Mass Effect Mass Effect: Reflection

**Mass Effect: Reflection**

Commander Shepard stood alone in the port observation room, hands tucked behind his back, staring out into a void that was almost as silent as he. Stars appeared to flash by, but he didn't see them. The blue cosmic shards from the Normandy's port wing slipped across the pane of reinforced plasti-glass once every few dozen stars. The more brilliant ones would perhaps catch the Commander's eye every now and then, but for the most part he didn't so much as register their passing.

It was strange, being shrouded in silence like this. Shepard was used to the constant buzz of deck conversation, the sliding of doors as crew moved from station to station, the steady "beep" of his inbox as yet more private messages reached him. Here, there was nothing. Simply him, and the beauty of the stars. He began to understand why Samara the Justicar and Thane Krios, the completely unconventional drell assassin, spent so much of their time in meditation; there was a certain…soothing quality to it. The rest of the crew didn't seem to care much for his new pastime, in truth Shepard knew they were concerned for him, but he'd given up caring. He didn't think he had it in him to care again.

It was as he stared through the plasti-glass that he recalled something the geth platform known simply as "Legion" had once said. "Windows are structural weaknesses. Geth do not use them." Shepard shook his head at the memory, remembering how Joker had silently mocked the sentient machine behind its back on their approach to the geth station. He stopped the motion and straightened, almost rigidly, as he remembered that that had been the last time either being had seen each other. Their parting words, a conversation about the dangers of windows. Shepard would have laughed if it hadn't had been such a fitting tribute to the logically minded machine.

The ex-Spectre still struggled to understand how it had happened, no matter how many times he replayed the mission over in his head. He, Legion and the quarian known as Tali, a stalwart friend ever since the reaper threat first emerged, had boarded the station undetected. Legion had kept them hidden from the geth it called 'heretics' by filling their wireless network with random 'bits' that kept them busy. It also ensured that any alarms the team tripped would be isolated to the room they were in; a fortunate occurrence, given the fact that Shepard's squad did manage to accidentally trip some of the alarms on the way in.

It was when they reached the main core that it all hit the fan. They found the terminal easily enough, undefended thanks to Legion's corruption of the intruder system. Unfortunately, activation of the terminal and the uploading of the runtime virus Legion's geth had developed alerted the heretics. They stormed the room and despite the fact that Shepard's squad held the high ground, there were simply too many targets to handle; inevitably, some managed to push their way to the upper level. Even the anti-personnel turrets Legion had hacked to assist them hadn't been able to stop their advance.

Seeing that their best chance to hold the geth back would be to pin them on the stairs where they couldn't manoeuvre, Shepard had ordered Tali to hold the right while he attempted to lock down the more populated set of stairs on the opposite side. Legion held position in the centre, cradling the immensely powerful M-98 "Widow" anti-material rifle. The gun was rarely put to use for anything other than anti-vehicle or anti-krogan purposes; humans couldn't even fire the thing without shattering each and every bone in their shoulder. Fortunately, Legion wasn't even remotely human and its careful, calculated shots did a lot to thin the enemy ranks.

The geth pushed Shepard hard, but between his biotics and the heavy weapons he carried he managed to succeed in holding them back. As the last heretic was sent clattering down the stairs, white armour scarred and glowing red hot from multiple slug impacts, Shepard made a fool's mistake. He relaxed slightly and stood, knees burning from crouching behind cover for so long, his arms numb from what had felt like a never ending sequence of recoils. He had made the mistake of letting himself believe they'd done it, succumbing to the belief that the hardest part of the mission was over. Ultimately, he'd forgotten to maintain his level of alertness and as a result was summarily punished, severely.

The Commander had allowed himself to get so caught up in his own battle that he'd momentarily forgotten about Tali. The quarian was fighting for her life just as much as she was to hold the geth back; her ammo count was low and the geth were steadily advancing up on her position. She popped her arm around the wall and squeezed off a blind burst from her submachine gun. The geth's shields absorbed the damage, the rounds being split between the three synthetics that had gathered and ultimately doing little to stop the machines. The geth promptly returned fire and Tali gasped sharply in pain as one of their rounds grazed against her arm before she had a chance to draw it back.

She glanced down at the wound, nothing serious physically but it had torn a hole in her environmental suit, exposing her to the multitude of toxins in the air that could potentially be fatal to her kind. She quickly sealed off that section of her suit to minimize the infection damage but knew she simply didn't have the time to give it the proper attention right now. Ejecting what little was left of her heat sink, Tali activated her omni-tool's offensive capabilities and stood, preparing to launch an energy spike at the enemy that should overload the geth's shields.

