Chapter Text
It’s remarkably hard to work out where in the universe you are without a single point of reference.
An alarm was bleating dully.
Mmm… Not the usual tone. Maybe Kaid had changed it? He tended to switch them up so they didn’t all get used to sleeping through the tone.
She breathed in and the acrid smell of cooking meat hit her nose along with something distinctly more chemical, like plastic - damnit Ash, really? Had she forgotten the spatula in the hot pan after walking away again? If she was going to insist on being the one to cook eggs and bacon for the three of them she should at least learn to do it without destroying their kitchenware.
There was something stuck to her face and, without opening her eyes, she reached up to wipe it away. It…. Didn’t move like it should.
The whatever it was, warm and maybe wet, pooled onto her fingers, all without removing itself properly from her face.
What the-
She opened her eyes.
It was dark, but not in the way that it should be.
Her room wasn’t ever truly dark thanks to the glow from her bedside clock and the power lights on the phone charger on the other side.
No… this darkness was complete and inpenetrab-a flash. She blinked. It flashed again and then her eyes finally consented to resolve it into some semblance of sense.
An emergency light, illuminating in no precise pattern as if the whole thing had been wired wrong and-
Proper emergency lighting kicked in with a dull whine. The sour yellow of lights that were never intended to be needed was painful on the eyes but still she struggled through the incomprehension of it all to to focus.
The source of the chemical edge which burned in her nose with every intake of breath revealed itself.
Thin, almost white smoke trickled out of a control panel full of switches in front of her, explaining perhaps some of why the flashing light which accompanied the alarm was acting unusually. An electrical fire?
Woozy, she turned her head and… oh fuck... To one side of the chair she seemed to be strapped into was another, also inhabited. Not that its occupant would be any help in this situation.
The smell she’d assumed was simply bacon was, nauseatingly, them.
Shit.
Right. Don’t panic. Not the time for panic.
As much as looking at that… body… was the last thing she wanted to do, she forced herself to examine them - no, not them. It. It was a corpse, not a them.
Thinking dispassionately had to help, right?
It was dressed in a thin blue jumpsuit, bits of which looked as they had melted into the skin with the heat of whatever had happened.
Shit. Hopefully that hadn’t been what had killed them - there were few worse ways to go than that.
Beyond the corpse was another seat.
Another body.
For a moment she almost thought this one was alive, its charred arm hanging in the air as if reaching out for-
Something bumped against her face.
An explanation, and not one she thought she liked.
There was no gravity.
What the fuck.
With the addition of a semi-stable source of light, she was able to see that the sticky liquid on her face and hands was blood. Considering the distance to the nearest burnt body did that mean it was… hers?
She reached up to probe the source and hissed in pain as it stung fiercely.
A headwound.
One which, if she wasn’t wrong, would be about level with the dented, bloodied touchscreen in front of her. Well, that explained a lot more. She must have hit her head on it when whatever it was had happened.
But just what had happened?
Why was there no gravity? What had killed the others? Why hadn’t it killed her? Why did- fuck. She should know this.
In the space where she thought recollection should be, only fuzzy blankness remained.
No knowledge of what she was doing, of why she was there, of what any of this was about.
It caught in her chest, heart hammering as breathing became-
No.
She had to stay calm. If nothing else, she had to find out the answers to a few of those things. And… that wouldn’t happen here, strapped in beside the dead.
She fumbled weakly with the restraints, the buckle familiar but resistant to opening when- smart, actually. The design made it hard to accidentally undo oneself whilst there was no gravity. That suggested at least in part that this was normal, within acceptable parameters.
They came apart, at last, and she drifted upwards slightly.
One hand found a handle above her head and she pivoted easily. As easily as if… did she have zero-G training? Perhaps she should have expected that much given that this seemed to be some sort of-
Some sort of what?
With a stab of horror she couldn’t quite swallow back, she realised that her own name sat on the tip of her tongue, close but tantalisingly out of reach. She closed her eyes, tried to focus and…
Goddamnit her head hurt like a bitch.
She couldn’t stay here, couldn’t sit and wait for her memory to come back to her. Who knew how long that’d even take - if it ever did?
So… in case of trouble, do something.
The first step would have to be dealing with the bleating alarm. It was almost impossible to concentrate around it and the sound combined with its periodic absence was splitting her skull even wider open with every second.
