Chapter Text
Liara exits the lift to stand in front of Shepard’s cabin door, the data-pad that hasn’t been out of her sight since they left Omega still clutched tightly in hand. The hand shakes slightly and the dread that had curled in her gut since she finished her research into the artifact continues to churn. She hits the intercom to request access. The door slides open almost immediately.
Shepard is standing at his desk. The glass face of the cabinet above his desk has shifted to a holo display, a map of Namakli projected in front of him. Another, smaller display is projected next to the planetary image, a map of the excavation site where the artifacts are said to have been found.
He has a stylus between his teeth, thoughtfully studying his handwritten notes next to the map.
For all the ways they are different, Liara and Shepard are similar in the fixated way they approach work. Whereas Liara has been looking into the artifact itself, Shepard has been plotting out Plans A through Z for when they land on Namakli.
He is a brilliant tactician. The Alliance was foolish to let him go.
“Shepard,” she says in lieu of a greeting. “The artifacts that are rumored to have been found on Namakli concern me.”
She had spent hours in her quarters after they left Omega, pouring over the data that Aria had given them and searching the extranet for more. As the pieces began to fit together and the dread began to grow, Liara reached for different data. Data she has kept, unread, in her desk for years.
“This whole rock concerns me,” Shepard replies, gesturing vaguely at the holo-screen. “Hotter than a krogan’s asscrack and swimming in vorcha.”
“The information Aria had on the dig was quite extensive,” she continues, approaching his desk. “She was able to intercept communications between one of the scientists and a colleague of theirs on the Citadel.” She takes a breath. It stutters. “From what I can tell, this artifact sounds very similar to the one my mother was studying on Noveria.”
That gets Shepard’s attention, and he turns to face her, an inscrutable look on his face.
They do not talk about Noveria. Everything that needed to be said about it has been said.
After Shepard rescued Liara from Therum, she offered to pay him for passage to Noveria. Her mother had been on the planet for months, studying an artifact she would tell Liara very little about. But as time went on, her communications with her mother became strange. Unlike Benezia at all.
Though Liara and her mother had never been particularly close, as she got older, Liara realized that perhaps it was because of how alike they were. Focused and driven to a nearly obsessive level. Before Noveria, Liara had reevaluated her expectations for her relationship with her mother, and they had grown to coexist in what was probably the best relationship either could expect from the other. They did not see each other often, but they did communicate on a regular basis, enough that Benezia’s sudden lack of communication was abnormal.
Concerned, Liara took the opportunity to attempt to check on her. But when she finally arrived on Noveria – Shepard in tow – what she discovered walking around in her mother’s body was not Benezia at all. What was left was someone cold and menacing, raging about ‘her masters’ being ‘gone’. How, without them, she had no purpose. She had been driven mad, and in her rage attacked Liara, whom she no longer recognized as her daughter.
Shepard had been forced to kill her to save Liara’s life.
She wanted to hate him for it. But she could not. And Shepard, who she had already written off as mercurial and ruthless as he was rumored to be, offered her a place on his crew.
“That fucking orb? We smashed that thing to bits,” Shepard says, resting his hands on his hips. “There’s more than one?”
Liara sighs, lowering herself into Shepard’s unoccupied chair. “I am not sure, though that seems to be the case. But the more I study this artifact – and the one my mother found – I am beginning to wonder if it is prothean at all.”
“That’s comforting.”
“It was assumed to be prothean because so many artifacts that have been discovered are. But it bears little resemblance to any other prothean artifact I’ve studied. It does, however, bear a striking resemblance to the artifact my mother studied. I went back and reviewed the data we discovered on Noveria. She hypothesized that the artifact was created by a long extinct race as a form of... mind control. Indoctrination. And that, despite the fact that the race that created the artifact is long dead, the mind control continues to work. What do indoctrinated individuals do with no master to serve?”
“That’s even less comforting,” Shepard mutters, leaning back against the edge of his desk and crossing his arms over his chest.
“If it is indeed the same artifact that my mother discovered on Noveria, and if it does what it did to her, I am not surprised the council wants it. In the wrong hands, it could be very dangerous.”
“I’m not convinced the council is safe hands, Liara.”
“I agree,” she says. “This type of power is too dangerous for anyone to have. Which makes me very concerned about selling it on the black market.”
