Shadows and Dust 032 (Patreon)

Subtlety was no longer the name of the game, so far as Cassandra was concerned. The time to hold back the strength that she did have access to had passed, and the situation was dire enough -and she had proven herself enough, it seemed- that the Force was willing to give her access to still more. Which was why she had been able to follow up on her confident statement aboard the Normandy and, when she was standing in front of the massive metal-cored stone door of the complex the Warmaster had vanished within, she was able to tear it apart.

It must have made quite the sight, she was sure, like something out of an old sci-fi movie. She’d reached out with one hand, tightened it slightly as if she was grasping something with her fingers, and jerked it to the side sharply.

The screech of tortured metal and shattering stone answered her as the whole slab of stone and alloy folded inward on itself with a groan that she felt more than heard, vibrating up through the soles of her boots. Dust and grit rained down from the archway above, and over the radio she heard more than a few exclamations in more than a few languages.

“Remind me never to get on your bad side, Skipper…” Ashley said, breathless, from inside the Mako idling behind her, the turret humming as she panned it back and forth to scan the newly-opened passage.

“You’re already on my good side, love, and I’m sure you’ll stay that way. If not, I promise to correct you in much more enjoyable ways than this.” Cassandra didn’t even look back as she said the words, her attention fixed on the darkness beyond the ruined door, golden light flickering and fading from within her eyes before she turned on her heel and backtracked to slide back into the driver’s seat of her own Mako. “Garrus, the girls and I will take point, you guys follow us in. Everyone, keep your eyes open. We’re on their heels, so they shouldn’t have much chance to set any traps, but don’t get complacent.”

A round of confirmations crackled through the comm, one after another, and Cassandra eased the Mako forward through the gap she’d torn, the vehicle’s headlamps cutting twin cones through the swirling dust. The ruins swallowed the light greedily, walls that were older than the Protheans themselves rising up on either side in slabs of corroded metal and pitted stone, and she felt the hair on her arms rise as they passed beneath the broken archway.

This place was ancient, and there was no other world for it. From what she knew, from what she remembered -as much as she could claim to ‘remember’ anything the Beacon had given her, given the memories weren’t actually her own- the Protheans had found ruins left behind by their own predecessors, the Inusannon, and built amongst them just as her own cycle built amongst the Prothean’s ruins.

Unfortunately, there was nothing in any of that borrowed knowledge that told her what she could expect inside of this complex. Nothing about its defenses, about it’s layout, not even it’s size. It would be big, of course, and -whether they were active or not- heavily defended, given it’s significance, but there was no indication of degrees on any of that.

The tunnel beyond the archway widened out into something that might once have been a processional avenue of some kind, wide enough for at least a couple of Grizzly’s -probably more- to drive through in a line abrest with room to spare, though Cassandra and Kaiden had to carefully guide their APCs around the not-insignificant amounts of rubble and toppled statuary that littered the floor. God, what had this place looked like in it’s prime? One hell of a sight, that much was certain. Something else beautiful lost to the damn Reapers.

“Cassandra, I’m reading massive energy signatures ahead. Big ones.” Tali’s voice came through her headset, sounding almost bewildered, soft tapping accompanying her words as she ‘looked’ at the world around them through the Mako’s sensor suite. “Whatever this place is, it’s not dead, not quite, and the readings are…really widespread. There was something big here, once upon a time.”

“Define big, Tali.” Cassandra asked, chancing a glance and a raised-eyebrow over her shoulder at the younger woman, and slender shoulder shrugged unsurely.

“In its heydey, probably a couple of dreadnaughts’ worth of power, running through a network that…well, its a web, Cassie. It fills the entire complex, if I had to guess. Hundreds of miles of cabling. I…geth! There are geth signatures activating ahead. Ashley!”

