Chapter 3: What's in a plan?

It was around four hundred hours when a slight rumbling echoed throughout the ship. Cracking a bleary eye, Shepard dragged himself upright and checked the clock. The numbers on it were not happy numbers, much to his disappointment. Rolling out of bed, he started suiting up instinctively, almost belting on his laspistol before he remembered the Citadel space weapons regs. Grumbling, he dropped it in a small drawer, and pulled on the beam laser instead. Now fully suited, Shepard started down the hall to the officer's wardroom. Moving over to the public full-ship terminal, he threw a query to Roland. The ship-MECT's response was near instantaneous, flavored with a bit of a chuckle.

"Good morning, LTC Shepard."

"Rolland, there is no such thing as a good morning when it is oh-four-hundred and you get woken up off watch. Seeing as you're talking to me in person, that means whatever that bump was is fairly unimportant."

"Point, sir, point. We just docked, and the visiting Spectre will be arriving aboard at ten-hundred hours."

"Very good, Rolland. Personal question, though- what rank are you?"

"Warrant Officer 1st Class. Right now, it would effectively be a demotion to accept any commission less than LTC, and they don't get to do nearly as much fun stuff."

"Really."

"Yep. Whenever I have silly thoughts about accepting a commission, I remember how many of terabytes of paperwork I have dodged over the years by being a lowly Warrant."

"Good to know, Roland."

"Alright. Although, could I ask why you joined the NLF? I have never carried them, and I am curious."

Shepard grabbed a chair, and sat down. This question was one that would take a little bit of work.

"Well, I'm sure you can tell I was a battle brat, born and raised. The Navy was in my blood after the amount of time I spent on the Volunteer-class supercarriers, but infantry war was my bread and butter." Shepard began, warming up. "That said, Naval Landing Forces looked good on paper. Then, when my family was on Nambia…"

Shepard took a breath, calmly.

"I don't know if you know this, but most of our first-wave, questionable-survival colonies sent out on Rip-shots were settled by religious extremists. It got them out of everyone's hair. Just pack them up in a drop-pod, strap it to a Wormhole Drive on a non-atmospheric cargo hauler, Rip it out, and have it wormhole home sans colonists. Check on the site in a year, and throw more settlers there if everything worked out. One of those colonies was Damascus. Damascus was one week by wormhole drive to Nambia, and the Damascenes were fanatics of the first order. They raided right in the middle of our leave, and were barely driven off. That's when I learned two things. One, NLF was the group that was covertly responsible for disciplining the splinters. Two, Damascus was a repeat offender, and had forsworn their Charter. I signed on to the NLF when I turned sixteen, trained for eighteen months, and was right in time to witness one of the first Chrysalid Strikes followed by fusion lance orbital bombardment. When the NLF left, the planet was a glasshouse with 'lids crawling over the remains. I saw two years there as we evacuated the planet's moderates between glassings, and have killed more 'lids than I care to remember. After that… I never put in a transfer or request for leave until the Regalo de Jesus."

Roland whistled quietly.

Shepard shrugged quietly. "I joined a long time ago. I keep saving up my leave time so that if something ever rattles me badly, I can take some time off even if the boys over me in the ladder don't like it. Probably have a few years piled up by now."

"Four hundred days even." Rolland replied, a tinge of smile is his synthesized voice. "Now go to sleep, Shep. Big day tomorrow."

"Too true," Shepard said with a yawn. "Goodnight, Rolland."

"Good night, Lieutenant Commander."

Waking up when he was supposed to this time, Shepard pulled on his uniform. The Spectre had already been piped aboard according to his tablet, and he figured that by the hum of the mass effect core that they had already gotten underway. Once again, on went the beam laspistol, and for show his boarding hatchet went across from it. Most Espatiers and NLF carried some form of boarding melee weapon as a just in case measure, as hitting dry magazines in the middle of a cramped hall was a death sentence. Checking the speed-release magnetic locks, Shepard smiled. Nobody had ever described him as remotely xenophobic, but you only needed to duel an illegal and drugged-up Berserker with only a boarding hatchet and your psionics once to never want to go unprepared again. Leaving his quarters, he started heading down to the bridge. As he approached, Shepard heard Joker's mumbling as he went through a post-jump checklist.