Shepard groans, raking a hand through his hair and throwing it into further disarray. “You really had to go and rain on my parade, didn’t you?”
“I do not- “
He waves her off, a small smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “I’ll deal with Aria. We’ll tell her it was destroyed when we got there.” He stands to his full height and levels a finger at her, still grinning. “But we’re still raiding that dig site. I have a reputation to maintain, you know.”
Liara smiles. He is not giving in lightly, not really. Any other weapon – any other situation – and he would fight her on it, reminding her that Shepard’s morality runs very much in shades of gray. But the possibility of a weapon that could wipe the minds of its victims and turn them into puppets is something Shepard will not tolerate.
Liara had often wondered why that was so. And at first, Shepard had been very reluctant to let his barriers down around her. It had been Ashley who explained to Liara that he had spent a good portion of his childhood with no sense of agency. Not allowed to make choices for himself.
For all his faults, Shepard does not use people. He values autonomy above all else.
“You should get some rest,” she tells him, standing to go.
“Touché, Dr. T’Soni,” he says, taking the stairs to the sunken portion of his cabin. He is stripping off his shirt before Liara has a chance to look away. She long ago got used to Shepard’s lack of modesty. “It must be exhausting being such a party pooper.”
Liara sighs, gathering her data pad and heading for the door. She stops at the sound of her name. She glances back at Shepard, standing near the foot of his bed, curious expression on his face.
“If it is the same thing we found on Noveria, we’ll smash the shit out of it.”
Liara nods, forcing a smile to cross her lips. It is as close to asking if she is ok as Shepard is capable of. It does not ease all of her anxiety, but knowing he is at her back helps.
Shepard grasps the handle above his head as the shuttle veers sharply. He and the crew bump into each other like bowling pins. There are a few muttered curses and apologies, along with the clink of armor knocking together.
Everyone present and accounted for. Even though he’d gathered them in the conference room after he met with Liara to further discuss the mission. Something he never did. Usually, he picks the jobs, and the crew follows his lead. They know he’ll line their pockets with credits. It’s a good system.
But sometimes it’s not that simple.
On the one-year anniversary of Torfan, they came across a batarians slave transport in the Shadow Sea. It would’ve been a good payday, especially since the batarians took more than people from whatever colony or outpost they’d raided.
He thought, not my circus, not my monkeys, until he noticed the kids. They were huddled together in the cargo bay behind stacks of crates and stolen equipment, trying to look as small as possible. The oldest of them couldn’t have been more than thirteen.
Eric had been thirteen with the Reds began pimping him out.
Some of them had the same dead eyed stare he’d had seen so many times living and working with the Reds. The zombie-like gaze of someone on autopilot, whose choices had been stripped from them.
The same stare he saw years later in Benezia before he gunned her down.
They could’ve sacked that ship for anything valuable and set it for course to the nearest station. But kids with nothing have even less in the way of choices, and half of them would been dead within the year. The lucky ones would end up like Eric had.
Maybe it’d been Williams’ puppy dog eyes that finally did it, but they ended up stripping the ship of anything valuable and batarian, while leaving the cash and other valuables for the would-be slaves, then escorted the ship through the relay jumps back to Sol so it wouldn’t be shot down the second it entered Alliance space.
The shuttle jerks again.
“Tali, you’re fired,” he hollers up to the cockpit, packing all the maudlin thoughts back where they belong.
Tali hums, wrangling the shuttle back until control under Namakli’s wind shear.
As if the heat and piles of vorcha weren’t enough.
“Sorry, Captain,” she replies. There’s a hint of a smile in her voice because she knows he’s full of shit. “I’ll return to the Flotilla right after the mission.”
Shepard grunts. If he has his way, the Migrant Fleet is never getting her back. Without Tali, the Normandy would be held together by duct tape and dreams.
She puts them down on a landing pad that hangs off the side of a cliff. In fact, the entire site seems to be built into the side of a mountain. Prefab buildings climb up the cliff face, using any outcropping for structural support. Below the landing pad, the desert valley sprawls on seemingly forever.
“Kind of disappointed in the welcome party,” Williams comments.
It is weird. Not a single person exits the surrounding prefabs. No one mills around the landing pad or the balconies above. The only signs of life on his combat scanner are the crews’ transponder pings. The only sounds are the shuttle thrusters and the wind whipping around them.
