Chapter Text
Arc 1: The Corinth Incident
Chapter 1: Mission Start
Sovereign was dead.
Shepard was dead.
The Normandy was debris.
Somehow, humanity had come out of it with a Council seat.
There were men and women in Parliament, Arcturus, and half the Alliance diplomatic corps who would have called that a victory. Maybe it was. Maybe, years from now, some clean-faced lecturer at the Academy would stand beneath a flag and explain how the Battle of the Citadel had marked humanity’s arrival as a true galactic power.
I doubted they would put the casualty lists on the slides.
Respect had come quickly after the fighting stopped. Quicker than trust. Quicker than security. The Council had offered us a chair at the table, but no one had offered to make the table smaller, or safer, or less likely to be flipped over the moment something uglier than a geth dreadnought came knocking.
So the Alliance did what the Alliance always did.
We smiled for the cameras, buried our dead, and sent ships into the dark.
The CIC of an Alliance frigate rarely surprised anyone. Consoles, displays, status boards, low voices, recycled air, and the faint electrical hum of a vessel pretending not to be a bomb with engines. Most of them sounded the same too: disciplined, controlled, all that professional quiet officers liked to pretend was efficiency.
The Saint Nazaire was louder.
Chatter ran beneath everything. Comms techs speaking over intelligence handlers. Sensor operators trading confirmations with navigation. Mission staff pulling fragments from half a dozen data feeds and feeding them up the chain in the hope that, somewhere along the way, fragments became information.
Newer ships used more automation. More VI filtering. Fewer hands. Cleaner, supposedly.
I had never trusted clean.
A VI could sort a thousand signals faster than any human being alive. It could flag anomalies, compare signatures, and tell me exactly how many seconds remained before our drive core finished cycling down. Useful things. Necessary things.
But a machine did not get a bad feeling.
A machine did not look at a missing colony report and wonder why the wording was too careful.
A machine did not hear silence and decide it sounded deliberate.
“Relay transit complete,” Amber said over the command circuit. “Drift is six thousand kilometers. Within operational margin.”
The words came through the console in front of me, too loud by half. Engineering insisted it was an acoustics problem, not a speaker problem. Engineering said a great many things when asked to fix something that annoyed me.
I looked down at the navigation plot. The Saint Nazaire hung alone in the system, the nearest mass relay shrinking behind us on the tactical display. Six thousand kilometers of drift was good. Not miraculous. Not Joker-good. Good enough that I would not have to pretend to be angry about it later.
“Nicely done, Amber.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Across the CIC, Commander Jessie Lowes turned from her station with that look she wore whenever she had already checked something twice and was deciding whether to make it three times out of spite.
“Confirming no immediate contacts,” she said. “Passive sensors are clean. No drive signatures within intercept range.”
Reports followed in sequence.
“No ships on scope.”
“Drive core cooling. FTL reinitialisation within safe tolerance.”
“Comms scan negative. No broad-spectrum distress traffic.”
“Mass effect field stable.”
Routine. Clean. Tidy.
The most dangerous kind of quiet.
I gave the usual acknowledgements. Meaningless, mostly, but people worked better when command sounded like it was listening. A nod here. A “copy that” there. Enough to keep the machine breathing.
“Set course for Corinth,” I said. “Prepare for FTL. Keep passive sensors wide and local comms open. I want to know the moment anything in this system so much as coughs.”
“Yes, sir.”
Jessie’s eyes flicked back to her console. “Amber, time to target?”
I almost smiled. Jessie never liked me asking questions I already knew the answer to, but she liked even less when I skipped asking them.
“Twenty minutes, sir,” Amber replied. “Corinth is off the main lane, but distance-wise it’s close. We got a clean angle off the relay.”
Twenty minutes.
The number sat heavier than it should have.
I had planned for thirty. Thirty gave Alpha time to finish gearing up, gave Jessie time to run the approach, gave me time to pretend this was a standard welfare check and not the latest point on a pattern Alliance Intelligence had been quietly refusing to name.
“Inform me before we return to realspace,” I said.
“Aye, sir.”
I stepped away from the galaxy map. Technically, it was not my map. It belonged to the ship, the CIC, the Alliance, and whatever budget committee had signed off on its installation. But people gathered around it when they wanted decisions, so in practice it was mine.
The elevator doors opened before I reached them.
I looked at the display above the frame. One deck down. One short ride.
Then I looked at the mission clock.
“Of course,” I muttered, and took the stairs.