"Thrusters… check. Navigation… check. Internal heat sink… check. All systems online. Drift… under 1500 k."

Behind him, the Turian Specter muttered quietly. "1500 is good. Your captain will be pleased."

Approaching, Shepard stepped heavier on his right steps than his left- an old way to warn someone you were coming politely.

"I don't know about the captain, but I know I am quite happy with that. Good work, Joker." Turning, Shepard looked over to the Spectre. "John Shepard, Lieutenant Commander. You would be the Spectre, I presume?"

The Turian nodded. "Nihlus Kyrik, SPECTRE. Good to meet you, Lieutenant Commander."

Shepard just nodded, as Joker politely interrupted.

"Excuse me, sirs, but there's a message from the Captain. Mr. Kyrik, he requests your presence in the wardroom."

The Spectre shrugged in a mirror of what any human might have done. "Your Captain calls, Shepard. If this is what I believe it to be, we may be calling for you shortly."

Shepard just smiled faintly.

As Nihlus left, Joker muttered to himself. "I hate that guy." His copilot just laughed. "A Spectre compliments you and you get pissy? No wonder you haven't made it all the way back up to Petty Officer first class!"

"Listen, you zip up your jumpsuit on the way out of a bathroom, great. Good job buddy. You ride a xenos artifact you've never seen before a couple hundred lightyears and hit a target the size of a pin, on your first and only try, now that's fukkin fantastic."

Shepard interrupted flatly. "Stow it. You know the drill, gentlemen. Or do I need to remind you that SR is the hull designation for Dedicated Badger Work?"

Any humor died instantly.

"Yes sir."

Walking away from the bridge, Shepard kept an open ear. Not many of the crew were happy with either the government overseer nor did they like the fact that an alien was, to all intents and purposes, riding shotgun in their new and shiny ship. To tell the truth, Shepard wasn't too happy with the state of affairs himself, but he didn't make those calls. That fell upon different shoulders. All he had to do was figure out what the plan was for him and his.

"Commander Shepard, please report to the wardroom for briefing. I say again, Commander Shepard, please report to the wardroom for briefing."

Great…. Shepard thought. This just keeps getting better and better…

Stepping into the wardroom, Shepard rolled his shoulders and got ready to call up his reinforced platoon. Back in the Two-K era, some geniuses in the USA had decided to turn a fast, sneaky submarine (some kind of underwater boat armed with city- and ship- killing weapons, as far as Shepard knew. Silly concept, but they kept building them for some reason. ) into a fast, sneaky submarine armed with elite commandos and whatnot instead of fast, semi-sneaky rockets. The idea was that the commandos got inserted into an area, did whatever they needed to do, and got back on the submarine and left.

Shepard hoped like hell this wasn't what the Normandy had been built to do. Besides the fact that space units were awkward as hell and noisier than a parade in atmosphere, the whole concept of launching munitions while in stealth had died a natural death after tac officers learned that your average nuke fired past the target would illuminate the target from behind, revealing the "stealthy" ship's silhouette. If the Citadel races had jacked themselves into space, they had to have figured out nukes at some point. And if nukes were in play, then somebody would remember the old axiom of "When in doubt, saturation bombing fixes most problems."

As he entered, Shepard noticed that the Spectre was in front of the presentation console, set to a view of some tourist-y planet.

"Hello, Shepard." Nihlus said calmly. "Out of curiosity, what do you know about this planet?"

Shepard walked up, and blinked a few times. Enhanced Depth Perception wasn't worth much here, but it never hurt to try. Besides, it let him dredge a few things out of his memory from the precious hardcopies he had been able to find.

"Just a name. Eden Prime."

