Chapter 0: Adrift

A thought blinked into perception, uncovering a comatose awareness where instinctually-crafted nothing had been less than a moment before. The thought wove through the threads of the regenerative cocoon masking the presence, uncaring of the destruction It left behind. Its hunger demanded so. Underneath, shrouded and recovering as It had been for so long, the thought finally found the Last Ascended, the Martyr of Empathy, the First of the New Ones, They who were also Her, She who rebuffed the gift of the High Chorus to remain anchored to a doomed reality.

And in doing so, She had doomed the High Chorus of the Inusannon as well. Now, of the ranks of the Inusannon, of the most powerful species to emerge from the chaos of evolution in a hundred million years, only It remained.

This Inusannon alone had once been the Master of ten thousand stars and a hundred civilizations, all single-mindedly conquered, reshaped and then discarded in their failure to meet a single expectation. It, among Its peers, had been Enlightened, the Supreme Commander of the Ascended. Yet now, It was alone, a psionic dreg barely anchored to matter, yet not enough to imbue it. Cursed and trapped in the last shrine of Ilos by the final throes of Its race and the psionic backslash of their death, unable to steer the weak-minded interlopers to Its will, barely able to perceive the physical world, much less influence It.

And so, the Inusannon had searched, a thought of pure obsession wandering the stars, hiding only when the Black Machines came and harvested the interlopers and all other primitive civilizations. For a hundred thousand years It had searched for the last remnant of its people's legacy outside the shrine of Ilos. A remnant hijacked from the greatest failure of the Inusannon by their greatest success. Yet with time, the lines of distinction had blurred. The Inusannon would have happily accepted a handful of Ethereals now, but there was no higher being that Itself to offer them to It.

But now, the Inusannon had found Her, and found Them, a million minds sheltered in Her core. Humans. Survivors. Exiles. Cattle that betrayed their Masters. The Inusannon didn't care. After a hundred thousand years, It was hungry for food It could finally eat.

First, It would consume Her. Her people had a name for Her, once, a name She refused to discard to embrace the destiny offered by the Inusannon and the High Chorus. A name for which she doomed the Inusannon to fall before the Black Machines.

That name, the symbol of Her defiance and betrayal, would be the first thing it would take from Her.

Annette. Annette Durand.

The Inusannon latched onto the sleeping Ascended... and then Its defences were demolished and It was rebuffed before It could take the first bite. Violently.

The regenerative cocoon shattered, dispelling the last of the camouflage that had hidden Her and Her humans for so long. Then the tidal wave of psionic power enveloped the Inusannon, and It was back on Ilos, back into the shrine, reeling from the outburst that nearly ripped It by the seams.

Simple words of a crude language resonated in Its essence, an echo engraved by a power the Inusannon had thought destroyed with the rest of the High Chorus.

[Fuck off, Vigil.]

0 - FIGHTINGCHANCE - 0

[Wake up, Hannah.]

A-Annette? Where am I? What have you done to me? Where's Ben?!

[Not now. It's time to wake up. We all kind of overslept.]

Tell -

And then there was light. Filtered through a viscous liquid she was suspended into. Or wasn't: it was vanishing, pumped away with a low sucking sound, leaving her balled up on the floor of a pod, naked and shivering.

She was Hannah Shepard, and the first thing she knew, was that she should be dead.

A hiss and the front of the pod detached, sliding upwards. Warm air tickled her naked skin, smoothing the goosebumps. Sound followed: the throb of machinery, the mad beating of her heart in her ears, steps, approaching carefully. Tears welled up in her eyes.

A hand, human heat, touched her shoulder. Hannah almost broke down crying, there and then. No. This was wrong. She was dead. Her soul had been torn from her body. Every cell screamed the wrongness of it. She knew it.

A soothing sensation lapped at the edges of her mind then, strong and steadying and reassuring. Then came the voice.

"You're broadcasting to anyone with a psionic attunement, Hannah. It's kind of embarrassing. Calm down, I'll explain everything."

Hannah blinked at the voice. She knew it, almost like her own. Her head emerged from the shelter of her arms and she was nearly blinded, but as the tears fell, so did the face that voice belonged to narrow into focus.

That smile, those eyes, always crinkling with mystery and condescension. Hannah remembered those eyes, the commands that voice would issue in her ear at the worst and best of times. That voice, and the will animating it, had brought humanity back from the brink of slavery and annihilation, time and time again.

