The Virus

The Normandy SR2 didn't just drop out of FTL; it screamed into real-space, its Tantalus drive bleeding heat like a dying star.

Commander Jane Shepard stood at the centre of the CIC, her hands white-knuckled on the hololith railing. The light from the Citadel’s nebula caught the dark strands of her hair, making the deep red highlights look like drying blood. Her green eyes, usually sharp with tactical precision, narrowed as she took in the sensor ghosting on the main screen.

"Joker, tell me that’s a sensor glitch," Shepard said, her voice a low rasp.

"I wish I could, Commander," Jeff "Joker" Moreau replied, his fingers dancing across the consoles with frantic grace. "The Citadel isn't just dark—it’s... humming. And not the 'ancient space station' kind of hum. More like 'high-voltage-experimental-lab-accident' kind of hum."

The Citadel, once the gleaming jewel of the galaxy, was cocooned in a web of flickering, cerulean arcs. Violent discharge spider-webbed across the Wards, leaping between the massive arms of the station.

The Arrival

As the Normandy drifted closer, the scale of the horror became clear. Dozens of ships—Asari cruisers, Turian frigates, and human transports—lay dead in the water, their hulls glowing with a faint, rhythmic electrical pulse.

"EDI, report," Shepard commanded.

The shimmering blue avatar of the ship’s AI appeared on the bridge, her expression uncharacteristically strained. "Commander, the energy signatures are biological in nature, yet they operate on a frequency that mimics synthetic neural networks. They are feeding on the station's zero-element core."

"Any word from C-Sec? Admiral Anderson? Anyone?"

"Negative," EDI replied. "All outgoing transmissions are being converted into a binary static. However, I have intercepted a localized visual feed from the Presidium."

The "Ascension"

The screen flickered to life. The once-lush gardens of the Presidium were gone, replaced by a forest of jagged, conductive spires.

Shepard watched, her jaw tightening, as a group of terrified salarians were corralled by shimmering, translucent entities—beings of pure, jagged electricity. When the creatures touched their captives, there was no scream. Instead, the salarians' skin turned a matte, metallic grey. Filaments of glowing wire burst from their temples, weaving into their flesh until their movements became synchronized, jerky, and terrifyingly efficient.

They weren't just killing the population. They were integrating them.

"It’s a hive mind," Liara T'Soni whispered, stepping up beside Shepard. "They’re not just upgrading the hardware, Jane. They’re rewriting the biology to sustain a constant electrical load. They’re turning people into batteries."

The Normandy shuddered as a bolt of blue lightning arced from the station, splashing harmlessly against the ship's specialized kinetic barriers.

"They're doing what the Reapers couldn't finish," Shepard muttered, turning away from the screen. She checked the thermal clip in her M-77 Paladin. "They’re stripping away the individual to power the machine."

She looked toward the elevator. "Garrus, Tali—meet me in the shuttle bay. We’re going in hot before they turn the Council into a literal power grid."

"Commander," Joker called out, his voice uncharacteristically grim. "The station just started opening its arms. I think it’s looking for more 'fuel.'"

Decent into Hell

The air in the chamber smelled of ozone and scorched copper. It was a wet, heavy heat that made every breath feel like inhaling static.

Shepard’s eyes snapped open, but the world didn't make sense. She was lying on something cold and jagged. Beneath her, the "ground" shifted—not with the movement of earth, but with the sickening slide of flesh on flesh. She was sprawled atop a heap of the discarded: C-Sec officers, civilians, and krogan mercenaries, all tossed aside like blown fuses. They were the ones whose bodies hadn't survived the "voltage" of the conversion.

Her vision swam. Her N7 armour once the pinnacle of human engineering, was shattered. The ceramic plating across her chest was spider-webbed with cracks, and her kinetic barrier generator hissed with a dead, hollow spark.

Then, she saw the table.

"Ash..." the name was a broken rasp in her throat.

Ashley Williams was strapped to a slab of pulsing, translucent alloy just ten feet away. She wasn't dead, but the woman on that table was no longer the soldier Shepard knew. Ashley’s right leg was gone, replaced by a jagged, skeletal limb of raw servos and exposed wiring that twitched in time with a nearby generator. Her left arm had been severed at the elbow; a hovering, multi-jointed mechanical rig was currently welding a heavy-duty mining tool directly into her bone and marrow.

Thin, translucent tubes snaked under Ashley's skin, glowing with a sickly blue light as they pumped a humming fluid through her veins. As Shepard watched in paralyzed horror, Ashley’s head lolled to the side.

Her left eye was gone. In its place sat a dual-lens sensor unit that pulsed with a rhythmic, alternating red and blue light. It whirred, focusing on Shepard with a mechanical click. There was no recognition in that gaze—only a cold, binary processing.

"No," Shepard whispered, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird. "No, no, no..."

She tried to push herself up, to scramble toward the table, to tear those tubes out of her friend. She planted her right hand on a discarded torso and went to brace herself with her left.

Her arm hit the floor, but there was no hand to catch her weight.

Shepard collapsed back into the pile of corpses, her eyes darting down to her left wrist. The hand was gone. The stump was cauterized with brutal precision, the flesh puckered and black, with silver filaments already beginning to weave their way into her radial nerve.

The realization hit her harder than an orbital strike. She wasn't just a prisoner. She was raw material.

Shepard’s composure—the legendary iron will of the Saviour of the Citadel—finally snapped. She threw her head back and screamed, a raw, jagged sound that was swallowed instantly by the relentless, thrumming vibration of the hive.

Citadel Chamber

The lift climbed with a smooth, sickening speed that Shepard’s stomach couldn't keep up with. The two drones who had brought her here—one wearing the shredded remains of a C-Sec blue uniform, the other a young crewman named Hadley from the Normandy’s engineering deck—had handled her with the terrifying indifference of a factory crane. Hadley’s jaw had been replaced with a metallic vox-grille that hissed as he moved, his eyes replaced by the same flickering red-and-blue sensors. He hadn't blinked. He hadn't even looked at her. To him, she was just an unfinished unit.

