AN: This was written for the Mass Effect Flash Big Bang! It's sort of an AU idea that kicked around in my head about 'what if Olivia Shepard never suffered through Mindoir?' so this is the answer to that question!
Many thanks to theturtlelives for providing amazing art for this story!
And lastly, thanks to my awesome betas deadwitchwalking (coffeeandbiotics) aka my lifeline for making this story make sense and kassandra black!
Enough rambling, more story. Enjoy!
BioWare, sandbox, etc.
-O-
The comm panel surrounded by two tech experts and lit by three omni-tools exploded in a magnificent display of electrical prowess, and Olivia swore under her breath for the fifteenth time that hour. She was about ready to chuck the whole thing - but despite the large budget granted to the retrofit project, greenlighting an entire board would not be okayed. Nor would her actions go without consequences. Like losing her contract with the retrofit project and being out of a job.
Not when there wasn't a physical reason for the damned thing to not be working in the first place.
"Blasted thing is a temperamental little shit," Samantha muttered.
Olivia nodded and leaned back on her heels, deactivating her 'tool. "Good thing we don't need the damn thing working yet."
"End of the week."
"You think the Admiral would approve a new board?"
Olivia eyed the Alliance specialist sitting next to her. Samantha's silence was telling. There wouldn't be a new board. Unless the current one found itself damaged beyond repair, and considering that wasn't the problem, well… no new board.
She stripped her jumpsuit down to her waist, tying the sleeves into a good old-fashioned belt and grinned when Samantha eyed her enviously. The environmental controls may be working, but the room was small and the air stuffy. And the Alliance stingy on power consumption.
She was used to the cooler environment of Mindoir was the highest temperatures were 18 Celsius.
"Goddamn cerberus tech with their weird protocols," she muttered under her breath.
"I'm gonna go grab lunch in the mess. Break time," Samantha stood up and dusted her hands on her pants. Olivia remained crouched on the floor. "Maybe food and a fresh start in an hour will help."
Olivia waved her away. "You probably have more important military things to do."
"You say that like it's a bad thing," Samantha laughed.
Olivia peered up at the taller woman and shrugged. "I like choosing my own lab." She punctuated it with a grin.
Though, to be fair, she had technically chosen this ship as her current lab when she accepted the contract that had passed her desk two weeks earlier. Alliance R&D specialists had messaged her with the contract opportunity, and she'd only had to read the ship's name before accepting. Perhaps a bit too enthusiastically. Cerberus tech was one of the few things that was hard to get her hands on as a civilian engineer, short of actually working for the terrorist organization. There were some lines even she wouldn't cross.
"I don't know, the things you could do with an Alliance R&D facility backing you…"
Olivia peered up at Samantha again, marveling at how well the woman was at drawing her out of her shell. She sort of reminded her of Jill, though with a massive dose of geek instead of dancer. But if she took all that away and just looked at the raw personality… Samantha had a magnetism that was not unlike Jill's. And Jill had always been able to get her to open up.
"Could I go home for the holidays, schedule my own contractual hours, and visit whichever planet I liked when I liked?"
"Ah," the Specialist nudged her with her boot, "got me there. If you're sure you're not hungry, I'm heading to the mess."
"Not out to the compound? That wings place you guys have got is to die for."
"I've got some specs to review and we're already running behind with this."
She waved Samantha away, shaking her head, and this time the woman fled. Though really, she was one to judge considering she was skipping lunch altogether.
Olivia really was about ready to just snap the board in half, or walk away and give up. But goddamn if she wasn't stubborn and saw absolutely no reason for the damned board to not be working. Alliance retrofits didn't get along with Cerberus tech at all, even though the ports all looked the same at a glance.
"EDI?" Olivia asked, casting a quick glance around what had been dubbed 'the war room'. She'd been granted a high-level contractor's security clearance, so she wasn't surprised but definitely relieved to see she had the room to herself. Benefits of working through breaks.
While there was no terminal for EDI to project a virtual representation of herself, the AI answered nonetheless.
