Shepard was sitting on a hospital bed with her legs tucked under her, biting her thumbnail vigorously. On the other side of the med bay, Nihlus was lying unconscious. Technically, he wasn’t sleeping, or so Dr Chakwas had said, but apparently that didn’t mean he couldn’t dream. His eyeballs were moving frenetically under his dark eyelids and every so often, his arms and legs would twitch as if he were trying to run. She could relate to that sort of dream. Someone had once told her that you dreamed of being chased and unable to move except in god damned slow motion when your legs got entangled in the sheets. Shepard had tried sleeping without sheets. Didn’t help. Her shrink had laughed his ass off when she’d told him. Good man. God rest his soul.
Continue reading Bad Dreams
The diversion had been a success. However, the point of the diversion had certainly not been to provide him with a convenient excuse, and Saren was far from satisfied. His weakness for Nihlus was turning into a serious problem, a problem that could no longer be kept secret from Sovereign. And indeed, just as he thought that, an unnatural feeling of heat soared from his spine, spreading over his entire body through the neural highways of his biotics, lighting up nodule after nodule, and when it reached his groin it felt like he’d wet his undersuit. A desperate attempt of his mind to interpret the alien input. The discomfort was intense, bordering on pain, but not bad enough to be disabling. There was no time for that now. It was just a warning. A reminder that Sovereign was far from satisfied as well.
Continue reading Failure
Nihlus listened to Anderson’s speech with half an ear as the Normandy dived into the dawn on Eden Prime. He checked his suit, counting the seals under his fingers before he finally put the gloves on and sealed them as well. He took off the sniper rifle, extended the barrel, reassembled, put it back. Then the assault rifle, and finally his sidearm. His hands went through the motions. His mind was somewhere else.
Continue reading Eden Prime
Six hours before the attack on Eden Prime.
Saren checked the clock. ETA to Eden Prime, six hours. For the umpteenth time, he inspected the wide pillar of holos with various system updates, projected in the middle of the large, irregular room that they kept calling “the bridge”. It was barely anything more than a glorified information center. A convenient place to store their communication and monitoring gear. Sovereign didn’t need a pilot to navigate it, or a crew to maintain it. It tolerated the presence of organics inside its vast mechanical body only because other arrangements had proven to be impractical.
Continue reading Deflection
One day before the attack on Eden Prime.
Shepard had never been to Earth and a part of her was frustrated at being so near, yet unable to land – again. She watched the attractive blue globe in its halo of space-junk and blinking satellites, and the desolate white moon next to it. She huffed at it. Of course she’d been there, on Luna, for six months of advanced tactical training. With each passing year, the feeling that the fate had allotted her to repeatedly hang just out of reach of the finer things in life, grew stronger and more tangible.
Continue reading Departure
Five days before the attack on Eden Prime.
Tali didn’t think her heart could possibly beat any faster until she opened the viewport on her tiny vessel and saw the thing with her own eyes. The sight stole the breath from her lips and sent freezing shivers down her spine. The ship was definitely there. It was definitely real. And it was definitely designed by the geth.
Continue reading Warning