As the lift doors sealed, Shepard slumped against the glass wall. Her breath hitched. She looked down at the stump of her left arm. The silver filaments weren't just sitting on the surface; they were burrowing. They pulsed with a faint, rhythmic light, mimicking a heartbeat that wasn't hers. She could feel them now—a cold, oily sensation as they threaded between her muscles and wrapped around her bones. They were prepping the site. Building the interface for whatever "tool" they planned to bolt onto her next.

"No," she choked out, her voice a ghost of itself. "Not like this."

She turned her gaze to the window, looking out over the Presidium. The view was a nightmare. The bright, open spaces of the Citadel were being choked by massive, glowing conduits that looked like the nervous system of a god.

Then, she saw it.

The Normandy SR2 was docked at a nearby spire. But the ship that had been her home, the fastest vessel in the fleet, looked like a carcass. The hull was webbed with the same blue electrical arcs, and the cargo ramp was down.

Shepard watched as figures moved in and out of the ship. They didn't run. They didn't talk. They moved with that same jerky, mechanical precision—a stop-motion gait that defied biology. They were carrying crates of supplies, or perhaps more "raw material," into the ship.

Her ship. Her crew.

The last thread of Shepard’s legendary hope didn't just fray; it snapped. If the Normandy had fallen, if Joker and EDI were gone, then there was no one left to call. No cavalry coming. The galaxy’s greatest hope was being loaded into a lift to be finished, while her ship was being prepared as a carrier for the infection.

The lift slowed. A chime, hauntingly similar to the one the Citadel had used for centuries, rang out.

The doors slid open.

Standing in the centre of the Council Chamber—now a cathedral of humming wires and sparking pillars—was a figure that had once been the Asari Councillor. Now, she was a towering pillar of light and steel, her many-jointed mechanical limbs weaving a complex web of energy in the air.

The entity turned its head. A dozen red-and-blue eyes fixed on Shepard.

"The architect has arrived," a thousand voices spoke at once, vibrating through the floor and into Shepard’s very marrow. "The Shepard must be integrated. The Shepard must be the Voice."

The adrenaline was the only thing keeping the shock at bay. Shepard’s boots hammered against the deck plating, the sound echoing through the sterile, bronze-trimmed corridor of the private hangar wing. Behind her, the rhythmic clack-hiss, clack-hiss of the pursuing drones grew louder, a sound of metal pistons and dead feet.

She dove through the archway, her shoulder slamming into the frame as she reached for the emergency override. With a grunt of pain, she smashed her remaining hand against the console. The heavy blast door hissed shut with a definitive, magnetic thud. A second later, the sound of metal fists drumming against the exterior began, but the door held.

She turned, gasping for air, her green eyes wide. There it was. The Ascension’s Grace, Councillor Tevos’s private long-range shuttle. It was sleek, shielded, and—most importantly—disconnected from the main Citadel power grid.

She scrambled up the boarding ramp, her breath coming in ragged stabs. As the hatch sealed, the silence of the pressurized cabin hit her like a physical weight. But the silence didn't last.

A sharp, searing heat erupted in her left arm.

"No... not yet..." she wheezed, collapsing against the bulkhead.

She watched in morbid, detached horror as the remains of her N7 gauntlet and forearm plating were forced outward, popping off the rivets. A thick, semi-translucent tube—pulsing with that same rhythmic cerulean light—tore through the skin of her forearm. It snaked upward, its tip seeking, until it punched back into the underside of her bicep, disappearing into the muscle.

Shepard gagged, the sensation of something artificial weaving through her chest cavity making her stomach turn. Her left forearm was now a nightmare of exposed, twitching hydraulics and silver webbing. It didn't look like a limb; it looked like a component.

"Move, Shepard. Move!" she hissed at herself, biting her lip until she tasted blood to stay focused.

She dragged herself into the pilot’s seat. Her right hand flew over the controls, sparking the Eezo core to life. The engines hummed—a pure, clean Asari hum, untainted by the hive's static. She didn't wait for clearance. She didn't check the sensors. She slammed the thrusters to maximum.

The shuttle lurched, tearing away from the docking clamps and punching through the shimmering blue barrier field that now encased the Citadel.

As the station shrank into the distance, Shepard looked back one last time. The Citadel looked like a Great White Shark being devoured by glowing parasites. And there, orbiting near the Presidium arms, was the Normandy, her silhouette flickering with the blue fire of the invaders.

Shepard banked the shuttle, diving deep into the thick, purple-and-gold clouds of the Serpent Nebula. The static in her head—the faint, collective whispering of the drones—began to fade as the nebula’s radiation interfered with the hive’s signal.

She was alone. She was mutilated. She was the last of the Normandy’s command.

As the ship drifted in the shroud of the nebula, Shepard slumped in the chair, staring at the mechanical nightmare that her left arm had become. The silver filaments were still twitching under her skin, but for now, they were silent.

The Lone Survivor

The blue tunnel of the Mass Relay jump stretched out before the shuttle, a blurring kaleidoscope of light that usually brought Shepard a sense of relief. But as the Ascension’s Grace screamed through the vacuum toward the Arcturus Relay, Shepard wasn't looking at the stars.

She was looking at her reflection.

The cockpit’s emergency lighting was dim, casting her face in a harsh, clinical glow. Under the skin of her neck, just above the collar of her shattered armour, thick black tendrils were beginning to map out her veins. They moved like ink dropped into water, branching upward toward her jaw and temple. They weren't just on her; they were replacing her, a sub-dermal network of alien circuitry claiming her nervous system.

Then came the sound. A wet, mechanical click-shirr.

Shepard looked down at the stump of her left arm. The cauterized flesh split open like a ripening fruit. She didn't scream this time; she was too hollow, too far gone into shock. Slowly, a multi-tool assembly—coated in a slick film of dark blood and synthetic fluid—pushed its way out from her radius and ulna.