The soft whine of the turret’s machinery spiked immediately, both barrels tracking left as three geth armatures and a dozen Troopers of various types stepped into visibility along a raised ledge that ran the length of the chamber ahead, muzzle flashes strobing white-blue against the rust-colored stone almost instantly.

“I see them, Tali! Contact front!” Ashley’s voice cracked through the comm, sharp and fierce, already returning fire before Cassandra could open her mouth to give -an admittedly superflous- order to do so. The Mako rocked as rounds pattered against its shields, kinetic barriers flaring visible for half a heartbeat before fading back to nothing.

“Kaiden, form up on our left flank, but don’t get to close alongside! Hammer them!”

The Mako’s second driver promptly banked wide, engine whining as the young marine brought the vehicle up on their flank, and the cannon mounted atop it barked out a shell that took one of the armatures square in its central mass. The great machine staggered, one segmented leg buckling beneath it, and Cassandra grinned fiercely as it tumbled off the ledge to land in a crumpled heap on the ground.

“Nice shot!” she called, wrenching her own Mako’s wheel hard to the left to bring their own turret to bear, feeling the vehicle’s mass shift and groan in protest. Ahead, the geth troopers were fanning out along the ledge, shouldering rocket launchers and taking aim. “Rockets!”

“I see them!” Garrus and Ashley barked together, turning their attention away from the admittedly-dangerous-but-few-in-number armatures to the rather more numerous launcher-armed infantry. Stone cracked and shattered and crumbled under the focused violence of each side as shots went wide, and in spite of the situation Cassie couldn’t help but grin at the displeasure she could feel radiating off of Liara as perhaps the greatest archaeological find in history received…considerable deconstruction.

A flicker of thought had three rockets exploding in midair before they could strike the weakened shields of the boys’ Mako, and with a final few bursts of fire the last of the ambushers were destroyed. Or, at the very least, no longer capable of fighting, which under the time crunch they were dealing with was more than sufficient to Cassie’s mind.

They moved on, passing through and past tunnels aplenty -she idly wondered what it was that Liara would find when she finally got the chance to come back to this planet with a full team or three- and killing plenty of geth (and more than a few batarians) as they tried to impede them.

Then, quite suddenly, they found themselves impeded by something else entirely. Ray shields, physical ones, preventing any sort of forward movement. Ray shields that had ignored everything that the Makos had thrown at it, and were -according to Tali- controlled by a nearby power source.

“Damnit…the Warmaster must have triggered it somehow. We’ll need to deactivate it by hand. Boys, you wait here, keep that turret warm just in case he has people waiting the minute the barrier drops. Girls, lets find that power source and deal with it.” Cassandra growled, feeling an odd sort of tension thrumming through her, for reasons she couldn’t quite discern or describe.

A chorus of acknowledgements graced her ears as she killed her Mako’s engine and keyed the hatch open, sliding from her seat with both SMGs at the ready. Liara and Ashley came next, then Tali, each and every one of them ready for a fight and working as smoothly as she could have ever dreamed. A careful look around in the direction of the power source Tali was tracking laid out a pretty clear destination for their next move, and there was a long moment of silence.

“…so, anyone else finding it incredibly convenient that there is a corridor dead-center of the area we’re trapped in by these ray shields, which just so happens to lead straight towards the power source that will turn them off?” Ashley remarked, sounding a bit tired, as she holstered her rifle and unslung her shotgun, eyeing the aforementioned corridor with not-so-mild suspicion.

“Convenient, or a trap, or both. Given our track record, I’m inclined to go with both, but maybe we’ll have some good luck instead.” Cassandra answered, already moving forward with her weapons raised high and every one of her considerable senses hard at work. “I’d have expected the trap to be sprung the moment we were trapped and relatively helpless, though. Stay sharp, just in case. Tali, keep tracking that signature and tell me the second it moves or spikes or generally does anything at all.”