The Saint Nazaire was not built like the Normandy. Not really. The Normandy had been a prototype, a political statement in stealth plating, all sharp lines and classified systems. The Saint Nazaire was more practical. Less elegant. More crowded. A black-ops scout frigate with too many analysts, too many compartments repurposed for intelligence work, and not enough places for anyone to stand without being in someone else’s way.
I liked her better for it.
Halfway down, I raised my omnitool and opened the team frequency.
“Alpha, briefing room. Now.”
They were probably already there. Good soldiers usually were. But no one made flag rank by assuming good soldiers had done the obvious thing, and no one survived covert work by trusting silence.
The briefing room lights were still up when I entered. That lasted only long enough for the door to seal behind me.
Four members of Alpha Team sat around the table. One empty chair remained for approximately two seconds before Corporal Clinton Jones slipped in behind me, helmet tucked under one arm and an expression on his face that suggested he knew exactly how close to late he had been.
He sat down without a word.
I pressed the control beside the main display. The overhead lights dimmed. A thin red glow rose from the corners of the room, painting armour plates, cheekbones, and tired eyes in the colour of emergency lighting.
Secure channel. Shielded room. No recordings beyond command archive.
That always made people sit a little straighter.
“Thank you for your timely arrival,” I said, looking directly at Jones.
He had the good sense not to smile.
The display behind me lit up with a colony map. Corinth. Small settlement. Thin atmosphere outside the hab-zones. Mining survey first, agricultural experiment second, population barely large enough to justify the name on an Alliance chart. The sort of place Earth politicians praised in speeches and forgot in budgets.
“The colony of Corinth has been out of contact for thirteen hours and counting,” I said. “No scheduled burst transmissions. No administrative traffic. No civilian comms leakage. No emergency beacon.”
One of the marines shifted in his seat.
Good. They had caught it.
Thirteen hours did not sound like much to civilians. Civilians thought in terms of days. Weeks. They imagined lost contact as something dramatic: burning buildings, screaming broadcasts, desperate final messages.
Colonies were not dramatic when they died.
Sometimes they just stopped talking.
“Could be equipment failure,” Jones said.
“It could.”
“But you don’t think it is.”
“I don’t get dragged off patrol for faulty comm buoys.”
The room settled again.
I changed the display. Corinth’s location pulled back into a wider cluster of systems. Three markers appeared. Then a fourth. Small. Red. Uncomfortably neat.
“This is not the first disruption in the region,” I continued. “Two delayed reports. One confirmed missing survey team. One freight route that has gone quiet twice in six weeks and come back with excuses so vague they might as well have been written by a politician.”
The squad lead, Lieutenant Mara Venn, leaned forward. “Geth?”
“No confirmed indicators.”
“That wasn’t a no.”
“No,” I said. “It was not.”
No one looked especially reassured. That was good too. Reassured soldiers rushed.
“Alliance Intelligence believes Corinth fits an emerging pattern. I agree. The Saint Nazaire is the closest available asset with the authority, equipment, and convenient official excuse to intervene without starting an argument with half the Terminus.”
Jones glanced at the map. “Convenient official excuse, sir?”
“We are on patrol.”
“Are we?”
“Officially.”
That earned the smallest breath of amusement from someone at the far end of the table. I let it live for half a second before killing it with a look.
“Alpha will deploy by shuttle. You will land outside the primary settlement, proceed on foot, and establish the cause of the blackout. You are to locate survivors, restore communications if possible, and identify hostile presence if present. If engaged, you are cleared to defend yourselves and neutralise threats.”
Venn’s eyes stayed on mine. “Rules of engagement?”
“Alliance standard unless circumstances make standard suicidal.”
That one did almost make Jones smile.
Almost.
I folded my hands behind my back. “I do not need heroics. I do not need improvisational theatre. I need eyes, confirmation, and people alive at the end of it. Corinth may be nothing. Corinth may be the start of a larger problem. Our job is to know which before command has to read about it in a casualty report.”
The room was quiet enough for me to hear the ventilation cycle overhead.
Then Venn raised a hand.
Not high. Not like a recruit. Just enough.
“Crew expendable?”
There it was.
The question no one liked asking and every special operations unit eventually did. Nice words and clean uniforms did not survive first contact with a locked door, a hostile landing zone, and twenty civilians standing between your team and extraction. Someone had to ask where the line was before blood started moving it.
I let the silence stretch one beat longer than was comfortable.
“No,” I said.
Venn did not look away.
“As ever,” I continued, “the Alliance continues to value all life. Especially lives directly under its protection.”
Jones looked down at the table.
I softened my voice by a fraction. Not much. Enough. “You are not there to trade colonists for clean mission parameters. You are not there to erase evidence. You are not there to make my paperwork easier. You are there because something may be happening to Alliance citizens and we are the ones close enough to stop it.”
