After recovering in the Normandy's medbay, Shepard went to the Citadel Council to confront them with the information that Saren had been behind the geth attack on Eden Prime. However, without incontrovertible evidence of Saren's involvement, and with the fact that he was their best agent, the Council was unwilling to believe Shepard. This meant that she needed some way to uncover solid evidence that Saren was connected to the geth. For a while, the search seemed fruitless, until Shepard encountered a quarian by the name of Tali'Zorah nar Rayya. Tali had been on Pilgrimage — a quarian rite-of-passage ritual involving travel through the galaxy to discover something worth bringing back to their people — when she uncovered an interesting audio transmission from the memory core of a geth unit. The audio clip was of Saren mentioning that the information he'd gained from the Prothean beacon would help him find something called the Conduit, as well as an asari — Matriarch Benezia — indicating that the information brought them closer to the return of the Reapers. An ancient, legendary machine race, the Reapers were supposedly responsible for the destruction of organic life in the galaxy, including the Protheans, tens of thousands of years ago. The evidence brought by Tali was sufficient to convince the Council that Saren had been working with the geth, though they were disbelieving of any connection he might have had to the Reapers, whom they regarded as mythical. When Shepard tried to convince them that the visions she'd received from the Prothean beacon had been of the destruction of that civilization by the Reapers, and that Saren's search for the Conduit — whatever it was — was part of his quest to bring them back, they dismissed her claims. After all, she had been the only one to see the vision. Nevertheless, it was clear that Saren needed to be brought to justice for the attack on Eden Prime. Though he had gone into the lawless Terminus Systems, where sending a Council fleet would have been considered an act of war, the Council had one other option: make Shepard a Spectre, give her a ship and crew, and send her into the Terminus after Saren. In the end, Captain Anderson stepped down from command of the Normandy, and the ship and its crew became Shepard's. With her new Spectre status and a handful of vague leads, Shepard left the Citadel to search for Saren.
The search took Shepard and her crew to several planets across the galaxy, though the most important were Therum, Feros, Noveria, and Virmire. On Noveria, Shepard encountered Matriarch Benezia, Saren's lieutenant and a powerful asari biotic — as well as the mother of Liara T'Soni, a scientist studying the Protheans who had joined Shepard's crew after Shepard saved her from being killed by Saren's mercenaries on Therum. After a difficult battle with her, Shepard was able to talk to Benezia, and discovered that Saren's flagship — Sovereign, a huge ship that had been present at Eden Prime — had allowed Saren the ability to control Benezia's mind. Sovereign had a subtle, insidious power known as indoctrination, such that anyone who spent enough time in or near it became extremely mentally suggestible, eventually becoming a mindless slave. Saren took advantage of this power to bend Benezia to his will, and she was able to break free of that control only long enough to tell Shepard what Saren had sent her to Noveria to do: find the location of the lost Mu Relay, a mass relay that would lead him to where the Conduit was located. She was able to pass that information to Shepard before Saren's control over her reasserted itself and Shepard was forced to kill her.
On Virmire, Shepard finally located Saren's base of operations, where he was in the process of developing an army of tank-bred krogan that he planned to control. Infilitrating the base, Shepard discovered a comm-link to Sovereign that Saren had been using to literally communicate with the ship itself. Speaking with Sovereign, Shepard discovered that it wasn't merely a ship, but a living creature: a Reaper. It was also on Virmire that Shepard was forced to make one of the most difficult decisions of her career. Two of her squad members, Kaidan Alenko and Ashley Williams, were on Virmire with her: Kaidan was responsible for setting a bomb in the heart of the base in order to blow it up and prevent Saren from creating his krogan army, while Ashley was working with the salarian ground force that had been present on Virmire already in order to draw off Saren's geth so that the others could move in with the bomb. Unfortunately, the geth forces became overwhelming, and both Kaidan and Ashley were within minutes of being overcome. Shepard had the time to double back and save one of them, but not the other. Both of them were willing to sacrifice their life for the mission. Both of them were valuable to her as both crewmembers and individuals, but Kaidan was something more — ever since the aftermath of Eden Prime, there'd been something between them, and Shepard had only begun to realize that she cared for him as something more than a squadmate or even a friend. And maybe it was a selfish reason, but she couldn't let him die. So she went back for him, saved his life, got them both back on the Normandy before the bomb blew. Later she would feel guilt over her decision — haunted by the thought that Ashley had died because of her feelings for Kaidan — but she forced herself to put her regrets aside in order to concentrate on her mission.
