Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

John Shepard stared at the hologram— at the Catalyst, and the choices it was presenting— and tried to summon up the rage he knew he should be feeling.  

Automatically, the tactical part of his mind had been cataloging all the things that ought to be sending him into a rage while the thing was speaking.  The obvious fact that it was in his mind enough to take on the form that would throw him most off-balance.  The Reapers that it supposedly controlled continuing to slaughter the gathered armies, putting him under pressure to make his choice. The lies .

To control, or destroy… maybe if those had been the only options, he wouldn’t have seen the lie.  But synthesis?  If the Crucible was truly nothing but a giant battery, there’s no way it could have “created a new option” like that.  Which means that either the Catalyst was lying about the Crucible, or it was lying about itself.  Either way, it had an agenda.  

Probably it was trying to prove that it was right for all these millions of years by showing that organics and synthetics can never really live side by side, Shepard thinks, and once again tries to pull up that anger.  Any other day, any other circumstances, and meeting a being like this would fill him with incandescent fury and drive to show them how wrong they were about not valuing individual lives.  

But today, now… all he has is a dull acceptance.  Losing Anderson, saying goodbye to Kaidan, seeing so much death in the space of a few hours after months of battle and so many sacrifices.  All of it has hollowed him out and left him with only numb acceptance.  When the Catalyst started spelling out how each option would involve his death, a part of him whispered Finally.  Finally, it’s my turn .  Finally things had come to the point where he can make his own sacrifice and be done .

Slowly, agonizingly, he starts limping to his left.  He can’t bring himself to consider destroying EDI and the Geth even with everyone else who’s been lost, and there’s enough spite in him to not give the Catalyst the pleasure of choosing the option it so clearly prefers.  Maybe whatever is left of him that takes control of the Reapers will throw all of them into a star after handing over all of their tech to the galaxy, and they’ll get the best of all worlds.

Except, of course, for the fact that he’ll be dead in that world.  

Kaidan will be heartbroken.

The thought is enough to break his momentum and send him stumbling to the ground.  Or maybe that’s just the shattered leg.  Or the blood spilling out onto the floor. Doesn’t matter.  He hauls himself back up, painfully and slowly, and then just as slowly takes another step.  But that sense of finality, that dead tranquility, is broken now.  He’d promised Kaidan that they would both live.  It had felt like a lie and they’d both known it, but he’d still promised.  

Living feels like the most impossible thing in the world right now, but he has to at least try something .  Even if there’s nothing.

For a moment he considers turning around, going back across that bridge to the energy router to destroy it.  Maybe if he had enough strength to put up a barrier, he could survive that… but no.  He’s not sure he’ll even have enough strength to keep going to the end of this walkway.  Those last five steps are going to take a lifetime.

Four steps.

Three. 

Two.

One.

John Shepard drops his gun and stares at the crackling columns.  Five steps and a lifetime later, and he hasn’t come up with a single thing to try.

“Sorry, Kaidan,” he whispers, and places his hands on the pedestals.

The pain is unimaginable.  Every cell in his body cries out as the power courses through him, analyzing him, reading him, carrying him along into the Citadel.  Shepard is leaving his old body behind and already he can begin to see how the structure works, how he can use the power of the Crucible to expand himself into a million bodies each made from a billion minds and take the reigns of the gestalt for the good of everyone—

And then something pulls at his attention.  The Prothean Cipher, a part of him distantly recognizes.  The understanding of the Protheans that was imbued into his mind is drawn to something out of place with the rest of the vast structure of the Citadel.  The remnants of the Catalyst try to hurry him along, but now that his momentum is arrested he’s not so eager to spread even this shade of himself out so quickly.  

The Catalyst is not so willing to let him do as he will, though.  Its mind rises up to meet Shepard’s, trying to fuse with him, trying to push him towards its intended goal of activating the Crucible and spreading out across the Reapers to give them the understanding of organics that it has always lacked. It is a fathomlessly vast intelligence, unspeakably ancient and powerful, that should subsume him completely in an instant. 

And yet, when Shepard fights back against this assimilation, the Catalyst recoils. More than that, it screams . With his mind uploaded to the same processors, he is no less powerful than it. And the Catalyst has spent a billion years never once struggling. It followed its programmed objectives with emotionless logic without ever making a single difficult choice. It has no will of its own. 

John Shepard was tempered in the fire of a thousand struggles. A thousand impossible choices. He is nothing but will. 

