Previously, we interviewed Ajak Charr, the Batarian Warlord who led the defense in the historic battle of Torfan. Today we see the other side of the story as we interview one of the Alliance soldiers who served and fought alongside the legendary Commander Shepard as they brought the final stages of the fighting to a close.

Jonathan Harrington, War History

Rising From the Ashes

Part 2

THE DUTIFUL

Let me set the record straight to start with. There's a lot of theories about him out there, all sorts of stories from both sides about how he's either the second coming of Christ, alien god or whatever. Far as I'm concerned, it's all one hundred percent grade A bullshit. So if you're looking at that angle for your story, you can show yourself out the door right now. I wouldn't be here talking to you if it weren't for him, not unless you're one of those new age spirit medium types. I'd have died that goddamned rock and that would be that. He saved my ass more than a few times in the two years we fought and bled together. Don't get me wrong, he can do all sorts of crazy things I'd say were outright impossible, but before that, the man's a brother marine and a hero whom I owe more than I can ever repay. That's all that matters.

Now, I won't bother with my unit number and name, if you've found me you already know it. But yeah I was part of his team when we took that god forsaken moon. We were dropped down a couple days earlier from the main force, kitted out with the new mimetic poly-alloy armour to help us avoid unfriendly eyes. We weren't just recon though. Would have been a bloody waste of our talents, even before he started training us. Our job was to lay low, take up the good positions and wait for the fleet to hit. Once the pirates had their eyes glued to the front, we were to make a mess of things through their backdoor and then keep moving to other targets of opportunity. We had a lot of choice stuff to pick from, naval intelligence had done their homework way before us, even if they did screw it up in the end.

I won't tell you how we got on the moon, it's classified to hell to back, but I can say it was a pretty smooth op right up until the invasion proper. That's when the pirates really pulled one over us. Let the ground pounders get up real close before springing the first of their surprises.

We knew the bastards had hundreds of slaves on call, all of them fitted with those nerve staple collars and broken down to the point of animals. Turians, asari, quarian, human and a half dozen other species from all across the Terminus. You see them now and again when some bastard gets caught smuggling slaves into Batarian space, all broken up on the inside, not even with a sense of self anymore. We figured they'd use them as hostages, human shields and the like. The naval psychs during the briefing said they'd be too broken to be used as fighting units. And they were right, mostly. The slavers wouldn't want them to get the idea of picking up a gun and fighting you know? Always the risk that they might get it into their heads to shoot the bastards who'd been hurting them all this while instead of their rescuers. But bomb vests... well, you can guess how that went.

Yeah, he made the call, nobody else could. Bastards were jamming every Alliance channel, but we had a few days to figure out their communication frequencies before things went to hell. It was a close call, calling in a fire mission like that though I can tell you he didn't like it at all. Really pissed him off. But we didn't have much of a choice. With those nerve staples, they were going to keep coming until they got shot or blew themselves up. At least it was quick for the poor bastards.

Compared to that, taking out their big guns was a lot easier to swallow. Naval intelligence might have dropped the ball there, those Longeyes took everyone by surprise, especially with those pirate reinforcements dropping out of FTL. Right then we knew the whole thing was a setup, but Shepard didn't let that slow him down. We went off the script, and he did a pretty damn good job of managing things by the seat of the pants, getting us to take out those anti-orbital guns in quick order.

That's where I lost a good chunk of my meat. Don't let Alliance PR bullshit fool you. That mimetic poly-alloy armour they talk about might give you a whole bunch of stealthy options to work with, but the designers sacrificed a lot of protection to fit all the tech underneath. I got shot at while dealing with the guards they had assigned to the guns. Wasn't enough to put me down for good, thank Sirta for medigel, but it was enough to slow me down some. Enough to get shot a whole lot more in another second in fact. But then he was there, pulling my broken ass out of the line of fire and going on to do what he did best.

We took those guns, and we put them to good use, turning them on the pirate reinforcements up in orbit. I'd have given up a lot to be the fly on the wall when that bastard warlord heard about that.

Not that he was going to have a lot of time to rant about it.

Lieutenant Samuel Jensen hurt.