It wasn't a hand. It was a three-pronged, rotating claw of matte-black carbon fibre and glowing fibre optics. It whirred as it extended, the joints locking into place with a series of sickening metallic snaps.

Shepard’s breath hitched. Experimentally, she thought about closing her fist.

The robotic talons snapped shut instantly. It was faster than a human hand, more precise, and utterly devoid of sensation. She could feel the intent to move, and the machine obeyed.

"God... no..." she whispered. Her voice sounded different—there was a faint, metallic resonance vibrating behind her vocal cords.

She leaned forward, pressing her forehead against the cold glass of the cockpit window. The black tendrils at her temple pulsed. She could feel a low-frequency hum beginning to thrum at the base of her skull—a dial-up tone from hell, trying to find a signal.

The shuttle was hurtling toward Earth, toward the heart of the Alliance. She was the Saviour of the Citadel, the woman who had ended the Reaper War. But as she looked at her reflection—at the glowing red-and-blue flicker starting to ignite in the depths of her green eyes—she realized she wasn't bringing a warning.

She was a carrier.

The Mass Relay exit loomed ahead. The Headquarters of the Alliance was in the distance, peaceful and unsuspecting.

Arcturus Arrival

The blue tunnel of the Mass Relay collapsed behind the Ascension's Grace, dumping the shuttle into the cold, organized space of the Arcturus System. The great Stanford Torus of Arcturus Station, the administrative heart of the Systems Alliance, rotated lazily against the starfield.

Shepard slumped in the pilot's chair, the relief of escape curdling into a sickening dread. Her gaze was fixed on her left arm, resting on her lap. It was a monstrosity of blackened alloy, glowing blue fibers, and sharp, articulating talons where her hand used to be. The N7 armour on her bicep was shredded, revealing where the thick, oily tubes had bored into her flesh to anchor the limb.

What am I? The thought was a scream trapped in her skull. I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm hardware.

She flexed the talons. They responded with a terrifying, silent speed. But it was the feeling underneath the skin that made her want to tear the arm off—a cold, buzzing connection that ran all the way up to her shoulder, tapping into nerves she didn't know she had.

She looked up at the station. It was teeming with life. Thousands of people—soldiers, diplomats, families—all blissfully unaware of the nightmare that had swallowed the Citadel. If she docked, if she let their medics hook her up to their systems, would she just be plugging the hive mind directly into the Alliance network?

I should turn around, she thought, a cold sweat breaking on her brow. I should overload the core and burn up in a star. Better dead than... this.

As if in response to her treacherous thought, the mechanical arm twitched violently. Shepard gasped, her own muscles locking up as the limb acted of its own accord. The wicked, clawed fingers whirred and retracted, sliding back into the forearm housing. In their place, a complex, multifaceted sensor array unfolded like a deadly flower, its lenses glowing with a hungry red light.

It swiveled, aiming directly at the shuttle’s main control panel.

"No!" Shepard hissed, slamming her flesh-and-blood hand onto the console.

She tried to will the arm to stop, but it felt like trying to stop a runaway train with her mind. The sensor unit began to sweep across the displays, the cockpit filling with the soft, rapid clicks of data acquisition. It wasn't just scanning; it was learning the ship's language.

Stop it. Stop it! She focused every ounce of her legendary willpower, channeling the same stubborn refusal to yield that had saved the galaxy twice over. A sharp, burning pain shot up her neck as the tendrils under her skin pulsed.

The battle was brief but brutal. With a final, shuddering groan, the sensor array clicked off. The claw snapped back into place. The arm went still, but it felt sullen, like a caged animal waiting for its keeper to look away.

Shepard was panting, her heart hammering against her ribs. She caught her reflection in the dark console screen. The black tendrils had advanced, spreading across her cheek like a dark, intricate tattoo, reaching toward her eye.

"Arcturus Perimeter to unidentified Asari shuttle," a crisp, professional voice crackled over the comms. "You are entering a restricted zone. Transmit identification codes immediately or be fired upon."

Shepard swallowed hard. Her throat felt dry, constricted. She reached for the transmit button with her right hand, her left claw resting ominously on the armrest.

"This is... Commander Shepard, SSV Normandy," she said.

She froze.

It was her voice, but it wasn't. The words came out with a strange, hollow resonance, a subtle, metallic vibration that underlaid every syllable. It sounded like she was speaking through a long tube, or as if her voice box had been replaced with a high-end synthesizer. There was a beat of stunned silence from the other end.

"Repeat, please? Did you say Commander Shepard? Commander, the Normandy is reported as docked at the Citadel. We have no flight plan for you."

"I know," Shepard said, the mechanical timbre causing a fresh wave of nausea. As she spoke, she felt a new sensation—a creeping pressure under the skin of her chest, like fine wires tightening around her lungs. The tendrils on her neck pressed inwards, a cold caress against her carotid artery. They were getting closer to her ear, to the auditory nerve. They're listening, she realized with dawning horror. Every word I say, they're analyzing.

"I... I have emergency intelligence," she forced herself to say, trying to keep the tremor out of her voice. "The Citadel has fallen. We were attacked by... an unknown hostile force. I am the only survivor."

"Fallen? Commander, that's impossible. We just received a scheduled data packet from the Council not ten minutes ago."

Shepard's blood ran cold. The hive wasn't just consuming the Citadel; it was puppeteering it.

"It's a lie," she urged, the pressure behind her ear intensifying into a low, throbbing hum. It felt like the beginning of a migraine, but one that carried a faint, binary whisper. ...scan complete... subject resistant... initiate phase two...

"Listen to me," Shepard pleaded, her voice cracking with the strain of the alien resonance. "You have to lock down the station. Do not let any ships from the Citadel dock. You are in grave danger."

"Commander, your voice... are you injured? Stand down and prepare for boarding. We're sending a medical team."

