April 18th, 2157 CE

Alliance Colony of Shanxi

Sipping casually on a bottle of water, Lieutenant Waters idly tapped her fingers on the console of the shuttle.

For such a big operation, this is boring as hell.

She wasn't keen on just sitting and waiting at all. Especially knowing that the vast majority of the people she was closest to were currently taking very active parts in the most important battle in human history. Still, it made a nice change from sitting and waiting on a space station full of bureaucrats and couch potatoes.

Deep down, she was convinced that the battle was already won by the time they'd landed their short walk from the colony. From her little bubble inside the shuttle, she could see that the fighting overhead had all but stopped. Given the vastly superior numbers that the Alliance had arrived with compared to the turians, as well as the element of surprise, and the squad of commandoes currently wreaking havoc on the occupiers within the colony itself, she didn't see any possibility of error.

Still, she couldn't help feeling twitchy.

Ugh, I hate emotions. Life's so much easier when you're dead inside.

It had been a good ten minutes since her last contact with the ship. She decided it was time to change that.

"Talk to me, Moscow," she said, faking sadness. "I'm bored."

Immediately, she heard a brief sigh.

"This isn't the time for idle chat, Lieutenant," Admiral Drescher replied.

"Oh, I know. I've just had enough of sitting in here by myself," she said, not even bothering to dress up her mood. "What's going on? Where is everyone?"

"Anderson, Dah and Rodriguez are slowly falling back. They're engaging the back ranks of the turians to confuse them."

"Ooh, I like that," she replied, impressed. "What's their ETA? Do I need to start gearing up?"

There was a brief pause on the other end.

"Not yet," Drescher eventually replied. "We don't know whether there's any turians near you. We'd rather not risk your neck any more than we already have."

"Well gee, Admiral, I'm touched," she said sarcastically. "What about Erika and Byrne? How are they getting on?"

Another brief pause. This one made her stomach tie itself in a knot.

"We lost contact with them about five minutes ago," he said. "Last we heard, they'd breached the building with the shield generator and... hold on Lieutenant, we're getting another transmission."

Before she'd had a chance to protest, he abruptly cut off the comm link. She tilted her head at the shuttle's console and huffed, annoyed.

Asshole.

Getting back to her feet, she made for the door of the shuttle again. But this time, as the door opened, she heard a strange crackling sound on the wind. Confused, she listened harder to try and make it out.

Her heart sank when she realised.

Gunfire. Lots of it.

Instinctively, she crouched down and listened a little harder. It didn't sound like any gunfire she recognised, which worried her even more.

Maybe I should go back inside...

Immediately, she barely saw two figures burst out of the bushes a couple of hundred metres ahead, and her heart leapt. She began to scramble back into the shuttle when she heard a voice, thankfully human, shouting in panic.

"Get the shuttle ready! We're being chased!"

Not thinking she quickly turned on her heel and dived back into the shuttle, heading straight for the cockpit. As she input the startup sequence, the sound of a distant but large explosion tore through the night air. Looking out of the side window, she could just about see the flame and smoke of the explosion rising into the air... exactly in the direction of the colony.

No, no, no...

"Admiral! Dah and Anderson are back and there was just a huge explosion, what the fuck is going on?!"

This time it was Jon Grissom's voice that replied.

"Get out of there, Lieutenant!"

"Fuck off, I wasn't asking you! Where's Drescher?"

"Do as he said, Waters! Grab the survivors and lift off right now!"

His reply made her blood run cold. She barely heard Anderson and Dah leap onto the shuttle behind her.

"What do you mean 'survivors'? Where's Byrne and the others?" She was shouting now, losing her composure.

"Rodriguez is dead," Anderson replied from behind her, aiming his rifle at the bushes they'd appeared from.

"Byrne and the Major..." Drescher said, despondent. "...were that explosion."

"Bullshit!" Waters yelled, slowly becoming hysterical. "Captain! Tell me they're bullshitting!"

There was a moments silence, interrupted by Dah shouting "Turians!" as both remaining commandos began firing their rifles. "We need to go! NOW!"

"It's true, Rebecca," Thomas said. "They've sacrificed themselves to ensure the success of the operation. The shield is down."

Waters clenched her fists as the shuttle engines fired, and she slammed her fist into the console. The shuttle's gullwing door swung closed. She could barely see through the tears stinging her eyes as the shuttle lifted off and just as it did, she barely heard the clang of bullets begin to rattle against the hull of the shuttle. She growled loudly as she wiped tears away from her eye enough to see that they had cleared the treeline, and she struggled to surpress a strangled groan as she thumped the shuttle's throttle to full, slumping back into the pilot's seat.

Absently turning a cup in his hands, Thomas vaguely registered the hiss of the door into the mess hall from the bridge opening and closing, followed by what sounded like two pairs of footsteps, first coming closer, then stopping and moving away. He didn't know how long he'd been sat there.

The battle had been won. Following the destruction of the shield, Alliance forces had begun to land on the planet en masse to begin the liberation of Shanxi. But he didn't care. He couldn't.