“This wind is really kicking.” Tali’s voice is tinny in Shepard’s comm. “I’m going to find a safe place to sit. Let me know when you need pickup, Shepard.”
“Yeah, you just want to take a nap, I get it,” Shepard replies evenly, his attention more focused on his eerie surroundings. Vakarian comes to stand next to him, and Shepard is tempted to yell ‘boo!’ to see if he jumps.
Liara joins him at his other side, fingers tapping at her omni-tool and a map of the area populating above her arm. “The artifact site is to the northwest of our location.”
“Simmer down, Liara,” Shepard tells her. Once she latches onto something, Liara is a pit-bull. “We can’t run off halfcocked. Where the hell are all the scientists that seem to have just vanished?”
“I thought ‘halfcocked’ was your middle name, Skipper,” Williams puts in, and Shepard gives her the finger.
“Liara and I will head to the dig site. The rest of you yahoos, see what you can find.”
Williams heads off to search the prefabs with Vakarian and EDI. One day he’ll get used to the geth she wears.
His rifle is a comforting weight in his hands. Alliance training isn’t something you can shrug off, even once your name goes from ‘possible Spectre candidate’ to the guy people only talk about in hushed whispers.
Torfan wasn’t the first time life had handed Eric a shit sandwich, so he pulled up a chair and used all the training and credits the Alliance had spent to build a life that wasn’t necessarily on the up and up, but damn it was fun.
Creepy, abandoned dig sites notwithstanding. Even though he’s back in the thick of it, doing similar shit to when he was an N. Briefly, he thinks back to the batarian slave transport. Then to the kids he lived with in the Reds, selling themselves before they were old enough to realize what that meant.
They take a lift that makes noises lifts shouldn’t make up to the second level. A lizard skitters passed Shepard’s boot and into the open door of a prefab right off the elevator. He motions for Liara to stand back as he clears the room.
No one here but us lizards.
“This is…” Liara begins.
“Creepy as fuck?”
“I was going to say ‘concerning’, but yes, ‘creepy as fuck’ also qualifies.” She grabs a data-pad sitting on a chair nearby.
There’s a mug on the table in front of the loveseat that has the dregs of what could have been coffee sitting at the bottom. But it’s a science experiment now, so hard to tell. Dirty dishes fill the sink that Shepard knows would stink to high heaven if he took his helmet off.
“Whoever lived here is either a slob or has been gone for a while,” he says.
“Yes, but to where?” Liara replies, her face scrunching up as she studies the data-pad in her hand.
“My guess is nowhere good.” He nods at her. “Anything?”
Liara nods. “Perhaps. This data-pad belonged to a Dr. Estera Cho. Her earliest entries discuss the discovery of the artifact and initial findings. She is very thorough and seems excited.”
Shepard hums, letting Liara continue to read while he pokes around. Piles of dirty laundry, unmade bed. He runs a fingertip across the surface of the dresser, coming away with a layer of dust.
After a minute or so, Liara hums.
“Liara?”
Liara comes to stand next to him. “The newer her entries get, the less detailed they are. She begins to talk less about what the artifact does and more about how it makes her feel.”
Before Shepard can ask her to elaborate, Liara continues, “Listen to this: ‘There are simply not enough of the orbs to go around. Everyone seems to want one of their own to study in their personal quarters. We have had to resort to a lottery system to keep it fair. My number was drawn; Dr. Frost’s was not. Last night I saw him attempting to break into my quarters to take it from me. I will have to find a better hiding spot’.”
“What the actual fuck.”
Liara shakes her head, her forehead doing that scrunchy thing it does when she’s concerned. “Shepard, this sounds very familiar to what my mother’s later data entries were like.”
Shepard frowns. Sometimes, in his weaker moments, he sees Benezia’s face when he looks at Liara. Mouth slack, sightless eyes staring up at him. She was far from the first person he’d killed, but he never proceeded to live with their loved one in a starship, either.
“What else does it say?”
Liara continues to read. “She was very habitual on reporting data – every day at around six in the night cycle – but there is suddenly a two-week gap in entries.” She swipes across the pad with a finger to the next entry, then stops, her entire body going still, like she’s frozen in place.
“Goddess. She speaks of starting to hear voices. ‘They are speaking to me. I have been chosen. I thought about asking the others if they have heard it, too, but I don’t know if I can trust them anymore. They… the masters… have picked me, not them. I must keep it a secret.’.”