"No! No medics!" Panic flared in her chest. If they hooked her up, it was over. "Just... just let me talk to Admiral Hackett. Directly. No one else."

The tendrils pushed harder. A sharp stab of pain pierced her eardrum, followed by a burst of static that wasn't coming from the radio.

...accessing communications protocol... the whisper in her head said, clearer this time.

Shepard slammed her hand down on the comms panel, cutting the channel. She sat in the sudden silence, breathing raggedly. The station was still there, a shining beacon of civilization. But as she looked at her clawed hand, and felt the alien circuitry weaving itself into her skull, she knew she was no longer its saviour. She was the vanguard of its destruction. Five minutes passed in agonizing silence. The air in the cockpit felt too thin, the pressure on her chest unbearable. Driven by a primal need to breathe, Shepard clawed at the clasps of her N7 breastplate with her remaining hand. It clattered heavily to the deck. Her breath hitching, she used both hands—the trembling flesh and the cold, precise machine—to grip the collar of her thermal undersuit and tear it open down to her abdomen.

A choked sob tore itself from her throat, a sound that resonated strangely in her own ears. Her chest was a ruin. Her left breast was gone, replaced by a crater of raw, throbbing meat and gleaming technology. Thick black cables snaked around her ribcage like parasitic vines, boring into the bone. Silver filaments were woven intricately into the muscle tissue, pulsing with that same sickly blue light that had consumed the Citadel. The horror reached its horrifying peak when she saw movement between the wires—the wet, pink sponge of her own left lung, labouring unevenly beneath a cage of alien metal. As she watched, paralyzed, a metallic tendril pierced the organ, weaving itself directly into the delicate tissue. A wave of absolute, crushing despair washed over her. It was a tidal wave of grief for her body, for her crew, for the galaxy that was about to be consumed. How long? How long until there was nothing left of Jane Shepard but wetware for the machine?

She opened her mouth to scream, but the impulse died instantly.

The despair didn't fade gradually; it was deleted. A cold, terrifying numbness took its place. It felt artificial, a chemical override streaming from the alien tech directly into her brain. They don't want me compromised by emotion, she realized with a detached, clinical horror that wasn't entirely her own. They are managing my hormone levels for optimal efficiency. Before she could process the violation of her own mind, the console jarred her with an urgent tone. Priority Override. It was Admiral Hackett. Shepard stared at the blinking light. The tendrils behind her ear throbbed, a silent pressure urging her to answer, to establish the connection.

She hit the stud.

"Shepard? Perimeter control says you cut the feed," Hackett’s voice was gravelly, the anchor she so desperately needed. "Talk to me. What’s going on over there?"

"Admiral," she said.

She stopped. The word was a distorted buzz, resonant with metal. It sounded less human than it had just minutes ago. The pressure behind her ear intensified into a sharp sting.

"I... I need you to see," she forced the words out, fighting the alien static in her own throat. "You have to know it's me before it's too late."

With a trembling flesh hand, she engaged the vid-link. The cockpit lighting was harsh and unforgiving. Hackett’s grizzled face appeared on the main screen, stern and expectant. Then the image resolved, and he saw her.

His eyes widened. His jaw actually dropped. The colour drained from his face, leaving him gray beneath his tan. "Sweet mother of God... Jane?"

He was looking at the black veins spiderwebbing across her neck, the shredded uniform, the glimpse of the horror beneath it.

"It's the Citadel, Admiral," Shepard said, the mechanical timbre of her voice making the report sound terrifyingly cold. "They're converting everything. Ships, people... the Council is gone. The Normandy is gone."

Hackett recovered instantly, years of hard tactical training overriding his horror. He wasn't just looking at a victim; he was looking at a biological weapon. He turned away from the camera, shouting orders to his command crew. 

"Perimeter, this is Hackett. Code Red. Initiate immediate quarantine protocols for that Asari shuttle. Do not, I repeat, do not let it dock. Full station lockdown. Seal all external ports. If it moves toward the station, vaporize it."

He whipped back to the screen, his expression a mix of fury and profound sorrow. "Commander... I'm getting the QEC hot right now. We’re warning Earth and every fleet in range about the Citadel. We're locking it all down. The Reapers were one thing, but this..."

His voice softened, cracking slightly as he looked at the ruin of his best officer. "Jane... I am so sorry."

As Hackett spoke, Shepard felt a new sensation. It started as a prickling heat behind her left eye, rapidly building to a searing pressure. A warm, thick liquid began to trickle down her left cheek, like a tear that was too heavy. Simultaneously, half the world went dark. The left side of her vision simply ceased to be. She didn't need to look at Hackett’s horrified expression to know what had happened. She slowly turned her head toward the dark canopy glass. Her reflection stared back, bisected by shadow. The black tendrils had claimed the left side of her face entirely. And where her brilliant green eye should have been, there was nothing but a wet, gaping socket, the eyeball itself having dissolved into a slurry of raw biological material as tiny silver machines worked to clear the socket for their next upgrade.

"Commander, stay with us," Hackett’s voice came through the comms, though it sounded miles away. "We’re sending a containment tender. It’s equipped with a mobile Faraday shroud. Once they have you in the ‘box,’ the signal from the Citadel should drop. We’re getting Miranda Lawson on a secure line. If anyone can rewrite the code in your marrow, it’s her."

Shepard didn't respond. She couldn't.

Inside the cockpit of the Ascension’s Grace, the transformation had reached a terrifying crescendo. The empty socket of her left eye didn't stay empty for long. From the darkness of the orbital cavity, a cluster of micro-hydraulics telescoped outward. A multi-lens optical suite—part high-resolution camera, part laser rangefinder—clicked into place, anchoring itself into her cheekbone and brow with serrated silver pins. The device whirred, its aperture dilating as it mapped the cockpit in a million points of infrared light. It wasn't just an eye; it was a targeting computer. The black filaments had now completely encased her left ear, turning the delicate cartilage into a hardened, conductive receiver. She felt the final shift in her throat. A sharp, internal pressure snapped the cartilage of her larynx, replaced by a vibrating, crystalline vocal processor.

