Shepard’s geist finally got a lock on one of their system’s, and interfaced.

“This is Commander Shepard,” he said, the kneeling Tiger Soldier twisting to look at him. “What is the situation?”

Asking at this point was a mere formality, but the Tiger Soldier didn’t seem to mind. He snatched up his combi-rifle from where it had fallen on the ground, bounding over to Shepard’s position in a low lunging run, using one hand to propel himself along with both feet.

“Hǔ-Zhanshi Bui Yen, sir,” the man replied, his English clipped and precise. “Second squadron of the Tigers of the Yellow Banner.”

“Where’s your unit leader, soldier?” asked Shepard, still aiming at the opposite corner. He could see on his motion tracker that at least one more Batarian was hiding that way.

“Daoying Champasak is inside, sir,” Bui Yen said. “She ordered us to engage the enemy while she deactivated the asteroid engine.”

“Alenko, the Yujingyu commander went inside alone,” Shepard reported, switching channels again. “I’m going in after her. Secure the perimeter, then send the Deltas in after me. Tell Aldo to triage the surviving Tiger Soldiers.”

“On it, Commander,” the lieutenant replied.

The wounded Tiger Soldier laying in the doorwell had fallen still by the time Shepard reached her, blood soaking the grey dust in a brackish slurry all around her. Shepard opened the airlock with his elbow, checking her vitals with a blink. Dead. He nodded once at the body, before advancing into the prefab facility with his multi-rifle up.

He considered his method of entry. Standard breaching tactic called for him to engage methodically, slowly advancing through the facility, but if there were as many Batarians here as there had been in the other building that would just leave him surrounded and outgunned. He had no idea where the Daoying was; if she was cloaked, he risked friendly-fire when a suspicious looking shadow piqued his interest. If she was uncloaked, she was heavily outnumbered and needed assistance immediately.

The airlock shut behind him, the room flooding with human-appopriate atmosphere. Shepard breathed in, breathed out, steadying his mind. He already knew the general layout ahead of him. He’d practiced in facilities just like this a hundred times, and he’d cleared one just minutes before. This was easy. Routine, even.

The airlock beeped as the pressurization concluded. Shepard hit the button, the door slid open, and he advanced with his rifle shouldered. There was no makeshift corridor here; he stepped out into an open floor, with the bulk of the containers lined along the far end making a strange sort of wall. There were dead Batarians scattered here and there, riddled with the sort of gaping wounds that implied shotgun usage. Others were down with almost pinprick holes in their armour, faces bloated and blood drooling from gaping mouths. Breaker ammunition for sure, the sort of hyper-lethal neurotoxins that would normally be banned under the Concilium Conventions.

Fortunately for Daoying Champasak, Batarians who identified as Hegemon nationals weren’t protected under the Concilium Conventions, meaning she was free to lethally infect as many of them as she saw fit, so long as they shot first.

Shepard’s motion tracker was lighting up like a strobe, flashes of red appearing all over his left-hand side, but he saw nothing there. Then, with the sudden crash of a shotgun’s booming retort, a Batarian appeared, stumbling backward from around the far end of the container-wall with a hole in his chest the size of a basketball. Automatic rifles rattled and cracked, and Shepard headed for the opposite end of the wall.

He rounded the corner to find himself facing down three Batarians, who had their backs to him with weapons trained on a small crate halfway down the wall. It was thoroughly battered and chipped from their weapons fire already. Shepard snapped a burst of AP-T rounds into the back of the one of them, ducking back around the edge of the container at the wall’s end when they turned to return fire at him. He licked his lips inside his helmet, waited for his rifle to finish cooling, and switched it to full-auto.

Once their own fire ceased, Shepard counted to two, turned the corner, and began to spray. The multi-rifle was a wonderfully advanced weapon; his own was a FrancoGermanique SGA-II, one of the best on the market, capable of loading dual ammunition blocks into a rapid-rotation chamber, venting heat through the bottom well to avoid shimmer around the sights, and even bio-locking to his specific genetic code through a mechanism in the grip.

It was also capable of propelling one-hundred and twenty-five rounds downrange in just a few seconds, before automatically seizing the mechanism to begin heat-dumping before a critical state could be reached. The result was the closest thing one could get to a machine gun without actually equipping a Spitfire or Mark12. It tore through the tightly-packed Batarians like a buzzsaw, shredding their shields and perforating their light armour with over a dozen holes each. Shepard stopped firing and the gun hissed as it cooled, the three pirates dropping in crumpled heaps like puppets now absent dangling strings.

His motion tracker was silent, but that only meant nobody was running around. Slow, careful motions wouldn’t trigger it, such as creeping down an access ramp with rifle in hand. Most Batarian pirates weren’t that clever, of course, but that just meant the exception was doubly dangerous. Shepard didn’t panic, instead clearing his throat.

“Daoying Champasak?” he called, voice-modulator turning his words into a heavy rumble. “Commander Shepard, Bureau Aegis. Are you injured?”

There was no response for a long moment, until the air shimmered and an orange-armoured figure appeared, leaning heavily against the edge of the container wall. The Daoying helmet was vaguely avian in shape, with a forward slope at the from the top of the head down, red camera-lenses inset to the sides. The rest was the usual sloped orange Yujingyu design, besides the plasticky sheen of the under-armour bodysuit, draped over the legs like a sort of waistcoat.

The legs themselves were mechanical, a hallmark of the Daoying; they were the Blade Raptors, the Invincible Army’s elite command corps. Each recruit, upon graduation from basic training to the Yingwo Academy, had their legs severed at the hip and replaced with advanced mechanical prosthetics. It was a mark of absolute devotion to the Jade Empire. Champasak’s weren’t looking so good; the right was sparking from a hole in the armour plating above the knee, presumably where a Batarian bullet had winged something important.

“Champasak, Doaying Lieutenant of the Raptors of the Yellow Banner.” Her helmet’s modulators contorted her voice into a quiet rasp that carried well in the quiet prefab interior. “What are you doing here? Your target was the first engine.”

“The first torch is dead,” Shepard replied, stepping over dead Batarians as he walked to her. “Your unit didn’t pass on a report, so we switched headings to come and check on your progress. Good thing we did too.”

“The objective was still within reach,” Champasak said, shaking her head. “Your assistance is welcome, but wasteful.”

Shepard bristled.

“There’s a lot of bodies on the ground outside,” he said. “You’re down almost half your detachment.”

“A risk they understood long before they donned that armour,” said Champasak. “No war is without sacrifice, Commander Shepard. You, among all those who bear the blade, ought to know that.”

She lurched forward, pushing off the container wall and moving as to walk past him. Shepard extended an arm and caught her, turning and pressing her against the wall opposite. Her head tilted, the scowl almost audible.

“Your leg is injured, Champasak,” he said. “Stay here. I’ll clear the rest of the facility.”

“Alone?” She scoffed. “I am wounded, Commander, not infirm. Omni-gel will mend this swiftly enough.”

“Then mend it,” Shepard said, before turning. “I’m going to sweep the second floor. Don’t get yourself killed.”

He left the stubborn woman to apply the miracle of omni-gel to her ravaged leg, raising his rifle to his shoulder and advancing for the access ramp. He peeked the corner, one eye on the reticle and the other on his motion tracker. Still no sign of Batarians, nor any sound. No pirates could move this quietly… either they were hunkering down in the office, or they were waiting in ambush on the gantryway above. Neither was ideal.

He reached the top of the ramp, and paused. The motion tracker was all blue. He heard nothing. He bit the inside of his cheek and worried it with his molars a moment, willing himself to focus. If he went left, to the office, he’d be exposed to the spillover of the gantryway. If he went right, the office would be at his back. Alternatively, he was overthinking and the Batarians were all dead. He breathed in. He considered his next play.

He breathed out, and he moved.

He advanced and swept right, then left. Halfway through the turn his motion tracker lit up, as well as several other warning icons as two electronic attacks hit him simultaneously. The first was an attempt at a petrification effect, which his Biotechnic Shields swallowed whole. The second was a sabotage, which was far more successful. His HUD crackled, his armour’s systems automatically shutting down his connection to the rifle to avoid any spillover. The vents started dumping heat, but for all its majesty the SGA-II had one fatal weakness; once it hit heat cap, it took almost six seconds to cool completely.

Six seconds was too long, especially with the third attack incoming. Assault rifles chattered from the office doorway, pinging off his shields. He took a one-two step back, but the petrification effect had only been repulsed in the major systems. His ankle servo locked, a tiny thing, but enough to make him stumble. That stumble got him shot in the side by a sniper rifle, which cracked his shields with a worrying ding.

Shepard bit back a grunt of pain and threw out his left arm, clenching his fist and barking an order to the Omega armour’s inbuilt VI.

“Fire Riotstopper.”

The canister loaded into his left vambrace cracked open at the approved nozzle point, and after half a second the entire right side of the gantryway was flooded with the rapidly setting grey-blue adhesive foam which had put an end to countless public disturbances, bar fights and perp-escapes across the Human Sphere and beyond. The Batarians who had smelled blood in the water and advanced from cover were immediately engulfed in the tide, their weapons seizing up as heat vents and barrels were clogged with foam.

