Chapter Text
The emptiness after a battle is always uneasy and liminal. Is the battle over? Should I keep pushing objectives, or fall back for debriefing? How's the chain of command? How is my team? How am I? Even in unquestionable victory, shellshock and adrenaline coarse through a vast majority of combatants, and exhaustion makes coordination difficult. In times like these, being a part of the elite squad that started, fought, and finished the fight gets you first pick of cleanup missions.
Especially when your priority is recovering your Commander.
Even Admiral Hackett, yet to be stripped of command over the off-world portion of the war assets and possibly the last person in the galaxy to ever have a leash on Shepard, couldn't pretend to exercise control over a single ship with the political power of a small interstellar government. The Normandy, Commanding Officer in absentia, was granted authority over the search and recovery operations aboard the Citadel.
Liara had ended up in the position approximating Executive Officer -- that is to say, the one in command until Shepard's condition was determined -- by virtue of experience handling cavalcades of information like those flying around the system amidst the cleanup effort. Volunteers were transferred to the Normandy's command, and EDI could only do so much coordinating, especially since whatever knocked out the Reapers had damaged her processing.
It was also a bittersweet memory that the Normandy had not seen an XO since Presley aboard the SR-1. Lawson was a sort of second-in-command when the SR-2 was a civilian Cerberus vessel, but she was also the onboard Cerberus liaison. Yeoman Chambers and Specialist Traynor had both served more secretarial roles for Shepard aboard the SR-2, given the Commander's chronic refusal to delegate. Liara herself admitted she was unsure if she could hold a candle to the memory of Executive Officer Charles Pressly.
Nobody would ever describe search and rescue efforts to be "fun". However, Dr. T'Soni had assumed command for perhaps twelve Earth hours and had hardly managed to assemble the crew to form a plan before the messages came in. Congratulations and gratitude, of course, but mostly a gallery of voices asserting what they could and could not do to retake the Citadel. Garrus, goddess love him, was happy to acquire a large net and vent the entire station into space if it made finding Shepard easier. Wrex, who had been brought aboard because if you need rubble sifted through you sent a krogan, was on his side.
The Alliance had probably the most even-handed and understandable demands. The Citadel was still in high Earth orbit, and the conduit Shepard had boarded the station with was reported to have been used to collect human corpses en masse. They needed commitments of the safety of their capital planet from sudden deorbiting of the Reaper fleet as well as a respectful but efficient cataloging of the dead. Hackett had clearly committed to giving up control now that he finally had an opportunity, as the Normandy was now in communication with a joint authority of the Admirals of the remaining Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Fleets. Rear Admiral Hannah Shepard expressed belief that they would arrive at the correct way forward, whatever that may be. Liara broke down and cried for ten minutes.
The Dalatrass was under the impression that anyone was listening to her, but the presence of STG strike teams at the Battle for Earth proved that was dubious at best. Most were in the process of pulling back to regroup while the Salarian Union prepared to enter the theater, but even then there were numerous salarians among the Normandy's volunteers and many teams were delaying their retreat for as long as possible to aid their fellows in repairs. The official word of the Union was that investigation into the Reaper fleet should be immediately halted until their arrival, and, failing that, damage to the Citadel should remain "less than a hundredth of a millionth of a percent". Liara considered printing that communique just so she could physically trash it.
Primarch Adrien Victus was, as always, a stubborn but practical sort. There was an undertone to his messages that suggested his real wish was to hide his entire race away in turian space to rebuild and emerge to pay off their debt on some magical future date when the galaxy was back on its feet and it was like the universe was new again. That was unfortunately not an option. The Primarch's demands were similar to the Dalatrass', though far more even-handed. If the Citadel was truly free of the Reapers, there was too much infrastructure and personal effects of families who might still be alive aboard to allow for recklessness. There was also the possibility of reestablishing it as the seat of galactic governance, which the turians actually stood a chance of returning to. Garrus asserted he knew Victus would be able to handle his new responsibilities.
It was summarily unsurprising that the asari were insisting on sending a diplomatic attaché to serve as the republics' eyes and ears as the Citadel was investigated. There was no doubt that they were subtly eyeing a return to the Council they had founded and dominated for millennia, but having the longest history with the station did give credence to a cultural attachment that they would want to protect. Liara turned down the diplomat, though the rejection was promptly ignored as they were being sent along with a peacekeeping corps that the Alliance had already accepted the help of.
Aria T'Loak joked about sending mercenaries in exchange for a finder's fee, but admitted they were stretched far too thin to offer anything. She promised to keep Omega's network generally undisruptive and focused on scrapping and reconstruction contracts for the time being. Liara would have called it a rare moment of genuine altruism, until Aria stipulated that anything looted by her men would have to be bought off of them and could not be demanded, though they would vet buyers to prevent another, in her words, "Cerberus incident".
The Admiralty Fleet sent congratulations and thanks and nothing else. Tali was unsurprised, especially since they had likely voted her in charge of the situation the moment news of the battle ending reached Rannoch anyways. She was actually surprised that their QEC was both unbroken and not misplaced.
The geth sent the geth. More accurately, they sent advanced notice that their remaining forces in the sector would be replaced with a sizeable reconstruction detachment in the equivalent of five and a half Earth days, assuming their diagnostics of the Mass Relay system was accurate. Liara sent advanced warning to the Systems Alliance of their imminent arrival.
In the end, they could say what they wanted. While everyone aboard the Normandy was scratching at the door to get aboard and find Commander Shepard, going in blind on a ship that large would be both dangerous and time-consuming. Dealing with the political correspondence was Liara's lip service to the administrative role she had been assigned while simulations were run to investigate the pulse that had deactivated the Reaper fleets. If Shepard could be relied on for one thing, it was to somehow always be at the literal center of whatever was going on.
And after two days of analyzing scant footage from any camera pointed at that part of space in that moment, running energy calculations, and simulating where the source could have been, they had found the room where it happened.