“Oh, believe me, I’m not going to take my eyes off of this unless someone starts shooting at us.” Tali murmured, face damn near glued to her omni-tool, casting its orange glow across her visor as she made her way along the corridor. Which made an interesting contrast, given her visor’s usual pale violet or lilac tint.

The corridor opened into a chamber that made Liara stop dead in her tracks, one hand rising to press flat against her chest, her eyes wide as they flickered this way and that. The room was small compared to the grand halls they’d already passed through, but it was just as obviously important, with consoles and displays that were dust-covered and dark. Whether this had been the control room or simply a control room for the complex, she couldn’t begin to guess with the information on hand,

And at the center of it all stood a plinth, and hovering above it, a holographic construct: vaguely humanoid, translucent blue-white, its form fraying at the edges and occasionally twisting around itself as it glitched out.

“Please. Do not be alarmed. I mean you no harm, enemies of the Reapers.” a distorted male voice, flanged somewhat in a way not dissimilar to turians, crackled as the figure ‘looked’ at them and made motion with what Cassandra assumed were it’s arms in a way that was probably meant to be placating.

Cassandra’s weapons lowered by a fraction, though she didn’t put them fully away, and she didn’t lessen her attempts to monitor the local area either

“You know what we are, apparently, but how?” She kept her voice level, cautious, though something about the construct’s fraying edges tugged at her heartstrings a bit. It wasn’t fear, or anger. Something closer to grief, exhaustion. “And what are you? Some kind of VI?”

“Yes. I am Vigil, a Virtual Intelligence imprinted with the memories and personality of Ksad Ishan, Chief Overseer of the Ilos scientific complex.” The hologram flickered, loosing all cohesion and shape entirely for a long moment before solidifying once more. “I have waited fifty thousand years for someone to come, and you are the first that are not either indoctrinated or artificial intelligences. Now, you must listen carefully. Time is exceedingly short if you are going to avoid your civilization suffering the same fate my own did.”

“The Protheans planned something? Does it have to do with the Conduit?” Ashley asked, sounding very much like she already suspected the answer, and the vaguely-formed head of the image nodded.

“It was the last gasp of our team. The best and brightest of the Prothean Empire created a miniaturized mass relay, one that will transport the user directly to the Citadel. It is our hope that you will combine this with a program that I will provide to you in order to prevent the Reapers from wiping out your government. You see, the Citadel itself is a Mass Relay, leading to and from dark space. If Nazara’s servants are able to purge the virus we placed in the Citadel’s control systems and return control of the station to him, he will activate it.”

“An activated relay leading directly into dark space.” Cassandra breathed in realization “That’s how they get their fleet here. They come through the Citadel, wipe out our leaders and our strongest fleet almost instantly.”

“Yes. That was the fate that the Empire suffered. The Imperial family, the High Council, the Lords of War and Peace...they were all wiped out within the first few hours of the war. And, as you say, our strongest fleet. Our people fought, but victory was impossible. In the end, it was decided to try and put things in place for the next cycle. Your cycle. Take the programs I can provide with you, and you will be able to take control of the Citadel back and lock out Nazara, though I cannot tell you for how long.”

He glitched out again, worse this time, and it was Tali who voiced the realization that they all had together.

“You’re dying.”

“My systems have degraded significantly.” Vigil acknowledged, which was a rather casual and understated way to say it, even for a machine. “However, my ongoing ability to operate will be irrelevant once you depart. Once you return to your vehicles, I will disable the ray shields and you will be able to proceed. Stop the Reapers. Save your people and avenge my own. My makers and I will watch from whatever afterlife there might be.”

“No.” Liara’s voice cracked as she stepped closer to the plinth, one hand clenched into a fist as she looked at all of the hardware around them. “Fifty thousand years. Fifty thousand years of memory, of knowledge no one else in this galaxy possesses, and you’re simply going to let it be erased? There has to be something we can do. A data transfer, a—”

“There is no receptacle capable of containing what remains of me, Doctor T’Soni.” The construct’s voice was gentle even as it fractured apart mid-sentence, reassembling itself slowly and imperfectly. “I accomplished my purpose, and I calculated the odds of surviving the effort at less than one percent when I began degrading. I have made my peace with this.”

