"There is nothing noble about taking a course of action you believe will prevent our arrival,
because that is impossible.
We will come, Shepard.
In fact, we are already here."

- Harbinger

ASV Normandy-II, En Route From The Arathot System
18:28, 2 December 2185 ASC
Cascade Minus 81.74 Hours

Elizabeth Shepard stood over Normandy-II's chart table, looking out at the cloud of superheated plasma that had three minutes ago been a colony home to nearly four hundred thousand people. Already they were picking up comm chatter from the batarian patrol forces in the area trying to determine just what had happened to Arathot. Some were being sent to sweep the area for a possible human incursion, others - unaware of the magnitude of what had just occurred - were being detailed to render aid to survivors. By the time any of them were able to make any sense of the situation, Shepard and her companions would be long gone.

"Joker? My only question is, did we destroy it?"

"Is there a Reaper armada chewing on our asses? No? Then I think we got it."

"Good." Shepard knew she should by all rights have been struggling with the immensity of what she'd just done, but some time around the defense effort at Horizon she'd found herself in a state where the hard decisions weren't hard any more- if she hadn't acted when she did, those four hundred thousand batarians and a whole lot more would've been just as dead. She wasn't sure, though, if that newfound clarity was a good thing or bad.

There were alarms coming from Miranda's station at the table. Shepard jogged back down to find her XO already there, bent over the terminal she had dedicated to sweeping civilian and military comm channels for reports that had a high probability of relating to Reaper activity. "Commander, you'd… best come see this."

Shepard reached over and tapped a contact, projecting the heatmap onto the holographic galaxy floating in the map table's center. There was far more red on the display than there should have been, more of it being added every moment, radiating outward from eleven hotspots situated more-or-less equally around the spiral arms with a conspicuous gap near their present location.

"Miranda?"

"Yes, Commander?"

"What made those scientists so sure their Object Rho was the only one?"

Dassis Station, Menae
21:57, 2 December 2185 ASC (16:30 Local Time)
Cascade Minus 78.26 Hours

"They're still pouring out of Relay Nine-Five-Two, sir! Patrol cutter was able to count at least fifteen unknowns before they went silent!'

"Reapers, Lieutenant," General Adrian Victus corrected the young officer manning the comms station, "They're called Reapers." And somehow, impossibly, they were coming not from outside the galaxy at all but from a little-used minor Relay only three jumps out from Palaven itself. And with the bulk of the Hierarchy's military power scattered across Citadel Space in patrol fleets and garrisons, there simply wouldn't be enough time to set up another line of defense before the things made it in-system. They could try to hold Menae, or they wouldn't be able to hold at all. Maybe, just maybe if they did, the Reapers would concentrate their forces at the Hierarchy's single best-defended location and leave the outlying colonies alone.

Victus had his doubts, however.

They made good time, and soon he could see them on the command center's external cameras: odd, gliding, angular shapes so profoundly black they made the empty space around them look brilliant in comparison, trading fire with the Home Fleet's formations. One of the things seemed to pause, then spat out a brilliant red beam that knifed clean through a faltering turian light cruiser and somehow despite the hard vacuum surrounding it the thing roared

roared

ROARED

and it took all of Victus's willpower to stay on his feet as every cell in him screamed to curl into a tight ball and close his eyes and just wait for it all to be over.

That cruiser had been the one carrying Primarch Fedorian back from his inspection tour on Taetrus. Victus didn't quite want to think about what that meant for him personally at the moment, but couldn't shake the feeling that the things up there had known.

The Home Fleet was standing strong and putting up a very good fight- he'd expected nothing less. The Reapers were slowing, breaking off to maneuver… but Victus knew they couldn't keep it up forever. Even as he watched, another of the Hierarchy's warships dissolved into a round orange fireball, mercifully silent.

Already one of the monsters was disgorging a horde of small, dark, insectoid landing craft which shrugged off the fire of Menae's surface-to-orbit guns like so much vakar spit and buried themselves in a hillside off to the east. The comm stations began picking up gunfire, and screams. Someone was reporting that they could hold the position but not for long, that the hostiles- whatever they were- just kept coming and they were already taking casualties.

How can the Council possibly take these things in a head-on fight? The new Primarch of the Turian Hierarchy wondered.

Why did we ever think we could?

Vancouver, Earth
10:24, 3 December 2185 ASC (02:24 Local Time)
Cascade Minus 65.81 Hours

"Sir, Reaper activity is lighting up all throughout Apien Crest, including right over Palaven. Citadel Operations reports the turians have managed to stall them, but are taking heavy losses. There's engagements with CDF troops all across the Norma Arm, and large numbers of ships are moving along the Gamma, Epsilon, Lambda, and Mu primary Relay corridors. Furthermore, while there's been no indication of Reaper activity inside the Batarian Hegemony we've been getting civilian footage from various points in the Attican Traverse suggesting that the batarians are moving out to secure independent colonies under some sort of protection scheme- there's been no official word on this one way or the other from any Hegemony source. SIGINT from the Perseus Veil is suggesting major, but relatively disorganized geth activity without a clear- wait a minute, that's a Cerberus communication frequency, why are terrorists forwarding intel to-?"

"Oh. Well! What a glorious day. The galaxy may be about to end, but at least Cerberus has finally seen the light..." Admiral Stephen Hackett waved his hand to silence the junior officer. "One at a time, please. How long until the force heading down the Lambda corridor reaches Earth?"

"We don't believe the Reapers are targeting homeworlds specifically, sir. Palaven was just in their way."

"Yes, and so is Earth. And Sur'kesh, I'd imagine. And probably Dekuuna. They'll get to the rest soon enough as well. Now how long?"

The officer shifted nervously from one foot to the other. "Unless we're able to slow them down somehow… They'll be at Arcturus in a little under seventy-two hours, and Earth not long after that. Sir."

"Damn. Get me Illigabeza, he needs to be in the loop on this."

"That's another thing, sir. The… Prime Minister is missing."

"… what."

"Security never saw him leave his stateroom on Alliance One, but he's not inside. They're still conducting a search."

