The Shepard: Canto 2 ~ The Citadel

 THE SHEPARD:

A CHRONICLE OF ROSAMUND AND THE REAPER WAR

An interpretive poetic narrative of a Mass Effect play-through

 This is the second part of the Chronicle.  The first is available here Canto 1 ~ The Attack Upon Eden Prime

The following is fan-fiction. Mass Effect belongs to Bioware.  Image Credit: Bioware and Corephantom
PG-13 rating for scenes of battle and darkness.
For those interested, an image of Rosamund Shepard is available here: Commander Rosamund Shepard

CANTO 2 ~ THE CITADEL

I hear the engine's whirring baritone

The prim Doctor Chakwas’ languid tones

Softly stepping people, going to and fro

A hoarse, gentle voice, which sounds like Alenko.

Through the gripping miasma of black,

Light starts to glow, and I struggle back.

The Normandy's left Eden Prime behind.

We’re coursing through vast star-fields of sunshine.

The Alliance relief force made it there

And we left the colony in their care.

This fearful matter calls us away.

Geth have not been seen in many a day,

And ‘Sarin’, that Turian, who murdered Nihlus,

Who fought with the Geth in their horrible violence

Appears to be Saren Arturius

Another Spectre – a collegue of Nihlus.

No other ‘Sarin’ would Nihlus welcome,

Or let him do what it seems he has done,

The witness described him quite reasonably

The Council must know of his treachery.

And what of the beacon? Our mission there?

It's gone. Overloaded. Mere dust on the air.

The second voice was indeed Kaidan Alenko.

He's standing nearby, his eyes wide, voice low.

‘I … got too close, let myself get submersed.

The chief and I thought you were dead at first.’

For a moment the loss of so great a find

Weighs it's great failure over my mind.

But I remember the light on the vale

And I cannot consider my team to have failed.

I nod. ‘Thanks for getting me back to the ship.’

He nods back, a faint smile appears on his lip.

‘The chief’, Ashley Williams, has been transferred aboard.

With Jenkins lost, we need more hands on board.

Alenko spoke well to the Captain of her.

He's right, she is a remarkable soldier.

The two weary and grieved marines carried me

Back through the port to the Normandy.

And she didn’t set foot back on Eden Prime.

Her unit is gone, they transferred her quick-time.

Anderson shortly strides into the bay.

‘How is our XO, Doc? Is she up today?’

We hold council together, the Captain and I.

We speak of the raid, of the hand in the sky.

And he asks a terrible question of me.

‘The beacon, Commander – what did you see?’

I bow my head, I remember too well,

But … not well enough, it's too strange to tell.

A tangle of horrors storms in my brain.

But not vague. Ice clear. It's like I’m not sane.

‘I saw synthetics, and what seemed wraiths of men.

Slaughtering people … butchering them.’

The words seem so small and formless and cold

Sick, petty horrors, not the great force that rolled

Over all, wiping out, turning to black

All trace of the light – the world on the rack.

The Prothean beacons stored information

That's what it gave me in terrible form.

A warning? Of what then? We do not know.

More like a record of war long ago.

Here, in the now, we have been attacked,

A senseless massacre, a pointless act.

What would the Geth want on Eden Prime?

They took not the beacon, and left no sign

Of interest in anything there but death,

And that with heedless, wanton, zealousness.

Yet they may indeed have read the beacon.

As I did unknowingly without seeking.

What good to them would monstrous visions be?

What good to anyone, such sights to see?

Anderson posits his theory to me.

Saren thinks men a blight on the galaxy.

This attack was an act of war.

He wants to kill men. And he will kill more.

With an army of Geth at his command,

No colony now is safe from his hand.

But still it's that beacon that fills up my mind.

I can’t just dismiss it and put it behind.

The Med-bay opens to a central Hall,

Low ceilinged, warm-lit, and pleasant withal.

The Mess can be found there, and so can too

Many an off-duty band of the crew.

Alenko is there when I leave the bay.

As I go to pass by him, I hear him say:

‘I’m glad that you’re up and about now, Ma'am.’

So I turn aside to speak with the man.