He caught himself on the edge of the door, one hand crushing the pale metal of the corner. His left hand fell to his hip, where he had a standard Kessler pistol waiting for draw. Before he could pull it and turn, Champasak made her entrance, the talons on her synthetic feet digging into the metal of the containers and allowing her to effectively run vertically in the low gravity, boarding shotgun in her hands. She lept upward and over, a graceful arc that put her upside down beside the two Batarian sappers who were frantically switching from omni-tools to pistols.

The boarding shotgun blew one’s head clean off, shields eradicated by a solid slug fired in hit-mode. The other managed to get his pistol out, extending his arm like a fool and losing his hand when her right leg completed its arc, slicing deeply into armour and flesh with a monomolecular blade that hooked and caught in the wrist. The pistol was cut cleanly in two as the Batarian was dragged down to one knee, hand pinned to the ground.

Champasak didnt even check before she twisted, the hooked blade on her other heel slicing cleanly through the armoured bodysuit and slitting the Batarian’s throat. She concluded her entrance by sliding into cover behind one of the same crates she’d just violently liberated from the Batarians.

Shepard’s helmet pinged a happy shade of blue to alert him to his rifle’s now-functional state. He raised his pistol and snapped a volley of five shots down the gantryway anyway, forcing the Batarians left in the office to duck back around the corners. He grabbed his rifle from the ground, the cycling system whirring softly.

“You can still surrender,” he advised, his voice booming through the confined prefab. “Throw your weapons out here and come out with hands up.”

They didn’t answer. Shepard rolled his eyes.

“Alternatively, I can storm in there and tear each of you in half, one by one,” he offered. “I prefer the first option. Less cleanup for the maintenance team and I.”

“Stupid humans!” one of the Batarians inside shouted back. “You can’t win! If you come any closer, we’ll destroy that console! Without it, you can’t deactivate the fusion torch!”

Shepard scowled. He always hated it when criminals made good points. He thought about the situation for a moment; Riotstopper was already expended, and he only had one more canister that was still on his back. No grenades on hand, and he doubted he could risk an explosion anyway. Storming the room was the best play, but if they got so much as one bullet into the control system, they would have to waste precious minutes or hours getting Alenko into the local network and finding a shutdown protocol for the torch outside.

“Commander Shepard,” Champasak’s voice crackled over a private channel. “I can get into the room.”

“Your cloak won’t pass that many sets of eyes,” Shepard replied. “They’re already jumpy, and you already used it. They’ll be watching for a shimmer.”

She was silent for a moment. Shepard swallowed. He blinked an overwatch map into existence; his team had crossed the minefield, and were waiting outside. If he flooded the building with O-12 and Tiger Soldiers it would only increase the pirates’ paranoia.

Flooding the building. He frowned. He thought for a moment.

“Champasak,” he said. “I have an idea. Cloak up and move toward the door. Slowly.”

She bristled audibly at the sudden order, but still obeyed, which was pretty typical Yu-Jing behaviour. Shepard reached behind himself and grabbed the second canister of Riotstopper foam, holding it tight in one armoured hand. Shepard and his sister had inherited a rather extensive list of bad habits from their peers back on Earth, including all manner of criminal actions ranging from the obscenely dangerous to the stupidly petty.

“Have you ever set off a can of insulation foam inside someone’s bedroom?” he asked, unloading the Riotstopper canister from his wrist, keeping his pistol trained on the door. “Or does Yu-Jing still dislike children enjoying themselves?”

“What are you talking about?” She sounded confused, which was good, because Shepard had no idea what he would say if she had somehow responded in the affirmative.

“We need to get all four of them locked down at the same time,” Shepard began. “My Riotstopper could do it, but I can’t get inside the room without them shooting the console. But this canister is full of compressed foam. If you can get it inside and cut it open, it would fill the room.”

“Would that not destroy the console as well?” she asked.

“Riotstopper foam is completely inert, no effect on electronics; it hardens and immobilizes everything it’s covering,” he said. “If we get it on the console, the console will just be harder to shoot.”

She considered the plan for a moment, shifting back and forth from foot to foot. The bladed talons on her heels scraped softly against the metal flooring. He wondered if she was worrying her lip, or perhaps chewing on her cheek like he was prone to do.

“Rooting a plan in a childhood prank seems unwise,” she said at last. “Have you no alternative?”

“None worth discussing,” Shepard replied.

She stilled.

“Very well.” She took the canister from him and vanished. “Stand by.”

He couldn’t see what she did next; all he could see was the Batarians lighting up his motion tracker when they suddenly stirred, moments before two cleanly severed halves of the canister appeared in the air, tumbling to the ground amidst a hail of Riotstopper foam. Champasak herself appeared a second after, clinging to the ceiling with her bladed feet and largely devoid of the sticky blue material rapidly expanding and covering the four Batarians.

A shot rang out. Shepard burst into motion, but didn’t enter the room until a moment after when the foam faded to a lighter shade, marking that it had dried. Pushing through dry Riotstopper foam was always a strange experience; like trudging through marshmallow fluff, or perhaps the interior of a very soft loaf of bread. Had it not been for the Omega armour he would have gotten stuck for certain, as the Batarians were.

“Alenko,” he blinked the comm channel open. “The facility is clear. We need you in here to shut this thing down.”

“Right away, Commander,” the LT replied.

A few minutes later Shepard and Champasak stood outside the office, Alenko diligently working his way through the shutdown procedure inside. Down on the main floor Aldo was going over the wounded Tiger Soldiers, injecting bullet holes with clotting agents and in one man’s case tourniquetting a severed leg. Champasak was watching them, but whatever she was feeling was well hidden by a face-masking helmet and years of Yujingyu conditioning.

Shepard leaned against the guardrail beside her, his armour making the entire structure groan slightly, but he’d been thrown against a similar structure by a biotic throw during Omega training and had barely dented the metal.

“Thinking or resting?” he asked.

“Damning,” she said, and she looked at him with those false red eyes, the sudden twist of her head itself a birdlike motion fitting her armour’s shape. “I have lost ten men. My superiors will not be pleased.”

“And the men?” Shepard asked.

“They…” She hesitated, for the first time in their sparse few minutes knowing one another. “They knew the risks.”

“We all do,” Shepard said. “But knowing doesn’t make the pain go away.”

“Anticipation lessens shock,” she replied, before her open hands curled into tight fists, and she leaned on her knuckles and stared down at the ten men she had left, of the twenty with which she’d deployed. “And yet…”

“You feel conflicted.” Shepard touched her on the shoulder, and to his surprise she didn’t flinch away. Daoying, he reminded himself. Blade Raptors with blood like ice water.

“I did not expect this,” she admitted, voice softening as her head fell. “I had hoped providence would favour me. Though praying for beginner’s luck is scarcely providential in and of itself, I suppose.”

Shepard blinked behind the helmet.

“Beginner’s luck?” he asked.

“My first mission,” she replied, and she sounded much further away than she truly was. “My auspicious beginnings.”

The sheer audacity of the Jade Empire shouldn’t have shocked Shepard. He knew the bureaucracy and political machinations of Yu-Jing were nigh-incomprehensible to any outsider not suitably educated in their labyrinthine systems of governance. He knew they were proud, deeply and incorrigibly proud, both of themselves and of their vaunted post as inheritors of the great Eastern Spirit. He also knew their proclivity for insane decisions, rooted entirely in paranoia and the desperate need to one-up their eternal rival in Panoceania.

“They sent you because they wanted to prove a point,” Shepard said. “They wanted to make you out as a natural born hero.”

“I failed,” she replied. “And now…”

She shrugged.

“Svalarheima perhaps,” she guessed, and her voice faltered, and her head was downcast and Shepard had been an older brother for most of his life and so knew when someone was crying. “I…”

She folded against the railing, sliding down to hide behind it. Shepard wondered briefly about her age; Daoying were typically graduates of two academies, the general and then the advanced school. But if she had only attended Yingwo, she could have been as young as nineteen. If this was her first mission, she couldn’t have been far above twenty-four. She was curled in a ball, prosthetic legs tucked against her chest, head down. She wasn’t sobbing; just breathing, choking and swallowing on air.

It was a noble fight, but she was losing. Shepard descended to one knee and held her by the shoulder. He was hardly qualified to provide battlefield psychotherapy, considering his crisis-response training was centred solely on the act of killing those responsible for the crisis and saving those not. This was more the department for Epsilon units or Bureau Athena personnel; he was always more a sword than a pen.

And yet, the part of him that had dragged his sister through more than a few episodes of soul-wracking psychosis in the dark of the night was always triggered by young people crying, be they innocent redheads wrestling with the voices in their heads or inexperienced battlefield leaders mourning the first casualties under their command. So he held her shoulder, and when she turned and pressed herself against the underside of his jutting breastplate he wrapped an arm around her for a long few moments.

“It should have been someone better,” she managed, and the modulator of her helmet did not suit her grieving whisper in the slightest.

“We don’t get to make those calls,” Shepard told her. “We only choose what happens when we hit the ground. Everything before? That’s over our heads. Hand gets dealt and we play what they give us.”

“We could play better,” she said.