Which wasn't much of a surprise given that he'd been shot a few more times than he would have liked. That was to say, once was one time too many. The magic of medigel and morphine being pumped into his system kept him breathing and numbed the pain some, but it could only do so much. He was lucky, in retrospect. Only one of the rounds had managed to punch through his armour, the rest missing or deflecting off the angled plate. He wasn't even a medevac case, just a short sit down, let the suits autodocs do their job and he'd be back in the fight. Not to mention he had a front row seat to the biggest fireworks show in years, so he had something other than just drugs to take his mind off the pain.

A hundred meters away and on the other side of the blast shield Jensen was hiding behind, smoke lazily curled around the Longeye's main armament. Much further away in high orbit, Torfan gained an extra dose of sunshine courtesy of exploding pirate cruiser, just one of three so far. There were going to be a lot more short lived stars tonight, he thought. His radio crackled to life, the closed fist icon on his helmet display telling him it was from the secret officers-only channel.

"Good shot. Good shot. Enemy command cruiser is breaking up. That's the last of them. Pirate reinforcements in Torfan orbit are losing cohesion, but they're still putting up heavy resistance. All recon, confirm. Have the enemy ground batteries been completely neutralized?"

One by one, the other teams check in, each one tired but victorious.

"Dagger one confirms."

"Dagger three confirms."

And lastly superman's voice fills the airwaves, calm like he hadn't faced off a platoon strength enemy escort with nothing but a pair of heavy pistols and a satchel charge. "Sigma lead confirms. Nine batteries destroyed, three captured. No others on scope."

There's something else in his voice too, something leaking in through the calm confidence and discipline. Something a bit... primal. But whatever it was, Jensen didn't have the time to ponder it as the next bit of coms chatter took all his attention.

"Confirmed Sigma lead. All teams still holding the batteries, maintain your position, relief forces are enroute. In the meantime, keep those guns aimed at the sky, command is requesting additional fire support. Uploading targeting data now. Fire when ready. Over."

"Dagger two wilco. Fire mission confirmed." Jensen braced himself, smart visor polarizing to near pitch black. "Guns firing."

The Torfan night sky lit up brighter than the burning ships in orbit, followed by an earth shaking shockwave that nearly threw him despite hiding behind the blast shield. Jensen swore as, morphine or no, the rattling made his abused chest twinge with a fresh shot of pain while his ears rang like an exploding factory. Not to mention the sudden blindness. Even with the visor set all the way down, the sheer brightness left a long greasy streak on his sight.

"Shells on the way. Clear the lanes."

Ignoring the cheers as another star lit up Torfan's horizon, Jensen picked himself up off the lunar soil, gingerly feeling at his chest before grabbing his rifle. No rest for the wicked or the hurt, not on this battlefield, and not under the commander's watch. Even with the pirate command center wiped out, there was still going to be a lot of fighting to come.

Scanning for the man, he found the commander crouching beside a dead slaver. Jensen was about to call out to him when a HMD icon lit up, indicating that his superior was on the line with someone. Shrugging, he settled in for a short wait while observing the man. The glow surrounding Sigma lead was mostly faded at this point, receding back beneath layers of ceramic armour insets and ballistic weave though it still shone through areas where the armour was thinnest. Jensen had to suppress a shudder at that.

No matter how many times he had seen it before, it never failed to unnerve him. That light was as much his signature as it was a sign of his otherness, nevermind the superhuman feats and impossible stunts. They knew about it of course, how it only showed when he was pulling all the stops and how much brighter it got the more he turned reality on its head, all the veterans of 51st Recon did. Whatever their commander was, he wasn't just human no matter what the docs said, not since Elysium. He'd become something more, an unknowable other defying all attempts at classification that just happened to have a human face. Not that it would deter any of the 51st from following him into hell if he said the word.

Commander Shepard had that effect on people.

His brief rumination came to a halt when the man in question ended communications with whoever it was, the icon darkening as Shepard shook his head. Jensen frowned. He wasn't the best when it came to reading body language, but that didn't look like a good sign.

"Trouble commander?" He asked on a private channel.

"Maybe." Was the terse reply as Shepard's omni tool lit up. A moment later, a window opened in the corner of Jensen's helmet display, updates to their squads mission profile scrolling past. He absorbed all the pertinent details in the space of a few seconds.

He blinked.

"Seriously, sir?"

Shepard nodded, "always am Jensen," he paused for a second before adding, "you could sit it out. Medigel or not, you took a pretty bad hit back there and it's going to get pretty rough soon."