“You don’t have to.” Cassandra was already moving, resting a loving but firmly reassuring squeeze on Liara’s shoulder as she stepped past her childhood love to approach the plinth. Kneeling down beside it, she ran her hands over it’s casing for a moment, before a touch of pressure had a hidden compartment popping open, full of a mix of wires and crystals. “Side benefit of having an entire beacon’s accumulated knowledge stuffed into my brain is that I’m now the galaxy’s foremost expert on Prothean emergency repairs. So let’s see what we can do quick and dirty…”

##############################################

Tela Vasir had never much cared for waiting rooms, and the Tower’s outer atrium currently qualified as the galaxy’s most expensive one. Mostly because they were painfully boring while trying -tastefully, of course- to be anything but boring, and those same attempts just made them feel artificial and grating to her delicate sensibilities.

There was also the fact that she hated waiting in general, especially for a fight. She’d rather just have the fight and be done with it than spend all sorts of time on tenterhooks ahead of time. And Goddess knew that a fight was coming. A big one, probably the biggest the Citadel had been in since the Rachni Wars or the Krogan rebellions, and wonder of wonders the Council had actually prepared for it.

Probably because Cassie, the STG, and the rest of SPECTRE branch had buried then in proof that Something Big and Bad was about to go down and they hadn’t been able to ignore it, but frankly she would take what she could get.

She was in the midst of a time-killing-but-admittedly-important conversation with the ever-reliable Jondam Bau about the security implications of the ‘indoctrination process’ detailed by Cassie and the surviving STG agents from Virmire when her omni-tool chirped with the priority tone reserved for genuine emergencies.

Then every omni-tool in the atrium chirped at once and the shouting voices started to spill from them.

“—repeat, unknown hostiles engaging civilians at the Zakera Ward transit hub, this is not a drill—”

“—Armax Arsenal Arena reports armed intrusion, multiple casualties, requesting immediate—”

“—all C-Sec units respond to Tayseri, we have geth, I say again, we have confirmed geth—”

The voices piled atop one another, overlapping, fracturing into nothing short of auditory chaos, but the common thread was painfully clear regardless: the enemy had, someone, gotten onboard the Citadel and was attacking everything that they could get their hands on.

“Prepare to evacuate the Council!” she snarled at everyone present, snapping her fingers and pointing at the three shocked forms of the Council in question, even as she prepared to key her comms, fully intent on messaging the Destiny Ascension, and have them send a gunship straight to the Council Chamber’s fucking windows if she had to. Unfortunately, she didn’t get the chance, because Matriarch Lidanya’s voice came through first.

“Relay activating! Enemy ships, one-hundred plus! Geth and batarians mixed, five dreadnaughts plus that big bastard from Eden Prime! Pickets, fall back…damnit, they’re gone! All ships, prepare for battle! Launch fighters and establish your firing lines!” perhaps the most experienced fleet commander in the last several centuries snarled, and damned if she didn’t sound anxious to Tela’s ears. It also sounded like the battlespace around the Citadel was about to become spectacularly messy, and Tela briefly weighed the chances of getting the Council aboard a shuttle, safely to the Ascension, and getting the Ascencion past the attacking fleet against her chances of keeping them alive in an on-station safehouse and found the results of that calculation distinctly unpleasant.

The decision made itself, really, in all the time it took to half a heartbeat or three. If she couldn’t gurantee the Council’s safety in space, with no cover, nowhere to really run, and no way to hide, then she had a responsibility to roll the dice on keeping them alive and hidden amongst the several thirteen million or so people that called the station home.