“Anyone could.” He nodded as he said it. “And you will. Next time. This time, you played the bad hand and lost your chips. People died. You’ll keep that with you for the rest of your life, and it’s good you will because it means the next time, you’ll be more prepared. All you can do now is pray they forgive you, in this life or their next.”

“We do not pray,” she said. “It is forbidden.”

“Everyone prays,” Shepard said, and for a moment he saw Sister Elinya Voster, bleeding from the neck and choking on her final penitent whispers. “Foxholes, atheists, the old spiel. You’re dug in deep now, and you’re only gonna go deeper. This is the war. It doesn’t end.”

He offered her a hand, as he had Elinya all those years ago on a bloodstained Paradiso street. She stared at it for a moment, that blue and black gauntlet. She reached up and held it, and he lifted her to her feet while she stared at him. Her head tilted forward slightly, another avian affectation that was starting to make her look more cute than fearsome the longer he observed it.

“Go lead your tigers,” he told her. “This mission isn’t over yet.”

He vaulted the guard rail, falling to the first floor with a light thud. His troops were waiting; Sergeant Barrows already had his Kappa team dispersed throughout the prefab, correctly guessing at the need for a garrison. Aldo was still working on the wounded Yujingyu, while the rest of the O-12 personnel were standing by in and around the facility.

“Commander,” Alenko approached from behind. “Torch is offline and the Batarians are cuffed. I managed to deactivate the blasting caps as well. Are we ready to move?”

“Ready as we’ll ever be,” Shepard replied, waving over Sergeant Liuye as he spoke. “We’re heading out in three. I need to figure out how we’re doing for gear.”

“Sir,” Liuye approached as Alenko slipped away, saluting. “Delta unit is still functioning at peak capacity, no injuries or equipment lost.”

“Good work, sergeant,” said Shepard. “But I need a full runner. How are you for grenades and pack fuel?”

“Three grenades expended outside, one per trooper,” she said. “Packs are a little over half. Our initial descent was mostly drift and glide, we only needed to steer. This rock has just enough gravity to make lift-off a burn, especially since we don’t have any fancy synth-muscles or servos. Sir.”

“How’s Aldo?” Shepard asked.

“She’s running low,” Liuye confessed. “And Handelmann’s saying he and Sadler’s multi-specs are almost fried from Asgard’s solar radiation.”

“Low on medicine and blind as bats against anything with camo.” Shepard shook his head. “This day’s not getting any better. Hopefully the Panoceanians are faring better for equipment. Is Hosha’s panzerfaust still good to go?”

“It’s a dummy system sir, we could hit it with a rock and it’d be good to go,” said Liuye, before she chuckled. “Hosha hasn’t used it yet. Do we think the four-eyes’ll have armour?”

“Better safe than sorry,” Shepard said, one of those old fatherly adages that often got him laughed at by his younger troops. Liuye was good enough to stifle it at least. “But without the Kappas, we’re down to seven personnel, and without MSVs Handelmann and Sadler are only half as good as they could be.”

“Handelmann’s better than that sir,” said Liuye, and Shepard nodded. “Besides, this was always gonna be a rough one. Better we punch through and keep moving, like you taught us.”

Shepard chewed on the inside of his cheek for a moment, before shrugging.

“Get your Haris together and standby to move,” he ordered her. “Those Batarians aren’t going to rout themselves.”

Sergeant Barrows took the standby and defend order as well as he took every order, saluting and nodding and making a very concerted effort not to complain about being left behind. He was a senior among his peers, but he was still a Kappa, and Kappas craved action. At least he wasn’t trying to convince the Deltas to stay back; those three were already crowding into the airlock, shouldering each other and talking in low, excited voices.

Alenko flanked Shepard as he entered the airlock, rifle in his hands. The two stood side by side as the pressure drained, Alenko’s fibre-bundles glowing again. Shepard tapped him once on the elbow, and he stirred.

“Still trying to sweep up the logic-bomb debris, Commander,” he reported. “It’s… strange. I think there’s someone else trying the same thing from somewhere else. I keep getting brief glimpses of a halo.”

“I’m sure the PanO have a cyberwar specialist,” Shepard said. “They’re likely doing the same thing you are.”

“No, it’s…” Alenko shook his head, but spoke no more, distracted.

When the doors opened Shepard was outside first. He stepped over a dead Batarian slumped in the doorway, before looking at the distant ridgeline. Handelmann was barely visible, a blue dot half-covered in grey asteroid dust that slowly rose to its feet and waved.

Shepard gestured to the northwest, toward the main facility. Handelmann nodded, a barely visible shift of the yellow atop the blue, before Sadler appeared from the dust as well and the pair began hiking toward the central facility. Shepard, Alenko and the Delta unit followed, with the remaining Yujingyu forces shortly behind.

It was twenty minutes of steady marching before they found the Panoceanians. Akalis, a group of ten, standing by in their matte blue battle armour and green-decorated helmets. They were waiting on a low ridge, overlooking the main facility’s squat entryway. One was tinkering with a squat, spider-like blue drone with four legs, roughly half the height of a man but far wider.

“Allied units in site,” Handelmann reported, a few moments before one of the Akalis looked up to see the O-12 detachment, and began signalling to their squadmates.

They met the reinforcements with cheers and handshakes, commandos clapping palms and forearms with the Delta squad and Alenko. Shepard searched for their leader, who found him first and beckoned him aside. Their haloes mingled, giving them a private communications channel, and the man bowed shallowly at the waist.

“Sergeant-Major Kirpal Singh,” the man introduced himself, a hint of aged gruffness in his smooth, accented tones. “I am the operational commander of this band. You are Shepard, no?”

“I am,” said Shepard. “How did your assault go?”

“Well enough; we suffered two dead and four wounded. I left four more to guard them, and came swiftly to this place where we could overlook the position ahead.” Singh spoke quickly, but with a relaxed tone that made his report feel almost conversational. “I see you are fewer than anticipated?”

“I had to leave ten at the prior locations,” Shepard replied. “The Invincible Army had a rough landing, heavy casualties. The Batarians had mined the perimeter of the facility. They ended up landing right in the middle of it.”

Singh winced, a tiny motion of the head. He made a sympathetic sound, but before he could say anything more Champasak joined them, her own Tiger Soldiers less enthusiastic in greeting the Akalis than the O-12 forces had been. Nods were exchanged, terse greetings, but the endless rivalry between the Hyperpower and the Jade Empire reached from the highest towers to the lowliest of grunts. Champasak herself nodded respectfully to Singh and Shepard both.

“Champasak, Daoying Lieutenant of the Raptors of the Yellow Banner,” she recited the greeting as if it were scripted, which knowing Yu Jing protocol it likely was, before looking up at Shepard. “What is the cause for the delay? We are all here, and time is of the essence.”

“The Batarians likely have hostages,” Singh said, before turning and pointing to the facility. “But there is another challenge before we might contend with that. The facility’s defenses are online.”

Shepard and Champasak both looked, seeing the same thing; multiple rocket turrets upright and scanning, searching for targets. They were stout, blocky Yu Jing models, painted yellow and green. Champasak swore in Laotian, which Shepard’s translator took a moment to translate as “dog fuck your family”, followed by several different slang terms for female genitalia.

“The logic bomb means any kind of MayaNet connection won’t work,” Shepard noted, shaking his head. “We’ll have to take them out.”

“We have no anti-armour equipment,” Singh replied. “Only spitfires, combi rifles and boarding shotguns.”

“We are the same, though I have two flamethrowers left,” Champasak noted, glancing at her troops in their awkward standoff with the Akalis. “Perhaps a Pitcher?”

“None on hand,” Singh said. “Both of our hackers are injured.”

The three of them stood in a circle for a moment, before Shepard snapped his fingers. His gheist relayed the sound to the other two, who turned to look at him.

“Alenko is a cyber-warfare expert,” he said. “And you have an Armbot. I’m guessing it has a Repeater?”

Singh thought for a moment, before nodding. Champasak looked between the two, visibly confused. Shepard gestured to the drone, which was standing by in mute, dog-like silence, its head canted slightly to one side.

“The turrets will be aiming at heat signatures,” he said. “And the Armbot runs cold. If it has a Repeater, Alenko can use it to boost his own signal, and connect to the facility from here.”

“The distance is too great,” Champasak noted, gesturing to the valley between them and the facility. “Panoceanian Repeaters have a maximum range of sixteen metres, same as a standard electronic warfare rig. You’d still have to get him within thirty-two metres of the facility.”

“Alenko has a Pitcher,” Shepard replied. “It was a gift from an OSS Danava he… assisted.”

Both his fellow officers (or NCO, in the case of Singh) looked at him. Shepard shrugged, before continuing.

“That gives us forty-eight metres,” he said. “I can draw the turrets’ fire by cooking off my synthetic muscle fibres, and I’m too small for them to accurately predict my heading.”

“Too risky,” Singh shook his head. “It would be better if we all drew fire, scattered across the valley.”

“Nobody else moves fast enough,” Shepard replied. “In this gravity I can outstrip some groundcars, and I can turn faster than any of them. Six turrets, firing at the same predictive angles, I can calculate the headings and evade the blasts.”

“This is madness,” Singh protested, while Champasak stared at Shepard with what he imagined was either shock or awe, possibly both. “Commander, it is a death sentence. Just one rocket could kill you instantly.”