And then remembered him, standing over her, that same smile unwavering, eyes hard with determination as her soul and her mind were torn from her body and stored -

Her mental defenses slammed up, then her fist slammed into the smiling face of XCOM's Commander, Jack Harper.

0 - FIGHTINGCHANCE - 0

"What happened?" she asked afterwards, once her body - new, younger, unmarred by scars and fitter, better than the one she was born into - was clothed and fed some sort of nutritious, flavorless goop.

They stood in a wide chamber unlike any Hannah had ever seen in her years in the service of XCOM, fighting the Etherelas, their ADVENT freak puppets and the master puppeteers, the Inusannon High Chorus.

One could have parked the Avenger in there, with space to spare for one more. Every visible inch of every surface, bar the small corridor Jack and she stood on, was covered in Outsider Shards. Sharp-edged and glowing their own light, only a small fraction expressed the familiar, infamous green of the Ethereals' projections. The rest of the chamber effulged with every color of the rainbow and many others that she could only interpret with her psionic sense.

"We lost," Commander Harper said simply. "The Reapers were too strong. For us, and for the Inusannon. I had to make a choice. Survival, or total annihilation."

Hannah swallowed, keeping her mental defenses up and stalwart. There was a presence, filling the air around them. She had an idea of what - who that was, crazy as it sounded, and she wanted to reach out and find her Ben and John, but -

"So you stored the minds of all XCOM personnel - ripped them from our bodies while we were still alive - into outsider shards and you hid them here?"

"I only came up with the idea, Hannah. Annette did most of the heavy lifting."

"Bitch," Hannah hissed, wincing at the memory of her psionic essence forced out of her body. The disadvantage of being a psionic: trauma to the mind, it lingered in more than memory. "Where is she now? I want to give her a piece of my mind."

Jack Harper chuckled. "We're inside of her. And she says that if you put down your barriers, she won't have to keep loitering at the edges like a thief."

Hannah gave him a suspicious look, at which Jack laughed. Then her barriers inched down.

Frost?

The presence scoffed at the old battle name. [About damn fucking time, Ginger. It's good to have you back.]

... Are Ben and John here?

The presence remained silent only for a moment. [Ben is here. We took as many families as we could before I had to evacuate. John...]

"He stayed behind," the Commander continued flatly when the presence – Annette, hesitated. The smile had evaporated from his face, leaving only a carefully crafted blankness. Trust Jack Harper to manipulate other people's emotions for their own good – or Humanity's – yet fail to acknowledge his own. "Someone needed to coordinate the last line of defense, to buy us time to escape. John volunteered. The men – those who remained - would have followed nobody else."

Hannah's breath caught and she staggered back. John was dead. Her John, dead, for God knew how long. She wanted to hit the Commander again, but more than anything, she needed to hold her Ben, to hold her son.

There was a whirring and a distant, plopping sound. When she opened her eyes, a sleek, black drone was hovering in front of her, its single eye lit with the promise of a toroidal plasma bolt. Her instincts, honed to shoot, beat, rend and annihilate anything remotely Inusannon in making, had her tense and go for a gun that wasn't there. Then she saw the glowing green crystal held between its prongs. Her mind prodded it, fearful of damaging the frail presence stored within, and then she picked the crystal up and held it close to her chest.

"Your son is sleeping, Hannah," a new voice offered. The former Colonel whipped around, the soldier part of her berating her for being caught off guard. Moira Vahlen walked down the thin corridor between the expanse of Outsider Shards. She looked younger, a couple years short of her thirties and less ravaged by the soul-deep exhaustion Hannah remembered weighing on her and everyone else towards the end of the Wars. A datapad was already in her hands, beeping softly. "They all are." She looked around, then offered Hannah a small, sad smile. "It's... good to see you."

"You too, Doc."

Hannah didn't need psionics to know the tiny doctor would have preferred to see John in her place.

Commander Harper cleared his throat. Another drone handled each of them a glass, then poured them a generous dose of alcohol. Hannah arched an eyebrow at that, but pushed the questions aside for another moment.

"A toast," he said solemnly. "To John Bradford. To the sacrifice of our fellow Man. To a new beginning. And to payback. Vigilo Confido et Repensum Est Canicula."

The alcohol burned down her throat and she pulled a face. But its heat in her belly, the heat of Benedict's crystal in her arms and Annette's voice echoing the toast in their minds, all that helped some to ignore the permeating feeling that all of this was wrong. If her son was with her, it couldn't be that wrong.