"Fine. Fine." Hackett dismissed the noncom with another wave and stepped back into the conference room he had just vacated, where the rest of the Joint Chiefs were waiting for him and the news they were hoping he'd bring from the civilian officials. "Gentlemen. Ladies. I'm afraid it's up to us now…" He tried his best to keep any hint of distaste from showing on his features. "Us and Mr. Harper."

Cerberus-Occupied Collector Base
04:41, 4 December 2185 ASC
Cascade Minus 47.53 Hours

Dr. Lawrence Waterhouse had to admit- a laptop in the cafeteria of a cheap habitation module awkwardly crammed inside of some sort of organic-matter-caked Prothean space station orbiting the Central Black Hole was not where he'd expected to be performing the most important work of his life. It was, in theory, a simple process – but then again, theory typically was. The recordings and scans collected by Commander Shepard and a few other people unfortunate enough to have come into contact with them face-to-face –and survive– suggested that every Reaper save for the one designated Harbinger essentially functioned as an 'amplifier' for Harbinger's indoctrination signal –and, more importantly, required that signal in order to act as a cohesive entity. A radical reinterpretation by the late Dr. Liara T'Soni of certain Prothean schematics recovered during the early Mars expeditions suggested a method of broadcasting similar signals using the Citadel as a transmitter, and the technology discovered on the Collector base had filled in many of the gaps. If they could use that knowledge to create an indoctrination 'jammer' the Reapers couldn't just adapt to – a well-studied problem in military communications engineering – they'd have a weapon capable of eliminating the things on a galactic scale.

At first, despite the covert addition of mainstream Alliance and later Council scientists to Waterhouse's Cerberus research team, they had been frustrated at nearly every turn by a paucity of Reaper transmissions to reverse-engineer; now, however, the Relay network buzzed with more Reaper transmissions than his cryptanalytic software could ever hope to parse, and his team would have been able under even the worst circumstances to have handed the galaxy an end to the machines' billion-year-old cycle of creation and destruction in just one or two weeks.

The downside of the flood of available data, of course, was that they no longer had weeks to model, prototype, and test their solution. They had hours, maybe days. By his math, looking up from his terminal for a few seconds to work the kinks out of his shoulders made Waterhouse the most prolific serial killer in the galaxy by a good wide margin. A nap was out of the question, unless he wanted to go down in the history books alongside Facinus the Cruel, Ganar Krev, and President William Howling.

They'd had the news on one of the big screens a while ago, which had helped him refine his estimates, but a few of the salarian junior researchers had said the constant listing of casualties and outposts going dark was distracting and made them nervous and was slowing down their work. An honest-to-God fistfight had broken out between three or four of them and an equal number of Cerberus techs who wanted the screens kept on, and after the fight had been broken up –with precious little effort– by the base's contingent of Marines there had been no more news for the last half-hour. For all Waterhouse knew, the situation could now be much, much worse- maybe Palaven had fallen, and the Reapers had continued on into the rest of Citadel Space. Maybe Mars had fallen, and the things were currently cluster-bombing Earth.

His mind was wandering again. With shaking fingers, Waterhouse extracted another caffeine pill from the bottle next to his workstation and washed it down with a swig of lukewarm Diet Tupari. Then, he got back to work.

Presidium Tower, The Citadel
07:09, 4 December 2185 ASC (23: 55 Local Time)
Cascade Minus 44.06 Hours

In a conference room that required top-secret clearance to even know about, buried beneath three hundred tons of concrete and steel and terawatt kinetic barriers, Tevos T'sael watched for the third time as a ragtag fleet of decommissioned warships and modified freighters nearly fifty thousand strong engaged a good-sized Reaper -the things were rather difficult to fit into standard naval classifications- and blasted it to arcing, pulsating exotic scrap. The fleet blew though it with no more concern than they might have shown for a micrometeor shower, and the video flickered off to repeat once more.

"Unbelievable…" Beside her, Councilor David Anderson pulled in a slow, awestruck breath. "Imagine if we had something like this as part of the Citadel Defense Force."

"We always understood the quarians to be highly adept at naval combat, but never saw the entire Fleet in action… until now," added Erdat Valern.

"We need to get them onboard, start coordinating defense and recovery operations," Anderson replied.

"They're going to drive a hard bargain now that they know we need them. Demand reinstatement of their associate status, certainly, probably additional reparations," Tarren Sparatus cut in, silencing for a moment the earpiece clipped to his auditory tines that was no doubt relaying the latest information from Palaven High Command.

"The Asari Republics are willing to meet whatever demands they level so long as we get them on the firing line," Tevos said. "All in favor?"

"Yes," said Valern.

Anderson nodded. "Agreed."

Councilor Sparatus paused, mandibles shifting as he seemed to stare past the video display. Then, "… Very well."

Tevos nodded. "I'll have the Diplomatic Office on Thessia formulate a message."

"Good. But there's another resource we haven't explored," Anderson continued.

"The Batarian Hegemony has actively rejected all attempts to negotiate. They seem committed to the belief that they can defend their own territory without any outside assistance whatsoever," Valern cut him off.

"I wasn't talking about the batarians. I was talking about the krogan."

Sparatus immediately shook his head. "The Reapers are not the Rachnai, we cannot beat them just by throwing expendable infantry in their path. If we could, the batarians would be winning."

Tevos shook her head. "We may not have a choice. Someone open me a line to CDEM Command."

Lower Mining District, Omega
11:16, 4 December 2185 ASC
Cascade Minus 40.95 Hours

Hand glowing blue with a surge of biotic energy, Nyreen Kandros yanked a pop-up security barricade away from a Reaperized parody of a vorcha. Suddenly exposed, the thing was quickly cut to pieces by concentrated gunfire from the mixed force of Talon vigilantes and humans in white Cerberus armor sharing the fortified alley with her. With practiced attention to detail Nyreen swept the alley to either side of them for further movement. There was none.

"Kandros. This is Taylor," a human male's voice echoed in her headset. "Just locked down the last of the docking bays. No more should be getting in. Garrus, how's the transmitter?"

