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Chapter 1- Priority: Dholen (Haestrom's Sun) So Here She Was WHISPERING SHADOWS- A MASS EFFECT 3 ALTERNATE ENDING - 1 Chapter 1- Priority: Dholen (Haestrom’s Sun) So here she was. Back on the Normandy. She couldn’t say she was surprised, by what she’d seen at Sanctuary. She’d known the Illusive Man had no problem sacrificing other people for his vaguely-stated goals. And she knew that scamming refugees was a traditional way to make money in wartime. Still, Sanctuary had been coldblooded even by those standards. She’d seen people in the Citadel markets, selling everything they had so they could afford to send their families to Sanctuary. And now the whole lot of them were husks. ...The Illusive Man probably thought it proved how serious and committed he was to saving humanity, that he’d go to such extreme, pointless lengths to save it. Shepard chuckled darkly. She had to wonder what he was saving it from. Hackett wanted to talk to her, ASAP, apparently. She splashed water on her face, wishing that would be enough to wash away the sickness-and-ammonia stench of Sanctuary. Not that Hackett would notice: He’d be a hologram with no sense of smell. She leaned on the metal sink, allowing herself a moment to look in the mirror. Not much of the old Shepard left there, she thought. When the Illusive Man had resurrected her as his errand-girl, he’d made her look the same as she had before she died. She’d hated that. It was a lie, that you could work for Cerberus and not change. Later, when the Alliance let her out of prison, she’d altered her face, hid it with bone-reshaper injections and unnatural iris-dyes that made strangers avoid eye-contact with her. She told her friends she did that because her old face was too famous. Another lie; what she really wanted was to shed her filthy Cerberus skin. Anyway, the new face hadn’t kept reporters from recognizing her. Photos had gotten out, and anonymity wanted nothing more to do with her. But at least she could look in the mirror without seeing the Illusive Man’s errand-girl looking back at her. No more time to dawdle. She went to the com-room. WHISPERING SHADOWS- A MASS EFFECT 3 ALTERNATE ENDING - 2 Admiral Hackett’s blue image flickered into existence in front of her. He hadn’t wanted her to waste time at Sanctuary, she knew. She wondered if he’d feel the same way once he got her reports on the place. “Sir,” she said, saluting. Hackett cut right to the chase. “Commander, we have a bad situation here.” Nothing new there, Shepard thought, but she didn’t say it. Hackett sounded rattled, and nothing rattled Hackett. Had something happened to the Crucible? “Brief me,” she said. “He’s here, Shepard. The Illusive Man is here, with the whole Cerberus fleet. Where we’re building the Crucible.” Shepard’s mind went blank for a moment. The Crucible’s location was top secret; even she didn’t know where it was. How the hell...? ...Councilor Udina. He must have told Cerberus where the Crucible was, sometime before Shepard shot him. The slimy little bastard was dead, and he was still ruining her day. “Cerberus is attacking the Crucible?” “Not yet.” Hackett cleared his throat, looking haggard. “Cerberus has been here for a while,” he said at last. “Sneaking ships into the system inside cargo vessels, we think. The Crucible required a lot of building materials, and we didn’t have the time to inspect every freighter. As of 0500 hours, Cerberus had enough fighters here to capture the mass relay and let the rest of their fleet through.” WHISPERING SHADOWS- A MASS EFFECT 3 ALTERNATE ENDING - 3 “Dammit, Hackett!” Shepard burst. “That was your watch!” It was a good thing that kind of insubordination didn’t mean much anymore. “I know,” was all he said. Shepard tried to think clearly. She was exhausted, and thinking wasn’t an easy task. “Cerberus hasn’t attacked the Crucible yet, you said,” she said. She was sure the Illusive Man wanted to destroy the Crucible. After what she’d seen in Sanctuary, she knew he didn’t give a damn about anything but controlling the Reapers, and if the Crucible killed the Reapers, then he couldn’t control them. So he’d try to destroy it. “What is Cerberus doing, then?” “Right now, they’re just preventing us from taking the Crucible out of the system,” Hackett said. “We can’t attack their fleet without drawing the attention of the Reapers. They know it, too. And they can’t launch a full-scale assault on us for the same reason. Once that