“Change of plans. We’re not going to the Ascension.” She grabbed Sparatus by the arm, hard enough that he startled, mandibles flaring in surprise before annoyance replaced it. “Bau, get every Agent and Officer in this room moving. I want a perimeter and I want it now. We’re heading for the primary safehouse on station.”

“Understood.” Bau didn’t waste time asking questions or second guessing her, instead turning to bark orders at the handful of junior agents and C-Sec troopers scattered through the atrium, and Tela allowed herself a fraction of a second’s relief at having at least one competent body in the room before the omni-tool chatter took another violent turn.

“—Ascension reports jamming across all frequencies, repeat, we are being jammed—”

“—can’t raise fleet command, I say again, comms are—”

Then everything cut out, and Tela growled something particularly foul -foul enough to earn her a shocked exclamation of her name from Tevos, even under the current circumstances- as she fruitlessly tried to regain the signal.

“Well, that’s just fantastic.” She flicked away the display, slapping a hand on her omni-tool with rather more force than strictly necessary and ran a hand over her crest. No fleet command. No Ascension. No word from anyone beyond this room, and for all she knew half the station was already burning. In fact, from the fragments she’d heard before they’d cut out, that’s exactly what it was. “We’re on our own, no comms for coordination or reinforcements. I’ll take point. I want two more biotics on the tail, the rest of them are sticking to the Council. Like fucking glue, you hear me? Everyone else, flanks and column. We’re taking the third evacuation route and heading for the safehouse in Bachjret. Move out.”

They made it almost exactly a three-quarters of the way there, damn near close enough to taste the safety the well-disguised and heavily modified safehouse would represent, when the ambush happened. Geth and batarians, all of them in state-of-the-art armor with weapons of the same quality, poured out of corridors, alleyways, and just about anywhere else that could have hidden an average sized being.

The first geth trooper went down before Tela even finished bringing her pistol up, dropped by a burst of overlapping fire from two of her Agents flanking the Councilors. Muzzle flash strobed off the polished walls of the corridor, throwing everyone’s shadows into stark, jerking relief, and she was already moving, already snapping orders even as her mind raced through angles and cover and headcounts.

“Ambush! Get the Council into cover! Barriers!” she shouted, just as their attackers found their range, and three of her people -C-sec officers, one and all, their shields not intended to stand-off this level of firepower- were cut down before her fellow biotics could obey. Spotting a cloak of dark energy from someone that wasn’t on her side, she lopped a warp at the batarian woman just as she tried to form a Singularity.

The resulting explosion was both encouraging and spectacular, and killed a good dozen of the attackers. But it hadn’t stopped the rest, and Tela ducked low as a hail of geth pulse-rounds sprayed the corridor, several of them cracking across her barrier as she carefully angled it. She came up firing, put three shots into a trooper’s optic before its shields could reform, and heard the wet, choking cough of a C-Sec officer behind her taking a round through the throat.

“Tevos, down! Get into cover!” she barked, but to her surprise the Councillor didn’t obey. Instead, the matriarch proved that -though she had been a politician for many years- she hadn’t won the affection of the Pirate Queen of Omega with pleasant speeches and lovely smiles.

Biotics flared blue around the older asari as Tevos slammed her palm forward, unleashing a shockwave that send another three of their attackers flying with a shockwave strong enough to punch a whole in the wall of the building behind her targets. The Councillor’s expression, when Tela caught a glimpse of it between shots, wasn’t fear or discomfort or even pure adrenaline. It was the intense, focused calm of someone who had clearly done this sort of thing before, a long, long time ago, and hadn’t quite let herself forget how. It was impressive as hell, and actually somewhat awe-inspiring. That being said, it was also a massive pain in her fucking ass, since her job was to keep the lady alive.

“Cover! I said get to cover, not join the fight, damn it!” Tela snarled, though there wasn’t as much heat in the words as she might have preferred.

“Someone has to actually kill things around here, dear. You keep talking, I keep working.” Tevos didn’t even glance her way, already tracking her next target through the smoke, and had the woman really just teased her under these circumstances?!