The vision hangs like a sword o’er my head

And the fearful attack, the swarms of the dead...

I welcome the sight of the kind, open face,

The soft-spoken words as we two retrace

The strange path we tread but hours ago,

Speak of his friend left behind, and the foe,

Of our fathers who both served long years ago,

Talk shop, we’re biotics, and share what we know,

Speak, of this beautiful, perilous, dark, and aglow

Galaxy we’ve only started know.

The Normandy's swift, far swifter than light.

On our own drive core we outpace in flight,

The beams of the stars, the Milkyway's blaze

We leave them behind and fly past their rays.

She takes the final mass relay

But days from the battle, though so far away.

We burst on vista of lavendar light.

The great Serpent Nebula's glowing alight

With the blazing of stars in their infancy

Young starlets and white, old vapours and bright

Radiant purple transparency.

Wreathed in the mists of this wavering cloud

Floats a vast silver structure, ancient and proud.

From a huge central ring, five wings fly out

Long, smooth, and curved, revolving about.

We skim through the billows, plunge through the veils

Towards this, the Citadel, rich of old tales.

From the Bridge where I, with my ground team, stand,

Prepared to disembark, as soon as we land,

I see the vast arms sliding by, ships in flight,

And one mammoth vessel of beauty and might,

A fleck beside it, is the Normandy

A gnat beside a monarch of the sea.

‘Look at that monster!’

Williams cries

A light of delight shining bright in her eyes.

‘She's the Ascension. Asari flagship.’

Alenko supplies. I hear Joker quip

Something about its guns and its size.

But I see she is graceful, like our fair allies.

Yet she's nothing like so large, not nearly,

As was the dark shape which hung over the valley.

We dock aboard the Presidium Ring

And walk among trees and fountains that sing.

Its like a deep canyon; a lake runs below

And above, the young sun-stars shine white as snow.

Along leafy terraces and through lofty halls,

Anderson leads us three, past waterfalls.

Around us are Turians, fierce and tall

The froggy Salarians, lithe and small

Asari star-women, blue and fair

And aliens stranger – their sounds fill the air.

Through the bud in my ear their words filter through

In translated syllables lucid and true.

‘I can’t tell the aliens from the animals.’

Williams remarks in an undertone drawl.

I glance over annoyed at this discourtesy

But she looks back quite innocently.

Great monuments stand alongside the streams.

There many a hero of old wars gleams.

Krogans, rough hewn, and lovely Asari

Stand tall beside many an alien tree.

And one, a mass relay, stands all alone

In a bed of white flowers, just freshly blown.

Alenko seems to be struck by it somehow.

It's only a statue, doesn’t work anyhow.

Yet he stops and listens – where I can hear naught

Neither can Williams. It's mere steel fine-wrought.

Far up in an office, high o’er the lake,

Earth's Ambassador, Udina, awaits;

A surly, beetle-browed, frustrated man

Grumbling as loudly as grumble he can.

He's displeased with the Citadel Council.

He's displeased at the sight of us three.

He's displeased with the state of the hearings.

And he's displeased especially with me.

The colony attacked, the beacon destroyed...

Pure, wretched disaster, quite unalloyed.

They were considering you for a Spectre, see?

Now what this will do to your candidacy-’

Spectres are the Council's most elite agents;

“Special Tactics and Reconnaisance.”

No human has ever been named in their ranks

Despite the schemes of political think-tanks.

Yet Nihlus, it seems, put forward my name.

It was partly for this on our shakedown he came,

To look after the beacon, but study me too

The ranks of the Spectres have always been few.

No wonder Udina's so wroth and so red.

The beacon is lost and that hope is sped.

In the domed Council courtyard of warm rosy hue

Dressed in Citadel Security blue

We meet a young Turian, bright-eyed and trim,

His name is Garrus Vakarian,

An investigator assigned to the case.

He speaks with fury of this blot on his race

And expresses frustration he's had no more time

To build a good case o’er this heinous crime.

‘Saren's a Turian. Why so eager?’

‘For justice! He's guilty. I see that quite clear!’

The Citadel Council is made up of three

Salarian, Turian, and Asari.