“Christ,” Shepard mutters.
Liara hums, opens her mouth to say something, then shuts it when Williams’ voice crackles over their comm.
“Shepard, we’re finding some weird ass shit over here.”
“Let me guess,” Shepard replies. “Empty pre-fabs and data entries from scientists that are talking to orbs.”
“Uh…”
“Same for us,” he tells her. “Be careful, scoop up anything valuable, and if you find a creepy orb, break the shit out of it.”
“You got it, Skipper.”
When he disconnects with Williams, Shepard finds Liara sitting on the unmade bed, her face still in the data-pad.
“Her elation at hearing the voices eventually turns to paranoia. She writes about realizing that what she was hearing was almost like a recording of her masters’ voices. She says, ‘It is clear to me. The masters are gone. Have been for a long time. But I still hear their voice, still receive their gifts. It is agony to know I will never be able to fulfill their purpose.’.”
They stare at each other over the short distance for a moment. They’ve never talked about Noveria or her mother, between the day Liara agreed to join the Normandy and today. It had been an unspoken agreement between them that it was done. Put in a safe and dropped to the bottom of an ocean.
But the words Liara reads from Dr. Cho’s data-pad sound so familiar to the words Benezia uttered that Noveria and that shit show don’t seem years away anymore.
“They were right, to call you a Butcher,” Liara had hissed at him after he’d gunned down her mother.
She’d wanted it to hurt him, but she only ended up hurting herself. Eric had come to grips with the ghosts of Torfan long before he laid eyes on Liara T’Soni. She couldn’t say anything to him he hadn’t heard a thousand times.
She apologized. He offered her a place on his ship. She was smart and resourceful, and he needed a crew. She accepted, though she stared at him like he sprouted another head while she did it.
It wasn’t until months later that they talked about it again, two bottles of Thessian red deep. Liara asked him why he offered her the job.
“Why did you take it?” he countered, taking another swig from bottle number three. Fuck the asari knew how to make wine.
Liara studied him, her eyes glassy. “I… do not think deflecting works in this situation, Shepard. The answer to my question should come before yours.”
He snorted, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “According to you.”
Liara stared at him for a few more moments. He took another drink of wine and passed her the bottle in silence. Finally, she sighed.
“I… was not ready to return to Thessia. I needed a change of scenery.”
Shepard snickered, leaning back so he was resting on his elbows and staring up at the swimming ceiling. “Well you certainly accomplished that.”
“And honestly, I was curious why you would offer in the first place,” she continued, circling the question back to him.
“Wasn’t my idea,” he replied, holding his hand out and waggling his fingers until she deposited the bottle into it. “Was Joker’s.”
She held on tight when he tried to take the bottle, pinning him with a glare. He groaned, rolling his eyes.
“I needed to fill out my crew with someone that didn’t let their fists do the thinking for them. You fit the bill.”
She let loose her grip on the bottle.
“Besides,” he slurred. “After everything that happened, I figured the least I could do was give you a little financial compensation.”
Liara studied him a moment before her lips curled into a grin. “I like you too, Shepard.”
Somehow, she managed to fill a place in his life previously only occupied by Stella and Williams.
“Anything else?” he asks as Liara continues to study the data-pad in hand.
Liara continues to swipe, faster now. When she inhales, her breath is hitched. “There is only one word on the next several entries before they stop completely… ‘Please’.”
A chill runs through Shepard, like the heat on Namakli doesn’t matter anymore.
“Please,” Benezia said, wheezing around the gaping hole in her chest. “I need to hear them.”
At the time, Shepard thought there wasn’t any sense to be made from her final words. Now, it’s clear what she meant.
“Whoever created these orbs is long extinct, as I suspected,” Liara says, placing the data-pad gently on the bed next to her. “The technology still works – to... indoctrinate its victims – but without ‘masters’ to serve...”
“It knocks them off their rocker,” Shepard mutters absently. Liara pulls a face but nods. “We need to find the orb she kept in here, smash the fuck out of it, and move on.”
“Agreed,” Liara says, squatting down next to the bed to peer underneath it.
They ransack the place, turning over every surface, looking in every cabinet or dresser or trunk. Ten minutes in, Shepard is beginning to question his life choices when he steps closer to the nearly waist-high pile of dirty laundry and stops in his tracks.