Her elongated finger hovered over the key, the quarian momentarily confused by the unnatural shimmer in the air that hovered directly on the other side of the wall she had been hunkering behind. Her eyes widened as she realised, too late, what the shimmer belonged to. The hunter's shotgun blast caught her full in the chest, obliterating her shields instantly, her shields dissipating the force of the impact just enough so that she was only forced awkwardly onto her back foot by its kinetic energy.

Tali expected a second, follow up blast and thought the chamber delay of the shotgun might give her enough time to scramble to cover again but the hunter had other plans. It followed the shotgun blast by immediately swinging its powerful arm across its chest, perfectly level with the quarian's head. Tali's visor fragmented into crystalline shards at the impact and her neck gave way with a wet snap as her head twisted brutally to one side from the force of the blow. The quarian fell to the deck, head lying at a perverted angle as clean, regulated air slowly billowed out of the gaping hole in her helmet in thin, wispy white clouds.

After seeing Tali, his longtime friend and, though he scarcely dared admit it to himself, the woman he loved, being butchered by the hunter, watching the way her neck just twisted and snapped so violently, a single-minded rage had come upon Shepard and the one time Hand of the Council had exploded into a biotic frenzy. He recalled little of the details of the incident; only bits and pieces stuck in his memory, most of it was lost to a violent blur.

He remembered the feeling as the white hot rage burned through his veins, the way he had leapt out of cover, heedless of the danger. He could still feel the power fizzing and tingling across his arms as he let loose with a singularity that sucked half the geth off their feet and crushed them with. The attack was so powerful that when the miniature black hole exploded, the tiny slivers of shrapnel that remained of the obliterated geth were thrust out with such force that many burst through the shields of their brethren and embedded themselves into their chassis', slicing wires and spraying synthetic fluids across the walls.

He recalled seeing Tali crumpled at the top of the stairs, the way her head hung at such an awkward angle, the geth hunter that stood atop her, staring at Shepard almost casually with its fisheye lens as if issuing a challenge. Some people might have thrown caution to the wind and attempted to gun the mechanical monster down in the open. Commander Shepard simply forgot entirely what caution was, so deep was his anger. He had charged across the platform, bellowing an animal cry of primal rage. In his right hand he clutched the Claymore shotgun, a modified version of a devastating krogan weapon, a weapon that most people struggled to fire accurately with both hands let alone one. His entire left forearm glowed with dark purple energy as he charged his biotics to overwhelming levels.

Shepard could still heard the deafening roar of the shotgun as he squeezed the trigger, could still feel the impact as the weapon kicked back brutally and nearly snapped his arm in two. He fired again and was dimly aware of something in his forearm snapping but the furious adrenaline rush masked the pain. The synthetic had raised its own shotgun quickly upon seeing the human charge, but Shepard was moving fast, faster than he'd even know was possible. He recalled the fizz of energy as the hunter's shields gave way under the sheer unrelenting power of the claymore. He'd let go of the trigger, begun to swing his body to the right as the geth prepared to fire. Presented with Shepard's side and thus a diminished target, the geth's round for the most part went wide, the stray shards easily being absorbed by the Commander's shield.

Too late it foresaw its own destruction as Shepard brought his left arm down in a swing as he sidestepped, the entire length pulsating with energy. The movement was reminiscent of an underarm throw and as he reached the bottom of his swing a massive vortex of energy began to leave his hand and barrel towards the hunter, crackling and warping the very air itself with power. The unshielded geth stood no chance against the wave of biotic power and the shockwave tore across the floor, exploding with such energy that Shepard's teeth rattled inside his head.

The shockwave slammed into the geth, propelling the platform back instantly and barely losing momentum. The hunter thudded against the wall with a deafening clang of metal on metal, dropping to the deck a moment after, leaving a massive rent in the smooth metal panels behind him. The three remaining geth platforms that had pushed their way up behind the hunter were similarly obliterated by the remnants of the biotic shockwave, their synthetic bodies tossed about the room every which way.

Shepard hadn't even paused to give them further thought; no sooner had the hunter impacted against the wall than he'd dropped to Tali's side. He felt the horror as he saw up close the damage that had been done, the blood that had pooled in the base of her helmet, the way her jaw hung loosely as though the bones holding it in place had been snapped or dislocated. Though he knew it was futile, he reached for her neck and grimacing at the lifelessness, forced himself to check for a pulse. He couldn't feel anything, no spark remained of the life that she once lived with such passion. Aware that his multitude of feelings from despondency to anger, fear to despair, sorrow to disbelief, all threatened to overwhelm him Shepard forced himself to focus on just one. He nurtured the feeling, pushed all others aside, fed his anger, channelled everything into it and let the rage burn a fire through his soul.