Following the information about the Mu Relay that Benezia had given her, as well as information that Liara was able to glean from Shepard's visions granted by the Prothean beacon, Shepard was able to pin down the location of the Conduit to the planet Ilos, a world once occupied by the Protheans, which had not been visited by anyone in many thousands of years. It was then a race against time to get to the Conduit before Saren could. Unfortunately, Saren reached Ilos first, and Shepard and her squad had to fight through his geth forces. On the way, Shepard came across an ancient Prothean virtual intelligence, and learned from it that the Conduit was connected directly to the Citadel — an ancient mass relay in disguise — and that the Citadel had been used by the Reapers in the past to enter the galaxy from their home space beyond the galaxy's borders, known as 'dark space'. Saren had thus used the Conduit to travel to the Citadel, where he would send a signal to the Reaper fleet hiding in dark space — the signal that would allow the Reapers to come through and attack. Following Saren through the Conduit, Shepard found the Citadel in ruins, besieged by Saren's geth, with Sovereign perched atop the Citadel Tower. The entire Citadel fleet was attempting to fight Sovereign and the geth, but things were looking poor and reinforcements were needed. Shepard had the choice to call in the Alliance fleet to assist, assuring many human casualties but protecting the Citadel Council, or ordering them to wait, which would have resulted in the Council's death and the loss of much of the Citadel fleet. Shepard had never been precisely fond of the Council, but she recognized the need all the same for a gesture of unity with the other races of the galaxy, and even if many of her own people lost their lives, their sacrifices would not be in vain. So she called in the Alliance fleet to help deal with Sovereign and the geth, while she herself focused on Saren. Recognizing that the ex-Spectre had been indoctrinated by Sovereign's influence and that there was no going back for him, Shepard managed to convince Saren that there was one last option he had to stop himself from unleashing doom upon the galaxy. Saren committed suicide, in death freeing himself from Sovereign's influence. And maybe that might have been the end of it, but Sovereign had other ideas, and reanimated Saren's corpse via implants it had placed in Saren's body for one final battle against Shepard and her squad. Defeating the "undead" Saren created a feedback effect that took out Sovereign's shields, and the combined Citadel and Alliance fleets were finally able to destroy the Reaper, saving the galaxy from certain doom. Shepard and her crew were heroes.
Even after having been confronted face to face with evidence of the Reapers' existence, however, the Council still dismissed what Shepard had been telling them all along. They didn't want to think about it. Hero or not, the things that Shepard knew, the things that she had seen were... inconvenient. Political pressure caused the Alliance to relegate Shepard and the Normandy to a less visible role, performing "cleanup duty" taking out small pockets of geth who had survived Saren's defeat. Privately, Shepard was angry — she felt betrayed — but her hands were tied, so to speak, and there was nothing she could do. Little did she know that her situation was about to change completely.
While patrolling an area of space where several Alliance ships had vanished over the past several days, the Normandy encountered an unknown vessel. It was huge, and powerful, and even the Normandy's speed couldn't outrun its weapons fire. Though a distress call was sent, it quickly became clear to Shepard that the Normandy was doomed. She ordered everyone to the escape pods — but it was too late for her, and an explosion threw her into space as one final attack destroyed her ship. Perhaps it was possible she might have survived, if not for the multiple punctures in the material of her suit that quickly vented all her oxygen into space. Commander Shepard died, asphyxiated, her body falling into orbit of the planet below.
That might have been the end if Shepard's body hadn't been recovered by Cerberus, an anti-alien, pro-human splinter group Shepard had encountered while she was fighting Saren and the geth. Using astronomical amounts of manpower and resources, Cerberus resurrected Shepard using a combination of bioengineering and cybernetics; the process took fully two years. Upon regaining consciousness, Shepard was taken to meet Cerberus's leader, the Illusive Man, who explained that he had brought her back to life for a purpose. Entire human colonies across the galaxy were disappearing, their people vanishing without a trace. The Alliance, still depleted of resources after the fight against Sovereign, was unable to do anything significant about it. Cerberus needed someone who could find what was happening to the colonists and stop it before it went any further — and the Illusive Man couldn't think of anyone more capable or more iconic than the legendary Commander Shepard. Shepard, for her part, was none too eager to work with the Illusive Man and his group, whom she regarded as terrorists, but at the same time she felt a duty to do something. After visiting the vanished colony of Freedom's Progress, Shepard found evidence that the colonists had been taken by a mysterious race called the Collectors — the same race whose ship had destroyed the Normandy two years prior, and who were likely working on behalf of the Reapers. The Illusive Man gave Shepard a ship — a replica of her old one, christened the Normandy SR-2 — and a list of dossiers of talented individuals Shepard could recruit to help her in her fight against the Collectors. At first, Shepard balked at the idea of working with people she didn't know and couldn't trust, but when it became clear that her old crew had moved on to other things in the two years she had been dead, she grudgingly relented.