Jensen snorted, ignoring the twinge in his chest the action caused. "Not dead yet sir, and you know our company motto."

"No rest for the wicked." The commander filled in, clapping a hand on his shoulder, "Good man. Now get the troops ready, command wants us into the breach the moment the dust settles."

He watched the man depart, the same confident, predatory gait to his step that never went away no matter what. Quietly, despite the fact that nothing would carry beyond the confines of his helmet, he whispered the other half of the 51st motto.

"Not while the sun shines."

Within the confines of Torfan's gravity well, a star blossomed. Just one more of the dozens that already burned across the horizon. Small, insignificant by any stellar classification, it still shone brighter than any star that surrounded the lonely moon of Torfan, illuminating the horizon with the actinic glare of its brief life. Like its siblings, it burned bright, quick and hot.

But unlike its brethren, its birth cry began in the heart of the pirate base.

Torfan didn't have much of an atmosphere to carry sound in, but let me tell you. It was loud. I can still close my eyes today and feel my bones rattling from the memory of that Longeye firing on the pirate base.

You see, the enemy command center in our sector was pretty well fortified. Half buried into a mountain cliff to shield it from orbital strikes, reinforced ferrocrete walls and enough guns to make the approach murderous for anything on the ground. Standard doctrine would have been to encircle the place and probe for weak points, but command didn't want to take chances after the surprise they had sprung on us. They wanted to shake up the place.

Turns out that our brand new anti-orbital guns make the best door knockers.

Didn't completely level the place, just enough to make a mess of their defenses. Torfan had been the centre of pirate activity for the last few decades, and command wanted that intelligence intact. Couldn't let the slavers get rid of it either once they realized they were losing, so we went in after the barrage with elements of the 402nd following close behind to help secure the area.

It should have been an easy job. Sure, they'd put up a fight, but their communications were in tatters, and any resistance in the complex would be disorganized after that shelling.

Or at least, that's what we thought.

"Hurry it up McTavish!" Jensen yelled over the chatter of his assault rifle, "that door isn't going to blow itself up!"

"Easy for you to say Lt," the one eyed sergeant huffed as he leaped over a barricade, sprinting across the no-mans land before sliding behind a burning utility truck, "you're not carrying all this crap."

"Yeah well if you don't open us an entryway soon, it'll be the last sack of crap you ever carry!" He shot back as a burst of retaliatory fire flew overhead.

It had been a heady advance at first. Slaver guards, still disoriented by the blast, quickly dropped as their company pressed forward with elements of the 402nd, the defenders unable to put up more than a token resistance. But it couldn't, and wasn't lasting. Not every defensive position had been blasted by the opening salvo, and some of the guards in them were starting to coordinate again. The Commander was cracking open the toughest ones with grenade fire, but they needed into the complex, and soon.

Shots sparked off the shattered packing crate that was his cover with increasing accuracy, the lucky few penetrations forcing him to duck. He came back up with a smart grenade in hand, tossing the spinning disc on one smooth motion at one of the few active strongpoints. The slavers had only a second to shout before the grenade went off with a satisfying whump.

Enemy fire slackened for just an instant. He gambled.

"Move it cyclops!" Jensen dashed out of cover, rifle chattering away as he made a mad sprint for the main entrance. More shots sparked the ground around him. The bastards weren't as suppressed as he had hoped. The smart HUD tracked McTavish's progress, pegged him as only a second behind as the sergeant followed suit.

It felt like a million years and a thousand parsecs away.

Miraculously, neither of them stopped a bullet. And then he was up against the bunker walls, under their fire and close to the sealed doors. McTavish arrived a moment later, panting as the sergeant unhooked the heavy duty breaching charge. He slapped the explosives against the door, hooked a finger around the arming strip, and exchanged a brief look with Jensen. The lieutenant nodded, shouldering his rifle-

The door hissed open. A shotgun the size of his torso shot out, jamming against the sergeant's chest.

He didn't have time to even shout a warning.

We weren't expecting the Krogan.

They were waiting for us, and the bombardment didn't seem to have phased them much. The moment we got to the access tunnels, dozens of the lizards started pouring out of the hatches. We fired back of course, but Krogan don't drop easily. A lot of good people died in the first few seconds once they got into melee range. I saw one Krogan grab a marine and literally pull him apart. It was the same across the entire platoon. Everyone was reporting contact with Blood Pack forces and heavy casualties.