A hand slapped inexpertly to the touchscreen of the console stopped it instantly, though the bloody handprint left on the glass half-obscured the flashing warnings still running across the screen. A readout of the issues?
Or… What?
Briefly, she tried to make out what they said but another stab of pain coursed through her skull as she tried to focus her eyes on them. Nope, not going to be reading those any time soon.
With that achieved… pick another issue to solve.
Maybe the source of the blood?
Twisting around - slowly, out of an ingrained habit - she spotted a plastic box on the back wall with the universal red cross of medical aid emblazoned across its white front face.
She glided over to it, using the edge of her seat to propel herself forwards slowly. It’d have been easier to use the chair parallel to hers too but… that would require looking at what remained of the corpse. Her… team-mate? Her friend? Crew-mate?
No. That wasn’t the topic for right now.
With a clunk, she hit the back wall of the compartment and used the edge of the first aid box to steady herself in place.
Inside was the fare she’d expected to find. Plasters, a roll of bandage, tape and gauze.
She let it float beside her as she dabbed the blood away and then, after some tentative prodding, decided that a plaster would probably be plenty.
No need to waste supplies. Who knew how long these things would have to last her.
The third step, now she’d muted the alarms and patched herself up: try to answer some questions?
She knew she had to be in space, logically, given the lack of gravity, but that that fact didn’t concern her suggested that she should know she was an astronaut. That… didn’t feel like the sort of thing a person should forget, right? And yet.
But if this was a spaceship, in space, she was relatively certain she should be able to work out where they were. Presumably orbiting Earth? Maybe Mars?
That… would be possible, right?
Turning around again, she propelled herself to her seat once more. Above the banks of switches, manual overrides and the three touchscreens - one set directly in front of each chair she realised- there was a large, flat screen with three analogue buttons at the edge of its frame. It alone remained completely blank and… that intrigued her enough that she pressed one of the buttons at random, going for the furthest right and she pressed the button to the furthest right.
Light flared as the dark screen slid upwards - not a monitor, oh shit, it was a window shade! And what it revealed took her breath away.
A heavy, almost blue star, some distance away, and the side of a uniformly red gas planet.
That- that couldn’t be right.
Could it?
There was just- there was no way that they had made it to- but there was no mistaking it, was there?
The nearest planet wasn’t part of the solar system, nor were the two others that shone in the reflected light from a heavy blue star far ahead. She might not remember a damned thing about, well, anything, but even she knew Sol never looked blue.
Holy crap.
This was another star system.
Right. Some grounding needed. Time to get the facts in order before she truly panicked about it.
Name.
She should start with a name - there had to be some record of the names of her and her ill-fated crew-mates somewhere, didn’t there?
Maybe… a mission patch? C’mon, brain, think. If they were all wearing jumpsuits then surely they had some sort of mission patch which could provide a clue.
Looking down made her vision blur and brought bile up into her throat but she gritted her teeth and cast her eyes downwards at her own front.
CMDR Shepard.
Below the name patch was a mission logo - a stylised… something… on a splash of gold with words encircling it.
Normandy. Waterloo. Marne. Project Sunseeker.
So… that made her Commander Shepard, of Project Sunseeker. And therefore the spaceship she was on had to be named one of those three things, didn’t it?
Why those names?
Historical events, she thought. Battle locations maybe? That was the sort of thing ships were named after. Warships.
And if she was a commander, did that make her a soldier, presumably? Was this a warship? A space… warship?
Alright. No, more information needed before she could come to a conclusion like that. Warships were big things, on earth at least, and surely it made no sense to have a tiny, three-person ship as a space warship. Right?
Verifiable facts though:
-She knew how to navigate in Zero G with a level of muscle-memory which made it seem familiar, or at least something she’d practiced at great length, so she’d chosen to come here. Or been ordered out here.
-She knew the look of her own home planet from outer space, like a half-buried memory, so she’d been in space before then. Or at least - she’d been conscious when they’d left earth (and they must have left earth). The mental image… seeing it in person wasn’t like the pictures and videos. Earth was so, so much bluer than that, when seen with ones own eyes.
-She had oxygen to breathe and medical supplies with which to patch herself up, so they were clearly meant to be alive at this point. This hadn’t been a suicide mission; they hadn’t been human test subjects sent up to die. They didn’t do that to people, whoever they was.
