"You sure that's what you want?" The Illusive Man demanded, standing up and approaching the QEC projector. It was strange to see him this way. Commander Jane Shepard had always seen him as the epitome of cool and collected, but now, seeing all his hard work turning against him, he was no better than any Alliance Officer who didn't get their way with the Spectre. "You're taking a hell of a risk, Shepard."
"I don't think so." She replied, crossing her arms. Most of her actions had been considered harsh, extreme or even, in some cases, unjustifiable until she proved her skeptics wrong, but when she saw for herself what the Collectors had been doing destruction seemed to be the only way to right their wrongs. "I'm going to stop the Reapers. But I won't sacrifice the soul of our species to do it. Joker... lose this channel."
The Illusive Man watched as Shepard disappeared from view, his fists clenched and teeth gritted. Slowly he allowed himself to calm down and turned to look over his shoulder. Behind him was a man, covered in slick, light armor, carrying a single blade as a weapon.
"Leng, give the word to what's left of Project Fabricator." The Illusive Man commanded. "Tell them to get those subjects up and running immediately and have them ready to be dispatched at my behest."
"I'll see to it personally that they are properly motivated." Kai Leng replied. Miranda Lawson had been one of the Illusive Man's best and brightest young officers and represented the perfection that humanity was. Now that she had joined with Shepard and abandon Cerberus he had to turn to an assassin to help him oversee his many cells. In truth the Illusive Man preferred it this way. Leng was not perfect, but he'd been broken and fixed a dozen times. Where Miranda had been the perfection of human kind, Leng was the indomitable will of humanity. "But do you need all three, sir?"
"I know you can do the same job just as well as one of them, but I need you with me, Leng." The Illusive Man answered. "I can't send you on missions that our products can do and expect you to be my right hand as well."
"As you say, sir."
"Head to the Terminus Systems. The relay system of Xe Cha in the Shrike Abyssal cluster is as far as you need to go. Tosal Nym, a planet devastated by asteroid warfare is your target. I'll send the message through to them that they should be expecting you."
"I'll make my report to you when I've arrived, sir." Kai Leng stated. The Illusive Man turned as the door opened but Leng was already gone. Taking a seat in his chair, he rubbed his temples and lit a cigarette.
"You were supposed to be the guardian of humanity, Shepard..." The Illusive Man mused aloud. "Bringing in everything that could keep us strong, keep us safe in this dark and terrible universe. And now I'm forced to send old equipment after you, now that you've endangered our species... Damn it all."
Word came all too quickly for the myriad of doctors, engineers and gunmen of Project Fabricator. The facility was a buzz with hundreds of people trying to improve upon systems, reporting protocols and even storage space, as they had no idea who was coming and what their purpose was.
"Honestly I'd half expected word to reach us that we were being shut down." Doctor Angela Romero stated to one of her colleagues as she brushed a few loose strands of her long black hair from her face. "I mean it seemed the Illusive Man had shunted all his resources into that other project and we nearly ground to a halt. Now he expects us to just pick up and start again?"
"Come on, Angie." Doctor Thaddeus Grey replied. The older, grey haired scientist continued typing into the virtual interface, responding to his colleague but made no eye contact as he continued working. "It's not as though we're starting from scratch. Sure, it will be a hurdle getting everything back on track, but at least we're almost complete. Hell, if that other project hadn't taken almost all of our resources away we might have been finished within the fiscal year. It should only be another month or so before our triplets are up and running at full operational capacity."
"Still, I don't like it." Dr. Romero said firmly. "We were so damned close to popping open the champagne bottles and celebrating, just to have the rug pulled out from under us and now, without any kind of warning, we need to have everything finished as soon as possible. It just seems... odd."
"Excuse me, Doctor?" Came a female voice behind them. The two scientists turned around to see Captain Elanor Fel, acting commander of the security force on Tosal Nym. "The shuttle has landed."