"Back online. Seeing a solid link to the Collector base… and the Citadel."

"Good." Nyreen replied before switching to the Talons' channel. "Now that we aren't held to a fixed location I want Vir and Cyrus's platoons to section off District Three, I want as much of this station locked down as we can before Aria gets- hold up," there was movement on both sides of the alleyway now: bipedal figures in Eclipse and Blue Suns armor. The asari at the head of the group facing Nyreen had abandoned her trademark white jacket for a more situationally-appropriate armored hardsuit, but that didn't stop the rogue Cabalist from recognizing her immediately. "Looks like Aria's finally decided to make an appearance."

"You came back." The self-titled Queen Of Omega just stared at her for a good ten seconds, her voice betraying no emotion and her expression unreadable behind her tinted helmet visor. "Why?"

"I came here to take back this station." Kandros swallowed, hard, and tried not to let her nervousness show. She knew just by saying that she was breaking the only law Omega consistently enforced, and she knew by hard experience just what happened to the people who did that. That, and she'd never been particularly good at these sorts of speeches. But fleeing her previous employment before Aria was 'done' with her had already been an unforgivable slight in the gang leader's eyes, and Nyreen was quite frankly tired of running away, "I came back to burn out a breeding ground for pirates, slavers, and only the Spirits know what else. I came back to… to give the people on Omega a chance at… a-a better life. Are you going to get in my way?"

The Talon forces behind her readied their weapons and moved back into cover with impressive coordination. They'd been nothing but a rabble of thugs and drug-runners when she'd arrived, but now… now she was willing to call them soldiers. But the humans in white armor just stood where they were. One by one, they looked to the lieutenant at the head of the group. "Kandros… Aria's here because we've cut a deal. In light of the current circumstances she's willing to allow us to operate Omega as a relay to the Collector Base indefinitely… but that's all. We aren't to… interfere in… her affairs. I guess you could say." The tan-skinned human male closed his eyes and shook his head. "I'm sorry."

He and his comrades stepped forward one by one in a ragged line, and the mercs stood aside to let them pass. Then they opened fire. It was when the first Talons soldier- a batarian who went by 'Vick'- was hit in the neck that Nyreen had had enough. She grabbed a pouch full of disruptor grenades from the armor of a dead Cerberus commando, powered her biotics, and charged head-on for Aria. She almost made it, too, before a heavy machine gunner on the rooftop up above opened up and cut her to pieces.

Former Location Of The Great Rayya Valley, Rannoch
16:07, 4 December 2185 ASC (05:12 Local Time)
Cascade Minus 36.11 Hours

The vitrified soil of Rannoch crunched under Tali'zorah's boots as she edged her way forward along a sort of ridged metal dividing wall or conduit connecting two large towers she guessed had something to do with refining titanium and aluminum. When Tali was eight years old, her father Rael had given her an educational video game where three salarian children were shrunk down to microscopic size and sent inside of various computer chips to fix them. This was a disturbingly similar experience, although that game hadn't included armies of geth collossi that shot at anything moving in their sensor fields- and, of course, it hadn't been set on the desecrated mass grave of effectively the entire quarian species. The irony was not lost on Tali that for most of her adult life she'd dreamed of walking without her helmet on the surface of this planet, but that if she did so now the thin, hot atmosphere laced with vaporized eezo and semiconductor dopants would kill her some dozens of times faster than if she'd done the same in a crowded marketplace on the Citadel. She supposed it made a blunt sort of sense, really, and wondered why she'd expected anything else- Rannoch already had an extensive industrial base the original Veil colonies had largely lacked, and even before the Reapers had turned their programming inside out the geth had probably figured they needed an army of military platforms a whole lot more than some hypothetical returning quarians would have needed to be able to breathe.

Beside her, the emissary platform the rest of the crew had taken to calling 'Legion' duplicated her awkward half-crouch-half-sprint with infuriating mechanical ease. "Creator('Tali', 'zorah')," it -they?- asked over the team comm channel, "There are behavioral indications that there exists a stimulus: 'bothering you'. Do you wish to discuss?"

Tali mentally cursed the AI for their eerie ability to read organics… and herself for giving her reservations away. "I'm just… the Reapers. There's so many…"

"We are doing all we can, 'Creator('Tali', 'zorah')'. Our studies of 'Shepard('Commander')' suggest that organics perform more effectively against threats of this nature when taking decisive action, even if it may not be the optimum course."

"I… I guess you're right. We should keep moving."

"Suggestion. There is an open trench thirteen meters east-southeast of our position that will bring us directly to the hub."

"Got it." Ancestors damn that machine for being so helpful- it's like it's dedicated to making this as hard as possible for me to do. In spite of herself she'd found she was growing to accept- or at least tolerate- Legion during their time together on the Normandy-II, and not for the first time Tali considered coming clean- just up and telling it that after they had finished their development of a firmware update to innoculate the geth against Reaper control, she and Joint Operations Command's best engineers had made additional edits that would render close to ninety-five percent of all current geth platforms inoperable. It was true that few if any geth would actually die because of this- Benevolent Ancestors, she was thinking of them as living things now- but beyond that the exact impact wasn't certain.

She caught herself wondering if, after it was all over and the Reapers were in pieces, Legion would be capable of forgiving her. Then she looked back out over the fissured surface and eerily luminous purple sky of the gray-goo catastrophe ten billion quarians had once called a homeworld, dropped into a low crawl with her omnitool held rock-steady in front of her, and set off for the trench.

Dassis Station, Menae
15:28, 5 December 2185 ASC
Cascade Minus 28.26 Hours

General- no, Primarch Adrian Victus swallowed the last few gulps of water in his canteen. He felt that he was abandoning the forces under his command even on these small breaks away from the situation room, but he knew he'd be of even less use to them dehydrated and confused. Of course, nowhere in the command bunker offered any respite whatsoever from the constant din of Reaper low-atmosphere strikes raining down outside. It had been, he realized, the better part of a standard day since he or anyone else in Turian High Command had fought under the assumption that this engagement was going to have an end.