-She was alone, but that information didn’t worry her so much as it saddened her, so she’d been close enough with her crew-mates but was also perfectly able to cope without them. Their deaths were tragic but… they weren’t catastrophic for her mental state, almost as if she were familiar with death. And yet still, being alone was worrying.
There were three names on the patch. Three names, three ships.
Shit.
Where were the others?
Not important right this second. No doubt their status would become absolutely crucial in due time but… right now? She had bigger issues to concentrate on.
Now that the shock of being in an unfamiliar star system had dulled to a chill across the back of her shoulders, it was time to see how much of the ship was salvageable. The warnings flashing on the screens up front were likely a decent starting point - any ship advanced enough to get out this far had to have some pretty advanced systems, hopefully ones that’d be able to inform her why her crew mates had died and maybe even why she hadn’t.
Taking stock of the damages, seeing what needed to be repaired (did she even know how to repair a spaceship?) and… dealing with the bodies, those had to be her priorities. With any luck, she would remember more of what was going on whilst running through that list of jobs, remember why she was here in the first place.
Trying not to look at the corpses in their seats, Shepard pulled herself back into her seat and tapped at the screen to bring up more details. A list of alerts cascaded down and just kept scrolling down the page. Shit.
Most of them were beyond her, system errors and shorthand code but one caught her eye.
SHIP INTEGRITY SENSOR ARRAY FAULT: ERROR 314
SUGGESTED ACTIONS: CHECK PHYSICAL WIRING CONNECTIONS FROM LOOM ACCESS PANEL 14 ONWARDS
Helpful ship. She liked that.
Loom access panel 14, located fortuitously just to the left the screen she was looking at, was labelled. As was every panel in the ship, when she forced herself to focus on them and was able to be pried open by inserting her fingers into the small groove along one side. Also useful.
That suggested that they were supposed to be able to fix parts of the ship themselves, didn't it?
Inside, much as the ship had suggested, the wiring loom had simply come unplugged and, in the case of one thin red wire, broken. Easy fix, well within even her capabilities.
Instantly, once the exposed wire had been crimped together and the rest of the loom simply plugged back into its socket, there was a quiet ping from the screen. Shepard looked up to see that that alert had given way to a series of readouts and a pictogram - covered in warning triangles. Ah. Shit.
It would be her luck to fix one problem and have another half-dozen spring up as a result.
The pictogram was a rough outline of an airpla-no. That… wasn’t an airplane. The proportions were all wrong, hull far too broad and wings too short. Was it-
No.
Why build a spaceship like that? What possible reason could there be for building a spaceship to be aerodynamic like that? Unless it was meant to land on planets and then take off again? But- no, they simply didn’t have the technology to do that.
Not that they had the technology to reach other star systems either, as far as she was aware.
Trying to distract herself from the frustration of everything she just didn’t know, she pressed on the alert for one of the wings and-
Ah.
STARBOARD PROPULSION SYSTEMS STATUS:
STARBOARD 1: 50% CAPACITY
STARBOARD 2: OFFLINE
WING INTEGRITY WARNING: MULTIPLE HULL BREACHES Ø 5MM OR LESS. PRESSURE LOCK ENGAGED. STARBOARD STORAGE BUNKERS UNAVAILABLE.
Well, fuck. So they had a quarter of expected propulsion on one side. If they were going anywhere, it wouldn’t be fast, then. Though… where would there be to go anyway?
Rapidly, she flicked back out of that display and opened up instead ship schematics - curious as to what else there was to this ship, in case it may offer some more insight as to what they were doing out here. And…
The answer to that was… maybe?
The ship was small, as she’d guessed. Two cabins on the port-side and one on the starboard, with a kitchen behind it, and then behind that was a space simply labelled as ‘laboratories’. Helpful. But… right at the back of it, it suggested that the aft of the ship was made up of several large compartments that appeared to be able to be depressurised and, if she wasn’t wrong, cut off from the rest of the ship so they’d freeze. It, well, it wasn’t a palatable idea, primarily because it meant she’d have to handle the bodied but… living with the dead was good for no one either.
So that became the next thing on the list.
Both were men, she thought, as she was forced to inspect them more closely. And… that information felt right?