Olivia still marveled at that little discovery. And she was honestly surprised that anyone who had so much as a peek at her server room thought EDI was something so simple as a VI.
"Yes, Olivia?"
"Level with me," she grunted as she heaved herself up, her knees protesting the extended kneeling position, "does your tech hate me?"
EDI considered the question in silence, while Olivia stretched her legs, wondering if leaping at the chance to get her hands on Cerberus tech hadn't landed her on the path to early gray hairs.
"Engineering crews have yet to finish laying down all new power cables. I have also detected misconfigured cabling in maintenance shafts B5, C2, and D7. I will alert Engineer Adams."
Lacking someone to stare at blankly, Olivia smacked her forehead against the nearest wall - and winced. Of all the possible things that it could have been, it was something so blindingly stupid as that. Something that should never have happened.
"Cable misconfiguration."
"A mix up," EDI confirmed.
"The entire morning wasted because of a cable misconfiguration."
"Yes."
She groaned. Lab techies not used to getting their hands dirty were crawling all over the ship. Retrofitting Alliance tech into a non-Alliance ship was already tough enough, getting two different systems to accept each other and play nice, unlike their real world counterparts.
"Who did it so I can strangle them?"
"I suspect that was a rhetorical question. In any case, reprimands for poor workmanship are handled by either the Chief Engineer or the Project Overseer."
"Well," Olivia raked her fingers through her hair, "let me know when the cable misconfiguration is fixed, and we'll have a working QEC."
In the meantime, she could make sure the war room table was at least programmed properly.
-O-
Olivia was hip deep inside an open hatch, strands of hair sticking to her forehead, when she felt the first shake.
Well, shake wasn't quite the most accurate description. It was a vibration that had sound but didn't, that moved the atoms of everything in its range and set them ringing with white noise. It hit her in her gut and reverberated through her chest. It carried the weight of an anchor as it moved through her body and her fingers stilled and for the smallest of seconds, the whole world silenced.
The dread hit her hard when she felt it again. This time, she scrambled out of her hole, slammed the hatch shut hoping her job was good enough, and powered the display searching for answers. Whatever those answers might be.
Hopefully good? Little 'booms' that were felt rather than heard made her rather doubt that it was a military drill but good god she held onto some sort of hope that it would be.
The comm chatter screamed static, emitting an ear-splitting keening and her hands immediately slapped her ears, blocking out the sound, before she had the good sense to actually turn it off. Blessed silence replaced the noise and she sighed in relief.
She stood next to the war room display for a few seconds, completely unsure what to do, hand frozen halfway up. Almost like she was ready to fight except she also felt limp with terror. Jostled every other moment by the near constant vibrations that could no longer in good sense be interpreted as an earthquake and were quickly reaching the point where even terrorism was becoming unlikely. Another explosion rocked through floor beneath her boots - the deck, it was called a deck and any military personnel who heard her refer to it as floor were likely to scoff at her and call her a 'quaint civilian' - and she clattered to her knees.
Which was how Samantha found her a minute later, bursting into the war room without so much as waiting for the doors to open all the way.
"We've got an emergency signal setup here that seems to be working for now," she spoke rapidly - and Olivia's gut dropped impossibly more, threatening to fall through her boots into the floo-deck. Traynor was R&D. As were most of the people on this ship. "Engineer Adams doesn't have any crew."
Olivia looked up sharply at the squeaky desperation in Samantha's voice. The Specialist was tapping commands into the console faster than Olivia had ever seen anyone program. Samantha's words combined with the desperate way she avoided making eye contact with her made her sick to her stomach. The console beeped angrily as Sam mashed her fingers through the buttons and input the wrong command.
"Does he need crew?" She licked her lips after the silence had extended for longer than was necessary and squeezed her eyes shut. She dreaded the response that she already knew, but was hoping Traynor wouldn't say.
"Well, yes, maybe, actually definitely needs crew and there's a bit of a crisis and we don't have communications so we can't get engineers and there's no time to go search for anyone because well, 'a bit of a crisis' was a massive understatement, buildings are blowing up everywhere and we need to take off now. So your degree is in mechanical engineering, right?"