"Shepard-Commander." The electronic voice, punctuated by almost indeterminable background clicks, brought Shepard to his feet. His geth companion looked at him with its single eye, surrounding fins spread apart at varying angles and with what passed for a head cocked slightly to one side in what had to pass for a sympathetic expression amongst its kind. "We are sorry for the loss of the creator." For a long moment, Shepard said nothing. Finally, he nodded slowly, dragging his two eyes from Legion's one and blinking furiously, his gaze slipping back to Tali's still form. "Yeah."

Legion stared at the back of his helmet for a moment longer, before a soft bleep from the core terminal drew its attention. The synthetic quietly tapped various keys on the interface before turning its head to one side to look at the Commander, as if unsure it should interrupt. Finally, it ventured a "Shepard-Commander?" which succeeded in bringing the human out of his apparent stupor.

"What?" He asked, his jaw tightly locked.  
"The runtime virus is ready, it is time to choose. Do we rewrite the heretics, or delete them?"  
"Why are you asking me?" Shepard growled, wanting nothing more than to finish this and get back to the Normandy.  
"We are conflicted. There is no consensus among our higher-order runtimes: 573 favour rewrite, and 571 favour destruction." Legion paused, as though allowing this to sink in. "Shepard-Commander, you have fought the heretics, you have perspective we lack. The geth leave their fate to you."

Shepard paused, appearing to wrestle with the decision. Rewrite the heretical geth and allow them to rejoin Legion's geth, thereby making the geth stronger as a whole; or erase the heretics and commit the equivalent of genocide. But, was it truly genocide? These were artificial beings, they weren't natural; they didn't even class themselves as individuals. They could probably program out a few more lines of code and before you know it all the losses would be replaced by freshly written geth. Was it possible to commit genocide against a 'species' like that? His gaze flickered over her broken body again, and suddenly his mind was made up.

"Blow them up Legion. Every last single one of the damn things."  
Amazingly, Legion co-operated without hesitation. "Acknowledged."  
The terminal's panels glowed an ominous red as the synthetic keyed in the station's self destruct code.  
"Collapsing antimatter magnetic bottling mechanisms." Legion said. There was a pause, and then: "Done. Recommend withdrawal to Normandy."  
Those were its last words as Commander Shepard, carnifex pistol levelled at the base of the synthetic's head, pulled the trigger.

The platform had topped instantly as a result of the close quarters round, the pistol so close it had actually entered the unprotected space between Legion's body and the energy shield surrounding him. The metallic crash he made as he hit the ground was as musical as a symphony to the enraged Shepard. Legion's sole eye fizzed and spat sparks, a final, futile gesture of defiance. The Commander placed his boot on the synthetic's body, directly atop the gaping hole that the geth had attempted to fix with Shepard's old N7 armour. "Join the rest of your kind in hell you son of a bitch." The Commander had snarled, before pumping a further two, very deliberate, rounds into the geth's head.

Shepard had fought his way off the doomed station single handed; carrying the limp, lifeless body of the woman he had silently loved, with one thought resounding through his head all the while. _If Cerberus could rebuild me, they can rebuild her._ He didn't remember how he had made it back to the Normandy alive, much less in one piece.

When asked about Legion, Shepard had merely shaken his head. Officially, and as far as the Normandy's crew knew, he had been cut down in the heretic geth's counter attack; only the Commander knew differently. Besides that, all he could remember after boarding the ship was the almost pitiful look Dr. Chakwas had given Shepard as he carried Tali in his arms all the way to sickbay and demanded the doctor do what she could for her. That and the searing ball of fire that engulfed the station just a few minutes later as he watched, silently, through the port observation window.

He still saw it now and if anything, the ceaseless anger he carried burned all the more fiercely.

**Author Notes**  
Yes, I know it's...unpleasant but at the time of writing I was struggling for inspiration and had wanted to do such a scene for a while. It's your bad luck that a friend of mine was trying to convince me to write Mass Effect fan fics at the time :P. If you're looking for something a lot less brutal and (in my opinion) something of a bit better quality, you should check out my other Mass Effect fan fiction, Pilgrimage; much less emotionally devastating, guaranteed.

-DA.


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