As she traveled across the galaxy recruiting her team, Shepard also encountered some of her old crew — a few of whom she was able to convince to join her in the fight. She even encountered her former love interest, Kaidan, on the colony of Horizon — he had been there helping the colonists with their planetary defense system, and Shepard arrived just barely too late to stop the Collectors from capturing most of Horizon's people. Kaidan was relieved to see Shepard alive, having thought she was dead, but his relief turned to confusion and then anger when he saw she was working with Cerberus. While Shepard tried to explain her point of view — that she was only working with Cerberus to stop the loss of human colonies, that the Alliance couldn't do anything to help — Kaidan was still unable to believe that she would willingly work with a terrorist faction, and their meeting ended on a bitter note. Though he later sent her a message to apologize, Shepard couldn't help the feeling that there'd been a rift torn between them, and she couldn't bring herself to respond. The mission was vastly more important, in any case, and once more she had to subsume her personal feelings in favor of the work at hand.
And then the time came when the Collectors made the fight very, very personal — while Shepard and the squad were away from the Normandy on a mission, the Collectors attacked the ship and kidnapped all of her crew, save for the ship's pilot, Joker, who managed to get the Collectors off the ship with the assistance of the shipboard AI. Though Shepard had initially had her reservations about working with a Cerberus crew on a Cerberus ship, she had over time grown to trust and value them — and if there was anything Shepard didn't tolerate, it was having the lives of her crew threatened. Gauging that her ship and squad were as prepared as they'd ever be, Shepard was ready to take the Normandy for a final assault on the Collector base. She knew that it was almost a certainty that this would be a one-way trip, that some of them or maybe even all of them wouldn't survive, but it was what had to be done and she was going to do it.
Upon reaching the Collector base, Shepard finally discovered why the Collectors were capturing so many humans and what they were doing with them: they were killing them, processing them into a paste of genetic material to fuel the growth of a Reaper. And not just any Reaper — a human Reaper. Shepard and her team fought the human Reaper, eventually knocking it down into a chasm. Believing the creature destroyed, Shepard prepared and set a bomb that would explode the Collector base. Despite the Illusive Man's protests — he claimed to want to keep the base so that Cerberus could study the technology inside and use it to fight the Reapers — Shepard felt the base was an abomination, stained by the blood of millions of innocent humans, and that not destroying it would be unconscionable. After setting the bomb, however, the human Reaper crawled back up from the chasm it had fallen into, and Shepard and her squad finally destroyed it permanently, just in time for the Normandy to rescue them from the bomb blast.
commander shepard | mass effect | reserved | 2 of 3
The search took Shepard and her crew to several planets across the galaxy, though the most important were Therum, Feros, Noveria, and Virmire. On Noveria, Shepard encountered Matriarch Benezia, Saren's lieutenant and a powerful asari biotic — as well as the mother of Liara T'Soni, a scientist studying the Protheans who had joined Shepard's crew after Shepard saved her from being killed by Saren's mercenaries on Therum. After a difficult battle with her, Shepard was able to talk to Benezia, and discovered that Saren's flagship — Sovereign, a huge ship that had been present at Eden Prime — had allowed Saren the ability to control Benezia's mind. Sovereign had a subtle, insidious power known as indoctrination, such that anyone who spent enough time in or near it became extremely mentally suggestible, eventually becoming a mindless slave. Saren took advantage of this power to bend Benezia to his will, and she was able to break free of that control only long enough to tell Shepard what Saren had sent her to Noveria to do: find the location of the lost Mu Relay, a mass relay that would lead him to where the Conduit was located. She was able to pass that information to Shepard before Saren's control over her reasserted itself and Shepard was forced to kill her.