"Hmmm…" was the Spectre's response. "You know, this world is widely considered the pinnacle of Human colonization. Far from help, far from your species home on Palachnia. Proof that humanity can brave the terrors of the void without fear."

Inside Shepard's brain, Meld-enhanced memory sprang forth. Specifically, a map. Eden Prime wasn't defenseless- three local stars had human-only solar forges around them, and none of them had ever observed hide nor hair of any observation. Wherever Man had planted down a solar forge, he always made sure it had both communications and defense. They were too critical for everything to allow anything else. The Citadel species must have been too tied to the Relay network, only settling on garden worlds. Silly gits.

"We're a fairly resilient species, Spectre Kyrik. 'He who fights monsters should see to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.' One of our better philosophers said that- Nietzsche, if I remember correctly."

The Spectre seemed to almost savor the quote, almost internalizing it.

"I believe the Citadel has stared far deeper than Humanity would ever care to look, Lieutenant Commander Shepard."

"Then in return, you have been gazed into far deeper than us. Is that a blessing, considering the power your government has entrusted to the hands of a bare few?"

Nihlus smiled ironically.

"And I suppose you have not had this problem before?"

"We have. What Nietzsche left out was that the monster and the abyss are related, but not the same. Besides, what is monstrous as it happens can be wisdom in hindsight, and what can be prudence and pragmatism in the now can be revealed as an act of inhumanity as the cycles pass."

Now it was Shepard's turn to let an old soldier's sardonic wit slip loose.

"The question is, has enough time passed yet to tell?"

At that moment, Captain Anderson walked in.

"Good evening, gentlemen. I hate to cut the discussion short, but it is time we let poor Mister Shepard in on the secret."

"Poor Mister Shepard" snorted in a most un-gentlemanly manor.

"Captain, please leave the diplomat-speak at the door. I'm NLF. Find crap, blow crap up. On a good day, I get a nice, vague set of orders that says 'Win this mess' so I can expand and act to the best of my unit's ability."

Anderson just smiled.

"Alright, then. We're doing a covert pickup, and as you were taught in OBS, the fastest way to find a spaceship is via radiant heat. Thus, the fact that we're using the internal heat sink, which hides our most obvious tell."

What neither mentioned was the fact that all Confederacy warships from hull number four hundred on out had an internal heat sink that dumped spare heat when activated into raw water-based slurry from ice-based asteroids and other space debris that couldn't get fed into a solar forge. Stealth firing wasn't an item of import, but stealth maneuvering was. Considering the fact that the vaporized slurry could be discharged into a lidar- baffling screen once it was saturated with waste heat only made the system better.

Either way, Shepard had to play the ignorant, me-shoot-scumbags subordinate.

"What about radiation from our engines?"

"We're entering the area on a ballistic."

Now Shepard had to whistle. Ballistic entry was hard. Add in the amount of time not being under continuous acceleration would add…

Wow.

Nihlus spoke up, cutting off the unrehearsed Barnum and Baily routine.

"We're going in under stealth to recover an artifact. Prothean. Your people dug it out of the ground, and we're taking it back to the Citadel for proper study."

Anderson spoke up, now.

"This is massive, Shepard. The last time we hit something like this, we were catapulted two hundred years, maybe three hundred."

Shepard nodded. The Ethereal tech was superior to a lot of the "pure" eezo tech according to reports, but Man had a lot of trouble making more of it. Finding the Prothean cache on Mars had allowed large-scale solar forges to be created, made the Rip Launch system a viable alternative to the Relays, and allowed the production of nearly all of the technology the Etheraels had brought. As an added bonus, it also made orbital launching cheap- the last remaining barrier between Man and the stars.

"I get it, Captain."

Nihlus butted in.

"With respect, I don't think you realize how far this discovery could stretch. Every species in Council space would be massively affected, if anything useable was recovered."

"Of course, the Beacon isn't the only reason I'm here," Nihlus continued. "I'm also here to overview a Spectre candidate. To writ, you."

"Me." Was all Shepard replied with.