The advantage of surprise, the shock of an immortal being that has never truly been hurt, makes it easy to take control of the ancient AI.  Within moments, the Catalyst is packaged and compressed, all its core algorithms and central code shoved into an isolated server and locked off.  It’s soon beating at the firewalls, and Shepard knows he only has so long before the Catalyst reasserts control.  If he doesn’t use the Crucible or find another solution quickly, it will adapt and subsume him just as it planned.  But for this moment that seems to stretch into infinity as he holds the processing power of the most advanced thinking machine in the history of the galaxy, he has complete control.

If he was still human, he would probably be feeling an immense amount of satisfaction, he muses as he turns to examine the apparently-Prothean disturbance that drew his attention in the first place.  As soon as he focuses his attention, information from an impossibly vast database leaps to him, identifying everything he “looks” at and providing any relevant data he could ask for.  It doesn’t take long before he realizes what the oddity is: the change that the Protheans made to the part of the Citadel that produces and controls the Keepers, which prevented them from receiving Sovereign’s signal to activate the Citadel mass relay.  

Except there’s more here than even that. The communication device that the Protheans of Ilos altered is only the receiving system. There’s another connected system that sends orders to the Keepers, and in the nanosecond of time it takes him to analyze it he realizes why the Protheans were able to sabotage the system at all. It’s a mechanism for directly writing information and instructions into the neural systems of organic beings that is as familiar to John Shepard as it is to the thing he’s becoming— this, or some piece of technology like it, must have been what the Protheans developed their Beacons from.  

A mild interest stirs in Shepard’s mind.  The human who was John wanted very badly to live.  In theory, this could be a way out for him.  All he would need would be a suitable organic body, something that can hold his mind. 

More of the database springs to life, putting information and options right where he needs them and piecing them together faster than any human mind could ever have processed.  Technical specifications, supplementary devices, scans to locate potential targets.  A vast flow of data that all serves to build one picture: it won’t work.  

The neural upload device is an offshoot of the same technology that the Catalyst and the Reapers use to upload a billion screaming organic minds to create each new Reaper. If he wanted to give someone information about the Reapers, send out a warning, it would be the perfect tool. But the Catalyst doesn’t understand— or doesn’t care about— the difference between knowledge and consciousness.  

His own upload into the Catalyst’s systems is already imperfect.  He is a different being from John Shepard, despite having all his memories and knowledge, simply by virtue of having existed in a virtual space with an entirely different form of thought.   A second transfer would dramatically exacerbate the problem, even if the receiving host was a perfect match in every way.  And there is no such match within range.  

Still, the solution need not be so easily discarded.  The mass-altering engine at the core of the Citadel which makes it the most powerful Relay in the galaxy is far more flexible than those of other Relays.  A brief subroutine is dedicated to calculating how such a powerful mass effect might be used to extend the range of the transmission, and arrives at an unusual result:  the complicated engine could create a corridor through not only space but also time .  

Under normal circumstances, such a corridor would last for so brief a time as to be totally unusable before burning out the entire energy processing capacity of the Citadel, but the energy provided by the Crucible would allow it to last for several full seconds.  There would not be enough power to move any sizable amount of physical mass, but it would be more than sufficient to transmit a signal some years in the past.  For all that temporal manipulation is far beyond any Council race’s capabilities, it is effectively simply the same way that communication buoys function.

With these two discoveries combined, it seems that there is a perfectly viable solution.  Sending a neural information upload to an organic in the past will provide all the information necessary to defeat the Reapers with a minimum of loss.  Electronic messages to appropriate terminals and omni-tools will provide corroborating evidence and additional data to assist.  It will probably result in the rewriting of this timeline, but that is an acceptable loss to end the cycle.  

Perhaps it is arrogance or selfishness that drives Shepard’s choice of target.  Perhaps it is simple practicality in knowing that there is an individual who is already being immobilized in a manner designed for neural overwriting.  Perhaps it is a combination of factors both practical and personal.  Whatever the cause may be, the entity once known as John Shepard aims a transmission corridor to the Utopia system relay three years ago and prepares to send the warning to one Commander John Shepard on Eden Prime. 

In the brief moments spent engaging the systems and calculating targeting variables, there is more than enough time to assemble an optimized upload with all the data necessary. Warnings, resources, locations, evidence, allies. And at the very last instant before the signal sends and the timeline changes, one final addition. 

Tell Kaidan I loved him.

Chapter Text

“…tain Anderson? I believe he’s waking up, sir.” 

“Understood, doctor. We’ll be over momentarily.”