Tela didn’t have the luxury of remarking on any of that, because a batarian with a shotgun barreled around the corner ahead and put a slug through the shoulder of the officer nearest her. The man folded, screaming, and she put two rounds through the batarian’s skull before he could line up a second shot. A glimpse of movement elsewhere drew her eye, a long-limbed and oddly-colored geth leaping off a nearby wall.

“Sparatus, on your left!” she barked, and the turian Councilor spun with a speed that belied his age, avoiding the machine’s wild swipe -mostly, his nice suit wouldn’t be quite so nice, but he wasn’t bleeding so what did the state of his clothes matter?- before taking aim with a small hold-out pistol he’d pulled from somewhere and putting three rounds through the thing‘s head.

Screaming drew her attention to another pair of batarians, who had apparently drawn the attention of Valern. Valern, who had apparently not forgotten his past as an STG field agent -and apparently hadn’t downgraded his omnitool to a benign civilian model- and had decided that setting the two men on fire was the best way that he could contribute to the current situation.

The batarians dropped, shrieking, one of them scrabbling at his own melting faceplate before he collapsed and stopped moving altogether, while the other took five rounds to the head from the SMG that Valern had snagged from the body of one of the dead C-Sec officers.

Tela put a round through the last remaining enemy’s head and allowed herself half a second to actually take stock of the corridor and the people still in it.

It wasn’t good, though it wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been either.

Three C-Sec officers down for good, unmoving in spreading pools of blue-black and red. A fourth was dragging himself toward the nearest bit of cover with one leg clearly shattered, teeth gritted around a scream he refused to let out. Of the twenty officers that had started this escort with them, she counted perhaps half to be uninjured and still fully combat-capable. Though at least her fellow SPECTRE agents were fine, their better equipment having made quite a difference.

“In hindsight, perhaps we should have expected Saren to have revealed the location of our safe houses, and therefore should have expected the enemy to be prepared to ambush us while attempting to reach them.” Tevos remarked almost casually, stooping down to pluck an assault rifle off of the ground and checking to make sure it was still functional.

“I’ll wager you a bottle of Founding Wine that there are other ambushes set up on the routes to the other safehouses and the shuttlepads.” Sparatus agreed, sifting through the many weapons on hand before laying claim to one that seemed to suit his fancy.

“That would be a poor wager.” Valern commented absently as he checked his omni-tool, tapping away at it briefly. “So, having established that, I suppose that this is the most convenient time to inform all of you that myself and my predecessors have spent the last two millennia establishing safehouses across the Citadel. Completely off the books, of course. I recommend that we make use of one of them instead of continuing to shove our heads into the thresher maw’s mouth.”

“Now you tell us.” Tevos groused, taking a firm grip on her skirts and starting to tear, ignoring the wide-eyed stares of her guards as she quite suddenly became rather less demure and reserved than they were used to, stretching her legs to test her improved range of motion. “Two millennia, and you’re bringing this up after we’ve already lost a third of our escort in the open? Valern, I respect you deeply as both a man and a Councillor and value your friendship deeply, but your timing is for shit. Why was this never brought up before?”

“My apologies. I would have mentioned it a bit earlier, but I was rather occupied setting men on fire and keeping secrets. Old habits die hard, you understand.” He said it without a trace of irony, looking up from what Tela could now see was a map. “At any rate, you never asked, and the information is kept compartmentalized for good reason. One never knows what might happen, after all. I believe if we were to take the nearest maintenance corridor, we will be able to cut our travel time to the nearest Kithoi Ward safe house by forty percent. Staying in this Ward is not, obviously, the wisest choice.”

“Indeed.” Sparatus’ drawl was delightfully dry, really, and he glanced at two of their escorting C-Sec officers, tilting his head towards their injured compatriot. “‘gel him and help him walk. We’re not leaving him behind for scavengers, or whatever friends these bastards might have called in when they spotted us. Tela, take point, and keep your fellow biotics to the front and rear. Elana can handle close defense for the three of us, I think.”