Something twinges at the back of his skull, like the start of a bad headache. Scowling, he kicks at the laundry pile with his boot. The toe clinks against something hard, and a momentary sensation of something like loneliness slithers up his spine.
He kicks away the clothing on top of the pile to reveal an orb about the size of his head, its oil slick like surface gleaming even in the dim room. The surface appears to shift and ripple before his eyes; an invitation.
Pick it up. See what it has to say.
His fingers flex around the stock of his weapon, a moment before he takes aim and fires a short burst into the orb’s surface. It shatters, pieces falling between pieces of clothing, and he swears a short cry echos in his ears before falling silent.
Liara starts, her hand flying to her chest. Her eyes are wide in her face when she turns to him.
“Found it,” he says.
Liara sighs, relaxing slightly. “Some warning would have been nice.” Her brow furrows as she looks at him. Studies him. “Did you... did you hear anything?”
Shepard shrugs his shoulders, shaking off the lingering tension. “Let’s keep moving.”
After a moment, Liara nods slowly, and follows him out of the prefab.
There’s a creaky, thrown together catwalk leading across a sheer drop, connecting to an outcropping in the mountain. The lights from the dig site blaze bright, even in the silence. They pass three more abandoned pre-fabs on their way, find and destroy one more orb, and pick up data-pads full of the same similar crazy pants ramblings.
Liara’s steps falter, her eyes darting up from the map she’d been consulting. Immediately after, Shepard’s combat scanner pings with half a dozen unknown transponders.
“There is another biotic here,” she says before Shepard can ask.
Shepard frowns. His experience with biotics is limited pretty much to Liara and the random mercenary. It’s never occurred to him to ask a lot of questions. Liara’s biotics are useful. That’s all he needs to know.
“More than that,” he says. “Combat scanner picked up at least six unknown transponders.”
They pick up pace towards the dig site, coming to a stop behind a raised ledge overlooking the main site. Even under the ablative, Shepard’s skin tingles, a moment before a subsonic boom makes his ears pop.
He and Liara exchange looks.
“Ok, even I felt that one,” he says, peering over the ledge. “Shit.” The newcomers wear uniforms Shepard could recognize anywhere. “Cerberus.”
Admittedly, his experience with Cerberus is limited to one fateful meeting where The Illusive Man offered him a ship and a spot on his payroll. Shepard had declined, but he, Williams, and Joker came back for the ship anyway.
They probably would have never gotten it out of the hanger if the onboard AI hadn’t offered to help. In exchange for unshackling her, of course.
Still, Shepard’s pretty sure The Illusive Man hasn’t quite forgiven him for swiping billions of credits out from under his nose.
The Cerberus troopers converge on another, lone figure. Shepard stifles a laugh when he spots the Spectre logo on his pauldron.
“The council sent a Spectre?” Liara whispers. “They must be desperate to obtain this artifact.”
Yeah, they sent my replacement. Shepard peers through the scope of his rifle down onto the dig site, getting a bead on one of the Cerberus troops.
A month before Torfan, Anderson had contacted Shepard to tell him the Alliance was putting his name forward as a possible Spectre candidate. Humanity wanted a seat at the table, and the first step was getting one of theirs into the council’s elite guard.
No one even mentioned it after Torfan, until years later after the near disaster on Feros. The hero of the hour, a young Lieutenant Commander, saved the colony from a mind controlling plant monster. The vids were splashed with his admittedly very nice face for weeks. Squeaky clean record. A list of commendations longer than Shepard’s arm. A biotic. He was probably a much better poster boy for humanity’s Spectre anyway. Six months after they pinned him, humanity had a human counselor as well.
“Can you give me some targets?” Shepard asks, and Liara blinks at him. “I don’t trust the council either, but if we’re going to get those orbs before Cerberus does, I’d rather have a Spectre on our side.”
Liara nods, a moment before she lights up blue, making the hairs on Shepard’s arms stand on end. Below them, Spectre Alenko rises from the fallen lab table he’s crouched behind, rilfe in hand, taking out one of the approaching troops with deadly accuracy.
Shepard swears his attention is diverted, just slightly, a moment before Liara waves an arm in an upward motion. A moment later the remaining five troops rise into the air, snagged in whatever biotic trick she’d just used.