Stepping back into a situation room that smelled increasingly of burnt wiring and long-cold rations, Victus watched on one of the tactical displays as the last transponder icons faded out around another artillery post. "Dilarian," he barked to one of the communications officers, "See if you can pull a squad away from the Area Four diversionary force and take those guns back."

"Sir, there's no way Area Four can handle the Reapers with the manpower they've got, much less-"

"I know." Victus shook his head. "But we can't afford to lose any more surface-to-orbit fire."

"Understood, sir."

Dilarian sounded tired. Spirits, they all did, and for good reason. Nobody on High Command had believed confronting the Reapers would involve anything even remotely resembling conventional warfare, but Victus had thought that- as with the geth two years ago- there would at least be some ebb and flow to their assault as they broke off to gather and regroup, giving the turian forces time to do the same. But their assault was relentless, neverending, mechanically repetitive. They had no sense of tactics or overall plan of engagement because they needed none; every last moment his brothers and sisters spent without maintaining a pitched firefight was another moment they used to advance and it was taking its toll. No logistical unit in the galaxy was equipped to handle that kind of drain and he'd had to set up specialized details to manage ammunition and medical supplies, to rotate combat troops on and off of the firing line in something resembling organized shifts… but there were fewer and fewer places left to rotate them out to.

On one of the smaller display screens the blackened, listing form of a critically damaged frigate had just bellied into the Menaean regolith in an emergency landing, either unaware that the valley around them was thoroughly under Reaper control or unable to do anything to change their course. Almost immediately it was swarmed by hundreds of small, glowing, blue-gray figures as the bridge chatter coming in over the comm stations took on an increasingly panicked tone. "Dzhe-Four," he muttered into his audio pickup as something large and loud struck the roof of the command center- probably just debris of some kind, seeing as he was still alive. "Circle around and assist the Indomitable in repelling boarders."

"Sir, we just got off the front line, we're in no condition to-"

"Neither are those crewmen. Do what you can, the only other forces close enough to make any difference are worse off."

On a different screen entirely, one relaying images from planetside, Victus watched as another ruby-red beam tracked across the skyline of Chen Fel Han City. "That was the spaceport," a technician cut in, confirming what the Primarch had already feared. "There's no way anyone on the island's evacuating now. Sir… what do we do?"

"We keep fighting. As long as we can. Try… try to do as much damage. As we can. Maybe someone else… down the line. Maybe it'll make a difference. It's the only honorable thing to do."

Kelphac Valley, Tuchanka
06:23, 5 December 2185 ASC (18:41 Local Time)
Cascade Minus 21.83 Hours

Wreav stalked through the corridors of the wrecked transport, heedless of the flickering electric lights and the constant pounding of his own forces' artillery on the surrounding countryside. He stepped over the bodies of loyalist fighters in unadorned gray armor- how did Wrex expect that to put fear into the enemy?- pausing only to confirm that they were dead. There was no resistance- before the insurrection had even really picked up steam, his idiot brother had loaded himself and his most loyal, hardened troops onto an outbound transport to assist in the so-called 'fight' against the Reapers, and Gatatog forces loyal to Wreav had shot it down before it had even cleared the nearby mountain ranges.

Those troops that remained had fought surprisingly well for being little more than pups in most cases, but in the end it didn't matter. There were simply too many clans that had chafed under Wrex's de-kroganizing 'reforms' and been quick to look to Wreav as a champion to usher back in the good old days when being a krogan had meant something. On any other day his brother's puppet-masters among the softer races might have come down from their monitor stations and helped to prop him up, but now that their blindness and poor decisions had come back to bite them in the form of an extragalactic invasion Wreav had given out the call to move openly. If he'd wanted, he could have had warriors from half the clans on Tuchanka at his back right now, but he'd refused. This was, after all, a family matter.

There were still two guards slumped against the bulkhead in front of the command bridge- one on his feet with a shotgun, the other sitting down with a sniper rifle in his arms. The sniper spotted him first and called out, but was too slow- before the alarm could be sounded Wreav had fired a single blast into his helmeted skull, the shockwave from the customized, overvolted Claymore shotgun instantly pulverizing composite, bone, and brains with little distinction made. Giving the weapon the time it needed to cool down he drew a serrated human-style trench knife, rushed forward, and jabbed it into the other guard's eyepiece just as he was bringing his rifle up to fire. Wreav gave the knife a twist and watched the resulting stream of blood and neuroplasm in mute satisfaction.

Wrex was waiting on the other side of the bulkhead, slumped over in what was left of the pilot's chair, covered in as much medigel as armor. No amount of the stuff, however, would be enough to reattach his right leg where it had been sheared off just above the knee. In time, it would grow back on its own. Wreav didn't intend to allow that to happen.

On one of the still-functional stations Wreav spotted an open communications link with the distinctive emblem of the CDEM patrol fleet, and turned to give his helmet camera a good clear look. "Look at him, calling out to his masters on the Citadel, begging them to send down their army and save him. Is this really the man who will lead the Krogan Empire back to greatness? He won't even use the name." Wreav snarled in the safety of his soundproofed helmet. He had no idea if that last part was true- for all he knew, the CDEM had been begging Wrex. But the krogan people didn't know that. He wasn't broadcasting live at the moment- he was brave, not stupid, and Wrex certainly didn't need access to his precise location- but he'd be a fool if he didn't recognize that someday quite soon these recordings would be spread all across Tuchanka… and all her reclaimed colonies.

"Wreav," his brother said, his voice perfectly level and at the same time immensely tired, pausing to spit out a glob of yellow-orange blood. "Always figured you'd end up going the same way our father did." It hurt to look into those dull, red eyes, and the younger krogan found himself, unaccountably, growing nervous. Good krogan didn't get nervous, and Wreav didn't much like it. One shot from the Claymore was all it took to bring him down.