“Then I’ll have to dodge them all,” Shepard replied. “The rest of you, stay back until Alenko gives the all-clear. When the doors open, we need to go in hard and fast. I’ll take point.”

Singh looked at Champasak, as if expecting her to back up his arguments. The Daoying was still staring. Shepard reached over and touched the smaller man on the shoulder, looking down to meet his eye. Singh’s were barely visible through the tiny lenses of his helmet. Unlike the Batarians, he knew where to find Shepard’s eyes, and met them with earnest concern that reminded Shepard of some of the best men he’d ever served under.

“Sergeant-Major,” he said, his voice gentler now. “Don’t worry. I can do this.”

Singh stared for a moment longer, then nodded once.

“Go,” he said. “And may the One Creator guard your soul.”

Shepard nodded, before walking past the man. He spoke with Alenko, who didn’t like the plan; not for his own sake, naturally, because Kaidan Alenko was one of those rare few men who genuinely did not care what happened to him, so long as those around him would make it and the mission would be completed. He was worried for Shepard, which was his second-favourite pastime after watching Aristeia on the MayaNet.

Shepard gave him the same reassurance he gave Singh, which didn’t work as well on Alenko because years of exposure had partially immunized him to the Commander’s natural charisma. But he couldn’t argue with the narrow rationale of the plan, and so with a nod and a beleaguered sigh the Cyberghost began preparing a shutdown package.

Shepard stepped to the edge of the ridgeline, ordering his VI to begin overheating the muscle coils. Before he could take those first steps, however, there was a shimmer and a quantronic spasm as Nihlus materialized next to him, clawed hands folded behind his back.

“This is a bold plan, Commander,” the Turian said. “Is it wise?”

“Wisdom has its place,” Shepard replied. “But sometimes you need to leap before you think, or you’ll waste all your time wondering.”

“Boldness is to be tempered with caution,” Nihlus said. “Can you do this? Do you genuinely believe that? Or is the Lion of Paradiso overestimating himself based on the realization that half the galaxy already knows his name?”

Shepard thought about that for a moment. Only a moment. Then he shook his head.

“I was born this way,” he replied. “I came out of the womb bullheaded, Nihlus. Is that going to a problem for the Council?”

Nihlus chuckled, a strange dry crackling sound in his avian throat. He turned away, disappearing into the haze of Asgard’s pale sun again, but before he went he said something that made Shepard smile.

“I hope so.”

The Turian vanished. Shepard cracked his neck, and felt his suit get warmer and warmer around him. He looked down at the valley, looked over at Alenko loading his Pitcher with a deployable Repeater and the Armbot where it stood at the edge of the ridge. He looked at the turrets. Under his helmet, he didn’t smile. But he did close his eyes a moment, before breathing out and breathing in again, long and measured.

Then he nodded once, and ran into the fire once again.

Chapter Text

|| X-57, Asgard System, 3.2 hours until X-57 Impact Event ||

Suicide missions had never bothered Jonathan Shepard, mostly because he didn’t think there was any such thing. A mission was a mission, and soldiers strove to accomplish them. Living and dying were impartial to the ultimate point that every mission had an aspect of danger, be it walking a beat on Concilium Prima or an interdiction assault on a PMC’s private headquarters. There was always the chance of a lucky shot winging you right in the blindside, where your armour was weak and your body was soft. To think otherwise was childish.

So Shepard treated every mission like it could be his last. It was why he’d kept winning; at Beckenstein, at Paradiso, aboard ships like the Argent Veil. It was why his men would follow him into any hell he chose, because they knew he’d done it before and that he would damn well do it a hundred times again. In a world where the human soul could be replicated, stored like any other data and backed up, where his body could be regrown and his life returned any time, any way…

What had he to fear from death? Nothing. The reaper was an empty husk; humanity had beaten it down and stolen the scythe from its skeletal grasp. Death wasn’t the danger. The danger was failure, defeat, the lives of others less fortunate than he. So Commander Jonathan Shepard was unbothered by the dangers at hand, insofar as they concerned his body; it was his mission he worried for.

So he ran, into the fire. The missile turrets locked onto him with sharp focus, little red lights flickering on. That was the warning, the signal to any approaching hostile that they were seen, known and soon to be dead if they did not turn away. Normally they would have been scrambled by the logic bomb the Batarians had dropped; the fact they functioned at all showed the Batarians had known a human response was imminent, and did not trust their own strength of arms to keep them safe.

He ran like the wind, feet pounding little craters into the stone and kicking up a cloud of dust. X-57 wasn’t particularly ferric, something he resented in minority because it meant the dust wouldn’t scramble any magnetic scans and locks by virtue of being mostly iron. All it could do was hide his shape, which the turrets hardly cared about; it was his heat and speed that interested them.

Good thing he wanted to be interesting, then. The first turret fired some four seconds after acquiring, and Shepard juked to the left and ran at a diagonal while the rocket sailed through the empty air and blasted a small crater into the already pitted surface of the moon six metres to Shepard’s left. The shaped charge didn’t produce much of a blast radius, thankfully; he twisted and ran the other way as another rocket launched.

He ran the numbers in his head. The turrets were Yujingyu Hwacha models, automatic systems with a payload of twelve each. That was two, of seventy-two. The second missile missed more widely, as Shepard scrambled for the far wall of the valley, only to turn and cut sharp down the edge. The third and fourth missiles both detonated in his wake, predicting his turn but not his speed. The fifth launcher spat a shot, and Shepard turned and ran the other way again, sprinting through the smoke of the last two and feeling the wake of the fifth missile passing by him.

The sixth missile shot too long, Shepard coming to a sudden dead halt. The other turrets locked onto him, but didn’t shoot; Yujingyu programmers weren’t that stupid. The turrets would fire one at a time again, waiting for each change of direction and angle. They would gradually learn his speed, his turning rate, sharpening their predictions with each shot fired. Dummy models programmed to learn were always annoying. Shepard knew it had to be a dummy system; no aspect of Aleph would permit itself to fire on a human.

Alenko shot him a single ping, alerting him that his part of the plan was beginning. Shepard ran. He cut forward, then left, then sharply to the right. Three missiles fired, each in a tight group he quickly outstripped with a burst straight toward the launchers. The fourth missile went completely wide, firing into the distance as it failed to turn quickly enough to account for his new heading. The fifth fired ahead of him and Shepard twisted, one hand scraping the ground as he forced his momentum to shift.

The low gravity was working against him here; turning was harder when the ground was less interested in holding onto your feet. He had to dip low, use three points of contact, or he’d drift another few feet before managing to alter his momentum. The last missile detonated only a few metres behind him, his backward-skid nearly carrying him into the blast before its kinetic force shoved him away. The sixth missile fired automatically and Shepard dove, using his hands and feet to scramble along the stone ground as it detonated.

There wasn’t much dignity in this, though he didn’t doubt at least somebody on the ridge was watching in rapt attention. Champasak perhaps; she seemed to find him worth watching, though he didn’t doubt that was due mostly to the fame. Paradiso had made him a household name.

The missiles repeated, and Shepard moved in a much tighter circle now, keeping them as far from Alenko’s makeshift Repeater network as he could. Some tiny, idiotic corner of his brain demanded he at least try to catch one of the missiles, which was entirely doable within the narrowest margins of success he could imagine. If he had adrenal stims he could probably make it work; unfortunately the Omega armour frame wasn’t equipped with an auto-dispensary, and Shepard had never liked adrenal stims to begin with. They made his teeth taste funny.

Eighteen down. Fifty-four to go, which was not a promising prospect considering how close some of the impacts were getting. The system wasn’t so dumb any more; as he’d predicted, it was getting better and better at figuring out his maneuvers. He needed some breathing room.

“Hosha,” he said, opening a channel with the Deltas. “Panzerfaust out, standby to fire. Aim for the centremost turret.”

“On it, Commander.” Hosha was the youngest of the Deltas, having been thrown into their unit only a few months prior by a twist of poor fortune; his predecessor, Adjit, had misjudged the height of a metal spar mid-jump and very thoroughly snapped his neck. By the time they’d gotten him back to the Normandy’s med-bay full-body paralysis had left him quite unable to serve. Hosha had been forwarded almost direct from the Delta training camp on Mars.

Now Shepard was relying on him to keep this little dance performance going a little longer. He backpedalled hard, the turrets struggling with his sudden shifting and swaying. Another rocket passed overhead, and he dropped low to gallop forward again. Over his head a different projectile flew directly toward the turrets.

Hosha missed. Shepard shouldn’t have been surprised; it was an incredibly long shot, over two-hundred metres with a pop-shot rocket tube designed for 100 metres or less. It went wide by a damn narrow margin as well, its contrail skimming the edge of the designated turret. Hosha swore over the mic before announcing a reload. Shepard said nothing, scrambling to evade another rocket.

“Almost in, Jon,” Alenko reported, his voice frantic. “Thirty seconds.”

Shepard wasn’t sure he had thirty seconds. It felt like he was dancing somewhere between three and fifteen, depending on how quickly Hosha could throw another shot. He must have looked a damn fool to Singh and the rest, dancing and diving around like this.