An assault rifle isn’t the best tool for the long-range job, but he and Williams had recently upgraded the target assist in their weapons. The first two fall easily, then Alenko slings a swath of dark energy at the cluster of troops Liara levitated. The boom that follows briefly shakes the ground under Shepard’s feet. The troops fall to the ground in a heap, unmoving but still glowing blue.
“Shepard, what the hell was that?” Williams shouts into the comm.
“Head to my location,” he replies, making his way down into the dig site with Liara right behind him. “Cerberus is here.”
Williams curses on the other end, but the comm disconnects. He doesn’t need confirmation to know she’s on her way, Vakarian and EDI in tow.
As soon as his and Liara’s boots hit the ground of the dig site, Alenko trains his assault rifle in their direction. Liara sucks in a breath. Shepard raises his hands in a placating gesture.
“Is that any way to greet someone that saved your bacon?”
Shepard thinks helpfully that he kind of expected Alenko to be taller. The vids and recruitment material made him seem twelve feet tall. Of course, they also only stopped shy of giving him a damn halo the way they framed him like humanity’s shining beacon.
Not that he’s short. He’s nearly as tall as Shepard.
“I’m here on Spectre business,” Alenko replies. The vids and recruitment ads didn’t capture the deep, top shelf sound of his voice. “Why are you here?”
Shepard shrugs, taking a couple steps closer and kicking the arm of a fallen Cerberus troop. Liara hangs back, probably glaring into the back of his head. Behind the visor, Alenko’s eyes narrow, then dart down to the ghost of the N7 emblem Shepard had pried off his hard suit, then over to the arm piece, where he’d spray painted over the red and white stripe. He adjusts the grip on his gun.
“Now that we’ve established that we know who each other are,” Shepard continues. “I’m just a guy, looking for some balls.”
“Goddess, Shepard,” Liara mutters.
Alenko actually looks taken back for a second, though his weapon stance doesn’t falter in the slightest.
“You know, big scary ones that turn people into drooling husks?”
“The artifacts,” Liara clarifies. “I assume that is why you are here, too?”
“You’re pirates,” Alenko says, and there’s a hysterical tone to the laugh he lets out. “Do you really think I’m going to let you leave this planet with those artifacts so you can sell them to the highest bidder?”
“That is not why we are here,” Liara says gently.
Alenko’s eyes flick back towards Shepard.
“They aren’t leaving the planet, period. We’re destroying them.”
“I’m under orders to return them to the Citadel.”
Shepard snorts out a laugh, lowering his hands to put them on his hips. “If you’d seen what those things do, you wouldn’t want anyone to have them.”
Alenko stares at him for a moment, like Shepard is a particularly tricky puzzle he’s trying to solve, then says, “Come with me. There’s something you need to see.”
In an apparent show of trust, Alenko racks his weapon back to his hard-suit and leads Shepard and Liara to the other side of the dig site. He pulls back a tarp that has seen better days, and ushers Liara and Shepard through.
Liara goes first, and a hand goes to her mouth as she stifles a gasp. Shepard peers into the giant hole on the other side of the tarp, sloping down to about six feet deep.
It’s filled with bodies. There’s no way to tell how long they’ve been there, without getting closer, and Shepard has no intention of doing so.
“The scientists, I take it,” he says.
Alenko nods. “All suicides, from what I can tell. I didn’t want to think it was connected to the artifact, but from what you said...”
Liara takes a step back, turning away. “We found some of the reports. They were hearing voices. It indoctrinated them, drove them to obey a master that no longer exists. When they realized this, they were driven to kill themselves.”
Alenko looks at her for a moment. “How do you know all that?”
“Because that is what it did to my mother.”
Alenko takes a step back, muttering, “I’m so sorry.”
Shepard steps away from the pit. “Let’s smash the rest of these things and get the fuck out of here, ok?”
Liara makes a sound as if to reply, but is cut off by Williams’ voice in her comm. “A Cerberus shuttle incoming to your location, Skipper!”
The shuttle appears through the clouds a moment later, careening towards the ground a few hundred yards from them. It’s followed by a fireball and a boom that reaches Shepard’s ears a few moments later.
“The hell-” he pulls his weapon and takes a quick scan of his surroundings. The good news is there’s plenty of cover.