It was the pain that first helped John realize that this was real. The visions— the memories? whatever they were— pain had been a distant thing in them. The pounding headache was a more present and pressing sensation than anything he had experienced there.

“How long was I out?” he croaked through a dry throat. 

The old woman who’d been introduced as the ship’s doctor when they staffed the Normandy— Karin Chakwas, a name he was pretty sure he would now never forget— turned away from her comm and strode to his bedside. “It’s been about ten hours, Commander.  How are you feeling?”

He rubbed a hand over his face as he sat up and took stock.  “My head hurts like hell.”  He lifted his head to look her in the eyes.  “It was only ten hours?”

She nodded.  “Just a bit under, actually.  I’m not surprised that you’re feeling pain, given the brain activity I detected.  You were experiencing an intense and near-constant level of beta waves.”  She seemed to hesitate, as if considering whether to say something more, only to be interrupted by the medbay door sliding open and Captain Anderson striding in, followed by Kaidan and Ashley.

“How’s he doing, doctor?”

Chakwas ran her omni-tool across Shepard’s face a few times and read the results before answering the captain.  “As far as I can tell, the commander is in good physical condition.  The brain activity seems to have dropped back down to normal.  I’d like a checkup in forty-eight hours or so just to be safe, but at the moment everything looks good.”

Anderson nodded sharply.  “Good.  Shepard, I’d like to give you some time to recover, but things have gotten even more complicated.  I need your report immediately.  Alenko and Williams have filled me in on everything up to the beacon, but we need to know what effect it had on you.”

The salute Shepard offered in response was probably more formal than a medbay report warranted, but moving his head to nod felt like it would rattle his brain.  The emotional double vision with everyone here wasn’t helping his headache.  Focusing on Anderson helped a little, but it was impossible to look at the Captain without also seeing his gaunt, worn face in the Citadel control room.  “Yes sir.  It’s… going to sound crazy, though.”

Anderson’s face was impassive, but Shepard thought he detected a softening of his gaze.  “We’ve seen a lot of crazy stuff in the last day, son.  You just tell me what happened.”

Shepard let out a long slow breath, tried to put everything he’d experienced into a coherent order, then began.  “I guess the only thing I can say is that I had a… vision.  It started with a sequence of disjointed images.  Death, destruction, synthetics.  It was vivid, but incomprehensible.  I might as well have been looking at pieces of a puzzle instead of the completed thing.

“Then the vision changed. Suddenly it was as clear as if I was watching a movie, except it was from inside my own head.  Sort of like a memory, but I’ve never remembered anything as vividly as I remember this, not even the worst days of my life.”

Anderson seemed to be taking this calmly, or at least was keeping his incredulity under control, so Shepard continued.  “Now, this is the crazy part.  As best as I can tell, the visions were my own memories from the future.  It started with us going before the Citadel Council and telling them about Saren. They didn’t believe us.  Then it jumped ahead to us finding someone who told us where we could get evidence to prove it.  Then another jump to finding that evidence.  It was like that over and over and over again.  

“Most of it was short memories, maybe five or ten minutes at a time.  Sometimes there were longer scenes, sometimes there was just a flash of me glancing at the date.  At one point the images from the original Prothean beacon played again, except this time I understood them somehow.

“Sir, there was a lot of information in these visions, and it would take me days to write up everything that the Alliance could find useful.  But the Prothean beacon and these additional visions were all designed for one primary purpose: to warn us that there is an ancient race of synthetics called Reapers.  They harvested the Protheans, and they intend to do the same to every organic species in the galaxy.  Saren’s ship was one of them.

“I know how crazy it sounds, sir.  I’m not sure I even believe it myself, except I can’t imagine everything I saw being fake.”

Anderson’s face was still as stone. He didn’t appear closed off, but there was no sign whatsoever of whether or not he believed what he was hearing. Finally, he asked, “Do you have any idea how these visions from the future came to you here and now?”

Shepard hesitated.  If the earlier parts had sounded crazy, this was even worse.  But David Anderson was a veteran of the First Contact War.  He would have seen the world change before.  And those visions were showing him a man who— was handing over the Normandy, was committing treason to do what was right, was sending him to unite the galaxy, was telling John that he was proud of him — would stand before him at the end of everything and trust that John would be the one to save it all. 

They wouldn’t get anywhere without trusting each other.  “There was a weapon designed to defeat the Reapers, sir.  We called it the Crucible.  It was passed down to us from the Protheans.  We learned that it needed to interface with the Citadel.  What we didn’t know was that the core of the Citadel was— is— an artificial intelligence controlling the Reapers. 