He ran straight for a few moments, before twisting. The next rocket nearly took him in the back, the shockwave making him stumble. His geist screamed a warning; he was in the line of fire for the next rocket. He bit down hard on the inside of his left cheek, desparate for adrenaline. The turret squared its aim.

Then it swivelled, as a sudden conflagration erupted on the far side of the valley. All of them did, focusing on the newer and far more intense heat signature.

Shepard watched as Champasak sprinted across the open valley, spraying gouts of fire all over from the underbarrels of two combi-rifles. The turrets were frantically switching targets, firing shots almost at random as they tried to figure out exactly what to shoot at in the now target-rich environment. Shepard rose to his feet, the synthetic muscles of his armour cooling now that he had stilled for a little while.

Champasak had a problem, however; the flamethrowers had limited range, and she wasn’t anywhere near as fast as Shepard. In burst, perhaps, but she wasn’t stacked up with the sort of performance-enhancing equipment that Shepard was enjoying the many benefits of. Each rocket impact was tight on her heels, and she wasn’t able to outpace them like he could.

Shepard didn’t think. He just ran. He hit her and scooped her off her feet and kept running, dodging between patches of burning ground, carrying Champasak on his shoulder with all the grace and dignity he could muster. She was almost weightless, which was good because the turrets were still focusing their fire on the area he was now running through. She hosed down the ground behind them, and when Alenko announced a final few seconds on the clock Shepard threw his head back and roared into a comm channel he’d forgotten was live before leaping into the air.

And for the second time that day Commander Shepard flew.

The ground he left behind erupted from half a dozen simultaneous impacts, the combined kinetic force throwing him even higher into the sky. Champasak on his shoulder twisted and slid down until he was holding her against his side, one arm wrapped around his shoulders and the other dangling free. The two made quite a sight at the apex of their arc, orange and blue-clad angels descending gently toward the ground.

Alenko announced his success, the turrets shutting down and falling still, their remaining rockets now aimed at the ground. Shepard and Champasak hit the ground a few moments later, Shepard gently setting her down at his side. That she held onto him for a few moments afterward didn’t escape his notice. Eventually, almost reluctantly, she pulled away.

“Thanks for the save,” he said on the private channel they’d established earlier. “I thought they had me for a moment.”

“That’s just one,” she said, before glancing up toward the rest of the soldiers, who were descending the ridge rapidly. “I owe you four more.”

Five injured Tiger Soldiers, he recalled. He nodded.

“Let’s get back to it,” he said, taking his multi-rifle off his hip. “This is the final stretch.”

They convened with the rest of the task force. They were twenty-eight strong, advancing on the central facility with weapons up. The Tiger Soldiers took point, behind Shepard at the speartip, flanked and followed by the Deltas and Akalis. The Epsilon duo brought up the rear, Handelmann trading out his sniper rifle for a handgun in anticipation of the corridors ahead.

They breached swiftly, the front door unlocked by a few moments of Alenko’s concentrated efforts. Shepard marched into the airlock, accompanied by Alenko, three Akali and three Tiger Soldiers, Champasak at the rear. Singh and the rest remained outside, unable to fit. While they waited, Alenko continued his work on the local MayaNet, occasionally grunting in frustration or sighing in relief.

“This facility’s already halfway to clean,” he remarked. “I think somebody inside has been working on it.”

“Somebody brave,” said Shepared. “The Batarians are probably crawling over this site looking for anybody they missed. They’ll be ready for us.”

“So long as they aren’t aiming at me,” Alenko replied, elbowing Shepard’s reinforced breastplate. “Lead on, Commander.”

Shepard rolled his eyes. The airlock chimed out a little confirmation that interior pressure was stable, before sliding open the access door. Shepard moved through, rifle up, but he only made it a few steps before pausing.

The hallway was littered with bodies. At least half a dozen dead humans, most of them in civilian clothing or workman’s uniforms. They were riddled with bullets, limbs torn off by shotgun blasts. Behind him, somebody swore in Punjabi. Another intoned a quiet prayer. A Tiger Soldier growled audibly, his helmet’s vocalizer rendering it a purely animal sound. Shepard breathed in, forcing himself to stay calm.

“Keep moving,” he said. “This won’t be the worst of it.”

He hated that he could already tell. Three-hundred and fifty-seven. So far they’d accounted for barely a dozen altogether. Shepard knew Batarian brutality. Turians had a sense of military honour, Asari an empathic understanding beyond most humans; even the Salarians showed restraint, even if rooted solely in psychological necessity. But Batarians? Batarians were bred to hate, indoctrinated from infancy to think of any race not their own as intrinsically lesser, undeserving of mercy.

Shepard didn’t like killing humans. He didn’t like killing Turians, or Asari, or Salarians. But Batarians? He recalled an interview he’d seen, some Net-Celeb speaking with a mercenary, a shock-trooper from Druze-Bayram Security sitting on an ugly red chair. She’d asked him what it was like, killing pirates, killing Batarians. How did affect him? What did he feel?

The man had chuckled. Pirates? He felt bad, because he’d nearly stumbled down that path himself. But Batarians? The chuckle had evolved, a full on laugh.

Recoil, he’d said. He felt recoil.

Never before had Shepard felt so close a resonance with someone he’d never met as he had felt in that moment.

They advanced past the bodies, weapons up. One of the Akalis paused, bowing his head and whispering a prayer over the dead. One of the Tiger Soldiers swore again. Shepard kept moving. The corridor was a perfect killbox; long, narrow, plentiful cover at one end for defenders. None were forthcoming, however. They kept moving, and at the end of the corridor Shepard gestured for the three Akalis to cover their left while he led the rest to the right.

Another corridor, devoid of Batarians and bedecked with human corpses. But at the end, an elevator. One of the Tiger Soldiers held up a hand. Shepard recognized him when he spoke; Bui Yen, from the second fusion torch facility.

“This is the main access,” he said. “Commander, should we proceed?”

“Two stay up here to cover the hall,” Shepard instructed. “The rest sweep the rooms. Daoying Champasak, Lieutenant Alenko and I will head for the atrium.”

“That is likely the building’s hotspot.” Bui Yen warned. Shepard summoned the elevator with his geist, before meeting the Tiger Soldier’s eye.

“That’s what I’m hoping for,” he replied. “Keep the upper floors secured. I want to meet the bastard behind all this.”

Three specialists was a risky gambit, but Shepard had counted over two-dozen bodies thus far and had little interest in waiting any longer. He was going to find the Batarians’ leader and, ideally, tear him half vertically starting at the pelvis. He stepped into the elevator, Alenko and Champasak taking up his right and left flanks respectively. They stood in relative silence for a little while, Alenko adjusting his spinal wires while Champasak examined her boarding shotgun.

“I did not think Cyberghosts were meant to be biotics,” she said suddenly, looking at Alenko. “To my understanding, they are purely technical specialists.”

“Most of us end up as Psi-Cops or Nightshades,” said Alenko, shaking his head. “But I have special dispensation. My implants are L2 model, meaning I don’t have the necessary stability for Psi-Cop work. My aptitude with electronic warfare meant the Cyberghosts fit better.”

“Do your powers sometimes fail?” Champasak asked. Alenko chuckled.

“Opposite issue,” he said. “Sometimes I have trouble holding back.”

The elevator stilled and pinged, announcing their arrival. Shepard raised a hand. The conversation ended instantly, weapons returning to ready hands as the doors slid open to reveal a half-demolished entrance lobby. Potted plants were overturned, terra cotta pots shattered and scattering loamy black soil across the floor. It was criss-crossed with prints from civilian footwear and armoured boots alike. Here and there a dead human lay, half-hidden behind overturned furniture or crumpled in the open space between.

Against the far wall, a bisected human figure was propped upright. Shepard chewed on his cheek again before noticing the pale grey skin with a faintly rubbery texture, criss-crossed with lines forming hexagonal patterns all over the exposed arms and face. The artificial eyes were propped open, unlit, and most tellingly of all the blood pooled around the severed waistline was a dark, almost burgundy red, too thick and viscous to be any sort of human essence. A fallen pistol lay on the ground beside the body, a few inches from one of its limp hands.

Before Shepard could make any kind of verbal note of the dead Aspect, he was being shot at. Batarians peeked out from behind overturned tables and benches, or else emerged from the adjoining hallways, firing at him. Champasak disappeared with her cloak, while Alenko ducked behind him. Shepard opened fire instantly, suppressing two of the shooters with AP-T rounds.

“Kill the humans!” one of the Batarians growled; Shepard shot him in the face, his shield vanishing a moment before Alenko put half a dozen rounds in his chest. His armour surrendered to the grouped impacts, cracking and leaking oozing red blood.

Shepard kept firing. He had to shoot in quick, sharp bursts, avoiding overheating. Champasak appeared again against the far wall, firing a blast-mode shot that bowled one Batarian off his feet and forced the other to duck low. Alenko kept up his own fire; what the combi-rifle lacked in variety of munitions, it more than made up for in rate of fire. Shepard clipped another Batarian through the head, his geist yelling that shields were running low.

The rest of the Batarians could smell blood, or at least see the flickering yellow and red of his nearly depleted kinetic barriers. Shepard flicked two fingers, pointing at nearby cover. Alenko got the message, sliding behind the fallen table before Shepard planted one foot and took off like a shot.