“They took out my shuttle!” Alenko yells, ducking behind some sand-covered dig equipment.
Shepard groans, watching more Cerberus troops pour into the dig site from the opposite entrance. “Help get us out of here and I’ll give you a ride.”
The crack of a sniper rifle pierces the air, and one of the troopers drops, rolling into the pit to join the rest of the dead. Shepard smiles.
Vakarian, I could kiss you.
“They’re with me,” he tells Alenko when he startles. “Liara, stay back and prime some targets for us if you get the chance. Spectre Alenko, you ready to get your hands dirty?”
Alenko just stares at him and Shepard chuckles, slapping him on the plated shoulder before rising from cover and opening fire. Alenko curses but is right behind him, and Shepard’s skin prickles again a moment before he’s cradled in a shining blue barrier.
“You’re making yourself a huge target!” Alenko complains but follows Shepard when he dashes forward towards the next bit of cover. Get back to the squad. Take out Cerberus’ goons. Make sure no artifacts leave the planet. Try not to die.
“That’s why I have you,” Shepard replies, winking at him as they drop behind a large boulder. “That space magic of yours.”
Alenko just stares at him some more, but Shepard notices helpfully that the barrier doesn’t gutter out. Across the field, EDI charges forward through a cluster of Cerberus troopers, taking out three just with her sheer size.
“Holy shit, is that a geth?” Alenko squawks.
Shepard laughs, rising and taking aim. He drops two troopers whose kinetic shields were obliterated by EDI’s wrath, but they keep coming.
Damn Cerberus shuttle is like a fucking clown car. The Illusive Man is just packing them in like sardines.
Vakarian keeps taking pot shots. Shepard spies Williams on the other side, popping out from cover to spray fire when she can. Meanwhile, EDI is apparently having the time of her life, treating the Cerberus troops like bowling pins and her the bowling ball.
“Shepard!” Williams yells. “On your nine!”
With their sheer numbers, half a dozen troopers manage to flank him, coming up on him and Alenko from behind some scaffolding. By the time he sees them they’re nearly on them both. He fires on the closest, his round pinging off their shields, but it barrels into Shepard, riding them both to the ground.
Distantly, he hears Liara shout his name.
He gets his feet into position, flat on the ground, and pops his hips, knocking his attacker off balance enough that he can roll them over. He flash fabricates a blade with his omni-tool before he’s finished straddling them, burying it to the hilt in their chest. He rolls off them when they stop squirming a moment later, in time for his ears to pop and the subsonic boom of a biotic detonation to knock him back on his ass.
Alenko slumps back against the boulder, breathing heavy. He’s still glowing blue, as are the remaining troopers that had been converging on them. But they lay in a heap, motionless.
And hell if Shepard’s always had a competency kink.
“Shepard! The artifact!”
He scrambles back behind the boulder and next to Alenko, peering in the direction Liara is pointing. Four Cerberus soldiers are retreating towards their shuttle. One is carrying an orb that is nearly identical to the one he and Liara had smashed not an hour ago.
“Don’t let them leave with that artifact!” he yells into the comm.
“On it, Skipper.” Williams changes aim, concentrating on the four that are pulling back. Two fall easily, but Shepard sees in his HUD the moment her shields fail, and the next round hits home.
She falls to the dirt in a heap.
“Ashley!” Liara screams, and she’s already running in her direction before Shepard snags her arm and pulls her down next to him.
“I’ve got her,” he says, then looks to Alenko. “Cover me.”
Alenko nods, rising from cover and laying down fire at the same time Shepard takes a deep breath and books it in Williams’ direction. Some rounds ping off his shields as Cerberus opens fire on him, but not as many as would have if Alenko wasn’t drawing their attention.
He skids to a stop in front of Williams, hooks his arms under her shoulders, and drags her behind the boulder she’d been covering behind. Her breathing is labored, but she is breathing, and Shepard listens for the hiss of her mexo delivering a dose of medi-gel and painkillers to the wound site on her left shoulder.
“You good, Ash?”
She groans, then mutters, “Fuck.”
Shepard laughs, patting her on the right shoulder. Shuttle thrusters fire, and a Cerberus shuttle rises into the sky.
“They have the artifact!” Liara yells, and Shepard curses.
Across the field, Shepard’s eyes lock with Kaidan Alenko’s.
So much for an easy job.