"Thank you Captain." Dr. Romero replied and looked at Dr. Grey. "Ready to meet whomever this is?"
"Why me?" The old man asked, typing in a few more commands into the terminal.
"Because you're the project lead, Thaddeus." Dr. Romero replied with a sigh. "Come on, you can finish plugging the algorithms in later."
"Fine, fine, let's go meet the man."
Captain Fel nodded and gestured for the doctors to follow her as she headed toward the landing pad.
Kai Leng stepped out of the Cerberus shuttle and quickly gained a feel for his surroundings. The facility, Jericho, had been built into the side of the largest crater on the planet's surface. There was no flora or fauna to speak of, which meant that the security team here was only necessary for the possibility of raiders discovering them or if the subjects got loose.
His eyes shifted to the entrance to the facility as a soldier, covered entirely in her black Cerberus armor and helmet headed his way, flanked by two doctors.
"Welcome, sir, welcome." Dr. Grey greeted, extending a hand when he got close enough. When it became obvious that Leng had no interest in shakking the man's hand he retracted it and cleared his throat. "Yes, I assume you are here to see our progress, yes?"
"That is correct." Leng replied and walked past him. "The Illusive Man wants the subjects ready for assignment as soon as possible."
"Assignment?" Dr. Romero asked. "With respect the triplets would have a lot of testing to go through before we could ever be sure they were ready for the rigors the Illusive Man plans to put them through."
"Project Fabricator has just received an abundance of funding." Leng said, dismissively waving her protests away. "There is an assignment he deems only they can handle, provided your assessments of their abilities is correct. We will forgo any unnecessary testing to ensure they are combat ready."
"Unnecessary?" Dr. Romero echoed shaking her head in disbelief. "I don't think any of the tests will be unnecessary, sir. We have yet to see them function in a social capacity. There's no telling what they'd do in a crowded room, no assurances they'll be utterly devoted..."
"I did not ask for your personal fears." Leng snapped as he strode through the facility as though he had been there before. "The Illusive Man demands that these subjects be sent out after a dangerous target and if his demands are not met then this facility will be of no further use to him."
Elanor Fel watched the display of angry scientists and Cerberus officer play out in front of her with relative amusement. She held no hate for anyone in the Jericho facility, but it was funny to watch these people, in all their brilliance be shot down at every turn by a man who carried a sword all over the place.
"Sir, here they are." Elanor stated, gesturing to a trio of stasis pods filled with some kind of fluid that kept the suspend beings inside sustained.
"Have they been woken up at all?" Leng asked, pressing his face against the glass as he looked in.
"Not to my knowledge, sir." Elanor replied. "If I recall correctly they were to be woken up shortly before the Illusive Man sent our resources to another project."
"And what a distinguished failure that was." Leng spat. "So, Dr. Grey, do you believe they are ready to be pulled from their pods?"
"Well... yes, actually." The old man replied. "They've been ready for some time, but if we pull them out we can't put them back in and there's still a lot of valuable information to teach them."
"Let me see what you've already done with them." Leng demanded, pulling up a screen on his omni-tool.
Each of the suspended humans had been given a different area of specialization and Leng moved to the first on the left, looking up at it. Though the three of them were technically clones, created from the DNA of human beings who had already existed, they had been engineered, altered to be someone else, likely to avoid confusion. They looked nothing alike and yet they were created from the same stock, by the same processes. The first of the three was a biotic, engineered as far as human science would allow. Leng took notice of the fact that data from the facility on Pragia had been preserved and uploaded to the Cerberus databases before the facility was abandoned and subsequently destroyed years later.
"So he's a powerful biotic, then?" Leng asked as he studied him.
"That's quite an understatement, if our data projections hold true." Dr. Grey replied proudly. "The data from the Teltin Facility proved invaluable. As much as I would have liked to have had access to whatever Subject Zero was, I am positive we have hit the proverbial wall in biotics, at least with the galaxy's current level of technological advancement."
"Explain." Leng demanded to which Dr. Grey was all to happy to oblige.