Shaking free of his momentary unease, Wreav brought up his omnitool and keyed in an order to shut down the jamming system his forces had set up around the Urdnot compound. Immediately the comm panel flickered back to life, issuing forth the voice of what was either an asari or a female human. "Wrex? Wrex, are you there? We are observing an apparent crash-landing near your compound, do you require assistance?"

"We've got the situation under control, but Wrex… didn't make it. This is Urdnot Wreav, of the United Clans of Tuchanka." Despite himself he broke into a grin under his helmet. Perhaps he could broadcast live today after all.

There was a long pause, a series of muffled noises before the audio cut off completely for almost a minute. Then the voice on the other end returned. "Understood. Are you still able to provide us with troops?"

"Oh, certainly. Once there's a cure for the genophage in my hands."

There was another pause, longer this time. Then, "It'll take time to prepare something like that, and we're really in need of-"

"My- our terms are our terms."

"Clanspeaker… Wreav. I don't have to remind you that the situation in Council space is extremely precarious, and every moment we delay is-"

"Do you really expect us to go out there and die for you when our own race has no future?"

"… We're working as quickly as we can."

"Good, good. Once a cure is in my hands… then we'll show the turians just how a war is won."

Planum Angustum, Mars
22:28, 5 December 2185 ASC (15:02 Local Time)
Cascade Minus 5.75 Hours

"Aww, shit! Breach! We got a breach!"

Spectre Ashley Williams wasted no time in descending the ravine the archaeological teams had carved into the Martian bedrock, sliding the first ten or so meters and then managing a sort of controlled tumble from several bits of protruding Prothean construction to the trio of Marines already defending their MAKO armored personnel carrier from a horde of shambling, bluish-gray… things. From a meter behind her James Vega lobbed a fragmentation grenade into the biggest cluster of them, the detonation kicking up a cloud of reddish soil and otherwise inflicted alarmingly few casualties. Observing the creatures spread out Williams drew her assault rifle and started spraying them from close range while Vega and two of the Marine marksmen picked off the ones at her flanks with short, controlled bursts. Their ranks began to thin, first a dozen, then six, then three, but Ash knew it was a risky strategy and soon enough one of the big ones- a howling monstrosity that looked like a krogan with his dorsal hump burst open from within by a good three meters of additional coiled-up spine- took a swipe at her with luminous blue claws. She dropped prone and rolled out of the way just in time for Vega to fish a Cain rocket launcher out of the MAKO wreckage and blast the thing into chunks of putrifying flesh ribbed through with scrap metal.

"Foxtrot, this is Bearcat 1, we're reading your signal, ETA 1 mike!" A quick glance at the tacmap projected in the lower left corner of her HUD told Ash that this valley held what was left of Echo Company. Foxtrot was dug in at the power node one excavation over.

"Vega, stay here in case any more show up!"

"Aye, sir!"

Another MAKO was already pulling in through the canyon entrance to reinforce the position. Williams jinked around it without slowing down and sprinted out into the valley beyond, zigzagging between the partial cover of the blast craters that dotted the surface to such a density that many of them overlapped- collateral damage from the pitched naval engagement still occurring overhead. A Grizzly heavy assault vehicle blew past her, mulching husks and popcorn-krogan and still worse things as though they were made of cheap fiberboard before itself being cut to ribbons by Reaper air support. A few rounds from the strafing run tracked close enough that Ash was briefly thrown off her feet by the shockwave, but she scrambled back upright and kept running until she was looking overtop of a second Grizzly in a still lower portion of the dig site.

"This is Bearcat-3. Multiple targets, in the open. Three o'clock, fifty meters. Fire at will!" The Grizzly's main gun snapped once, then again, and reduced the husks advancing on a Marine fortification to the consistency of oatmeal. Then, at roughly the same time, Williams, the Marines, and the Grizzly's spotter caught sight of the black, cuttlefish-shaped craft gliding over the canyon wall. "Enemy air! Incoming! Back up, back up, back the fuck u-" The carrier started to pull back closer to the walls, but it was too slow. A beam of crimson energy so bright that it hurt to look at lanced down and burnt both the tank and its crew to cinders.

Ash pushed herself forward once again, managing to get within range of the husks and bring up her rifle just as the first of them crawled over a pop-up barricade and sliced a human with a shotgun clean in half at the waist. It didn't hold together long enough to swipe at another, nor did its companions when the rest of the Marines pulled back and the grenade in the dead woman's hand went off. Williams ducked down into the trench, grabbed a discarded DMR, and started picking off the rest. That was when the tower in the center of the ruin complex lit up a brilliant, magnesium white, her HUD flickered briefly before dissolving into static, and from the blood-red sky up above the first of the Reapers crashed headlong into the plain less than a kilometer from her position.

As soon as the dust cloud thinned enough to see through, the Marines in the trench with her started to cheer- even the medics and the wounded they were tending to.

A few hundred casualties and a company or two of scrapped armor later, the press would go on to call it the Miracle of Mars. Ashley Williams would go on to call it a clusterfuck.

Presidium Core, The Citadel
04:13, 6 December 2185 ASC (23: 55 Local Time)
Cascade Minus 30 Seconds

Commander Elizabeth Shepard dashed across the metal archway at a full sprint, even as gunfire splashed against her kinetic barriers and the Citadel pitched around her, threatening to toss her off into the chasm below. She didn't know quite how far down the hollow in the core of the Presidium tower extended, but she wasn't about to find out. All she cared about was the glowing red terminal in the center of that vast mechanical space- the terminal, and the tiny cylindrical package of Cerberus, geth, prothean, and who-knew-what-other gadgetry currently magnetized to the small of her back.

Twenty meters…

She brought her rifle back up into firing position and shot a trio of Keepers scuttling down the catwalk towards her without breaking stride, not bothering to watch them slide off into the abyss and detonate harmlessly before they ever hit the ground.

Fifteen meters…

She was taking heavy fire from something with wings now, a lot of somethings in fact, things she'd never seen before but that brought up vague memories from a comparative mythology course of Ardat-Athama and many-eyed Seraphim. There was no telling how they could possibly have gotten in here when the core had been sealed for millennia- for all she knew they'd been built into it when the Citadel was constructed, just in case the worst should ever happen -but they fell to her assault rifle just as quickly as the Keepers had.