Venn gave a single nod.
“Understood, sir.”
“Good. Anything else?”
No one spoke.
That was the trouble with good teams. They understood too quickly.
“Excellent. Gear up. Full armour, sealed kit, hostile-environment loadout. I want you in the shuttle bay before Amber drops us back into realspace.”
Chairs shifted. Armour plates clicked. The squad rose in a wave of practised movement.
As they filed out, Jones paused beside me.
“Sir.”
“Corporal.”
He seemed to consider saying something. Then training, wisdom, or cowardice got the better of him.
“Nothing, sir.”
“Best kind of report.”
He left.
The door sealed behind Alpha Team, and the red security glow faded from the corners of the room.
For a moment, I remained where I was, staring at the colony map.
Corinth rotated slowly on the display. A little blue-white marble with one settlement marker and too much empty ground around it. Somewhere down there, a comm tower had gone quiet. Maybe a storm had knocked out a relay. Maybe a technician had fallen asleep drunk over the wrong console. Maybe thirteen hours from now, Alpha Team would be laughing in the mess about the time command got spooked by a broken antenna.
Maybe.
I missed having a rifle in my hands.
That was not nostalgia. Nostalgia was warm. This was uglier than that. A crawling impatience under the skin. The knowledge that I was about to send other people into the dark while I stood in a room full of displays and pretended distance made me more useful.
Command was mostly the art of not flinching where people could see.
I shut down the map and returned to the CIC.
The ship felt different when a deployment was close. It was not obvious. No alarms. No dramatic change in lighting. Just a tightening in the air. Conversations shortened. People stopped leaning on consoles. The Saint Nazaire’s usual noise compressed into something leaner.
Jessie was waiting near the galaxy map.
“Alpha are moving to the bay,” she said.
“Of course they are. I told them to.”
“You also told Jones not to be late by looking at him.”
“He benefited from the reminder.”
“He was two seconds behind you.”
“Two seconds is a measurable quantity.”
Jessie’s mouth twitched. On someone else, it might have been a smile.
I took my place at the command station and brought up the mission feed. Alpha’s armour transponders appeared one by one as they entered the shuttle bay. Venn. Jones. Patel. Okonkwo. Reiss. Five blue markers. Five neat names. Five future letters to families if this went badly enough.
The armoury feed confirmed weapons issued. The shuttle systems came alive a moment later. Fuel. Mass effect field. Kinetic barriers. Medigel reserves. The steady ritual of turning people into a deployable asset.
Amber’s voice cut through the CIC.
“Approaching FTL exit. Ten seconds.”
The chatter dropped away.
I watched the timer count down.
At three seconds, the Saint Nazaire began to shudder.
At one, the stars came back.
“Jump complete,” Amber said.
Again, too loud through the console. Again, engineering’s problem for some mythical future dock where nothing more urgent was on fire.
“Position,” Jessie said.
“Within approach envelope,” navigation replied. “Corinth on scope.”
“Sensors?” I asked.
The answer came too slowly.
Only by a second.
That was enough.
“Passive scan active. No orbital traffic. No debris field. No heat blooms consistent with surface bombardment. Colony power signature is…” The operator paused. “Irregular.”
Jessie looked at me.
There were many words I disliked in reports. “Irregular” sat comfortably near the top.
“Define irregular,” I said.
“Primary grid is active, but fluctuating. Secondary systems intermittent. Comms tower cold.”
“Any distress beacon?”
“Negative.”
“Any sign they know we’re here?”
Another pause.
“Negative.”
The CIC seemed to get quieter without actually losing sound.
I opened the shuttle bay channel.
“Alpha, this is command. We are green for deployment. Colony comms are dark, power grid unstable, no visible orbital threat. Proceed as briefed.”
Venn answered at once.
“Copy, command. Alpha deploying.”
On my display, the shuttle detached from the Saint Nazaire.
There was no drama to it. No thunder. No cinematic sweep. Just a small icon separating from a larger one, moving down toward the planet with five blue markers inside it.
Easy to watch on a screen.
Harder to explain to next of kin.
“Shuttle is away,” Jessie said.
“I can see that.”
“I know.”
She stayed beside me anyway.
The icon crossed the first orbital line. Then the second. Telemetry scrolled beside it: descent angle, barrier status, atmospheric contact in twenty-three seconds. Routine numbers. Necessary numbers.
Numbers that meant nothing if something on Corinth looked up and decided to shoot.
I kept my hands clasped behind my back and my face still.
Around me, the Saint Nazaire listened to the dark.
Below us, Corinth waited.
Mission start.