battle starts, it’s endgame. The Reapers will come, and when they do, the Crucible must be ready to use.” Hackett watched her carefully. “Our engineers and Prothean specialists still don’t know what the Catalyst is. They only know that the Crucible won’t work without it.” And that’s my watch, Shepard thought. It’s my job to find the Catalyst, and I haven’t found it yet. She tried not to let Hackett see failure weighing down on her. “The Illusive Man sent his pet ninja to steal my clues,” Shepard said, forcing herself to smile as if Kai Leng were no trouble at all. “We’re on his tail right now, sir.” How far can you stretch the truth before it snaps? she wondered. Shepard had no idea where Kai Leng had gone after he’d run from Sanctuary. When Miranda said she’d planted a tracer on Kai Leng, it had sounded too good to be true. Well, it was too good to be true: A few minutes later, EDI had found Miranda’s tracer on the floor, where Kai Leng had thrown it. James swore and swore until EDI said, I hope you organics were not planning to use this tracer to track Mr. Leng through interstellar space. The Normandy’s quantum entanglement communicator is state-of-the-art, and it fills an entire room. It is absurd to believe that this tiny device has such capabilities. Both James and Shepard had kept their mouths shut for a few minutes after that. “We’ll catch him soon,” Shepard added. “Kai Leng may be headed here, Commander,” Hackett said. “So don’t follow him here. You can’t jump through this mass relay without provoking Cerberus. I don’t want you doing that until we have the Catalyst in hand.” “Understood, sir,” she said. Hackett was right; jumping into the middle of the Cerberus fleet would mean facing endgame without the Catalyst. But what the hell was she supposed to do now? “You’ll have to tell me where ‘there’ is, so I don’t track him into your system accidentally.” “We’re orbiting Anadius, the red supergiant,” Hackett said. “We built the Crucible here because Anadius’ radiation disguises most activity.” “Risky,” Shepard murmured. The mass relay network had its share of red giant suns, but no one liked to build in those systems. Red giants had a lot of solar flares, and solar flares wreaked havoc with most technology. Even if they didn’t cook you alive. “We built the Crucible in the shadow of a planet, of course,” Hackett said. “Hiding the Crucible in a red giant’s glare was a Prothean idea. Our Prothean specialists tell us the Protheans built one of their Crucibles next to a red giant.” “’One’ of their Crucibles?” Shepard wasn’t sure she’d heard that right. “Did you just say the Protheans built more than one Crucible?” “At least two,” Hackett said. “The first one wasn’t built in a red giant system, and the Reapers found it and destroyed it. The other Crucible... our specialists haven’t been able to identify the system where it was built.” Shepard’s fingers tightened on the edge of the com-console. This was the best news she’d heard all week. “Does that mean the specialists know where the first Prothean Crucible was built? Tell me; I’ll go there. Find out what I can.” WHISPERING SHADOWS- A MASS EFFECT 3 ALTERNATE ENDING - 4 “You do that, Commander. But it sounds like there was nothing left of the Prothean Crucible after the Reapers found it. And you’ve been to that system before. The star is called Dholen. You rescued some quarians there a while back.” Shepard remembered. Dholen, and its third planet, Haestrom. She’d pulled Tali and some other quarians out of a nest of hostile geth. She remembered Haestrom’s sun, too: The damned fireball had fried her shields every time she came out of the shadows. That sun, there’d been something odd about it, right? Tali and the other quarians had been studying it. “I’ll do what I can, sir,” she told him. “Hackett out,” Hackett said. His hologram disappeared from the com-room. Shepard had to find Tali, but she went upstairs to shower off the Sanctuary-stink first. When she came back down, Specialist Traynor accosted her. “I think you need to talk to Tali,” Traynor said. “Perfect,” Shepard answered. “Where is she?” Traynor looked at her, slightly horrified. Apparently, Shepard was being insensitive again. “On the observation deck. She’s really broken up over Miranda’s death at Sanctuary.” I would not have expected that, Shepard thought, but she nodded. “Tell Joker to set a course for Dholen. I’ll take care of Tali.” It was worse than Shepard thought.
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