Jane Shepard: Command of Steel by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Jane-Shepard-Command-of-Steel-1217610443?file=1

Jane Shepard: Command of Steel ANIMATION

The Tartarus Equation

Gravity did not merely cease inside the transit corridor of the uncharted mass relay; it inverted, folded, and wept. Commander Jane Shepard clung to the magnetic plating of her boots, her armor’s servos whining against an unseen pressure that tasted of ozone and decaying copper. Beyond the reinforced visor of her N7 helmet, the internal architecture of the colossal engine stretched into an impossible infinity. It was a cathedral of quantum-locked alloys, bathed in the sickly, bruised luminescence of runaway dark energy.

"I always assumed," Garrus Vakarian’s voice crackled over the secure comms, a thread of tension weaving through his sub-vocal fluting, "that if we ever breached a relay's outer shell, we'd find impossibly complex gyroscopes. Maybe a very large, very exhausted hamster on a wheel. Not whatever this is."

"The architecture is organic," Liara T'Soni whispered. Her asari biotics flared in unconscious sympathy with the ambient spatial distortion, casting a pale violet halo around her hardsuit. "Or it is trying to be. The dark energy here isn't just powering the mass effect fields. It is rewriting the structural integrity of the universe. It is digesting the relay from the inside out."

Shepard swept the barrel of her assault rifle across the gloom. She was a woman whose beauty was forged in the crucibles of survival—sharp cheekbones, piercing green eyes that held the ghosts of Akuze, and a jawline set like tungsten. But here, suspended in the stomach of a celestial machine floating in the cosmic abyss, she felt a profound, chilling insignificance.

"Keep your sightlines clear," Shepard ordered, her voice an anchor of calm in the swirling madness. "We came here to find out why the vanguard relays in the Abyss are going dark. We find the source, we plant the disruption charge, and we leave before this thing spits us out into uncharted space."

They advanced along a spar of tuning-metal that spiraled into a cavernous nexus. The air inside the relay was breathable, according to their hardsuit sensors, but the atmospheric data was laced with impossible elements—isotopes that should not exist outside the belly of a dying star.

Then, the whispering began.

It bypassed their auditory receptors entirely, scraping directly against the inside of their skulls. It was not a voice, but a chorus of fractured glass, drowning out the steady hum of their life support systems.

*...fracture... bleed... the apex falls...*

Shepard gritted her teeth, tapping the side of her helmet. "Everyone feeling that? Tell me it is just electromagnetic interference from the drive core."

"If interference comes with a profound sense of despair and smells like ancient blood, then yes," Garrus replied, his rifle tracking invisible threats in the bruised violet fog. "Shepard, my thermal clip readings are fluctuating. The physics in here are starting to forget the rules."

"Look down," Liara breathed, pointing into the abyss below their narrow, magnetic walkway.

Beneath them, the cobalt energy core of the relay was not spinning smoothly. It was pulsing. A sluggish, arrhythmic heartbeat. Wrapped around the core, intertwined with the colossal gyroscope rings, was a shape that defied rational comprehension.

It was a Leviathan.

Shepard had stood before the apex race once, beneath the crushing oceanic depths of Despoina. They were majestic, terrifying gods of the abyss, beings who viewed the Reapers as mere rebellious progeny. But this creature was a broken mockery of its lineage.

Its colossal, squid-like mantle was fused with the relay’s quantum-locked plating. Great, weeping fissures scored its dark carapace, bleeding thick, viscous dark energy that behaved like a sentient oil. Its lower tentacles had been sheared away by the relay’s grinding gyroscopic rings, replaced by jagged constructs of hard-light and dark matter that twitched with agonizing spasms.

"Goddess," Liara murmured, taking a slow step back. "It didn't invade the relay. It was pulled into the transit beam while traveling, and the relay's fail-safes locked it inside the corridor. It has been trapped in the transit-state. For millennia."

"A million years of solitary confinement inside a broken blender," Garrus muttered, the targeting laser of his sniper rifle cutting through the dark. "That does wonders for the disposition."

*...cold... so cold... the spheres are shattered...*

The telepathic projection slammed into Shepard like a physical blow. She dropped
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