Maybe it was a blessing that the jumpsuit was charred through right where the name should have been - was on both of them. The lack of gravity was a godsend for getting the corpses through the ship, too. They drifted wherever she guided them once unclipped, moving with absolutely no effort on her part. That beat trying to haul the dead weight of a grown man around at least.
And if she knew that, well, was that confirmation that she was a soldier? Else… how would she know?
Shepard passed by the cabins on her way through and stopped after the first trip to the cold storage to inspect the names; the two on the port side were labelled ‘Nav. Pressley’ and ‘Dr. Bryson’. So… those had been her crew mates names then.
She didn’t know which was which and pointedly avoided any chance of finding out upon her second trip to storage.
The solo cabin had her name on it. Cmdr Shepard.
Like she’d been offered added privacy. Was that related to her gender? Or her seniority? Or just… picked for no particular reason at all?
Did it even matter?
Still, it was to her assigned cabin that she retreated once the job was done and a helpful display on the outside of the storage compartment was counting down through the depressurisation sequence.
A spartan place - though should she have expected anything else? A tightly made bed with zero-G restraints floating loose, a sealed box on the wall which she thought had to act as clothing storage and precisely nothing else. Not even so much as a photo. Yet she knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that this was her space and as such, strapped herself tight into the bed.
It wasn’t that she was tired, far from it, but the dull ache of a grief she didn’t fully understand pressed up in her throat. Grief for the loss of the two crew mates who’s names she couldn’t even attribute to their burned corpses mixing with something far more profound, more painful still than that; the loss of her own personhood.
The cabin might be just as devoid of life as the rest of the ship, but it was a smaller place to be lonely within, even if it were still a vaster expanse to manage than the inside of her own blank head. And… it was dark. She needed that right now.
Shepard woke from a sleep she wasn’t aware she’d fallen so deeply into some hours later to find that some sort of artificial gravity had kicked back in whilst she’d been asleep - the restraints fixed to the frame of the bed to keep her from drifting away now redundant and slack. No bad thing - artificial gravity significantly reduced the concerns about bone loss and muscle wastage that plagued most traditional astronauts time in zero-G.
Dimly, she realised that sleeping had likely been a damned foolish thing to do, given her head wound and amnesia. What if she’d been unable to wake up? Concussions did that and god knows, she had every symptom of one - the pain when focusing, the bloody head wound and the complete ignorance as to what she was doing on a space ship in another fucking galaxy.
The cold answer came easily - then the ship would have had a compliment of corpses and it would likely stay there forevermore. Nobody would know what had happened to them, nobody would likely ever come looking for them.
A quiet grave who only knew how impossibly far from home and no body to bury. Not that- she thought- there was anyone left to bury her anyways.
The return of gravity explained some of the stranger features about the ship though, such as the fact that it’d so clearly been designed with a floor and a ceiling in mind. It also brought up something interesting though - clearly the ship had some level of autonomous function beyond just sensing its issues and bringing them up for her to handle; the computers onboard had to have figured out whatever had turned gravity off in the first place and corrected that issue whilst she’d slept. If that were the case, maybe other errors would have sorted themselves out whilst she slept?
There was something bizarre about walking out of a cabin she’d floated into but her legs didn’t protest. Moving under her own steam was enjoyable, even. Familiar and comforting, even if she’d have liked more space to pace than the little ship could provide.
Shepard slid back into her own seat in the cockpit rather than allow herself to become distracted.
The room still smelled nauseatingly like frying bacon.
A quick run-through of the system alerts that she had found previous revealed that, no, unfortunately not much else had managed to sort itself out. Damn. Whatever had happened to kill Bryson and Pressly had well and truly fucked the ship over.
The better news was, now she felt a little bit less disorientated by, well, everything, Shepard realised that the touchscreen in front of her did a fair amount more than simply offer alerts about what wasn’t working; she also had access to a number of their mission logs. For all the good those would do her.
No… wrong thing to think.
They were immensely useful for filling in the vacuum left by her complete lack of memories.
Hunger prickled at her stomach though, too, and even without any sense of time, she decided that it’d probably been a correct amount of time to eat so… left the cockpit in search of something to fulfil that before embarking on the next most important stage in this post-incident reality she now lived in.