He knew it was selfish, but regardless, he just didn't care. Every chance he'd gotten to apologise for his behaviour towards Erika, she'd rejected it before he even could. Part of him wondered if she'd sacrificed herself to spite him, although his rational self chastised him every time the thought crossed his mind.

It's military, you know that. Any soldier must be prepared to sacrifice themselves for the greater cause.

Not that knowing that made him feel any better.

He sat there, numbly, his brain registering the sounds of the ship and crew around him – the footsteps, the hydraulics, the occasional idle chatter. But his body failed to react.

All of a sudden, Jon Grissom seemed to appear out of nowhere before him. He seemed tired, bedraggled, but still carried the confidence of a man who set out to achieve something and did it.

"Captain, I want to thank you for your contribution to the mission today," he said, firm yet supportive, though somehow no less patronising than usual. "Your ideas were invaluable to the success of the mission."

His words, despite the well-intentions of a military man congratulating his colleague, made Thomas' blood run cold. Inside, he was screaming, and for a second he wanted nothing more than to knock Jon Grissom's teeth out. But he knew his role, and with a grim expression, he stood up and saluted stiffly.

"Just doing my job, Admiral," he said through clenched teeth.

Returning the salute, Grissom turned on his heel and disappeared. Thomas loudly exhaled, doing his best to restrain himself from putting his fist through the nearest bulkhead.

No sooner had Grissom gone, however, than the person he was dreading facing the most appeared at the same door. Immediately, all the anger inside him dissipated as Waters looked back at him, her expression filled with a mix of despair and disappointment. He slumped back against the chair behind him.

"How could you let Drescher send him?" She said quietly as she approached him, clearly fighting back tears. His own eyes began to sting a little as he struggled to find the words.

"I... couldn't refuse... he... volunteered."

"Horseshit!" She suddenly shouted, stepping forward and pointing at him accusingly. "You were his Captain! You could've ordered him to stay!"

"It doesn't work like that!" He replied, flailing his arms wildly. "By the time I knew he'd volunteered to go, Drescher had already planned the operation to include him. There was nothing I could do!"

Waters looked as though she was formulating a counter, but the words never came out. Instead, the burst of anger was swallowed by tears.

"I'm sorry, Rebecca. It was out of my hands. If I could've protected him, you bet your ass I would have."

She stepped back against the wall and covered her hands with her face, beginning to sob. Tentatively, he stepped towards her, putting a hand on her shoulder, and to his surprise, she threw herself into his arms, twitching as she was overcome with tears. Within a few seconds, he couldn't help but let the emotion overwhelm him as well.

"I'll miss them, too," he said, quietly. "Both of them."

"Right, because you really showed Erika how much you'd missed her when she reappeared."

As soon as she said the words, they both froze in horror. Her in the terror of letting the cutting remark slip; him in the knowledge of the truth behind it.

Breaking the embrace, Waters stepped back, mortified. She looked as though she wanted to take it back, but when she looked at Thomas' now-stony expression, she knew the damage was done.

"Thank you, Lieutenant."

She stepped back again, stung by the tone in his voice. Slowly, she turned away, making for the doorway back to the bridge once again, and she vanished without looking back.

Thomas found himself unable to move. Her remark had cut almost as deep as any of the rejecting comments Erika had made to him over the past week.

What good have you actually done for anyone? Not for humanity, for any individual person? All you've done is get people hurt or killed.

His mind remained blank as his body began to drift towards his cabin, and he found himself sat on the side of his bunk, elbows on his knees, staring at the floor. There he remained for a length of time he couldn't track.

FOUR MONTHS LATER

Alliance Headquarters, Vancouver, United North American States

The hall suddenly filled with rapturous applause, snapping Thomas out of his daydream. The hastily-arranged ceremony was to commemorate those who had given their lives in what was now being called the First Contact War. During the course of the war, an immeasurable number of things had happened that at one point, he could only ever dream of.

Twelve days ago, after weeks of brutal and bloody fighting between the alien invaders of Shanxi and the humans fighting to liberate it, the Alliance fighters had declared victory. The human army were immediately hailed as heroes across the entirety of the Sol system; history pledging to remember them as the winners of the first interspecies war in human history.

The victory was to be short-lived.

Only two days afterward, the occupants of Shanxi relayed a message from a turian by the name of Irixi Brennus, proclaiming himself to be a leader in their military. He had promised to return to the colony and not only decimate it, but to track down the human homeworld and all their colonies, and crush them. Not only that, he claimed that the turians had committed genocide before, and would have no problem doing it again to protect "galactic peace".

Panic swept across the Alliance as the idea of fighting an alien army of unknown power took hold. Calls were made to extend a truce to turians somehow. Thankfully, their prayers were answered, although not without a touch more panic.

The next day, Shanxi reported an unknown alien ship approaching, several times bigger than any Alliance ship but of a bizarre, curving shape. The human fleet still guarding Shanxi rushed to investigate, and were met with a simple, civilised request. Quickly, the interim UNAS President, Amelia Jeffords, was flown with the Alliance to conduct a meeting that would go down in galactic history as the day humans "arrived."