Ten meters…

Joker was yelling in her earpiece, something about the Fifth Fleet being in pieces and the Reapers pushing through. "Just a little longer," she managed to get out between breaths, "I'm almost there…"

Five meters…

The entire station felt like it was going to disintegrate around her now; the screams of humans and aliens over her comm rig drowning in a wash of static and a deep, resonant, metallic droning that seemed to suck the adrenaline from her blood and fill her skull with something the consistency of molten lead. Shepard didn't know if it was the Core making that sound, or the Reapers closing in outside, or if it was the same sound in both cases coming from two directions at once. It didn't matter. She didn't have any further to go.

With hands somehow still steady despite the vibration now kicking up billion-year-old dust from the floor around her, Elizabeth Shepard unclipped the Catalyst from where it was held on her back, slotted it into the corresponding impression in the dead center of the console, and twisted it until she heard something click.

Dassis Station, Menae
04:13, 6 December 2185 ASC (02:56 Local Time)
Cascade Plus 0.5 Seconds

They'd promised Adrian Victus reinforcements. The reinforcements had never come. They'd promised him Commander Shepard. Commander Shepard had been able to assist for maybe a few hours before being called away again on something even more urgent involving the geth and Rannoch, only the Spirits knew the details.

And yet, in spite of all of that, Menae had held. Palaven had held. They had held for three straight days of nonstop combat against an enemy they barely even understood. And now, from a forward command post nearly overrun by that enemy, he watched slack-jawed, as the greyish amalgams of flesh and metal that once could have been called brother and sister turians froze, spasmed, and slowly pitched forward, even as-

- Steven Hackett and Jack Harper watched through the bulletproof one-way glastic of an interrogation room window as Daniel Illigabeza, former Prime Minister of the Systems Alliance and longtime sleeper agent of the Reaper horde slumped forward in his chair like a puppet with its strings cut, even as -

- the assembled Councilors of the Citadel watched in 3D high definition as the mass of dark shapes congregating just outside of the Presidium ring seemed to lose definition and flake apart into a thousand constituent fragments a barely-perceptible instant before their Element Zero cores ruptured. When the plasma flash cleared, there was only empty space.

11:11, 13 December 2185 ASC
Cascade Plus 211 Hours

"We now understand the process of indoctrination as a continuum," said a salarian in a crisp white medical jacket as he pointed to sections of a graduated infographic on the screen beside him, "At one end, we have complete control- the Reapers had erased whatever original personality the victim once possessed and replaced it with their own instructions. Now that those instructions have been blocked across the galaxy, subjects demonstrate little to no higher brain activity and are unequivocally considered legally dead. On the other end we have extremely mild cases- in layman's terms, the Reapers attempted to implant or suppress certain thoughts in a highly targeted manner in order to, for instance, influence the outcome of key policy decisions. We don't believe that this form of indoctrination was ever particularly common, although unless people who may have been affected choose to come forward- which may not be so simple, as the changes are not necessarily even noticeable at the level of conscious awareness- we may never know for certain. Between those two extremes we are seeing a variety of symptoms ranging from confusion, anxiety, and memory loss in the less severe cases up through depression, personality changes, and various forms of cognitive and motor-control impairment. At this time we don't know to what degree recovery is possible, nor what sort of treatment will be most effective, but through comparison to more direct forms of traumatic brain injury…"

"There have been a number of confrontations in which weapons fire was exchanged," said a turian in a naval uniform, "but overall the Batrian Hegemony has withdrawn from the independent Terminus colonies promptly and more or less peaceably. We have encountered sporadic reports of looting and abuses by batarian occupational troops, but considering the generally… confused political situation on many of these colonies it should come as no surprise that upon in-depth investigation many of these reports have turned out not to be credible..."

"… after all, Cerberus was formed at a time when extremely little was really known about the wider galactic community," said a human in a formal tan suit, "and while the organization assumed the worst when it was unknown whether any alien species could engage diplomatically with humanity, that shouldn't be construed as maintaining a belief that cooperation was impossible when evidence to the contrary emerged.

Obviously many actions taken during the early years of Cerberus proved to be immensely detrimental to both Alliance and Council security, to say nothing of the cost in lives and suffering inflicted by such ventures as Project TELTIN. However, in more recent years the organization has made good on its commitment to reform and purged such operations from its ranks, as well as reaching out to the STG and other organizations dedicated to maintaining the safety of Citadel Space. Cerberus has evolved from guaranteeing short-term human supremacy at the expense of our Council allies to strengthening us all through the investigation and research of extranormal threats- among which the Reapers are far and away the most prominent.

Now, the Reapers are no more, but it would be naive for any of us to believe that there aren't more and stranger things out there in the dark corners of this galaxy against which we must with all our vigilance and courage defend. To do that, we must have an organization with the ability to go anywhere, and investigate anything, any potential threat, no matter how fantastical- and by necessity, much of this work will need to be done in secrecy. Therefore, I have come before you all today to announce that in light of their contribution to the destruction of the Reapers the Citadel Council has agreed to grant Operations Group Cerberus the same super-jurisdictional status enjoyed by the Spectre Initiative, the Special Tasks Group, and the Ascetic Order Of Justicars..."

"… and so we must temper our celebrations with mourning. The homeworld is forever lost to us, as is any hope of reestablishing control over the geth," said a quarian in a Captain's golden suitwrap, "Yet, at the same time, the threat of synthetic invasion has been ended, the galaxy as a whole enjoys unprecedented peace, and most importantly our basic rights as sapient beings are finally being recognized by the authorities that for so long dismissed our struggle as someone else's problem. Already we've seen the arrival of the first aid shipments from the Citadel; many more are on the way. With the Counci military at our backs we no longer need fear the Terminus pirate fleets. And, while I'm not authorized to disclose specific details, I can tell you all that the Admiralty Board is currently engaged in negotiations with the intent of securing a suitable colony world within Citadel Space. It has been a long, hard exile, and we must never forget how so many turned their backs on the quarian people rather than afford us the basic decency due any intelligent being. But now I can look out across the hold of this great ship and tell each and every one of you that you will once again have a world you can call home.