Each stands for their race in this ancient place

The political meeting ground of Milky-Way space.

The Ambassador's fears prove justified.

The councillors list not to his diatribe

Against their great agent, their Spectre bold

Not on such evidence as we have told.

They regret the attack, but they will not blame him.

They call it a raid on the council-space rim.

Saren is not even present and there.

He attends as a hologram standing on air

And scoffs at the word of a single dock-worker

Especially such an obvious shirker.

The Citadel Council will not disavow.

They’ve had other false accusations ere now.

Initial dismissal stops not our case.

We reconnoitre and pick up the pace.

If we believe truly, and he has gone rogue,

There’ll be other matters wherein it is told.

From here on the Citadel we can well reach

Numerous networks and search for a breach

In Saren's cover and catch him in speech,

When he slipped up, or when overreached.

Many leads we follow up, many trails of facts we search,

Through the record's sordid tales, look for things that do not work,

Combing, combing, finding out, little tips and hints that lurk,

Digging, digging, turning up, making contacts in the murk.

We pick up the trail of a Quarian girl

Of whom a ‘Shadow Broker’ agent heard

She called on C-Sec shortly since

With a claim to have damning evidence

‘Gainst an unnamed spectre who had done ill

But the cop on duty wrote her off as a shill.

Following sightings and news reports

My team heads to a clinic, down in the wards.

It’s more like a space station here below,

Clean and bright still, but no sunlight like snow.

With slow plodding steps the Elcor move

On their four trunk-like limbs, while silent and smooth

The strange Hanar people glide by in the air

Like aerial jellyfish, and, here and there

We see in the passages straight human forms.

And sometimes a keeper, six-legged, strangely deformed.

No word do these speak, and they never look up

Just trudge along with steps oddly abrupt.

They call them the keepers, for they keep this place

Like a strange, taciturn, dwindled janitor race

Dwelling in this huge, age-old station in space.

They never vary their phlegmatic pace.

The clinic seems to be closed at first

But the door is unlocked. The latch is burst.

Thus clearly invited, we slip inside

Soft down a hall, to a room low and wide.

A doctor struggles in a gunman’s grasp,

His voice shouts threats with the sound of a rasp

But not to her and not to us.

Another is here, beyond in the dusk.

The captor’s gun’s in the doctor’s face.

I hear her breathing loud with fear

I shout and he looks for a moment’s space.

A rifle cries out sharp and near.

‘Fancy seeing you here, Shepard.

Thanks for the distraction.’

The gunman falls to the floor of the ward.

And out steps Garrus Vakarian.

The doctor’s alright, just shaken and bruised,

The gunman had asked, and she had refused

To tell tales of a Quarian who’d sought help from her

But she’s glad to tell lawful investigators.

Vakarian’s too, is on the Quarian’s trail.

He cannot believe how bad C-Sec failed.

The doctor well remembers the girl,

A young thing; enviro-suit purple with swirls.

Her wounds were light, but she seemed in danger,

And asked the doctor of the Shadow Broker.

An odd question that, but the doctor knew

Of a nearby agent, who she sent her to,

A local bar owner, named Amos Fist.

We check on him through the agent we know.

Yes, Fist was, a while ago

But now a Spectre connection exists....

We go at once, the girl is in peril.

She’s gone straight to Saren and may well be killed.

With us comes eager Garrus Vakarian.

He's done with C-Sec. But not done with Saren.

Garrus knows where this ‘Fist’ can be found

And swift leads us thither, he knows well these grounds,

To seedier places, and dim lit halls,

Far from the sound of the bright waterfalls,

To a back-end nightclub, closed and locked.

He stops at the door, and briskly knocks.

Perhaps we four look too military.

Perhaps our approach is far too scary.

But rather than asking us what we want

Or pretending there’s nobody left at this haunt,

They throw open the doors and gunfire flies.

We have to take cover and dodge to the sides.

We demand to see Fist, but they do not heed.

We fear that they’ve done some dreadful misdeed.

Through the door, to the dance floor, and over the counters

We fight past the armed thugs and big Krogan bouncers.

Even the janitors stand in our path

But they choose to take our advice not our wrath.