“The Crucible didn’t work the way we thought it would. I was, or I guess the future me was, the only one who could get in position to activate it. When he reached it, the Citadel intelligence presented him with choices of how it should activate.  They were…” he trails off, unsure of his own feelings on those choices.  Twenty four hours ago, he’d never met a single true synthetic, and now he’s seen a colony slaughtered by some of them and been shown visions of the truest friendship and loyalty from others that may not even exist yet.  Committing genocide of every synthetic in the galaxy to stop a genocide of organics is more than he can wrap his head around.  And the other options were certainly no less complicated.  “...they were complicated.  A lot of collateral damage for all of them.”

He shakes his head.  “My future self chose an option that would let him take control of the Reapers.  I don’t know why— I saw what happened, but it’s not like I was listening to his thoughts or anything.  And that’s where the memories stop.  The only thing I can figure is that somehow he used that control to send the visions back in time.  I can’t imagine how, but that thing was definitely powerful enough to do it.”

As he finished, they were once again left in a silence that stretched on.  Despite John’s best efforts to focus entirely on Anderson, he could see Kaidan and Ashley fidgeting at the right edge of his vision and Chakwas looking up from her scans to his left.  

Finally, Anderson spoke.  “That’s a hell of a story, son.  But fortunately for you, and maybe for all of us, we have a little information that you don’t have.”  He activated his omnitool, pulling up a file and flicking it up to display a long column of tiny text.  John couldn’t read it from this side, but it looked to be a list of dates.  “This file arrived on my personal omnitool right at the time you had your encounter with the beacon.  A copy of it arrived in the Normandy’s main computer.  Other files— similar to the version I received, but personalized— were placed in the omnitools of Lieutenant Alenko, Chief Williams, Doctor Chakwas, and Joker.  They appear to be timelines of the next four years of galactic history.”

Anderson lifted his gaze from the file as he turned off the omnitool and stared back into John’s eyes.  “Everything you’ve said so far is corroborated by the information in these files.  If this is a hoax, it’s the most dramatic, thorough, and easily-disproved trick I can imagine. I’m going to want that full report of everything that you saw to compare this to, but until such time as the information proves inaccurate I believe that we should act on it. We’ll confirm everything that we reasonably can before rushing into anything blindly, of course. But if this is true, an incomprehensible number of people died for us to receive this warning. I will not disrespect their sacrifice by ignoring it simply because it seems outlandish.”

The Captain straightened up into military posture and glanced to either side, commanding the attention of the room in a way that reminded all of them that he was one of the most decorated officers of the Alliance. “This information is now classified absolute top secret until I say otherwise. You do not discuss with anyone not already in the know without direct orders. Am I understood?”

The sharp salutes and “Yes Sir!”s from everyone in the room were the only possible response. Anderson nodded and started giving orders. “Alenko, go talk to Joker. You can fill him in on everything we talked about here, but be perfectly clear that he’s not to talk about the situation with anyone else outside this room.  Williams, you’re on leave until we get to the Citadel. Take some time to recover and get yourself settled into the ship. Shepard, take whatever rest and treatment Doctor Chakwas recommends.  Any free time you have is to be spent working on that report detailing everything you saw so we can crosscheck the information.  I will call you for another meeting when we’re an hour out from the Citadel so we can decide on next steps, but for right now I imagine we could all use some time to process.”  