We've lost Rannoch forever, it's true. But the geth and their Reaper masters could never take away the spirit of ingenuity and hard work that resides within every quarian and has made us once again captains of our own destiny. And it's that spirit that will, in a very short time, allow us to do what the geth ultimately never could. We're going to rebuild, we're going to make alliances, and we're going to take. Back. The Veil!"

"They came to us begging for aid against the Rachnai," said Urdnot Wreav, "and we gave it. And in return they denied us the colonies that were our birthright. Then they sent the turians to neuter us like ten-year-old varren. Then they sent us Urdnot Wrex with his slippery tongue and empty promises, to try to make us like them- soft. Weak. Afraid. No more.
The Council's been brought low by the Reapers, but we are, and have always been, survivors. We don't need them. So what if they refuse the cure they've promised us. We can take our own cure. We can take back our colonies. We can take back our glory. We can show those egg-breakers what it means to be krogan…"

"We have all… lost so much to those things," said Tarren Sparatus, "but in doing so the spirit of every brother and sister who fell in the last three days can rest easily, knowing that they did the most noble and important thing a soldier can ever hope to do- to secure a lasting peace for the galaxy. Although the current situation in the outer colonies may seem bleak, with the aid and assistance of our fellow Council races I have absolute confidence in our ability to rebuild and continue as we always have…"

"Every member of our armed forces, those still with us and those who have passed on, deserve our absolute highest regard," said David Anderson, "as they have met this unimaginable horror and faced it down with the utmost honor and distinction. It is thanks to their indomitable spirit that we see ourselves in the position we now enjoy. Our holdings in the Attican Traverse are secure, our position on the Citadel Council is strong, and even our historical adversaries look up to us. We have finally found our place in the galaxy…"

"I cannot overstate the magnitude of the danger the Council has recently averted," said Erdat Valern, "The fact that galactic infrastructure has held together at all is an immense credit to the system of the Citadel Council and those who maintain it. The Circle of Dalatrasses understands that the salarian people are deeply divided over any number of issues, from the distribution of reparations for the Migrant Fleet to the question of a cure for the krogan genophage. However, as intelligent, reasonable beings I am confident that we can work out these issues and come to an agreement…"

"… today, we come at last to the end of a cycle of creation and destruction older than any civilization in the galaxy," said Matriarch Tevos, "It has been a long and painful journey to reach this point, and for a while we will all need to come together as a Council and heal. But the end of the Reapers will also carry with it new opportunities for growth and discovery, and it will be the responsibility of the Asari Republics to insure that those opportunities are explored peacefully…"

Sellitt Lom muted the news feed and rubbed at the ache building up in his horns. So much had happened so quickly, and he wasn't sure how to even start to process all of it. In addition to the deaths of nearly fifty million people, mostly soldiers and colonists, there had been riots and looting on Sur'kesh, religious demonstrations and cult suicides and the Wheel knew what else throughout the Asari Republics; Cerberus, the go-to villain of action vids for the last two years, was now elevated to the same exalted status as the Spectres and the STG; the science channels were full of very excited talk about weaponized Ganzfeld phenomena and the Miracle of Mars and something called a 'crucible program' that had been passed down from cycle to cycle over geologic time… and to a 3D artist working at a game studio on Illium, it might all as well have happened in another galaxy.

Everyone Sellitt worked with had contacted him to confirm that they were all right within the week- although Carlos Zamora had been visiting his wife's family on Earth and was obviously having some difficulty getting his travel plans in order. They expected him back at the studio a week after that, by which time the Reapers had joined the long list of crises he and his colleagues occasionally mentioned in passing, always in the past tense. There was no more talk of the end of intelligent life, just statistics and memorials and vague suppositions that serious important people in moodily-lit rooms somewhere on the Citadel were doing whatever was necessary to keep it all from happening again.

Across the galaxy, life went on.

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Author's Notes:

Palaven's Dogs would not have been possible without the assistance of a large number of other writers on this site. At certain points the thing was basically written by committee, and I don't think there's a line of text in it that hasn't been touched in some way by at least one of the following people:

Serketry

archangel1207

CunkToad

BatJamags

DapperT

szierera

DarkDanny

justaregularguy01

At the time of this writing CunkToad, DarkDanny, and archangel1207 are working on projects of their own- if you're liking PD, do take a look at their stuff as well. I'd also like to give a special shout-out to my fellows on Library Of The Damned, as it was one of their recommendations that got me started on this project, and their relentless scrounging of the worst of the worst of the worst of fanfiction that kept me going by convincing me that I could indeed do better.

I think it would be worth my time to mention that originally, Palaven's Dogs was set in College Fool's Renegade Reninterpretations AU. That is no longer the case. Instead, the vast majority of changes I have made are confined to two places- Mass Effect 3 and the Lair Of The Shadow Broker, which I thought that both were just not up to Bioware's regular quality standards (or, in the case of ME3, sadly consistent with EA's regular quality standards). LotSB was I thought the culmination of many poor choices relating to Liara's character arc that dated all the way back to ME1 (as well as the introduction of a major Gary Stu race from basically nowhere); ME3 was just rather strange in the way it had galaxy-scale events play out.

In addition to changes made specifically to set up the events of PD proper, and those that were made to fix issues with canon, some of them are just things I personally found appealing- I figured since I was already slicing the Reaper War into complete unrecognizability anyway, why the hell not? However, I tried to have the new version stay relatively close to the spirit of canon if not what actually happened, and have good reasons for all of my changes:

Killing off Liara at some unspecified point in the past (I am actually thinking fairly early on, possibly pre-ME2 if it ever comes up) was more because I knew I did not have the narrative 'space' required to properly address her character than any real dislike for her on my part. I just figured it would be better to not have to deal with her at all than to try and fail to give her character the rehabilitative treatment she properly deserves in a story where her contributions are mostly on the sidelines.