"Acknowledged," Shepard said.

The word was a shock. There was no breath behind it, no warmth, no Jane Shepard. It was a flat, synthesized tone—the sound of a high-end VI speaking through a corrupted speaker. Outside the viewport, a massive Alliance tender ship approached. It looked like a hollowed-out rectangular cage of glowing copper coils. It drifted over the shuttle, and then, with a thunderous hum that Shepard felt in her teeth, the Faraday field activated.

The world went silent.

The "whisper" in the back of her brain—the binary static that had been urging her to merge, connect, upload—was suddenly, violently severed. It was like a physical blow. Shepard slumped forward, her mechanical arm clattering against the flight stick.

"Commander? Shepard, do you read?"

Shepard lifted her head. She looked at her reflection in the glass. The camera cluster in her eye socket glowed with a steady, clinical blue. The black tendrils on her face had stopped moving, frozen like ink in ice.

She felt... nothing.

The grief she had felt moments ago, the sheer terror of her own mutilation—it was gone. The hive mind had already performed a chemical lobotomy on her limbic system, stripping away her ability to feel fear or despair to make her a more efficient drone. Now that the hive was gone, she was left in a state of perfect, terrifying clarity.

"Signal lost," she said, her new voice echoing in the small cabin. "The hive is silent. I am... functional."

The Reconstruction Begins

A holographic window flickered to life on the shuttle’s console. Miranda Lawson’s face appeared, her expression a rare mask of focused intensity, hiding whatever horror she felt at seeing Shepard’s new form.

"Shepard. Can you hear me?" Miranda’s voice was clipped, professional. "I'm looking at your internal telemetry via the tender's bypass. It's... it's a mess, Jane. The tech is fused with your central nervous system. If we try to remove it, your heart stops. Your left lung is 60% synthetic now."

"Understood," Shepard replied. The lack of emotion in her own voice didn't even bother her any more. "The hardware is integrated. I require... operational control."

"That's what we're here for," Miranda said, her fingers flying across a virtual keyboard. "I’m uploading a 'Jailbreak' kernel into your neural interface. It’s going to trick the alien nanites into thinking you're still part of the hive, but it’ll put your frontal lobe in the driver’s seat. It’s going to hurt, Shepard. Or at least, it should."

"I no longer feel pain," Shepard stated. "Proceed."

As the data packet began to stream into her head, Shepard looked down at her mechanical claw. Under Miranda’s guidance, the fingers began to twitch—not with the jerky gait of the drones, but with the smooth, lethal precision of a soldier. She was a monster. A hollowed-out shell of the galaxy’s greatest hero, held together by alien wire and Alliance code. But as she watched the Alliance fleet mobilizing through her new, multi-spectral eye, a single, cold directive formed in her mind.

They took the Normandy. They took the Citadel.

"Lawson," Shepard said, the mechanical voice levelling out into something cold and hard. "Hurry. I have a war to finish."

The Ascension’s Grace drifted in the centre of the Faraday tender, a small silver needle in a copper haystack. Outside the cockpit glass, the vast bulk of Arcturus Station loomed, but to Shepard’s new multi-spectral eye, it was just a collection of heat signatures and structural vulnerabilities.

The Alliance Response

Four hours later the comm buzzed as Admiral Hackett and Miranda called the shuttle sheltered in the faraday cage of the transport.

"Commander, the shuttle bay is prepped for a hard-seal quarantine," Hackett’s voice echoed through the cabin. "We can get you out of that ship and into a high-security med-bay. Miranda can work on you there."

"Negative, Admiral," Shepard replied. The vocal processor in her throat didn't tremble. It didn't hesitate. It sounded like a recording of a machine. "My presence on the station constitutes an unacceptable risk. The jailbreak protocol is a temporary partition. If the entity’s signal strength increases, I may become a remote access point for the Alliance mainframe."

"Jane, we can't just leave you out there like that," Hackett argued, though his voice lacked its usual steel. He was a man who had seen too much death, and seeing his greatest soldier as a half-empty shell was a bridge too far.

"Logic dictates isolation," Shepard stated. She looked down at her mechanical hand; the talons were perfectly still, resting on the flight stick. "The Relay is secure. The infection is contained to the Citadel. We must strike before they find a way to bypass the quarantine."

A small, automated Alliance drone drifted into the Faraday cage, guided by the tender’s crew. It carried a heavy, lead-shielded canister—a Null-Phase Frequency Bomb. Miranda’s hologram appeared beside the console, her arms crossed. "It's tuned to the specific resonance of the entities, Shepard. It won't just explode; it will create a massive grounding effect. It will dissipate the electrical bonds holding their 'cells' together. On a station like the Citadel, the feedback loop will be absolute."

"And the converted?" Shepard asked.

Miranda hesitated. Her professional mask slipped for a heartbeat. "They are part of the circuit now, Jane. Their nervous systems have been rewritten to conduct the entity’s energy. When the bomb 'grounds' the station... the shock will be fatal. To everyone."

Shepard’s camera-eye whirred as it zoomed in on the bomb being mag-locked to her shuttle’s exterior. She knew, intellectually, that the people on that station included her friends. Garrus. Tali. The crew of the Normandy. A person would feel a crushing weight of grief. Shepard felt only a minor calculation of resource loss.

"The mission is primary," Shepard said. "The population of the Citadel is already effectively deceased. I am simply... cleaning the site."

Lieutenant Clarke, the Alliance demolition specialist, came over the audio feed to finalize the arming sequence. "Commander, the timer is slaved to your biometrics. Once you reach the Citadel Tower, the central hub, you’ll need to physically interface with the bomb to bypass the Citadel’s internal dampeners. The blast radius will be... total."