Although the news had yet to go public, the identity of those who made the request had become an open secret in the Alliance. The group, calling themselves the Citadel Council, welcomed Jeffords onto their ship, and she later described the meeting with the three main representatives as "the most surreal day I'll ever experience."

She learned that not only were all the theories about the Protheans true, but that there was a thriving galactic community utilising the same technology as humans had stumbled across. She reported that the Council was made up of a member each of three alien species – the turians, who had invaded Shanxi; the salarians, an amphibian lizard race; and finally, the asari, who were not only regarded as the leaders of the community, but confirmed as species B from Thomas' historic discovery of the alien research facility on the desloate moon. As well as them, several other species inhabited the community, all with their owns unique qualities.

The community was centred around the gargantuan space station known as the Citadel. The asari councillor described it as a haven of civilisation. Not only that, but the Council had received word of the turian threat, and offered humanity peace and a place within the galactic community in exchange for their cooperation.

And so as it was, humanity's first interstellar war had ended almost as quickly as it began, with little more than 600 casualties apiece. Humanity was now taking its very first step in becoming a member of the galactic community governed by the Council. The human race was, in equal measure, buzzing with anticipation and bristling with trepidation at the events that had come to pass – no one could know if all these new aliens, having appeared from nowhere claiming to fall under a banner of peace, could be trusted after the brutal Turian attack. But the Alliance, the new unofficial-yet-uncontested face of humanity in this new era, had taken the olive branch extended to them with open arms, and by all accounts, were already showing a determination to make their mark, for better or worse.

It was a sequence of events that, on another day, would have Thomas giddy with excitement and anticipation. But the events of Shanxi, and the days leading up to the assault and Erika's death, had cut deeply into his psyche. He'd long lost count of how many psyche eval sessions he'd walked out on. He knew he was risking his career, but he'd long stopped caring about that.

His arms moved robotically as he joined the assembled crowd in its applause, numb to the actual sound. The voices of Admiral Drescher and President Jeffords fell on deaf ears as they were lapped up by those present. He picked out the occasional word or phrase, talking about defending from threats and standing up for humanity...

Defending from threats...

This isn't how this was supposed to be.

"...Captain Thomas Jameson!"

His reverie was split by Grissom's booming voice announcing his name, and his cue to take the podium. He almost felt as though he were sleepwalking as his body got itself up, marching to the podium as the crowd applauded enthusiastically once more, punctuated by the occasional whistle or whoop. Absently, he fumbled around in his jacket pocket for the speech that he'd fogotten he'd written.

Is this really what we're here for? To celebrate winning a battle with the first live alien species we've ever met?

Opening up the crumpled paper, he quickly reminded himself of the words.

"Ladies and gentlemen of the Alliance..."

He paused, taking a deep breath.

The Alliance. Is this what we're going to stand for? War and murder? Is this what humanity stands for?

Catching the eyes of the expectant crowd, he took a deep breath as he tried to force the words out.

"The First Contact war... will go down in history. Some will see it as humanity's triumphant introduction to the galactic community. Others will see it as a terrible mistake; a consequence of man's reach extending his grasp. I, however, believe I will see it a little differently."

He scrunched up the sheet of paper in his hand, prompting a few hushed whispers in the audience.

"I will forever see the First Contact War as a wrong turn. I joined the Alliance to explore the far reaches of space. To set foot where none ever had. To broaden humanity's knowledge of the universe. The First Contact War... signalled the end of that dream for me."

His voice hardened ever so slightly as the whispered began to turn into a clearly audible chatter.

"I did not join the Alliance to become the architect of plans to attack others, hostile or not. I did not join the Alliance to see the person who raised me as an officer sacrifice herself for those plans. I did not join the Alliance to stand by and watch as the dreams of my friends were shattered by those asked to sacrifice themselves for those plans."

Full of determination, albeit still entirely unsure of what he was doing, he turned to face Grissom and Drescher, both clearly mystified.

"Admirals, I hereby tender my resignation from the Alliance. I am thankful for the opportunities I have been given during my time here, however this is no longer an organisation I wish to be a part of."

He felt his mind disconnect from his body again as he became dimly aware of the attending crowd erupting in shocked shouts as he spun on his heel and made to leave the hall. In the far corner of his eye, he saw the Admirals stunned into silence, merely watching as he left, unable to respond.

As the door opened and he swooped through, he flicked up his left arm, opening his Omni-tool. Tapping out a message to his wife, he gave a satisfied sigh as he hit send, before removing his Alliance cap and quickening his pace down the hall.

A/N - ...and there you have it! Took me bloody long enough. Sorry if this last chapter ends a bit suddenly or seems a bit anticlimactic - you may or may not be pleased to know (depending on your inclination) that I'm planning on addressing the immediate aftermath of this early on in the next story.

Speaking of which, the first chapter of that is already up! It was actually the first thing I wrote ages and ages ago, and I ended up planning this whole story to give it context, which of course ended up spiralling out of control a teeny bit. Anyway, the next story is called FIREBORN. Go take a look!

In all seriousness, if you've stuck with me this far, from the bottom of my heart, THANK YOU. Hopefully I'll see you in part 2!