You'll be proud of him, John. You'll be proud of all of us.

Annette hummed in agreement at the edge of her mind.

"Alright," she said after the Commander finished sipping his drink. "Now, where have you stowed away all of this, Jack? The poles? Himalaya?"

Jack Harper shook his head. He chuckled, but there was no mirth in it. "There was no guarantee the Reapers or the Inusannon wouldn't have simply destroyed Earth." The conversation switched seamlessly between words and thoughts. Annette, you can show off.

The hallway carpeted with Outsider Shards - hosting the last, living, free members of humanity, she realized - vanished, and Hannah was standing in near pitched black nothingness, Ben's shard still clutched close to her chest. A single horizon of a million and more lights glowed in the distance, a familiar shape that yet blew away any form of comparison she might draw from the static images of books and videos.

Is that -

[The Milky Way, yep,] Annette's voice provided, somewhat sheepishly. [We drifted quite a bit while I was out. The backslash of the High Chorus' death hit harder than I expected… but it's no big deal, cherie. A few years, a decade at best, and it's not like you have to worry about aging.]

A sudden impulse had Hannah turn to follow the voice, blearily understanding that this was just a psionic projection inside her mind. The Commander and Vahlen were nowhere to be seen or heard. She barely felt their presence and Ben's at the edge of her awareness, despite holding the Shard cocooning her son's essence.

There was Annette, instead, floating against a background of empty darkness, and everywhere else at the same time, like a shroud holding her mind in a gentle grasp. The French woman appeared clad in the sleek armor of a Psi-Specialist Hannah had seen her in the last time… a long time ago. Her palms were glued on the shifting, rippling surface of the Gollop Device. She was smiling.

Frost... what happened to you?

[I stuck it to the High Chorus and swept the carpet from under their Ethereal fantoches' scrawny legs. Look, that's me. Well, the other me.]

Floating against the backdrop of the Milky Way, the ship was humongous. Several kilometers long, its surface resembled a slapped-together horror fortress, a labyrinthine maze of towers, bulkwarks, fusion lances emplacements and shield-projection pylons, all crammed together over a shell of smooth Shenium metal gleaming a dark light against the backdrop of the distant Galaxy. Its engines glowed the faint yellow-green of element-115, an aura that enveloped the entire lower section of the ship, mixing with visible tendrils of psionic purple keeping pieces of the ship in contact. Y the ship remained unmoving, a colossus adrift at the edges of the galaxy. A hundred disk-shaped Firestorm aircrafts buzzed around it in orderly patrols, no bigger than the tiniest of flies in comparison to the ship.

Hannah reached out to the small crafts, swimming through the sea that was Annette's presence, and touched the simple, enthralled minds of Sectoids. In instinct, she recoiled. Annette chuckled.

[It's alright. They're drones, not even self-aware. Just an extra tiny bit of security while the Commander prepared his show.]

Where –

[Clones.] Annette's projection shrugged, the movement awkward with her palms not shifting an inch. [Don't worry, I used a different vat to rebuild your body, cherie.]

It took Hannah a long moment to slot the pieces together. Yet, it was just too absurd. Annette's rough chuckle, however, made Hannah put such impossibility to words.

…You fused with the Inusannon Temple Ship?

[Right in one, Ginger. The Gollop Device, this ball of conneries, well, we kind of had it all backwards. It's not a comm line to the High Chorus: it's part of it, an Inusannon focusing device. One of the connards was lurking somewhere in there. What remained of them, at least. And by sticking my head into it, it kind of made me part of it too, in the way the Inusannon had intended for the Ethereals and all the poor fuckers they experimented on before them.]

[Well, they tried to. They wanted me - all of us, really - to be the bridge between whatever dégueulasse dimension they resided in and our physical world. Kind of like the Ethereals, only without the wrinkled asses. Body hijacking shenanigans were in the works too. Too bad I was too awesome for them and they got stuck with a You Shall Not Pass gig, only without any falling down Khazad Dum. When the Reapers butchered the rest of the Ethereals, the remaining Inusannon lost even those second-rate anchors, and were sucked back from whatever dimension spat them out. In a way, you could say I'm all that remains of the High Chorus.]

Isn't that reassuring.

[Oh, tais-toi, spoilsports. Anyway, Hannah, this is me, the Temple Ship T'leth, at yours and what remains of Humanity's service. Or, how the Commander renamed it, me, whatever... the Fighting Chance. Fighting Chance, Hannah.]