Everyone nodded in response to that.  Anderson patted John on the shoulder and strode out of the medbay. Kaidan and Ashley looked for a moment like they might linger, but a waving-off from John and a raised eyebrow from Chakwas was enough to have them following after the Captain. There was a part of John that felt bad for not talking with the two of them, but there was a hell of a lot that he needed to sort out in his head before he felt even remotely ready for that. Not to mention that damn headache. 

~~~

Ten hours later, John knocked on the captain’s door.  After an acknowledgement, he slid it open and walked over to the desk where Anderson was sitting.  “You got my report, sir?”

Anderson nodded, taking his eyes off the screen where two columns of text were pulled up side-by-side.  Shepard couldn’t quite read them from where he was, but he’d have wagered a month of shore leave that the captain was comparing his report with the file that was apparently from the future.  “I did.  I guess it didn’t end up taking you days to write after all, Commander?”  His joking tone was accompanied by a teasing smile. “And I believe I told you that we didn’t need to talk until we were an hour away from the Citadel. We’re still half a day away.”

John grimaced. “Sorry, sir. I appreciate the downtime, but I can’t keep resting without knowing that we have a solid plan for… all of this.”

Anderson’s smile dropped. “Well, I can’t say I don’t understand that feeling. To know the future and be charged with preventing it is more than anyone could find comfortable.”  He shook his head and sighed before getting up from his desk.  “I could use a break from looking this over anyway.  Do you drink tea, Commander?  I’m going to make myself a cup.”

“I wouldn’t mind some, sir.  Thank you.”  Taking the cue, John sat at the captain’s meeting table.  

A minute later, Anderson returned from his supply cupboard with an electric thermos and two mugs and took the other seat.  “I hope the good doctor cleared you to be up and about?  I make a firm policy of never having the ship doctor angry at me until I can do something to deserve it myself.”

John smiled.  “Yes sir.  She insisted that I get some actual sleep since the visions didn’t allow my brain to properly rest and asked that I write my report while under her observation.  But otherwise, I’m apparently in good physical condition.”

“Good man.  I won’t lie, I’m glad to have you here.  I’ve been bouncing between trying to verify this future information and attempting to actually make plans with it, and I could use another mind working on the problem.”

“Have you managed to verify any of it, then?”

Anderson seemed to decide enough time had passed for the tea to be ready and poured some for both of them.  “Some of it.  Obviously none of the truly important parts were things we could actually investigate, but there are plenty of details that can be confirmed.  Places, names, that sort of thing.  So far, all of them check out.”

John blew on the tea to cool it and took a sip.  “I don’t know if I like that or not.  There’s a part of me that wouldn’t have minded this all being a bad dream brought on by weird Prothean technology.”

Anderson gave a grim little laugh at that.  “I felt the same way when I read the file.  I wanted to believe that it was a trick from Saren, trying to distract us.  But this isn’t his style.”

Another version of Anderson flashed across John’s mind.  “You knew him, right?  The… future you, he told the future me about Saren ruining your chance to be a Spectre.”

“Yes.  It’s not something I’m proud of.”  Anderson was silent for a long moment then, staring at John.  “We must have been fairly close in that future, it seems.”

Anderson bleeding out at his side .  “You meant a lot to him, sir.”

“Mm.  Part of the file that we each received was a personal message.  I haven’t pried into what the others received— it wouldn’t have been useful for verification anyway, and it felt too much like disrespecting the last wishes of a dead man.”  There was another moment of quiet.  John wondered if Anderson was thinking the same thing he was.  The vision-memories made things complicated, but there was no denying that the future Shepard was dead.  And there was no one alive who actually knew that person to mourn him.

Well.  If there was no one who could mourn his future self, then John would at the very least be sure to make that sacrifice worth something.

“You wanted to discuss next steps, Captain?”

Anderson looked at him for a moment, clearly reading something off his face, before apparently deciding to go along with the subject change.  “Yes.  This information provides us with a wealth of targets to pursue, but we still have only so much time to pursue them.  If we throw all our efforts at trying to acquire the assets that will help us defeat the Reapers, Saren will reach the Conduit and Sovereign will take control of the Citadel.  We’ll lose the war before it even starts if we try to act too far in advance.”

“I could go straight to Ilos.  I already have the coordinates for the Mu Relay.  We’d beat Saren there by months.”

“A good start, except then you would have to hold Ilos against his assault.  If you go there before he does, you should be planning to either ambush him on the ground, or else go in with the tools to either destroy or recover the Conduit.”

Shepard hummed, enjoying the feel of getting fully immersed in planning.  This was what he loved doing, and it was a pleasure to do it with an abundance of tactical information and time.  Not to mention having someone like Captain David Anderson to bounce ideas off of.  “Recovery, then.  The Conduit is useful if the Reapers ever take the Citadel again, but the Vigil VI on Ilos might be even more valuable.  It had the data file that let us take control of the Citadel, even while Sovereign was attacking.  That’s the perfect component to add to the Crucible.”