The Batarian he was aiming for had no idea what to do, and so had no recourse or response to a four-hundred and fifty pound human hurtling toward him at a speed typically reserved for automobiles. His only retort was a final burst of rifle fire, half of which missed in his panic, before Shepard hit him in the head with a fist travelling at forty-plus kilometres an hour and his entire brain casing turned into a bowl of jelly.

Shepard turned and dumped two bursts into the Batarian’s nearest counterpart, before his shields finally cracked. Shots started pinging off of and into his armour. One of the Batarians roared a command, rising to fire at him right before Champasak blew his head off with a hit-mode shot. Something, probably a rifle round, found a soft spot in his forearm and bit deep.

Then, without warning, the bisected corpse leaned against the back wall snatched up the pistol laying by its side, and began shooting the Batarians in the back. It fired several rapid bursts, unneringly precise in its machine-like motions. Two Batarians died before the third and fourth could even realize what was happening; by the time the third turned his shields were cracked, and the fourth was barely able to aim his rifle before Champasak blew a hole through his torso half again as large as a football.

The last Batarian died when Alenko channeled his biotics and threw the table he was hiding behind against the wall, crushing the Batarian between two unyielding metal surfaces. The Aspect set the pistol down again, a rattling, wet breath escaping its parted purple lips.

“Commander Shepard,” she greeted him, her voice the usual Aleph monotone, unbothered by her severely damaged physical form. “I had hoped to greet you more properly.”

“I wouldn’t want to impose,” said Shepard, returning his rifle to his hip and dropping down to one knee. “Thanks for the fire support. Do you need any sort of medical attention?”

“Outside of the current inconvenience, I am well enough to function,” she said, gesturing to her absent lower half. “I have managed to shut down any further leakage, and I am fairly certain that my upper half will maintain function for at least another six hours; should we survive that long.”

“The torches have all been shut down,” Shepard replied. “Once this facility is clear, we’ll be able to redirect them and get X-57 away from the terminal approach vector. Do you have any idea how many Batarians have occupied this facility? How many hostages?”

“I counted ninety-six Batarians in the initial assault,” she reported. “If you have destroyed all three teams dispatched to guard the torches, that would put the number nearer to sixty. With these nine dead, that leaves them with fifty-one. I calculate at least half that number will be guarding their escape vessels; the Batarian’s leader likely has twenty-five or twenty-six men with him. Twenty-five is more likely by a narrow margin; Batarians prefer squared numbers.”

“I have twenty-seven personnel on-site,” Shepard said. “Do the Batarians have control over the facility’s defenses besides the turrets outside?”

“Negative.” The Aspect shook her head. “I have blocked any attempts to assume control. The turrets were likely forcible reprogrammed from the control centre. I have control of the facility’s doors and life support.”

“What’s your name?” Alenko asked, leaning past Shepard.

“Aleph Deva Aspect 080310,” the Aspect said. “The humans here prefer Ruth. It is shorter, and more maternal. It comforts the children.”

“Children?” Shepard and Alenko exchanged a quick look.

“Sixteen,” Ruth said. “Nine of the Panoceanian personnel, seven from Yu Jing. I was brought on to serve as a caregiver during working hours. Multiple families planned to emigrate to X-57 on a semi-permanent basis; it was believed the children would be best off acclimatizing right away.”

“So you’re a nanny?” Alenko asked. Shepard elbowed him. Ruth nodded.

“I prefer caregiver, but nanny is a suitable shorthand,” she said. “The head of the Yujingyu detachment did not wish for me to be involved in the actual development of X-57. He wrongfully assumed I would favour Panoceania in any disputes. When the Batarians arrived I took the children to a safe room in the lower floors. I would have remained with them, but the Batarians’ logic bomb removed my control over facility security. I attempted to sneak back to the main server room.”

“The Batarians caught you,” Alenko guessed.

“Fortunately, they were unaware of a Deva Lhost’s general durability.” Ruth nodded. “The children are still safe. Terrified, but alive. I must ask that qualified personnel recover them. I fear my current state would only cause them further distress.”

She sounded distressed herself, a rare show of emotion from an Aspect. Aleph’s children were notorious for their emotional and psychological resilience; Shepard appreciated how much she cared, that it could slip through even her steeled self control.

“Lambda-Officer Chakwas is qualified for post-crisis psychological support and recovery,” Shepard said. “We’ll bring her in as soon as the Batarians are gone. Do you know where their leader is?”

“The atrium,” Ruth said. “I believe he is expecting you. There is a good chance he has explosives planted near any hostages he has taken. He may attempt a negotiation.”

Shepard nodded, before climbing back to his feet. Champasak was cloaked again, but she pinged her location by the right-hand door. Ruth watched him rise, blinking once.

“Please, Commander,” she said. “Don’t let them kill any more of my friends.”

They went quickly, Champasak down the right-side corridor while Shepard and Alenko took the left. Sergeant-Major Singh called in, confirming that they’d cleared out a couple more Batarians wandering the upper floor. Shepard told him to send a team with an engineer for Ruth, and for the rest to start heading for the atrium and landing craft. He made sure to request Handelmann, thinking of Ruth’s warning regarding the bomb and hostages.

“It’ll be a firefight,” he told the Panoceanian, voice low. “I don’t want a single Batarian leaving this facility alive and free.”

“Affirmative, Commander,” the Akal agreed. “I will send half our detachment. I and the rest will seek their means of retreat and return them all to the light of God.”

Shepard had no response in mind for that, so he cut the channel and signalled for Alenko to sweep left. He kept his eyes on the far doorway, which a blink-map showed him emerged into the bottom level of the atrium proper. His motion tracker was clean, and when Alenko sounded off an all-clear he advanced.

This was always the worst part; final approach, those last few moments before the climax of an operation. The stop and start nature of long-term deployment had never been much of an issue in O-12; they hit the ground and kept moving until the job was done, then returned home. It was national armies that had to garrison, secure and sweep, run patrols. O-12 solved problems.

This was different. This was the unsettling worry in the back of his mind, that faintest of aches in his stomach that told him he was missing something even when he was certain he wasn’t. Twenty-five Batarians, one leader, a handful of hostages. Shepard glanced at Alenko, who nodded. The two stacked up on the door, rifles ready. A three count. Shepard turned, went in.

“Humans.”

The Batarian atop the far stairwell was better armoured than most of his colleagues; his hardsuit was reinforced at points, the chest and shoulders, around the joints. He wore an elaborate battle-helmet, with two trailing cables that jutted from the back and fell over his shoulders like hair, plugging into his forearms. He carried a shotgun in one hand and a pistol in the other. His voice echoed dully through the atrium; he was probably using the intercom to speak. He was flanked by two more of his pirates, and behind them a trio of strange furred creatures, with four legs and quills jutting from their backs. Shepard raised an eyebrow at that.

“You humans,” the Batarian repeated. “You’re almost more trouble than you’re worth.”

He sounded idly entertained by the notion, but equally tired, as if the concept of humanity itself was in some way exhausting. Shepard checked both sides; the atrium looked empty, but that meant nothing; there was plenty of cover to hide behind. Behind him Alenko had one fist already roiling with blue mass effect, his Biotics running hot. Shepard put a hand on his arm, gently pushing it down.

“It comes naturally,” he said, his armour automatically pitching his voice across the room as a modulated rumble. “We just love causing problems. I can make a few more for you, right now if you like.”

“Predictable,” the Batarian replied. “But you’re too late. I’m leaving this asteroid. If you or any of your friends try to stop me, I’ll detonate those charges, and this station will be short a few dozen more of your kind.”

Shepard glanced sideways, to a grimy observation window through which he could see several human personnel clustered around some kind of mining explosive. He breathed out. Breathed in. Looked back at the Batarian.

“You don’t seriously think you get to leave?” he asked, before chuckling. “After what you’ve done here? There’s a few dozen too many bodies on the ground for me to just step aside.”

“And dozens more if you don’t,” the Batarian scoffed, waving his pistol dismissively. “You humans. You play at empathy, at understanding. O-12 especially. But you’d throw away countless lives if it got you one step closer to your goals, wouldn’t you?”

“Batarians shouldn’t be talking about throwing away lives,” Shepard said. “Not after the Blitz. Not after Torfan.”

The Batarian tensed. Shepard shook his head.

“Did Achilles not teach you this lesson already?” Shepard asked. “Did I not teach you this already? I’m hurt. You can’t have forgotten, not so quickly.”

“We have forgotten nothing!” the Batarian snarled, taking a half step forward. “You humans… ruined us! Stole everything! The Verge was our birthright, and you sweep in and take it without so much as the courtesy of declaring war! And the Council, binding our hands, refusing us our right to take what we were owed…”

“You were the ones who quit the table,” Shepard said. “You walked away, not us. Panoceania, Yu Jing, they were open to negotiation. But you couldn’t handle negotiation. You wanted it all.”

“We deserved it all!” the Batarian cried. “All of it! And now… now we are outcasts, thrown aside! The Council found a willing lapdog, and we were thrown to the wilds to die. But we survived, human. We remembered.”