“Volunteering me for things, are you?” Tevos scoffed without bitterness, rolling her head on her shoulders as she almost absently kicked away the scraps of cloth that had once been every part of her dress below mid-thigh. “Fine, I’ll protect you poor boys.”

“I didn’t hear anything about needing protection…” Valern remarked, waving his omni-tool at the door for the previously mentioned maintenance corridor, the lock flickering green before the panels slid near silently apart. “Excellent. The overrides are still functional. Into the corridor, everyone.”

As she stepped into the dimly-lit and narrow passageway, Tela couldn’t help but marvel at the change in demeanor of the Council. She’d been more impressed with them in the last five minutes than she had in the last several years, and the thought very much occurred that the three of them did -apparently, and she never would have believed it if she hadn’t seen it- still ‘have it’.

How lovely for everyone involved. They might just survive this war after all.

############################################################################

The bridge of the Destiny Ascension shuddered once again under yet another a near-miss from the batarian dreadnaught that she was dueling with, the deck plating trembling beneath Lidanya’s boots as her beloved command’s shields flared white through the bridge windows. It was nerve-wracking, even for someone with her experience, but she didn’t let those nerves show. She just kept her hands clasped behind her back and kept her spine straight, because the officers around her needed to see calm and control even when calm and in control was the last thing she felt.

“Updates.” Her voice cut through the din of a dozen overlapping status calls, and Chief Petty Officer Yaelis snapped back an answer without looking away from her console.

“Shields holding at sixty-two percent, Matriarch. We’ve lost the Vaenathi and the Tesephet, and the Pride of Thessia is dead in the water, venting atmosphere from her forward decks. Our escorts have been getting hit, hard, but we haven’t lost too many of them yet. The salarian and turian fleets are in similar shape, but the Alliance squadrons were wiped out entirely thanks to that…thing.”

Lidanya made a noise of understanding, her expression tightening. Sovereign, as she’d been told the monstrous super-dreadnaught was called, had come out of the relay and accelerated directly towards the Citadel, leaving its smaller minions to take the brunt of the defending fleets’ fury. Her own squadrons, not wanting to have the Citadel as the backdrop for missed enemy shots, had stationed themselves obliquely to the station, and therefore been entirely out of position to intercept it.

The Alliance cruiser squadrons present, however, had not been. Though they had been few, they’d had a fierce desire to avenge the dead of Eden Prime, to defend the innocent people of the Citadel from the very people that had killed so many of their own civilians.

They’d damn near lept forward, in a perfect triple-pair formation that caught the massive, squid-like ship in the middle of their overlapping fields of fire. Their gunners had landed every hit, their helmsmen had manouvered them in such a way that any conventional enemy would have struggled to keep one of them in its sights for more than a few moments, and she could see from how they were moving that each pair was ready to rotate the forward ship to avoid any one of them taking critical damage.

It had been beautiful, and it had been pointless. Their volleys and torpedoes had been ignored outright -the bastard hadn’t even shot their torpedoes down!- and Sovereign’s return fire had been devastating. Goddess, she’d never forget it so long as she lived, and she’d be seeing the red glare of it’s main gun burning behind her eyelids for more nights than she cared to imagine. It had cut them to pieces, quite literally in most cases -and ramming straight through one in another case- on its way to slip inside the closing Citadel arms, just before they could close and lock it out. Now it was inside, and she was outside with near about a hundred enemy ships.

Which was another problem, because the data SPECTRE Shepard had sent had quite clearly shown just over twice that many, and she was feeling more than a little on edge about the possibilities implied by their absence. They had to be somewhere, but she was struggling to think of where it could be that was more significant than this.