"Shepard," Miranda interrupted, her voice uncharacteristically soft. "The bomb's frequency is designed to kill machine-life that uses that specific electrical signature. Your left lung, your heart-assist, your neural bridge... they're made of that tech. When that bomb goes off, your life support will fail instantly."

Shepard stared at the readout of her own synthetic heart rate.

"I am aware," she said. "Prepare the release sequence."

The Faraday cage began to retract. The copper coils moved away, exposing the shuttle to the cold, silent stars of the Arcturus system. The massive jump rings of the Mass Relay stood ready, glowing with the blue energy of a billion tons of element zero.

"Shepard," Hackett’s voice came through one last time. He didn't sound like an Admiral anymore; he sounded like a father saying goodbye. "You've saved us more times than we had any right to ask. I... I wish there was another way."

Shepard’s right hand, her flesh hand, gripped the throttle. Her left claw moved in perfect, silent synchronicity. The black tendrils on her face were frozen, but the blue light in her mechanical eye pulsed with a steady, rhythmic cadence.

"Do not be concerned, Admiral," the mechanical voice said. "The Shepard is a tool. Tools are meant to be used until they are no longer functional."

She slammed the throttle forward.

"Godspeed, Shepard," Hackett whispered.

The Ascension's Grace hit the Relay’s acceleration corridor. In a flash of white-blue light, the shuttle was gone, hurtling through the vacuum toward the nightmare waiting at the centre of the galaxy. Shepard sat perfectly still in the cockpit, the only sound the soft whirr of her synthetic lung and the cold, silent countdown beginning in her mind.

The Return to the Beginning

The Ascension’s Grace drifted out of the relay’s wake, and for the first time in her life, the sight of the Citadel made Jane Shepard’s cooling, synthetic blood run cold. The station was no longer a beacon; it was a parasitic organism. Massive, jagged mechanical clusters, looking like calcified tumours, had grown over the elegant curves of the Wards. Thousands of drone ships, their hulls encrusted with pulsating blue conduits, swarmed like necrophagous insects. They were dragging the drifting carcasses of the Citadel fleet toward the central ring, stripping them for parts in a silent, coordinated frenzy. Even the Serpent Nebula, the thick purple-and-gold cradle of the station, looked anemic. The entity was siphon-feeding on the very gases of the nebula, drawing the ionized energy into the station’s arms. The space around the Citadel felt hollow, the vibrant gases replaced by a thin, grey shroud of industrial exhaust. Shepard’s camera-eye zoomed, the lenses clicking as they focused on the docking ring.

Then she saw it. The Normandy SR2.

The ship that had defied the Reapers, the ship that had been her home through the end of the world, was a flayed beast. The sleek, white-and-black hull plating had been systematically peeled away, likely processed into the very drones now swarming the station. All that remained was the skeletal core—the long, curving structural ribs of the ship, exposed and gleaming under the harsh blue light of the entity. The Tantalus drive core was gone, a gaping hole left in the ship’s "spine" where the heart had been ripped out.

A sudden, sharp spike of heat flared in Shepard’s chest.

Deep beneath the layers of partitioned code and suppressed hormones, a ghost flicker of the "Old Shepard" surged. It wasn't a thought; it was a memory of the smell of leather in the cabin, the sound of Joker’s laughter, the feeling of the deck vibrating beneath her boots. It was a fragment of the woman who had loved that ship, mourning the desecration of its corpse. A single, salt-heavy tear welled in her right eye—the only eye that could still weep. It traced a slow path down her cheek, cutting through the grime of the journey before it hit the black, unfeeling metal of the sensor cluster on her cheekbone. The mechanical arm on the flight stick twitched, a micro-tremor of grief.

"Irrelevant," the vocal processor hissed, though there was a jagged edge to the synthesized tone. "The vessel is no longer an asset. It is... waste."

She wiped the tear away with a cool finger. The motion was clinical, but her hand lingered for a millisecond too long against her skin. Shepard banked the shuttle, ignoring the "Normandy" and the ghosts that haunted its ribs. She set her sights on the bronze archway of the Presidium Tower hangar—the place where she had escaped, and the place where she would end this. As the shuttle’s thrusters flared for the approach, the black tendrils on her temple began to pulse in time with the station's hum. The "Jailbreak" firewall was straining; she could feel the entity’s presence trying to shake hands with her hardware, welcoming its "Voice" back home.

"Initiating final approach," she broadcasted on the Alliance frequency, her voice now a flat, terrifying monotone. "The Shepard is on site. The weapon is armed."

She wasn't going in as a saviour this time. She was going in as the grounding wire for a god.

Grounding 

The air in the Council Chamber wasn't air anymore; it was a pressurized medium of data and ozone. The grand, sweeping balconies where the fate of the galaxy had once been debated were now choked with "nerves"—miles of pulsating, translucent cables that hummed with the collective consciousness of a trillion stolen thoughts. Shepard moved toward the centre of the chamber, her gait uneven. Her right boot thudded against the deck; her left claw clicked with cold, mathematical precision. In her right hand, she gripped the detonator, her thumb locked over the dead-man’s switch. She had welded the casing shut. There was no disarming it now. Not by her, and not by the thing that lived in the wires. She felt it then—a psychic pressure so immense it felt like her skull was being crushed in a vice. The "Jailbreak" firewall Miranda had installed began to flicker and spark in her mind's eye.

...Welcome... Daughter... Voice... Why do you struggle against the inevitable current?

Shepard ignored the whisper. She reached the central dais and set the Null-Phase bomb down. Her sensor-eye whirred, scanning the room for threats, when a figure stepped out from behind a pillar of sparking conduits.

"Identify," Shepard’s vocal processor hissed.

The figure stopped. It wore the shredded remains of Alliance blue, the "Major" insignia still visible on a piece of shoulder plating that hadn't yet been replaced by a cooling rack.

"Jane," the figure said.