“And this is… what?” Shepard asked. “War, then? You want us to roll over Kar’shan, bomb you into dust? Do you want to see Achilles carrying the heads of Hegemon leadership on a banner pole for the entire galaxy to see? Is that what your pride is worth?”

“We want what was stolen from us!” The Batarian paused, stepped back, settled himself. “Sometimes, if you want someone to listen, you have to wake them up first. This world, Terra Nova, will be our rallying cry. The Council will see what they’ve made of us.”

“You’re delusional,” Shepard said. “And I won’t let you kill these people.”

“It’s too bad you have no say in the matter,” the Batarian said. One of the other Batarians lifted his hand, holding up a makeshift remote of some description. “Step aside. Show me that vaunted humanity.”

Shepard didn’t step aside. He raised his own hand, signalling to an unseen ally. His geist pinged him once, confirming his hopes. Shepard raised three fingers, then lowered one. Then another.

“Put the remote down,” he commanded.

The Batarian with the remote glanced at his leader, which was all Shepard needed. He closed his fist. Somewhere behind and above him, on the observation level above, Handelmann pulled the trigger. There was a crack, louder than thunder, and the Batarian’s hand and remote vanished in a haze of red. At almost the exact same moment, Champasak emerged from her camouflage and shot a concealed Batarian in the head. Nihlus appeared on the opposite side, his Paladin barking once and killing another. Half a dozen Akalis and Tiger Soldiers each leapt from the overlook, packs burning as the descended.

Shepard charged the Batarian leader. He leapt up the stairs three at a time, cocking one hand back. The Batarian fired his shotgun from the hip, burning two-thirds of Shepard’s shield charge, but before he could follow up with the pistol Shepard slammed into him with his lead shoulder and threw him backwards.

Infuriatingly, whatever armour he was wearing was similarly designed to Shepard’s Omega pattern; the Batarian took the hit and stumbled, before swinging the shotgun like a club. Shepard blocked with a forearm and grunted at the impact, before swaying his head to the side to narrowly avoid a spike-set bayonet that burst from the underbarrel. It scratched a narrow line across his helmet’s temple. His forearm ached from the bullet wound earlier and the new impact, before Shepard cocked back his right fist and aimed straight for the Batarian’s faceplate.

The Batarian was quick, and had definitely been in his fair share of brawls. He swayed back, feet skidding on the concrete floor, before trying to jam his pistol into Shepard’s exposed side. Shepard fired his elbow at the alien’s head, forcing him to dodge away, his pistol firing once past Shepard’s shoulder. The shotgun came back around, Shepard smashing it downward before stepping in and, without thinking much, smashing his helmet into the Batarian’s faceplate.

Both of them bounced back, Shepard’s geist warning him that the automatic tensile fibres in his suit’s neck had been overextended; another impact like that would go straight into his own spinal column, and was therefore inadvisable. The Batarian’s faceplate was cracked, one big line running from one corner of the visor to the other. There went his vacuum seal. The Batarian swung the pistol up, forcing Shepard to try and sidestep the three-round burst he fired. Two of them winged off his shield, delaying the regeneration.

The Batarian lurched backward, barking orders, and the three war-beasts behind him circled around to rush Shepard. They were big, vicious creatures, their quilled backs bristling and slavering jaws wide open. Shepard smashed his fist across the side of one’s head when it got too close, before swaying away from the Batarian’s next round of pistol fire. His hand went for his rifle, but halfway through unfolding another of the beasts snatched it in its jaws and wrenched back. Shepard relinquished his grip instead of losing his balance; falling over would be an open invitation for these things to pile on and start tearing at the soft points of his armour, at the throat and insides of his upper arms.

Another lunged for the throat, but Shepard caught it by the forelegs and swung it up, then down, smashing it bodily against the metal floor. The one that had stolen his rifle rammed into his side, but he swung a leg out to catch himself and caught it in a makeshift headlock. He pulled his pistol, slamming it into the animal’s forehead before pressing the barrel against one of its beady black eyes and firing twice. The spray of purple-red blood washed over his forearm and shoulder; his armour warned him that it was corrosive. Shepard swore.

He went to raise his pistol, but the threat of the Batarian raising the shotgun again forced him to swing it out like a bludgeon to knock the bulk of the weapon aside. Something cracked; his geist warned him he’d broken the heat-vent on the pistol’s underside. He dropped it and stepped into the Batarian’s range, bringing his right fist down and cocking his now-empty left back up by his face. His legs spread as he adopted the more natural boxing stance he’d been training in since he was twelve years old.

Sometime Alenko would tease him for the anachronistic approach he took to CQC. Standard O-12 training was judo and other grappling, non-lethal restraint and restriction to make arrests easier. Shepard was decent in that, but he preferred the classical feel of bringing both arms up and moving light on his feet, striking and withdrawing. The Omega armour made kicking less ideal, the thigh plates restricting how high he could lift his legs to the sides, so his hands were his best offense in a fight.

The Batarian was obviously new to the idea of boxing, so when Shepard threw a three-piece combo at him with a right jab, left hook and right straight across the jaw, he had no idea how to retort. He held onto his guns like a lifeline, swinging the shotgun’s bayonet again. Shepard knocked it with the side of his left fist, before stepping closer for an uppercut. His fist impacted the underside of the Batarian’s helmet and finished the job his headbutt had begun, snapping the faceplate clean in half and breaking the entire thing off his head.

The Batarian didn’t topple, stumbling and cursing and trying to bring the pistol around again. Shepard stepped in with his left fist and drove a vicious straight into the exposed green face, blowing the Batarian clean off his feet and down to the ground like a sac of potatoes. Shepard turned for his rifle, picking it up and turning it on the last living war-beast, firing a burst of three rounds into its upper torso.

He went to the unconscious Batarian leader and wrapped one hand around the top of his head, before lifting him into the air with a wheeze of effort. He turned to face the rest of the room, and called out.

“Batarians!”

His voice echoed through the firefight, his vocalizer maximizing output to amplify his shout and carry it to every corner of the atrium. The gunfire began to slow, then halt, as the last Batarian holdouts and the human forces both turned to look at Shepard. When they saw the helmetless, unconscious leader, several Batarians cried out in what was either horror or anger.

“This is over,” Shepard declared. “Throw down your weapons and come out. Nobody else has to die.”

Some of them listened, dropping rifles, pistols and shotguns. Others turned to resume the fighting, only to be gunned down by their human adversaries. Those who surrendered walked with an awkward, almost shameful posture, heads down and hands up. Shepard dropped the unconscious Batarian, almost impressed that a left-straight into his unprotected face hadn’t completely shattered his skull.

Alenko approached, folding his rifle and returning it to his back.

“Sergeant-Major Singh has the rest of his Akalis securing the Batarian’s landing craft,” he reported. “The last of them are already retreating; Panoceanian ships are waiting by the relay to intercept.”

“Hostages?” Shepard asked. Alenko shook his head.

“None on the ships,” he reported. “Looks like they wanted to leave them here, to die during the impact.”

“And our people?” Shepard asked.

“Hosha took a nasty hit, but one of the Tiger Soldiers has paramedic training,” Alenko said. “Looks non-fatal so far. Sadler got winged in the head, light concussion, but her helmet held; she’s more pissed they blew out her MMR’s scope. Our other teams are holding up well; the Batarians didn’t have the numbers to launch any counter-offensives.”

Shepard breathed a sigh of relief. The last of the Batarians were either dead or down on their knees at gunpoint while Handelmann broke out the cuffs. The Deltas were standing by, gathered around Hosha while a Tiger Soldier with a white helmet worked on him, gauntlets and vambraces discarded to expose the olive-green vacuum suit beneath. Sadler was sitting on the edge of one of the planters lining the room, helmet removed while one of the Akalis shone a light in her eye.

More encouraging was the sight of an Akal and a Tiger Soldier standing opposite one another, speaking much more casually. Another Tiger Soldier was down nursing a bloody arm, while an Akal sat beside him with one hand on his shoulder. Both had discarded their helmets, chuckling at something one of them had said. Alenko followed Shepard’s eye and chuckled.

“Nothing like a breach and sweep to start making friends,” the LT said.

Shepard nodded. He raised one hand to the side of his helmet, opening a channel with the Normandy to make his report. Anderson sounded optimistic about their chances of catching the Batarians attempting to flee; they had two small freighters with false transponders, which was how they’d managed to get into the system and land on X-57 without being detected without any trouble. It was troublesome that they’d managed to get their hands on accurate transponders that Aleph didn’t pick up as fake or paradoxical, however. Those sorts of things were usually beyond the capacity of the AI to get wrong.

Beyond that minor hiccup, all seemed well. The hostages emerged from the various offices and lounges they’d been locked into, ecstatic and celebratory. Shepard, Alenko and the various Tiger Soldiers and Akalis were hugged and kissed for several minutes, or received vigorous handshakes, claps on the back or deep bows from those Yujingyu too chaste or dignified for the more exuberant celebrations of their peers.

In the midst of the jubilant pandemonium Shepard found Champasak, sitting with her right leg outstretched, using a small set of hand tools to perform a repair on the damaged section. Her omni-gel application had served to avert the issue, but now Shepard could see a viscous black fluid drooling from a severed line. She had stripped off the armour of her torso and arms to better bend down and work on it, exposing the glossy black undersuit beneath. She was narrower than he’d imagined, slim and lean with narrow shoulders and a narrower waist. She had long, nimble fingers, holding the tools like a practiced surgeon moreso than an engineer.