The kitchen was a mess - seemingly well stocked but not prepared for a complete loss of gravity nor its sudden return. The ration packets which had spilled out of their opened boxes and which were strewn across the floor though? They were easy enough to identify in order to pick through in search of something which appealed and… the ship possessed a water-heater which allowed her to at least rehydrate them following the pictogram instructions on their sides.
Spaghetti carbonara it was, for ease.
She wandered back to the cockpit once again with her prize. Multitasking time.
Alright, maybe curiosity was getting the better of her but there was no reason why she couldn’t shovel pasta into her mouth whilst reading through logs, was there?
They’d left set off from Earth nine months ago along with the two other ships - labelled as Marne and Waterloo - which surely meant that this one had to be Normandy and they had headed, heading straight for something called Anomaly Zero - and why did she feel like she should know what that was?
The mission had been uneventful for the most part, an exercise in boredom aside from when they’d been within visual range of each of the planets they’d passed in convoy. Bryson had found out he was going to be a father and they’d celebrated by cracking Pressly’s smuggled-on whisky. That… That hurt. So one of the corpses had a baby back home who’d never know their father. Poor kid deserved better.
It wasn’t even as if he’d died a heroic death, was it? Just been a victim of terrible luck, out in an unforgiving place. Shit.
They’d paused for last engineering checks at a place called Buzz Station - a manned station which orbited Mars for scientific purposes, apparently, before using the planet to slingshot themselves further out into the darkness. Out beyond human experience, Bryson’s written log commented in what she suspected was awe. He seemed to have been a scientist.
One hundred games of Go Fish achieved.
Saturn was on the wrong side of its orbit, unfortunately, but they’d been the first people to orbit Jupiter as they’d used it for a second and final slingshot, gaining even more speed as they aimed themselves out towards Pluto. Someone called Williams - here her fragmented mind whispered Ash, Ash Ash like a mantra she should be familiar with - had instigated the most unbelievably tenuous game of eye-spy over comms and Shepard found her own log for that day sadly ironic as she’d marvelled at how she’d grown up thinking of Jupiter as unattainably far away and now it was a rapidly diminishing speck at their backs; to think, she’d now give anything to be as close to home as Jupiter once again. At least she’d be able to call for help then, even if it’d likely be unattainable.
She didn’t care about the many-minute delay, the ability to communicate with other people even if she were beyond rescue, for however long she had left, would be a comfort.
Then, finally, they’d made it to Pluto. Shepard had celebrated her thirtieth birthday by finding out that their rations for the day included a packet that rehydrated into something that resembled, if not could exactly be called, a chocolate birthday cake. It’d been a a change and a moment’s levity, all three ships coming together as much as they could. Alone in the dark and separated by space they couldn’t cross though they might have been, they were still all humans coming together for a celebration.
Once again, theirs were the first human eyes to observe Pluto in direct - what a privilege that was - and then, then they’d approached Anomaly Zero.
Some of the logs were corrupted to her great frustration, and any information that would have been damned useful (like a first name for herself maybe?) was inaccessible.
The last one she could access had been when Pluto had passed back into being little more than a little brown dot and… that had been four days ago, by the ship’s internal clocks.
From what she could make out - and here she sure wished she had the cliff notes version of why the hell they’d come here - something had happened when they had reached Anomaly Zero.
“Godspeed Normandy, Godspeed Marne, Godspeed Waterloo, au-revoir if not goodbye.”
Normandy.
Her ship was definitely called Normandy.
And - yes!
Williams had been commander of Marne, she knew despite not having a face to place for the woman. They’d been the only two women on the whole mission. There had been jokes made about token diversity, even in their day and age, that only two out of nine astronauts were women. Of course there were other reasons for that but... fuck, she couldn't remember them.
She’d liked Ashley Williams. They’d been very close, at some point. Far, far closer than she had been with the rest of the crew with the exception of… oh, Alenko.
He had been the third commander, in charge of Waterloo - a soft spoken man who had the driest wit imaginable that came out at the best possible moments. Like Ash, Kaidan had been a good friend. A friend as close as sibling before the.... uh, before it all.
Were they dead too?
They’d seen hell together in… uh… well, on Earth. Fought back to back against impossible odds and survived, all to die out here in fuck-knows-what corner of the universe.