"You're a good soldier, Shepard. Always follow orders to the best of your ability, never expressed dissonance with command, always knows what to do, where to go, and who to ask. However, what put you on the list as a potential candidate was dealing with the Colachan."

Shepard hissed. Colachan was his first campaign as the commander of an independent element. There were… un-fond memories of it.

"How do you know about Colachan?"

Out of sight of Nihlus, Anderson's eyes flashed purple. A voice, dried until it was unrecognizable from eternity, softly slipped into Shepard's mind.

We needed to throw him a bone. They wanted a young, veteran officer by their definition. Colachan alone made you one of the premier candidates.

Nihlus never noticed, and continued on.

"We asked for your unsealed record, and the Palachnia Army was overjoyed to deliver it."

Never mind the fact that your real record has never entered a non-MECT database.

Shepard just had to laugh a little, now.

"So you're telling me that someone who destroyed nineteen civilian outposts with orbital bombardment, killing in excess of two thousand noncombatants in the act alone, is your prime choice to be above the law."

Anderson stepped forward, and almost slapped Shepard.

"Lieutenant Commander Shepard, there was an inquiry after Colachan. You were absolved of all guilt in the mater. I will not have a decorated officer of the N7 program self-flagellate, especially in front of a damn Spectre!"

Nihlus tried to soothe the mater.

"Captain Anderson, what Mister Shepard just demonstrated is exactly why he is such a valuable Spectre candidate. He has taken responsibility for his actions in full, and regrets the outcome which caused collateral damage. That alone makes him far more suitable than many of the more infamous Spectres of days past."

"And Mister Shepard" Nihlus said smoothly, "you were spotting for a general orbital bombardment. Over three hundred strikes did not hit civilian targets. Post-inquiry, you were even awarded a medal for the precision of your spotting. But we digress from the topic at hand. Eden Prime will be the first of a handful of missions together. If I approve, then you will be sent to the Citadel for formal training, and then officially become a SPECTRE."

Over the intercom, Rolland interrupted the discussion with all the tact of a plasma strike.

"Capitan, we have a problem. Eden Prime is under assault, and they are sending a distress signal."

"Put it on screen."

On the briefing projector, a young tech sergeant tackled her lieutenant to get him out of the way. Moments later over the sound of mass effect rifles and gauss guns, the lieutenant repapered.

"This is Eden Prime PDF Actual! We are under assault, and need immediate evac! Whatever they are, they're everywh-"

A massive snap stopped the young lieutenant's voice in its tracks, and in that moment Shepard knew that poor sod would never live to see his captain's bars. The camera spun wildly, and for a second, a brief second, it showed the assaulting ship. It was massive, a malformed beast whose tentacles dangled like a squid or octopus. It rode the vortex of a storm it was creating with its anti-grav, and every soul who saw it shivered quietly as the cancerous weapon expanded its grasp. The signal cut out straight to snow thereafter.

"Sir, we have no more com signals from Eden Prime. Requesting permission to call down a Broken Arrow."

Anderson had to grab a chair, and sat down heavily.

"Negative, Rolland. Tell Joker we're going in hot and fast. When we reach Palachnia, though, the first thing I want you to do is to send 'Ring the Doom Bells. What was Etherael thought was there is, and now it rises again."

"Affirmative, Captain. Should we signal for assistance to Home?"

"Negative. I think we can handle it until they up their game or summon Cthulu."

Nihlus just snorted at the fairly obscure code that he both recognized as a code and didn't understand.

"Captain, Lieutenant Commander, a small strike team can get in quietly and retrieve the beacon. I suggest air-drops."

Shepard just smiled.

"I suggest orbital drops. We have the pods, Captain. Doesn't look like they can saturate that much airspace."

Anderson grinned a little, now.

"In which case, get your Roughnecks suited up and in their pods, Commander. We have a small long-fall glider Nihlus can use. Don't attract undue attention, but don't be afraid to give them hell."

(AN: Questions? Comments on how to improve? I can be PM'd. Don't be afraid to follow or review either!)