"His implants are state of the art, Mr. Leng." Grey began with a jovial grin. "They generate less than forty percent of the heat that any other biotic implant generates to do the same job and after one of our security force members, of all people, mentioned how thermal clips worked, we developed a way for these implants to cool almost instantaneously."
"He ejects thermal clips from his head?" Leng asked, raising an eyebrow.
"Oh, of course not!" Grey replied with a laugh. "There are seven micro thermal absorption chambers in each implant. In the unlikely even that one becomes over heated the mechanism holding these tiny thermal clips rotates, allowing for the over heated unit to cool and another unit to take over. That actually took up more resources than the other two combined, but I believe it was well worth the effort!"
"If making an unstoppable god monster man is your thing, that is." Elanor interjected, though it seemed the two of them were ignoring her.
"Impressive." Leng replied. "I do hope your findings are correct, Doctor. The Illusive Man will be most pleased. What of the next one?"
"Ah, this one." He replied and moved to the middle tank. "He has been given extensive modification to be physically strong, but more so to be quick. I've no doubt he could easily win an arm wrestling contest with any of our security, but his reflexes are so far beyond cat like that one might not even see it."
"And his non-organic parts?" Leng asked.
"Ah yes, he's been implanted with a motion field sensor." Grey stated, activating his omni-tool to show the schematics for it. "Basically he has three hundred-sixty degree vision, no matter where his eyes are pointing. He has a minor targeting VI implanted within his cerebrum, allowing for better accuracy and the VI has been programmed for familiarity with all standard side arms, as well as many illegal ones. The VI has also been programmed with nearly every style of human, turian, asari and drell martial arts form we could find."
"So he's an assassin." Leng replied, looking perturbed by it.
"Not just an assassin." Grey replied. "The assassin. And lastly our youngest subject."
"Youngest?" Leng asked.
"By a few days, sir." Elanor informed him. "They didn't want to grow them all at once, just in case, so the other two grew together and this one was developed last."
"I see." Leng replied and looked the tank over. "And what is his specialty?"
"This one has the most synthetic upgrades out of the three." Grey replied, making Elanor cringe at the wording. "Like the assassin he has a targeting VI implanted in his brain, but this one is far more advanced. It has been programmed with every fire arm Cerberus has seen, as well as a few of the most useful galactic martial arts we could fit."
"Most useful?" Leng asked.
"Oleg Petrovsky, the projects military advisor made the call on what would be most useful to this one." Elanor informed Leng.
"Yes, yes." Grey continued. "This one has also been fitted with the most advanced omni-tool technology we could muster. He's capable of using the widely known tech attacks such as Overload, Incinerate and Tech Armor, but I'm sure with a little time he'd be able to figure out plenty more, or perhaps even create his own. He's also been gifted with powerful hacking programs and as many decryption programs as we could gain access to."
"So you have a tech warrior for long distance kills and gaining access to nearly anything, an infiltrator with deadly close combat skills and a biotic that may be dangerously close to godhood, by your security's standards." Leng said, exaggerating the results but still very impressed. "It's a shame the Illusive Man put so much stock into Shepard."
"Who?" Grey asked.
"Not important." Leng replied and looked back at the doctor. "The Illusive Man's orders are clear. Get these three up and running, then find a way to recreate these clones that's cost and time effective. He's likely to want more than one of each if he can get his hands on them."
"Cost effective?" Grey asked, stifling a laugh. "Sounds literally impossible, but a few decades ago, living anywhere that wasn't Earth did, too. I'll see what we can do."
Leng nodded and left the room to make his report to the Illusive Man. Elanor watched Dr. Grey work frantically to get all of the staff ready to give the final push for Project Fabricator. She shook her head, hating to see these brilliant thinkers trying to play God, but she didn't get paid to feel good about the work of others. Still she was terrified of the prospect of something going wrong when they woke up and how very little her security force could do if the triplets decided to attack.