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Even her memory fails her, a few days after the report is written. She gets snippets, like…clips of some movie. But all back lit by the sky. She doesn’t include that in the report.

The ugly batarian yacht that lands in the middle of a flower bed shaped like a U, crushed pale green and white flowers under the landing gear. 

The sound of armored boots on the “distinctive yellow brick made of indigenous clay” that paved the streets in the town. The sound a human makes when a batarian prod gets jammed under their chin and the exact way it cuts off when their system whites out.

The shade of pink that drains to chalk as the corporal with a foot brace that she’d flirted with the day before when she’d registered her sidearm with the Alliance outpost points out the door when she asks where their CO was, the smear of dark red as the CO’s shattered body slides down the glass.

The picture of two small girls and a big dog she knocks off the desk when she slides across it to cover the two servicemen who made it inside. 

The red and white polka dots on the halter top of the girl who helps her barricade the tunnel that led to the mayor’s bunker. 

The glittery purple nail polish on the hand of another girl, when she hands her a pistol out of the armory. Sharla, she gets told later. Her name was Sharla. 

They make the local news studio, first. There’s equipment and enough techs to figure out how to bounce a damn signal. She manages to ferret her way into a cruiser’s comms and piggy back a distress signal before the batarians cut the power.

They hold the AA gun long enough that the ships stop dropping. They hold it long enough to piss off the pirates that had already landed, long enough to make them turn from herding squalling citizens and tourists into their holding pens to trying to root out the stubborn little band of half healed up infantry and over the hill officers she’d gotten to listen to her.

Night fell at some point. It had to have. Elysium only had the one sun. She still can’t recall the sky ever doing the ordinary thing of going dark. 

For her, the night is when the screams start up again. Pirates checking their herds. A tiny team harrying the edges and drawing their attention away, gunfire spattering in the air. They make it a few hours before the gunfire falls silent.

The wide, panting mouths of the three stragglers  she pushes inside before they close the gate for good. 

The bunker under the mayor’s house holds, the tattered remains of the squads sitting in the front room, red spattered clothes on the pale blue sofas. The flat concrete roof, the weird stones with their cut outs, perfect to hold a rifle barrel steady. The gleaming stock of an ancient Hahne-Keder. 

The heads peeking over the vine covered wall like special targets, nice and round. The arch filling up with the cheap armor of pirates.

They’d have had to dig through 750 meters of granite to get in from the other side. Elysium chose its safe house well, way back before they’d known they’d need it. Elysium holds, a few hundred citizens kept safe. Another few hundred given enough time to get away.

Okay, call her a liar, too. 

She remembers every slow heartbeat of that night and every trigger squeeze. Every moment waiting for one of them to get smart enough to try and drop in on her from above. The flare and sputter of shields on the first Alliance soldier to try and cross the line she’d drawn.