Vakarian notes my tack with surprise

‘ “Get a new job”? Well! Smooth improvise.’

Deep in the dark of the back-room office,

We find the hiding miserable Fist,

He thinks his time’s up, expects only death,

And pleads out surrender in quaking breath.

‘We’re not here to kill you. Call off your thugs!’

He sends them off from his place on the rug.

The Quarian came here, not to long ago,

He set up a meeting for her to sell info,

But, she won’t meet the Broker’s men

Those waiting there are assassins of Saren.

With any luck, we’ll re-catch this guy later.

But time is short. The girl is in danger.

We take the swiftest path we can

And reach the appointed dark dead end.

We quietly creep along the way

Listening to movement some ways away.

A young voice speaks, high-pitched, somehow canned.

‘Where is the Shadow Broker?’

The voice demands.

The answer is low and we cannot hear.

‘No. The deal’s off.’

The young voice holds no fear.

But weapons are drawn and flash in the dark.

Vakarian’s bullet is right on the mark.

The skirmish is brief. The assassins are few.

They had not expected me and my crew.

The girl comports herself well, and holds her ground.

She’s used to handling herself from the sound.

But when they’re gone, she thanks us the same

Putting her own naivete to blame.

Tali Zorah Na’Rayya’s her name when we ask.

Her face hides behind a dark purple mask.

She hears our story of Saren and strife

‘Why then, I can thank you for saving my life.’

She recently encountered a troupe of Geth

Took down several, and escaped the rest.

She salvaged data from one’s memory banks

It was partly burned out and mostly blank

But she found a recording worth digging for,

Proud gloating words, heard just days before.

The checks are all run, the voice test bears out

The data's combed back, origins check out.

The speaker is Saren, the listener Geth

Recorded but hours past the colonist’s deaths.

‘Eden Prime was a major victory.’

- His voice is filled with a terrible glee -

‘We’re one step closer to finding it.

One step closer to the Conduit.’

Then another voice, mellow and deeper:

‘And closer to the return of the Reapers.’

Reapers? Her voice, so low and so smooth

Crawls through my nerves, and I cannot but choose

That a sharp deadly chill takes ahold in my breast.

It reminds me of something – but I can’t see the rest.

As far as Tali can tell from Geth lore

The ‘Reapers’ fought in an ancient war.

Great terrible beings, nature unknown,

Who wiped out the Protheans, left crumbled stone,

The long silent beacon looms in my mind

The complete devastation, end of the line....

What is this conduit? None of us know.

Nor have our networks an answer to show.

He was there for the beacon, I am sure now.

And he read it, as I did, and understood it somehow.

Back to the Council, we take his foul words

It's been substantiated. This time we’re heard.

But Saren ignores the formal summons

He breaks off contact. He is not coming.

In the Council's great Presidium hall,

A airy bastion broad and tall,

Warm with bronze leaves, yet smelling of spring

Filled the voices of warblers that sing,

The Council pronounces judgement on Saren

Tried in absentia for crimes against humans,

For perjury, treason, and acts of war

He's stripped of his status. His funding is torn,

And he is declared a fugitive.

But they don’t propose steps more punitive.

They won’t send out ships to take the rogue down.

Last heard, he was in much contested ground.

Oh, the political ramifications....

Udina can’t swerve their determination.

And they will not hear of this ‘Conduit’

They say that the ‘Reapers’ are clearly a myth,

Which Saren is using to win Geth support

And lies are bad ways to set-up rapports.

His plots will now fizzle, plans fall apart,

As if they were not quite doomed from the start.

But the beacon-

No, they won’t hear of that.

The Protheans fought too, and that is that.

‘Send me.

I, as your agent, could take it on as a case.

And my ship can go silent in Terminus Space.’

A moment of quiet. Then the Asari

Look to her fellows, looks back to me.

And I am named the first Human Spectre.

The Council's ‘right-hand’, galactic protector

And told to go out and hunt down the traitor.

Garrus comes with us, to finish the mission,

Avenge the fallen, vanquish the villain.

The Normandy strike-team is very small

For stealth, not fighting, we three are all.