On Virmire, Shepard finally located Saren's base of operations, where he was in the process of developing an army of tank-bred krogan that he planned to control. Infilitrating the base, Shepard discovered a comm-link to Sovereign that Saren had been using to literally communicate with the ship itself. Speaking with Sovereign, Shepard discovered that it wasn't merely a ship, but a living creature: a Reaper. It was also on Virmire that Shepard was forced to make one of the most difficult decisions of her career. Two of her squad members, Kaidan Alenko and Ashley Williams, were on Virmire with her: Kaidan was responsible for setting a bomb in the heart of the base in order to blow it up and prevent Saren from creating his krogan army, while Ashley was working with the salarian ground force that had been present on Virmire already in order to draw off Saren's geth so that the others could move in with the bomb. Unfortunately, the geth forces became overwhelming, and both Kaidan and Ashley were within minutes of being overcome. Shepard had the time to double back and save one of them, but not the other. Both of them were willing to sacrifice their life for the mission. Both of them were valuable to her as both crewmembers and individuals, but Kaidan was something more — ever since the aftermath of Eden Prime, there'd been something between them, and Shepard had only begun to realize that she cared for him as something more than a squadmate or even a friend. And maybe it was a selfish reason, but she couldn't let him die. So she went back for him, saved his life, got them both back on the Normandy before the bomb blew. Later she would feel guilt over her decision — haunted by the thought that Ashley had died because of her feelings for Kaidan — but she forced herself to put her regrets aside in order to concentrate on her mission.
Following the information about the Mu Relay that Benezia had given her, as well as information that Liara was able to glean from Shepard's visions granted by the Prothean beacon, Shepard was able to pin down the location of the Conduit to the planet Ilos, a world once occupied by the Protheans, which had not been visited by anyone in many thousands of years. It was then a race against time to get to the Conduit before Saren could. Unfortunately, Saren reached Ilos first, and Shepard and her squad had to fight through his geth forces. On the way, Shepard came across an ancient Prothean virtual intelligence, and learned from it that the Conduit was connected directly to the Citadel — an ancient mass relay in disguise — and that the Citadel had been used by the Reapers in the past to enter the galaxy from their home space beyond the galaxy's borders, known as 'dark space'. Saren had thus used the Conduit to travel to the Citadel, where he would send a signal to the Reaper fleet hiding in dark space — the signal that would allow the Reapers to come through and attack. Following Saren through the Conduit, Shepard found the Citadel in ruins, besieged by Saren's geth, with Sovereign perched atop the Citadel Tower. The entire Citadel fleet was attempting to fight Sovereign and the geth, but things were looking poor and reinforcements were needed. Shepard had the choice to call in the Alliance fleet to assist, assuring many human casualties but protecting the Citadel Council, or ordering them to wait, which would have resulted in the Council's death and the loss of much of the Citadel fleet. Shepard had never been precisely fond of the Council, but she recognized the need all the same for a gesture of unity with the other races of the galaxy, and even if many of her own people lost their lives, their sacrifices would not be in vain. So she called in the Alliance fleet to help deal with Sovereign and the geth, while she herself focused on Saren. Recognizing that the ex-Spectre had been indoctrinated by Sovereign's influence and that there was no going back for him, Shepard managed to convince Saren that there was one last option he had to stop himself from unleashing doom upon the galaxy. Saren committed suicide, in death freeing himself from Sovereign's influence. And maybe that might have been the end of it, but Sovereign had other ideas, and reanimated Saren's corpse via implants it had placed in Saren's body for one final battle against Shepard and her squad. Defeating the "undead" Saren created a feedback effect that took out Sovereign's shields, and the combined Citadel and Alliance fleets were finally able to destroy the Reaper, saving the galaxy from certain doom. Shepard and her crew were heroes.
Even after having been confronted face to face with evidence of the Reapers' existence, however, the Council still dismissed what Shepard had been telling them all along. They didn't want to think about it. Hero or not, the things that Shepard knew, the things that she had seen were... inconvenient. Political pressure caused the Alliance to relegate Shepard and the Normandy to a less visible role, performing "cleanup duty" taking out small pockets of geth who had survived Saren's defeat. Privately, Shepard was angry — she felt betrayed — but her hands were tied, so to speak, and there was nothing she could do. Little did she know that her situation was about to change completely.