But he was there again, glowing like he always did when things were bad. That got their attention. This really big Krogan came rushing for him, shrugging off our shots like rain.

And you know what? He met the overgrown lizard head on.

But before I go into detail let me tell you, what you see in the drone captured vids, the re-enactments based off witness accounts? They're nothing like seeing the real thing in action with your own two eyes. I'd seen it happen plenty of times before when we were working together, but when he does that, and you get the feeling like he's telling the universe to shut the fuck up because he's goddamned Commander Shepard? It never goes away. Don't know what Alliance brain trust did to him that made him the way he is, but whatever it is borders on sheer magic.

Jensen swung his rifle to bear, rage and fear in equal measure giving his limbs speed. The red armoured giant was faster still, trampling the gory remnants of his sergeant aside as it charged.

"Krogan!" The panicked shout filled the airwaves as time seemed to slow down for him. He saw it then on his HUD, on the tactical maps. New contacts, pouring out from both marked and previously hidden access points. Shotguns the size of cannons roared, adding their thundering mix into the battlefield din. They were close. Too close. Marines fired back, threw grenades, some even pulled combat knives. The wave of Krogan simply closed the distance and trampled them down.

Something exploded, white hot flechettes whizzing by his face, smashing against his body. His barriers collapsed, the blare of alarms accelerating time to the here and now. And the rapidly closing Krogan.

His rifle chattered, dozens of rounds sent down the range. Fire shifted from the other teams, picking at the massive speeding target. A storm of fire smashed against the alien, tearing its barriers, puncturing its armour. To no effect. The Krogan didn't even slow, an angry bellow filling his ears as the behemoth checked its shoulder and sprinted the last few meters. A yell formed in his throat, all rage, fear and stubborn determination.

And then he was there, a blazing star in the face of an unstoppable force.

The Krogan swung-

The sun flared.

-and hit empty air.

The glowing man flashed aside, leaving afterimages swimming in Jensen's vision. Bereft of a target, the Krogan stumbled, target missed.

Shepard never gave him a chance.

Heavy pistols stitched a staccato beat like full automatic fire. Alien blood splashed the ground as its eyeport shattered. The Krogan roared a challenge, feet digging into lunar soil as it tried to stop and turn.

A golden fist streaked faster, jabbing into the shattered eyeport. Pulling out so quick that the alien only bellowed in pain after he had danced back a step and out of reach. But then the krogan paused. Looked at Shepard, poised to move in any direction. It grunted.

The shotgun swivelled towards Jensen.

He reacted on instinct, pulling the trigger, the first shots slamming into the alien. Hitting the barriers, the armour. Failing to penetrate. He saw the meaty finger twitch-

The Krogan's head exploded.

He froze, finger falling off the trigger as the headless corpse slumped and fell down, spilling blood on Torfan's soil. A sniper? But there hadn't been any friendlies in his range with the ordnance. Before he could do more than think those thoughts, Shepard darted forward, snatching the dead Krogan's oversized shotgun. As if noticing his stare, the commander turned towards Jensen, giving him a shrug.

"Grenade," he said by way of explanation, racking the veritable hand cannon. "Left it in his helmet."

A stray shot whizzed by, forcing the two of them to dive for cover. "I hope you've got a whole lot more grenades then commander," he said, snapping a shredder module into place and wishing he had something meatier. Like a nuke. "There's a lot of krogan out here."

Popping up, he fired off three shots at krogan charging Charlie squad. The first two improved rounds smashed against the barrier and armour respectively, but the third punched through. Blood puffed as one of its ankles shattered from the fragmentation round. But instead of collapsing like a sensible creature, the damned thing turned around on the shattered limb, shotgun roaring. The pellets went wide, but Jensen ducked all the same. "A whole lot of Krogan, we... uh Commander?"

Still glowing, Shepard had crouched down, hands on the floor and legs stretched out as tensing for a race. The shotgun was folded up and stowed on his back.

"What are you doing?"

"Buying us some time." He said, the glow growing brighter with every second, "the rest of the 402nd will be here soon."

And then when he was almost too bright to look upon, he leaped.