A Turian could be of great help here

So I take him on as an irregular.

I also take Tali, the Quarian girl

She’s on a pilgrimige, travelling the world.

She's smart and she's able, and she asked the favour,

Which – after her intel, – how could I not grant her?

Also, the Quarians know the Geth best

Her knowledge may help in the coming unrest.

Straight from the Council, to the Normandy I go,

With Garrus, Tali, Williams, and Alenko.

But on our way there a Krogan meets us,

A great monstrous hulk with a blunderbuss.

He's taller than Garrus and broader by far.

His wide yellow face is criss-crossed with scars.

His huge head is capped with a horny red crown.

His great humped back looms in the background.

He calls me by name, in a deep gruff growl,

Transfixing me with his alien scowl.

He had a job. That bar owner, Fist.

He wasn’t re-captured, the C-Sec raid missed.

We left him with such a fear for his skin

That he’s fled this station which we are in.

‘That was my job! And you did it instead.’

The Krogan looms grimly over my head.

‘And so! … I’m transferring the credits to you.

I don’t accept funds for things I didn’t do.’

That was … unexpected. I let go my gun.

As I rather expect my crewmen have done.

The Krogan's quite friendly, name's Urdnot Wrex,

He cheerfully offers his gun for my project.

He knows that Saren's been named an outlaw

I’ve just been named Spectre. Coincidence? Pshaw!

He knows what's up. And he wants in on it.

That's where the action is. It's just his fit.

A great hulking merc who’ll switch on a whim?

I go to refuse. I wouldn’t take him!

But … I don’t know, I can’t send him away.

He stands there grinning a few feet away,

Big, ugly, uncouth, a dirty hit-man.

A mercenary's a thing I can’t stand!

But each time I go to say those few words

My voice dries in my throat. They are never heard.

I reach out and take his huge horny hand

‘Welcome aboard, Wrex.’

And he joins the band.

The Captain stands by the Normandy dock

Waiting outside the open airlock.

Udina's there also, haughty and pleased.

A human as Spectre has him much appeased.

They have advice for me, possible leads

Matters which might link to Saren's black deeds.

A private research station exists

Hid in Noveria's icy mists.

Supervision is low, security tight,

And Saren has ties there, out of the light.

There’ve been more Geth sightings since the attack.

A far distant colony's reported back,

With tales of metallic, agile men

Haunting the cliff banks, lurking the fens.

And the lonesome voice, from the Geth's record

The one who spoke that terrible word

Belongs to one ‘Matriarch Benezia’

Of the Asari intelligentsia.

A well known elder, ancient and wise.

She's long travelled space to help and advise

Her scattered people and other folk too

She's not known to hate humans, or ever bring rue.

She has one daughter, Liara T'soni

A scholar of xeno-archaeology,

Especially Prothean, from what we see.

… She might be of help for her speciality.

But also, family of the inner ring

Might have insight on Saren’s planning,

Might even know where her mother is now.

Last heard she was headed to Artemis Tau,

To an unspecified Prothean ruin.

But though they are many, they aren’t common things.

Anderson speaks of these much to me

As though I were captain, instead of he.

‘But, Captain,’ I say, ‘aren’t you coming too?’

He shakes his black head and bids us adieu.

‘A Spectre needs their own command, Shepard.

The Normandy's yours now. Take care of her.’

Somewhere up the line the call has been made,

And though he is always steady and staid,

His voice is regretful, his words become few.

He bids us goodbye, the best man of our crew.

We leave him behind, alone on the dock.

I raise my hand to him; close the airlock.

The Normandy glides back out into space,

Out into the burning lavender waste.

The Citadel flickers and fades away

Lost in the haze of the endless day

I turn my gaze away from the station,

Away from my captain, to the constellations.

‘Attention all hands! This is the Commander.

You know we’ve been sent to catch the rogue Spectre.

But it's not merely to justly avenge

Far more than that on our mission depends.

He's searching for something, the “Conduit”.

This only we know; he must not find it!

This is far bigger than Humanity.

It may matter to all in the Galaxy.

… Take us in to the Relay now, Joker.

Show us what the Normandy has in her.’

to be continued...