While patrolling an area of space where several Alliance ships had vanished over the past several days, the Normandy encountered an unknown vessel. It was huge, and powerful, and even the Normandy's speed couldn't outrun its weapons fire. Though a distress call was sent, it quickly became clear to Shepard that the Normandy was doomed. She ordered everyone to the escape pods — but it was too late for her, and an explosion threw her into space as one final attack destroyed her ship. Perhaps it was possible she might have survived, if not for the multiple punctures in the material of her suit that quickly vented all her oxygen into space. Commander Shepard died, asphyxiated, her body falling into orbit of the planet below.
That might have been the end if Shepard's body hadn't been recovered by Cerberus, an anti-alien, pro-human splinter group Shepard had encountered while she was fighting Saren and the geth. Using astronomical amounts of manpower and resources, Cerberus resurrected Shepard using a combination of bioengineering and cybernetics; the process took fully two years. Upon regaining consciousness, Shepard was taken to meet Cerberus's leader, the Illusive Man, who explained that he had brought her back to life for a purpose. Entire human colonies across the galaxy were disappearing, their people vanishing without a trace. The Alliance, still depleted of resources after the fight against Sovereign, was unable to do anything significant about it. Cerberus needed someone who could find what was happening to the colonists and stop it before it went any further — and the Illusive Man couldn't think of anyone more capable or more iconic than the legendary Commander Shepard. Shepard, for her part, was none too eager to work with the Illusive Man and his group, whom she regarded as terrorists, but at the same time she felt a duty to do something. After visiting the vanished colony of Freedom's Progress, Shepard found evidence that the colonists had been taken by a mysterious race called the Collectors — the same race whose ship had destroyed the Normandy two years prior, and who were likely working on behalf of the Reapers. The Illusive Man gave Shepard a ship — a replica of her old one, christened the Normandy SR-2 — and a list of dossiers of talented individuals Shepard could recruit to help her in her fight against the Collectors. At first, Shepard balked at the idea of working with people she didn't know and couldn't trust, but when it became clear that her old crew had moved on to other things in the two years she had been dead, she grudgingly relented.
As she traveled across the galaxy recruiting her team, Shepard also encountered some of her old crew — a few of whom she was able to convince to join her in the fight. She even encountered her former love interest, Kaidan, on the colony of Horizon — he had been there helping the colonists with their planetary defense system, and Shepard arrived just barely too late to stop the Collectors from capturing most of Horizon's people. Kaidan was relieved to see Shepard alive, having thought she was dead, but his relief turned to confusion and then anger when he saw she was working with Cerberus. While Shepard tried to explain her point of view — that she was only working with Cerberus to stop the loss of human colonies, that the Alliance couldn't do anything to help — Kaidan was still unable to believe that she would willingly work with a terrorist faction, and their meeting ended on a bitter note. Though he later sent her a message to apologize, Shepard couldn't help the feeling that there'd been a rift torn between them, and she couldn't bring herself to respond. The mission was vastly more important, in any case, and once more she had to subsume her personal feelings in favor of the work at hand.
And then the time came when the Collectors made the fight very, very personal — while Shepard and the squad were away from the Normandy on a mission, the Collectors attacked the ship and kidnapped all of her crew, save for the ship's pilot, Joker, who managed to get the Collectors off the ship with the assistance of the shipboard AI. Though Shepard had initially had her reservations about working with a Cerberus crew on a Cerberus ship, she had over time grown to trust and value them — and if there was anything Shepard didn't tolerate, it was having the lives of her crew threatened. Gauging that her ship and squad were as prepared as they'd ever be, Shepard was ready to take the Normandy for a final assault on the Collector base. She knew that it was almost a certainty that this would be a one-way trip, that some of them or maybe even all of them wouldn't survive, but it was what had to be done and she was going to do it.
Upon reaching the Collector base, Shepard finally discovered why the Collectors were capturing so many humans and what they were doing with them: they were killing them, processing them into a paste of genetic material to fuel the growth of a Reaper. And not just any Reaper — a human Reaper. Shepard and her team fought the human Reaper, eventually knocking it down into a chasm. Believing the creature destroyed, Shepard prepared and set a bomb that would explode the Collector base. Despite the Illusive Man's protests — he claimed to want to keep the base so that Cerberus could study the technology inside and use it to fight the Reapers — Shepard felt the base was an abomination, stained by the blood of millions of innocent humans, and that not destroying it would be unconscionable. After setting the bomb, however, the human Reaper crawled back up from the chasm it had fallen into, and Shepard and her squad finally destroyed it permanently, just in time for the Normandy to rescue them from the bomb blast.