Jensen had seen the commander move before, impossible sprints and jumps that should have been impossible for any living person. But not like this. Time seemed to slow down to a crawl, but Shepard still blurred as he shot through the air. Despite everything that had been drilled into him, Jensen broke cover, tracking the streak of lightning. Watched it slam into the charging krogan's head. Watched a full ton of angry alien rock back as if hit by a tank. Saw the oversized shotgun materialize from the light and slam right into the creature's forehead with enough force to crack the helmet.

Saw the trigger pulled.

The alien's head disappeared in a wash of flame and shrapnel.

The headless krogan tottered once, twice, and then Shepard kicked off the corpse, stripping its bandolier of det charges in the same fluid motion. A ton of dead alien flesh smashed into the lunar soil with a resounding crash as he landed. And then impossibly, implausibly in the age of 22nd century infantry combat, the commander stood, whirling the bandolier above his head like a medieval whip.

But there was nothing medieval about the flashing lights of armed charges, a spinning circle of red light above his head like a demonic halo.

Nothing medieval about the rapid fire barks of his heavy pistol, each shot tearing a det charge free from the bandolier. Each explosive trailing a different crimson trajectory as it was set loose.

The krogan line vanished in flame and smoke.

Jensen felt his breath catch, fingers nearly going numb as they tightened their grip on his rifle. Too close. The blasts had been too close...

And yet miraculously, no fresh KIA lights in his HUD, no feeds going ominously silent. Only the shell-shocked chatter of confused troopers as they fell back from the roiling clouds of dust.

As for the Krogan... he didn't take the rifle off line, yet it seemed unneeded. The smoke obscured his vision, blanked out the more advanced sensors, but they couldn't have survived that, could they?

An angry bellow from a dozen enraged krogan proved him wrong.

Let me tell you. Krogan are tougher than most people would think. Don't let the holovids fool you. Just because you managed to bring one down doesn't mean it'll stay down. They can shrug off a lot of damage before they start feeling it. A lot of times, putting one down just means you managed to give him a hit that really hurt.

They came boiling out of the flames like an angry tide, the ground shaking beneath their feet. Not all the krogan had survived the devastating blast, but many had. Too many.

Their armour shredded, covered in burns and gaping wounds that drenched them in blood, they should have been dead or in the final throes of it. Yet they charged on, one long howl of hate issuing from their throats as they thundered for the glowing man before them. Jensen didn't hesitate, firing instantly. His rifle sent dozens of deadly shredder rounds downrange at the mass of flesh and metal in the space of a second.

It was like throwing spitballs at a tidal wave.

A tidal wave that shot back. Krogan held guns roared, the chatter of heavy machineguns mixing with the throaty boom of outsized shotguns. A storm of fire that should have shredded Shepard.

The commander moved again, but not to jump. He weaved, bobbed, shifted, a blurring dance that left afterimages burning in the air. Bullets streaked by, never once touching him, Krogan fire spending itself uselessly against shining smoke. But he wasn't just dodging. The staccato retort of a heavy pistol announced his reply, the rate of fire too fast to count the individual shots. Never missing. Always crippling.

Reinforced eyeports shatter, bullets finding the soft organs inside. Guns fall, the fingers holding them shot off.

And then when the tempo of fire slackened momentarily, when they were only meters away, he jumped. Not away. But toward the roaring wall.

The closest of a trio raised his shotgun, tracking the commander's trajectory-

Only to explode in fire and smoke as a shot from the glowing man punctured its innards. The krogan bellows in rage, but then stops as something rockets from the falling star, slapping onto the exposed neck join with a barely audible thwap.

The crack of the grenade going off is sharp, rising above the roar of gunfire like a slap.

He plummets through the smoke, ducking under the blurring fist of the second krogan and jamming the shotgun into the exposed armpit. The blast nearly tears the alien into two as his foot lashes out, knocking the last krogan's rifle aside. The alien juggernaut doesn't even have time to react as the commander spins, slamming his pistol into the broken eyeport. The gun barks once, thrice, too many to count in that long second.

And then he slides past them, shotgun and pistol akimbo. Behind him, the trio of krogan collapse like dolls with their strings cut. For one instant, one moment frozen in time, the remaining aliens halt, staring at the glowing creature in front of them with loathing and just the tiniest bit of fear.

He broadcasts a single message in the clear.

"Come on then."

AN: And here's the next piece. Hope you all like it since Shepard's not quite done with Torfan yet.