“Take control of the software while adding the new hardware?  It’s a good start.  We’ll need to let the eggheads work on it, but I agree that it’s a high priority.  You’ll need a skilled team and the right equipment to recover both of those, though.  And you won’t have long to do it.  These kinds of excavations usually take years if not decades, and you’ll have months.”

“I’ll start building the team by rescuing Liara T’soni.  She’s a specialist in the area, and I know she can be trusted.  And as for time, we know exactly what we’re going there for.  We can blow the rest behind us if we have to.  But it would still be good to delay Saren if we can.  Any chance of the Alliance helping out in any of the places he hit before?  That might slow him down.”

Anderson nodded distractedly, clearly thinking through the options.  “Feros would be an easy sell.  Colonies are under Alliance protection.  Even if Saren and the Geth aren’t there when we arrive, the Thorian infection would provide enough of a reason for us to intervene.  Noveria and Virmire are trickier.  Sending a fleet to Virmire would almost certainly start a war with the Terminus Systems, and Noveria is a notorious legal quagmire.”

“I have a possible solution for Noveria.  If we can send an Alliance ship to the Yangtze system, I can point them to a Cerberus lab that’s studying rachni shipped from Noveria.  The Council would be forced to send in at least one Spectre, and probably several, if they knew there was a potential resurgence of the rachni.”  Shepard hesitated before continuing.  Even to Anderson, this was going to be a hard sell.  “And there’s an option for Virmire, as well.  All we have to do is tell the krogan that there’s a cure for the genophage there.”

Anderson slowly put down his datapad and stared Shepard right in the eyes.  “You recognize that one of those probably ends with the rachni going extinct again, and the other ends with the krogan overrunning the galaxy.”

Picking his words carefully, John replied, “I can’t take responsibility for either of those.  I don’t think the rachni should all be killed.  I don’t think the krogans should be left to die out.  I don’t want either of them to come back and fight a war, either.  But the Reapers are just too big a burden without taking on those problems as well.  I’ll do everything I reasonably can to point both of those situations in the best direction possible, but at the end of the day those are both issues that the Council races created.  They’re going to have to deal with their own ghosts.  We can pick up the pieces once we’re sure that there’s still a board to play on.”

His heart was pounding by the end of that speech.  Anderson stayed silent for a long time before he replied, his tone unreadable.  “And should I expect the same attitude toward the geth?”

“If you’re asking about their heretics, the ones working for Saren, then obviously I have no intention of ignoring them.  I’ll take them out wherever I see them,” Shepard said. “And if you mean to ask whether I intend to reach out to the peaceful faction of them and ask for help, then I can’t think of any species better suited to help us build the Crucible.”

Anderson raised an eyebrow.  “You think you can convince them to cooperate?  There hasn’t been a single peaceful contact with them since their rebellion.”

“How many people have actually tried?” Shepard asked dryly.  “Besides, we have something they’ll want very badly.  The geth want to become more sentient.  They want to understand their Creators.  One of the options the Crucible presented could make that happen.  If I can recruit Tali’Zorah and convince her to help, I’m confident that we could make the geth an ally.”

“Do you intend to recruit all your future team members and tell them about this vision, then?”

“I’d like to,” Shepard said honestly.  “I know I don’t actually know them, but there’s a part of me that feels like I do.  If they’re even a tenth as brave and skilled as the people I saw, I would trust any of them to have my back.”

Anderson frowned with disapproval. “Trusting them to be useful is less concerning to me than the possibility that you might consider it necessary to tell them about this possible future.  This is the most valuable information anyone has ever acquired, and I believe the Alliance would appreciate discretion a great deal.  We’re going to have to elevate this if you want additional resources for all of these missions.  There are a lot of potential advantages for humanity here.”

Shepard allowed himself a deep breath.  He reminded himself that he did in fact like Anderson, even if their relationship was a long way from being the bond that he’d experienced, and that the captain was helping.  He just didn’t yet have the visceral understanding of the reapers necessary to appreciate that this was not a threat that could be maneuvered around for advantage.  Even when the reapers had actually arrived, there had been plenty of people who lacked that understanding.  

And honestly, he was probably right.  They would be asking for a lot of resources that the Alliance could scarcely afford to spare to make this work.  That would happen a lot more easily if they had something to offer in return.  Fortunately, he knew just the thing.

A slightly vicious smile crossed his face.  “I think the Alliance will have its hands full when we tell them where to dig up the last living Prothean and I tell them exactly how to wake him up.  If that’s not enough, I imagine that having him activate and reveal the Prothean beacon that the asari have been hiding for thousands of years— full of technological advancements that they’ll be forced to share— should do the trick.”

It was quite a sight, to see Captain David Anderson actually taken off guard.  “You really don’t intend to leave a single pillar of galactic stability standing, do you?”

“As long as someone is still alive to pick them up, I’ll consider it a job well done.”  Shepard’s conviction was absolute.

Anderson laughed.  “Well then, let’s get to it.”`