Shepard could remember sand in her socks, cursing the fine dust that jammed her rifle as Alenko had done his damnedest to keep their shack from being buried by the howling storm that threw twice as much sand at them as they brushed away the second before.
So she was definitely a soldier then.
Nice to clear that up.
Neither of the other ships was within sight - she ascertained this by taking full advantage of the manual controls to check her surroundings out fully with a slow roll on each axis in turn. No ghost ships, no debris, they just… weren’t there.
Shepard was utterly alone.
What was there however was a silent, dark object identical to the descriptions of Anomaly Zero, hanging in the darkness behind them.
If Shepard had to make (yet another) guess, she’d guess whatever they had done at Anomaly Zero had somehow transported them here. Teleport seemed far-fetched but if she had to name it, it was like a teleportation device - that had to explain why she’d been in the Sol system and then… hadn’t. A teleportation device that must be connected to her home system and, if she was to assume from Normandy’s lonely status, other stations too. They’d all left, after all; she was sure of that.
Marne and Waterloo could have gone through with them and then been shunted out at other stations god knows where. Were they even all still in the Milky Way?
What none of this helped her out with was why the hell they’d felt the need to go to the anomaly in the first place. This whole thing smacked of desperation; the lack of preparation, that they hadn’t any prior research about Anomaly Zero to fall back on, that there hadn’t apparently already been a team who’d been this far out, that they’d sent soldiers.
Shepard wasn’t a scientist, wasn’t an engineer, wasn’t a pilot, wasn’t anything actually useful to the sort mission this purported to be, but here she was, in charge of it. The same went for Kaidan and Ashley - they were both career soldiers who’d seen active duty back on Earth without any specific skillset aside from decisive leadership qualities and the ability to fight. Yet there they’d been, in charge of a tentative mission that had thrown them to the wilds of the galaxy.
But why?
Why risk so much, why send them out seemingly to die in the three most advanced ships that anyone on Earth must have ever built?
The next train of thought was that, eventually, she’d have to do something. Either that would involve attempting to go back through the teleport-thing or she’d just starve to death here.
Sure, their oxygen supply would last seemingly indefinitely thanks to the CO2 scrubbers - why did she know they had those? - and the solar panels covering the ship would provide near-endless power for essential systems, but they’d only had food for two years; enough to last the sole survivor six years therefore. She’d go crazy from the isolation far before that though.
Of course… there was always the other way out; she could reduce the oxygen percentage and up the nitrogen until she fell asleep and never woke up but… damned if she already knew she couldn’t just do that to herself.
The problem was that Shepard, despite barely knowing who she was, knew that she didn’t have the strength to end her own life.
She’d fight for her final breath, cling to life even against inevitable death like a cockroach sprayed with bug-killer, despite the absolute certainty that her mission was going to end with her dead - likely long before anything interesting happened. It was just one of those things that she knew instinctually, even when considering the prospect of just ending it all.
The teleport wasn’t an appealing option either. She might have survived this journey through it, but that felt more like dumb luck than anything else given that they were currently looking at (as far as she knew) a sixty-six percent mortality rate for using the damned thing and, on top of that, there was absolutely no guarantee that she’d be spit back out in her own system.
And so, she sat in desperate indecision for the first time in her life.
It’s remarkably hard to work out where in the universe you are without a single point of reference.
Eventually, something would have to happen and, really, it was only a question of what would give first, the ship or her sanity.
Shepard angled the ship to face the teleport device, the only possible way out of this mess for all that she had absolutely no desire to go near it, and just… watched it. Let its pale reflection burn into her retinas as she tried not to consider the other implication of it.
See, the more she stared at it, the more it became apparent that someone or something had made it. Nothing natural about that shape, no way its composition were accidental. And… that came with bigger questions than she could ever answer. Came with answers that went so far beyond the scope of her own understanding of the universe that she thought she’d go mad even considering them.
That was, until the anomaly suddenly flared blue; lights coursing down the length of its two metal arms and the central interlocking rings spinning in place as energy crackled within it.
Had… it heard her thoughts? No, be logical here.
It was nothing she’d done, Shepard knew that much in her gut, and yet… she couldn’t help but hope that someone had sensed that she was out here on her own, that someone had come to rescue her.
But… who?
And then it was obscured by the very thing that she’d just thought she’d go insane if she were forced to confront.
A ship.
An alien ship.