Commander Shepherd's shields shimmered, deflecting a hail of high speed projectiles. A few made it through to slam into the thick plating that protected her chest, leaving dark dents to mark their impact. "Shit," she swore under her breath as she raced toward the overturned table to her right for cover.

The massive Krogan Battlemaster leveled his shotgun, tracking the woman as she dived for shelter. Before he could squeeze off his shot, he was lifted from the ground and sent spinning like a terrifyingly-sized pinwheel into the far wall at high speed. He slid to the floor with a loud groan and slumped, unconscious against the wall.

"Fuck. My aim is all off." Jack vaulted over the bar she had ducked behind when the shooting started. "I meant to throw him at you." She walked toward where Shepherd was climbing to her feet, her shotgun dangling loosely from the fingers of her right hand.

"You're drunk, it's understandable," Shepherd offered dryly. She stood up and crisply folded her assault rifle down, clipping it into its slot in her body armor. The weapon was still warm to the touch, evidence of the epic bar fight that had just concluded.

The cramped interior of Swilly's, a dingy dive bar in the orbiting mining platform Gamma Iota, was littered with bodies, both unconscious and dead. The patrons who had valued their skin had already fled. Like the previously airborne Krogan, all the victims displayed the logo of a minor batarian-led mercenary group, the Black Hand.

"That fucker looked at me wrong." Jack kicked a dead Batarian hard enough to cause it to roll over, exposing the massive exit wound caused by Jack's shotgun blast as it tore straight through his torso.

"So, by all means, start a big damn fight." Shepherd was too annoyed to look at the tattooed biotic, instead she busied herself exploring the craters in her armor with the tip of one finger. It would cost her a pretty credit to make the surface smooth again. Just another annoyance, like the rest that had piled on since the pirate frigate in the Arghos Rho sector had improbably ripped a hole in the Normandy.

Joker kept insisting that it was a freak accident -- a ship that size should have been nothing for the new Cerberus-upgraded Normandy. Fluke or not, they had been forced to dock at this miserable mining platform to get the supplies for such a massive repair. It would take a week to make the ship air-tight and space-worthy again, Tali had assured the Commander.

After two days of stultifying boredom aboard the docked, crippled Normandy the Commander had nearly taken Kelly up on her offer of a date. She had a strict rule against sex with therapists, so she had been maybe too eager when Jack asked if she wanted to join her on a bar crawl. Sex with Kelly might have been less devastating to Shepherd's general well-being then the mess that the evening had become.

To Shepherd's surprise, the prickly biotic had slowly become her favorite person onboard. Liara's decision to remain on Illium had left the Commander lonelier than she had realized, and far too wounded to consider another relationship. As Jack had come to accept that Shepherd wasn't actively trying to exploit her and that they shared an abiding suspicion for their employer, Cerberus, she had begun to warm incrementally to the former Spectre. After each short and emotionally fraught call to Liara, Shepherd would retreat to Jack's lair deep in the bowels of the ship to play cards. Jack's foul mood seemed to match hers, and she didn't need to worry about her energy contaminating her relationship with the rest of the crew.

Being Jack's friend was not without its perils, though, and this was a very graphic illustration of why. "Luckily, this hunk of space shit is too ugly to have a police force." Jack sauntered toward the door, kicking bodies along the way. She paused at the exit, turning to look at Shepherd who had hesitated. "Really, Commander, don't sweat it."

Shepherd shot Jack a dark glare. "I'm the one that gives orders here." Her stride was crisp and martial as she passed Jack on her way out of the ruined bar, a striking counterpoint to Jack's slouching gait. Whatever the red, Asari liquor was that she had been drinking all night had amplified the dark shift of her mood at the close of the brawl.

Jack's drunken grin morphed into a frown as she jogged to catch up to Shepherd. "A little mayhem never hurt anyone," she argued. At this point she would usually have gotten mad, but over the last few months she had come to value her friendship with Shepherd. If she was willing to admit it, she was afraid that she might drive her new friend away with the more extreme limits of her behavior. Just the thought that she cared what Shepherd thought, paradoxically made her see red with anger.

"Well, aren't you the fucking space princess!" Jack shouted at Shepherd's ramrod straight back. Her balled fist at her side began to crackle and spark with building biotic power.

The hallway leading from the bar toward the space docks was eerily empty. Apparently everyone had fled when the gunfire began. They were alone, and undeniably drunk, a bad combination for two women with anger issues. Shepherd's right hand dropped to hover next to her holstered pistol and she spun on her heels to face the angry biotic. She looked like a gunslinger and Jack knew she had the skill to back it up.

A sharp, tense atmosphere filled the hallway, thick and electric. Abandoning her military dignity, Shepherd flung herself at Jack, fists lashing out. They hit the ground, rolling back and forth in a wild tangle of striking arms and kicking legs. The noise was ear-splitting, one of them (maybe both) were shouting in rage. They rolled far enough to hit the wall and then rolled back the other direction, leaving a trail of blood drops. Someone's nose was broken.

"That's unexpected," Grunt remarked with a low rumble that must be Krogan laughter. He was walking down the hallway from the direction of the space dock next to a decidedly unamused Miranda Lawson. Cerberus had sunk too much money in rebuilding Shepherd to have her taken apart by an angry biotic woman-child.

"Get off each other!" Miranda roared, reaching out with a flat palm. Energy boiled from her hand lifting the two combatants and separating them, holding them suspended in the air for a second before they dropped back to the floor. A resounding silence followed.

Shepherd's nose was bloodied and her long brown hair had come free of its confining ponytail to cascade around her face and shadow her alarmingly swollen eye. She had gotten the best of it though, Jack was a mess. Her shoulder looked dislocated and her ribs were visibly bruised. Her eyebrow was bisected by a bleeding cut that dribbled down the bridge of her nose and was smeared across her cheek. It was annoying, to Miranda, to see a figure as impressive as Shepherd looking like a drunken mess.

Miranda hadn't noticed when Shepherd and Jack had left the Normandy originally, she was too busy doing all of the reports she had put off for weeks. The changing shape of Shepherd's mood since Illium hadn't passed her by unnoticed, as well as the increasing amount of time she was spending with Jack. She wasn't quite sure why it bothered her so much that after their odd encounter with the Asari, Shepherd had confided in Jack and not her.

Everything about Jack was vaguely repugnant to Miranda, from her tattoos to her unforgivable lack of clothing. However, Shepherd was a hero of the human race. She was statuesque and dignified, with all the power of command embedded to the very core of her personality. She was really the most impressive specimen that Miranda had ever witnessed, and she prided herself on having encountered many attractive women. Maybe it was her species-pride that was pricked by Shepherd's behavior, certainly it couldn't be because of her own interest in Shepherd.