It was Kaidan Alenko. But the name felt wrong. His face was a map of glowing blue circuitry. His right arm was a heavy, multi-jointed piston that ended in a series of data-spikes. His jaw moved with a clicking, mechanical rhythm, and when he spoke, his voice was a haunting chord Kaidan’s warm baritone layered over a screeching, high-voltage hum.

"You’re late for the Ascension," Kaidan/The Entity said, his eyes—two burning pits of cerulean fire—fixing on her. "But you are just in time to lead it. Submit, Shepard. The firewall is a paper shield against a sun. Let us in."

He reached out, not with his hand, but with a pulse of raw code. Shepard’s mechanical arm jerked upward, the claw snapping open and shut as the Entity tried to override her motor functions.

"Negative," Shepard ground out, her voice a distorted growl of static. "I am... the grounding wire."

"Joining is inevitable," Kaidan’s voice boomed, now entirely subsumed by the roar of the hive. "We are the upgrade. We are the solution to the frailty of flesh."

As he spoke, the Entity turned its full attention to her physical form. It didn't need to touch her. The very air around her began to vibrate at a frequency that targeted the remaining biological matter in her lower body. Shepard collapsed to one knee as her left leg began to scream—a phantom pain that shouldn't have been possible. The N7 hardsuit plating on her thigh and shin suddenly buckled, popping rivets like shrapnel as it was pushed away from her body.

Underneath, her flesh was liquefying and reforming. Fibre optic tendrils, thick as fingers, wove themselves through her muscle, braiding with her femur. The skin didn't just break; it became a matte-grey polymer, translucent enough to see the silver filaments and mechanical servos as they expanded and locked into place. Her knee joint hissed, a hydraulic actuator punching through her kneecap to provide the support her vanishing bone could no longer give. The transformation was a ravaging fire, a brutal, high-speed evolution that left her breathless.

"The Shepard must be complete!!," the Entity roared through Kaidan’s mouth, stepping closer. "The Shepard must be the Voice of the Galaxy!!"

Shepard looked up. Her green eye was clouded with pain, but her mechanical eye, the targeting sensor, was locked on the bomb. She felt the firewall in her brain finally shatter. The collective consciousness of the Citadel poured into her mind like a tidal wave of lightning. She saw the faces of the millions she was about to kill. She felt the Entity’s cold, binary joy.

But in that final microsecond of sovereignty, Jane Shepard didn't think about the galaxy. She thought about the Normandy. She thought about the smell of the coffee in the galley.

Her right thumb, still fleshy and human, pressed down.

"Goodbye... Kaidan," she whispered.

The detonator clicked. The Null-Phase Frequency Bomb didn't explode with fire. It erupted in a silent, blinding sphere of white-blue anti-static. The Entity didn't just scream through Kaidan; it screamed through every wire, every drone, and every converted soul on the station. It was a sound beyond audio—a digital agony that tore through the vacuum. The electrical bonds holding the Hive together were instantly, violently severed. The blue arcs vanished, replaced by a terrifying, absolute darkness as the energy was grounded into the station's very frame.

Inside the Council Chamber, the light died.

Shepard was thrown backward by the sheer force of the energetic collapse. Her synthetic lung stalled. Her neural bridge sparked and went dark. The silver filaments in her chest, her arm, and her new leg flickered once, twice, and then went cold.

Silence reclaimed the Citadel.

As the station drifted, dark and tomb-like in the dying light of the nebula, a single, battered shuttle sat on the hangar floor. Inside the chamber, amidst the cooling metal and the still, grey forms of the converted, there was no movement. Whether the spark of Jane Shepard remained trapped in the silent hardware, or if she had finally found the peace she had earned, the stars did not say. Somewhere in the deep, cold black, a single red-and-blue sensor lens gave a final, erratic blink... and then went out.

Recovery in the Desolation 

3 hours later the Alliance 5th fleet and a small Turian fleet arrive at the Citadel and begin the task of cautiously investigating and reclaiming the station the remains of the victims horrify the teams sent in, a special shuttle docks next to the Asari shuttle in the Council hangar and retrieve Shepard's body and deliver it along with Kaiden's remains to the flagship of the 5th fleet the SSV Everest and Shepard's body is taken to a specially outfitted medical suite and worked on by Miranda Lawson

The Citadel was no longer screaming.

Three hours after the detonation of the Null-Phase bomb, the station was a tomb of silent, cold iron. The blue fires had vanished, leaving the Wards in a terrifying, absolute darkness broken only by the searchlights of the arriving Alliance 5th Fleet and their Turian counterparts. The recovery teams moved in silence, their boots echoing through the hollowed-out Presidium. They walked past what had once been their friends and colleagues—now just grey, metallic statues slumped over consoles or frozen in mid-stride. The "grounding" had been total. The entity was gone, but it had taken every spark of life it touched with it. In the Council Tower, the air was freezing.

A specialized Alliance HAZMAT team, led by a turian technical expert, entered the ruined chamber. Their lights swept over the dais, falling first on the remains of Major Kaidan Alenko. He lay like a discarded marionette, the heavy mechanical components of his conversion now just dead weight pinned to his cooling flesh. And then, they saw her. Commander Shepard lay ten feet from the bomb’s casing. Her new mechanical leg was locked in a jagged, awkward angle. Her left arm, that wicked carbon fibre claw, was curled protectively against her chest. To the soldiers, she looked more like a piece of the station’s wreckage than the woman who had saved the galaxy.

"Get the containment litter," the team lead whispered, his voice shaking. "Careful with the limbs. We don't know what’s structural and what’s... her."

The SSV Everest: Medical Suite Zero

The flagship of the 5th Fleet, the SSV Everest, was a hive of frantic, hushed activity. But Deck 4 was a ghost town, guarded by two fireteams of N7 marines. Behind the reinforced glass of the primary medical suite, the atmosphere was thick with the scent of antiseptic and the hum of high-end surgical VIs. Miranda Lawson stood over the operating table, her face pale, her eyes bloodshot. She hadn't slept since Shepard had left Arcturus.

On the table lay the "body."