She’d also removed her helmet. She was young, as he’d suspected; early twenties, like as not, with the delicate features of a model or aristocrat. Her hair was cut short and efficient, a short and messy bob that just barely reached her shoulders. She was beautiful in that classic Yujingyu way, and it hardly surprised Shepard that the Invincible Army wanted her as a propaganda piece; O-12 had wanted the same from Jane, before Akuze and the scarring.

“Commander,” she said, glancing up at his approach, blinking as if seeing him for the first time. “I, ah, I am losing lubricant.”

“I can see that,” Shepard replied. “Need a hand?”

“Well, I… unless you have a six millimetre hose clamp, I don’t know if there’s anything you can do,” she replied, before refocusing on her work. “But… I should almost have it…”

She stuck her tongue out of the corner of her mouth, visible squeezing it between here canines. After a moment, one of her tools sparked lightly at the end, and she breathed a sigh of relief as the trickle of fluid ceased.

“Done,” she said. “That should hold long enough to get us home.”

Shepard offered her a hand, and she accepted, standing up and testing the leg by raising the other and spinning in place like a ballerina. There were no unseemly sounds, and when quickly switched feet with a snapkick from her right nothing seized or jammed. She made for an interesting profile when stripped of all armour to the waist; her mechanical thighs were each nearly as thick as the narrowest point of her waistline, giving her a silhouette like an elongated teardrop.

She bent down and began buckling her armour back on. Shepard held her helmet, handing it back to her when she’d finished fighting the straps on the underside of the breastplate. He couldn’t say if he preferred the view before or after. She looked up at him, eyes wide. There was still a hint of that starstruck awe in there, behind the conditioning and training. She was standing in front of a living legend, and handling it better than most.

“Thank you,” she said, taking her helmet, but they both knew the headgear had nothing to do with it. “I… I hope we meet again, in the future.”

“I’m sure they’ll find another impossible mission to send you on,” Shepard said, patting her on the shoulder. “And if they do, I’ll likely be there. You did well today. Better than they set you up to do. I’ll make sure to reflect that in my report.”

She looked up at him, grateful. He smiled, though the helmet made it impossible to see, before watching her pull on her own helmet. The watched each other a moment longer, before turning their separate ways. Shepard returned to his O-12 troops, and she to her Tiger Soldiers.

He hoped to see her again, some day.

With the main facility liberated and the last of the logic bomb swept clean by Ruth, Alenko and several specialists from X-57 itself, redirecting and restarting the fusion torches was a simple procedure. Within the hour the asteroid was being redirected, the torches burning bright as they forced it back toward a gentle orbital lock. A cheer went up from the lobby as soon as their success was confirmed, and Shepard felt himself relax the slightest bit.

He clapped Alenko on the back as they moved back up through the facility, making their way toward the main landing zone outside where Cortez was set to pick them up. The Kappa teams were double-timing it to their position, with Sadler leaning on Handelmann for balance. Hosha was to be left behind, his condition too unstable to risk moving just yet. As such the mood of the other Deltas was more dour, Liuye walking with her head down while Whitman stalked forward with his fists clenched.

“Crisis averted,” Alenko said, audibly relieved as the airlock door slid shut behind them, and the depressurization sequence commenced. “I think we did pretty well for ourselves, Commander.”

“Well enough,” Shepard said, staring at the exterior access door. “Hosha should pull through. No body-losses will make the Bureau happy. Were all the civilians Cubes accounted for?”

“None missing at last count,” Alenko replied. “Two of the Tiger Soldiers that hit the mines were beyond recovery, though. Still, two final deaths out of fifty-nine deployed personnel is a pretty damn impressive rate.”

“We’re lucky they didn’t have E/M gear,” said Shepard. “This kind of attack… Starmada’s going to be busy for a while. They might even bring the Torchlight Brigade out to reinforce their security teams.”

“Not having Torchlight here to start is strange,” Alenko noted, before shrugging. “Politics, I guess. No way around that.”

Within twenty minutes, they were back aboard the Normandy. It was good to decompress; Shepard headed for the can-opener, the trio of mechanical limbs designed to strip him out of his Omega armour quickly and efficiently. There was nothing that couldn’t be undone by hand with a few tools, but the can-opener was faster and involved less stretching and contorting on his part. He stepped onto the two pressure-sensitive pads, spread his arms wide and let the machine do its work, unsealing the heavy battle armour and freeing him, first of the plates, then the synthetic muscle-fibre undersuit, until he stepped out of the armours calves where his legs sat atop the ankle (part of the additional height) and into the open.

He stretched for a moment, luxuriating in the ability to fully rotate his shoulders without pauldrons or back-plating getting in the way. Across the room the Kappas all stripped off their body-gloves and armour, chatting and laughing and exchanging stories. Handelmann sat on a steel bench with his helmet off, eyes closed and head bowed. Post-combat meditation was a common Epsilon tradition; Sadler had already been walked off to spend some quality time in the medbay with Doctor Chakwas. The Deltas were still sombre, removing thruster packs and armour with slow, robotic motions.

Shepard turned, grabbing a bottle of water from the small cooler beside the can-opener. It had been a “housewarming gift” from Captain Anderson, back when Shepard had first joined his contingent. He considered heading straight for his office and quarters; he’d have a lot of paperwork to do, a report to draft up, after-action recommendations for his men. Handelmann deserved some points of merit for his shot on the Batarian bomber, the Deltas had all performed admirably… a Medal of Honourable Sacrifice for Hosha, for certain.

And after that… he leaned against the steel frame of the can-opener and crossed his arms, letting out a slow, lingering sigh. Shore leave, hopefully. But he wasn’t stupid enough to think that was coming any time soon. Instead he waited a moment, and just as he’d expected there was a faint shimmer in the air as Nihlus appeared, still fully-armored.

“Your conduct on the field is impressive,” Nihlus began, which felt like a pretty good start to a performance review. “Congratulations, Commander. The mission is a success, and Terra Nova saved. I trust you are satisfied?”

“Not many other ways worth feeling about it,” Shepard replied, waving a hand. “I could wish we’d been there earlier, saved more lives, but that isn’t how missions work. Time starts when boots hit the ground for me; everything before that was beyond my control.”

Nihlus nodded.

“I appreciate your sense of realism, Commander,” he said. “Just as I appreciate your valour. You certainly do not lack for courage. Do you always throw yourself into danger at the first available opportunity, or were you looking to impress me?”

“Always,” Shepard nodded. “Came with being a big brother, comes with being O-12. Omega especially. We’re trained, equipped and set up to be the best; it’s our job to fulfill those expectations.”

“The elite record of your unit was a matter of some import in the selection process,” Nihlus replied, nodding. “However… are you aware that yours was the first name supplied by the O-12 High Commission, when we first approached them about the Spectre program? They assumed you were our only candidate.”

“Only me?” Shepard blinked. “Wait, are there other candidates?”

“Eleven besides you,” Nihlus said. “That is the next matter. The Normandy’s next destination is the Citadel. There you will be meeting with your fellow Spectre prospects, and the Council will examine each of you before making their decision. There will be tests, of course, and interviews. It’s a very elaborate process. My selection took almost two months.”

Shepard frowned, glancing at his troops now largely changed into uniforms and relaxing.

“Going out of action for two months is a big ask,” he said. “I can’t remember the last time I rotated off of duty for longer than…”

“Two weeks,” Nihlus said. “It was just over a Terran year ago, after the Argent Veil boarding action. You took two weeks off on Concilium Prima. From what I understand, you spent most of those two weeks assisting in a murder investigation.”

“In my defense, the killer dumped the body outside my hotel,” Shepard replied. “I couldn’t just walk away from that.”

“That’s the sort of initiative the Spectres desire most,” Nihlus said. “We have been watching your career with great interest, Commander. I believe, as do several of my colleagues, that you are the most likely candidate to be chosen by the Council. Your record is effectively spotless, you have no major political ties to any one of the Human Sphere’s nations or religious groups, and you have the weight of legend behind you. As I said before, there are Turian academies in which your defense of Paradiso is used as an example of how to rally a garrison force in an area largely devoid of military presence.”

Shepard thought about that for a moment. Then another moment. He spent a while thinking about it. Two months was, as he’d said, a big ask. A lot could happen in two months. Could he risk it? Did he dare refuse? A lot was riding on him here; the first human Spectre was a heavy title. If the Oberhaus wanted him to carry it, who was he to say no?

Who was he to say no?

“Alright,” Shepard said. “When we get to the Citadel, I’ll meet with the others. I’m ready.”

“Good,” said Nihlus, nodding his head approvingly. “Very good, Commander. I will send word to the Council. I look forward to working with you again.”

He thrust a hand out, the palm facing the right way this time. Shepard shook it, and then Nihlus bowed his head and disappeared. Shepard leaned against the frame of the can-opener again, took a long drink of water, and sighed.

Then he pulled his uniform jacket over his vacuum-suit and headed for the elevator. He still had work to do.