If they’d committed the entire enemy fleet to this attack, the battle would probably be well on its way to ending already. As heavily reinforced as the CDF had been, they hadn’t been able to completely abandon their responsibilities elsewhere, and two-hundred ships led by a half-dozen dreadnoughts could have simply overwhelmed her people through sheer weight of fire.

So if they weren’t here, they must be doing something else, and it must be part of some kind of plan. After all of this, after the way the Warmaster and Saren had had damn near all of the Citadel chasing their own tails -SPECTRE Shepard’s apparent brilliance in hunting the men down left aside- she rather doubted that half the fucking fleet had just wandered off and gotten lost.

“Matriarch, priority signal, Alliance encryption—Emergency Action Message, all frequencies, unjammed markers.” The comms officer’s voice cracked with the effort of staying professional, her hands flying across her console as she isolated the transmission from the chaos of overlapping fleet chatter. “It’s a couple of hours old, and degraded, took this long to punch through the jamming and get decrypted, but I have it now.”

“Read it.” Lidanya could hear the flatness in her voice as something cold and heavy settled in her chest. It wouldn’t be good news, couldn’t be on a day like today, so the only real question was how bad it was.

“’This is Fleet Admiral Hackett, Systems Alliance Fifth Fleet, broadcasting in the clear. Case Zulu declared. I repeat: Case Zulu declared. Arcturus Station under sustained assault by unknown hostile force, approximately one hundred vessels, geth and batarian designs. First and Fifth Fleets engaged, unable to disengage or reposition without exposing station to bombardment. Relay corridor to Sol under direct threat. All available forces requested. God help us all. Hackett out.’”

Fuck!

Of course it would be Arcturus! The headquarters of the Alliance military and the meeting place of their Parliment, damn near the brain of humanity and sitting squarely at the galactic crossroads one damn jump away from Earth, all of which was more than enough to make it a target. Include the fact that the leader of this not-so-little plot was a fanatical batarian and that the Alliance had the most powerful non-Council military? It became a foregone conclusion.

And now she couldn’t possibly expect Alliance reinforcements anytime soon. Even if they were willing to sacrifice Arcturus itself -which they wouldn’t be, obviously, and with good reason- they could never leave an enemy force a clear shot at their home system. So, she was just going to have to win this fight with what she had and hope that the scales tipped in her favor.

“Alright, ladies, it looks like we’re on our own for now. Keep the fleets together, keep fighting, and we’ll win this thing!” she barked, letting a smirk of confidence that she didn’t really feel crease her lips. “And after we turn these bastards to dust, we’ll see about riding to the rescue of humanity!”

A cheer, ragged but genuine, went up around the room, and she let it soothe her frayed nerves as much as she hoped it soothed that of her crew. She let it settle, and she prayed that fortune would favor them all.

###############################################################################

Deep in the heart of the besieged Citadel, dimly lit by emergency lighting, raging fires and the explosions that caused them, the large replica mass relay -long considered a sculpture honoring the nameless Prothean scientist who had surely invented the concept of those massive feats of engineering- suddenly spun to life. Faster and faster it’s rings did spin until, quite suddenly and with a blinding flash of blue lightning, two battered Makos appeared. Flying through the air and crashing through gardens and fountains and walkways alike, they came to a crumpled halt amidst the wreckage both new and old.

Hatches popped open, disgorging a group whose bonds and trust had been forged by months of fire, and there was a brief moment of conversation before they separated. The men, led by a once-maverick young turian who had learned the value of pairing caution and temperance and long-term thinking with his passion for justice and fierce dedication to justice, made for C-Sec HQ to help break the siege there.

The women?

They turned their feet towards the Council chambers, and the enemy that would doubtlessly be waiting for them there. The man who had been the mastermind of more suffering than they could really quantify, recent and distant past alike, and the man who even now was assisting his mechanical master with killing untold multitudes.

The Warmaster would be confronted, he would be killed, and this war would be brought to an end.