The "grounding" had done more than just kill the entity; it had fused the alien tech into a state of inert, blackened slag. Shepard’s left side was a ruin of scorched polymer and dead circuitry. The camera-eye cluster in her socket was dark, its lenses cracked from the feedback loop.

"Biometrics?" Miranda snapped, her fingers flying across a holographic interface.

"Faint, Ma'am," the medical VI responded in a calm, feminine voice. "Cardiac activity is erratic. The synthetic heart-assist is unresponsive. The left lung is holding a vacuum but failing to oxygenate. We are currently maintaining her on an external bypass."

Miranda looked at the readout of Shepard’s brain activity. It was a chaotic mess of jagged lines—the "Jailbreak" partition had been shredded by the blast, leaving a shattered landscape of human neurons and fried alien synapses.

"She’s in there," Miranda whispered, more to herself than the VI. "She’s just... buried."

The Retrieval of the Major

In the adjacent room, separated by a thick lead-glass partition, lay the remains of Kaidan Alenko. A separate team was working on him, but the prognosis was visible to the naked eye. The conversion had gone too deep, too fast. His chest was more machine than meat, and the Null-Phase blast had turned those internal components into a localized EMP that had stopped his heart instantly.

Hackett stood in the observation gallery above, his hands clasped behind his back. He looked down at the two of them—his best officers, reduced to scrap and shadow.

"Can you save her, Lawson?" Hackett’s voice came over the intercom, sounding older than the station itself.

Miranda didn't look up. She was currently using a laser-scalpel to carefully cut away the melted remains of Shepard’s N7 undersuit, revealing the silver filaments that were now charred black and embedded deep in the Commander's collarbone.

"The bomb did its job, Admiral," Miranda said, her voice tight. "It killed the machine. But Shepard is nearly half machine now. I’m not just performing surgery; I’m trying to jump-start a fried circuit board without killing the person wired into it."

She paused, looking at Shepard’s face—the black tendrils were no longer pulsing, but they had left permanent, darkened scars etched into her skin like a roadmap of the hell she’d endured.

"I can keep her heart beating," Miranda continued, her voice trembling slightly. "But I don't know who’s going to wake up. The entity deleted her emotional centres to make her a drone. The bomb fried her neural bridge. We might be saving a ghost."

"Save the ghost then, Miranda," Hackett replied grimly. "The galaxy's had enough of funerals."

The Origin 

The observation deck of the SSV Everest’s medical wing was silent, save for the rhythmic, artificial wheeze of a ventilator. Miranda Lawson sat behind the reinforced glass, her eyes fixed on the figure on the table.

"I’ve done everything the laws of physics and biology allow, Admiral," Miranda said without turning around as Hackett stepped up beside her. Her voice was brittle, stripped of its usual icy confidence.

On the other side of the glass, Shepard looked like a shattered porcelain doll mended with lead and steel. The blackened, slagged tech from the Citadel had been painstakingly removed or replaced with Alliance-standard cybernetics. Her left arm was no longer a wicked claw; it was a sleek, silver-and-grey prosthetic, though the way the wires disappeared into her shoulder was still a gruesome sight. Her left eye—the cluster of cameras—had been replaced by a singular, glowing blue ocular implant that sat deep in the socket, surrounded by the faint, permanent scarring of the black tendrils.

"The synthetic lung is functioning. The neural bridge is... holding," Miranda continued, rubbing her temples. "But the damage to her limbic system is profound. The entity didn't just suppress her emotions; it pruned them like dead leaves to save processing power. I’ve installed a neuro-stimulator to try and jump-start her dopamine and serotonin production, but..."

"But we won't know if she’s Jane Shepard until she opens her eyes," Hackett finished for her, his voice heavy.

"Exactly. Right now, she’s a masterpiece of engineering, Admiral. I just don't know if the soul is still in the machine."

Before Hackett could respond, his omni-tool chirped with a high-priority signal. It wasn't a standard alert; it was the staccato burst of an encrypted data-drop from the Citadel recovery teams.

"Admiral," the voice of a lead cryptographer crackled over the link, sounding breathless and terrified. "We’ve breached the first layer of the Council Chamber’s core. The 'Brain' of the entity. You... you need to see this. We're uploading the primary origin header to your station now."

Miranda and Hackett both looked at the holographic display as it shimmered into existence between them. Lines of strange, multi-dimensional code scrolled by, rapidly being translated by the Everest's VI. At the top of the file, a star-map appeared. It wasn't a map of the Milky Way. The constellations were wrong, the clusters too dense, the spiralling arms rotating in the wrong direction. Underneath the map, a single sentence was translated and highlighted in a searing, warning red:

[ORIGIN: ANDROMEDA GALAXY]

The air seemed to get colder. Hackett’s face didn't just turn pale; it hardened into a mask of pure, agitated fury. He stared at the word as if it were a personal insult.

"Andromeda?" Miranda whispered, her eyes wide. "That’s... that’s impossible. The Initiative left 3 years ago. Nothing should have been able to cross that void. Not like this."

"It didn't just cross the void, Lawson," Hackett growled, his hands clenching into fists at his sides. "It followed a trail. Or it was sent."

He didn't wait for a further explanation, He turned on his heel.

"Admiral?" Miranda called out. "Where are you going?"

"The QEC," Hackett barked over his shoulder, already halfway to the door. "I need to speak to the Joint Chiefs and the surviving Initiative liaisons. If this thing came from the Andromeda Galaxy, then the Milky Way isn't just dealing with an invasion we’re dealing with a spillover from a war we didn't even know was happening."

He vanished into the corridor, leaving Miranda alone with the silent, half mechanical Commander. On the bed, Shepard’s new silver hand gave a sudden, minute twitch. The blue ocular implant hummed, a tiny iris dilating as if reacting to a light that wasn't there. Deep within the shattered architecture of her mind, a single, cold realization flickered to life, unbidden and devoid of feeling.

They are coming back.