The drastic changes to the scale of the Reaper 'War' occurred for three main reasons- one was simply because I thought places like Palaven being able to hold the line for months somewhat deflated the Reapers' threat level; another was so that the main, post-Reaper conflict of PD could occur with something other than sticks and stones; and finally just because Palaven's Dogs is not really about the Reapers and I did not think it was worth expending the wordcount. There is indeed more development that went into this version of the Reaper Crisis than what we see here, however, and I may explore the Reapers later on in another story.

A lot has been said about the original and Extended Cut endings of ME3 and I won't retread it all here. In my case there's the added fact that I very much did not want a super-definitive 'fix everything' ending, since PD needed to have things that could still drive conflict after the Reapers were gone. That, and I went with what was more of an obvious technological 'off button' as opposed to ME3's limping chimera of technological solution and direct military one because I happen to be a massive Manhattan Project / Bletchley Park fanboy.

I thought the geth maintaining the surface of Rannoch for the quarians was just bizarre and that the sudden agreement to hand it over happened far too quickly. I still wanted the quarians to come out of the Reaper Crisis with substantial wins, but tried to make them something that it was actually in the Council Races' power to give. It's worth noting that I consider the very humanoid depiction of quarians from ME3 to be inapplicable along with the rest of that game; I actually had a more alien design for them outlined, but I think I will be sticking with the way the first two games handled them where while it might be relatively common knowledge what they look like in-universe the reader/player never gets a chance to see them. I dunno, this is a written work, I suppose you can imagine the quarians looking like their original ME3 version or Slimer from Ghjostbusters if you want and there's really not a great deal I can do to stop you.

Conversely, the decimation of the geth was added because if you think about it the geth are actually really insanely powerful and I didn't want them swooping in under Legion's leadership to just fix everything, or to become a major player that would demand more attention than the organics-on-organics central conflict that I have planned for the story.

I have many somewhat small reasons for 'redeeming' Cerberus. First, they played a very large role in the original RR-centric draft and it would have been a lot of trouble to write them out completely. Second, I thought ME2 actually did a very good job of presenting the organization as on a path towards some sort of reform from its blatant anti-Council roots and got a bit of characterization whiplash from ME3's sudden "NUH-UH! STILL EEEEEEVIL!" reversal. I can understand why people were more than a little pissed at Shepard working with Cerberus when ME2 first came out, but after going to all the trouble of setting up an odd but very workable redemption arc for them the least the games could do is stick to it. Third, I've just read waaaaay too many 'fics that amplify their evil to simply cartoonish levels, and wanted to do something different- I always had a soft spot for SCP-Foundation-like organizations that operate in secrecy because they face universal threats that are in some sense paranormal or outside the jurisdiction of individual nations or superpowers, so I decided to have them have been evolving towards that the whole time.

I wound up with the krogan not getting their genophage cure simply so that it could remain an ongoing conflict post-Reaper. If they'd gotten it, not a lot would have actually changed other than characters would be having the same arguments they are having now but in the past tense, which I thought sounded awkward and strange (unless the krogan gestation rate is absurdly fast, it's really not possible at all for anything to have changed in PD's timeframe). Again, I wanted to keep the fact that they got something they wanted out of the Reaper Crisis while the turians got hosed, but made it stuff the Council was more able to actually give.

The lack of Reapers on Earth-proper was partially to give the humans a more significant head start in terms of becoming the predominant military power in the galaxy after the end of the Crisis, but was also because I thought it was strange how they arrowed directly for homeworlds and kind of ignored the outer colonies the way they did in canon. There is a reason why they then devoted so much energy to going for Palaven that will take some time to fully explain, but for now the theory most of the in-universe talking heads settled on will suffice- that it was very close to one of their exit points, and simply got in the way.

I think there is a much larger ratio of species on colonies versus those on homeworlds compared to in canon, but I don't think it will ever really come up.

PD never addresses what the Reapers actually were trying to do here because I doubt it was just to create additional Reapers from humans and humans only; the subject of what they may actually have been trying to accomplish I think requires more in-depth examination than the prologue could provide. However, I may end up exploring this issue with the depth it deserves in another project that while not exactly in the same continuity as PD has many of the same worldbuilding assumptions.

I am basing the death toll of the Reaper Crisis (as well as other population and numeric figures used throughout PD) on the assumption that the total population of the galaxy is between about 150 and 200 billion. This is well below what I'd consider the original canonical range (some of the dialogue in ME1 mentions trillions), but was chosen so that the humans would be able to get themselves on roughly equal footing with the rest of the Council races in the 30-year timespan of the games- logically those races should vastly outnumber the humans simply because they've had modern medicine and multiple colonies for so much longer, but I'm just going to wave my hands a little and say there are many cultural and biological factors that have slowed their growth (and which the Alliance is also beginning to develop, so in another 200 years they won't massively outnumber the aliens). ~0.1% of the population dying violently in a single event would certainly be a lot, but I don't think it's something that would cause the Citadel civilization to completely fall apart- at least not immediately…

The revision of Nyreen's death on Omega was mostly dictated by the changing external circumstances of the conflict there, but also was largely inspired by a now-deleted Shepard-Nyreen story called It Was Definitely The Red Tattoo. Unfortunately I made the mistake of not keeping very detailed records of the thing so I don't recall the author or much other information about it, but… towards the end it got a bit strange and started pulling in a lot of animalizing elements into Nyreen's characterization, but at the same time the earlier sections had some actual, genuine pathos to them and I thought it had a lot of potential. So if anyone knows who wrote the story or has any kind of lead on it, I'd like the author to know that while I understand why it was deleted, it stood out above probably 90% of what gets published here and I think a rewrite with some additional maturity and forethought would actually be quite good.

Overall, PD originally had a very fast-and-loose approach to canon where I changed a bunch of things basically whenever I felt like it and just tried to keep to the spirit of the original game, but in this rewrite I have decided to be much more judicious- however, I do not think the story will end up holding 100% to canon regardless. However, I will do my best to make sure that any changes I do perform are thoroughly documented and justified.