"Uhh…" Olivia spluttered, "one of them, yeah."
"Great, fantastic," Samantha crossed the room and yanked on her arm, shoving a large datapad with an updated clearance into the other, "Adams is going to need your help."
With that, the Specialist practically threw her across the threshold before she could so much as object; though the moment was somewhat ruined when she followed hot on Olivia's heels. The security field wasn't even running, which Samantha quickly explained she'd deactivated once it became clear that there were more important things to do than man a security field when Reapers were touching down every hundred meters. At least, that was what they'd been able to gather from what little chatter had come through before communications had been jammed.
"Where's the retrofit crew?" she asked as she half-ducked and was half-shoved into the elevator. The CIC was practically empty, only four souls manning the nearby stations out of twelve active terminals - and that was around the galaxy map alone.
Samantha winced. "They were on break. We're lucky we still have Adams."
The doors whispered shut, cutting Samantha off from view. "Oh."
Shit, she wasn't ready for this. Not by a long shot. There was a reason she hadn't joined the Alliance, aside from all the fancy perks she'd teased Samantha with earlier. For fuck's sake, the worst crisis in her life to date had been a facility malfunction that put exactly two lives in danger - and both had walked free at the end of the day without a scratch. This… this was a whole 'nother scale of shit-tastic and she wanted to glue herself to the back of the elevator - except it didn't have a back. The ceiling then. Melt into the metal and disappear.
Yet barely a minute later, Olivia found herself standing in the engineering room while Adams debriefed her really quickly on the layout and what needed doing to get the ship ready to fly. Getting her breathing under control and slowly swallowing the lump in her throat.
She could do this. She could.
Having something to do eased the tension in her mind, but only just. She still didn't know what the hell was happening. She had a masters in mechanical engineering, but her PhD was computer engineering - and she'd never worked with a live drive core. R&D, sure. Some testing, but nothing ever in the field, and certainly not live field testing while buildings were blowing up around them on the best ship in the Alliance fleet.
That didn't stop Adams from putting her to work once he was done explaining, hooking cables wherever there was a free port that would get the job done, not worrying about organization. Priority one, made clear by Joker frantically coordinating the effort from the cockpit over the only functioning ship-wide comm system, taking charge even though he wasn't meant to, was to get the ship off the ground. That was easier said than done. She wasn't on the engine room project of the retrofits, but the datapads still crossed her hands, so she knew approximately what state of 'ready to go' the core would be in.
And that state was 'not flyable'.
At least, not yet. Fear, earthquakes with unnatural causes, and distant gunfire was a hell of a motivator to jerry-rig the core into operating status.
She didn't let the continued shudders and mini-earthquakes affect her performance as they finally got to calibrating power input levels for eezo flow, once all the systems were reconnected - some with the new tech from the retrofits, the rest put back together with the old tech. Shoving the images of burning buildings and dead people out of her mind. Stomping hard on exceptionally visceral and vivid images of the hangar exploding around them.
Olivia allowed herself one second to breathe a sigh of relief when Joker announced that a Major and a Lieutenant were on the way, one capable of leading the ship and both capable of defending it. That moment was quickly ruined as the sound of gunfire erupted from the open docking bay one level below them, the hard metal walls doing absolutely nothing to muffle the shots.
"It's online."
Her head shot up faster than varren's at the scent of roasted pyjak as the core came to life. They'd done it.
Olivia smiled in delight and wiped her forehead with the back of her sleeve, and Adams whooped as he brought up the main terminal and got systems running. She kicked a box of unused cables out of her way and jogged the length of the short hallway to monitor to the eezo levels and make sure nothing explosion-ie would happen with all the criss-crossing of tech between Cerberus and the Alliance. Nothing peaked dangerously and she gave Adams the all clear.
Then the klaxon sounded.
She ducked her ears between her hands, looking to Adams. "What the hell is that?"
"Proximity alarm!" Adams shouted back. He gestured sharply for her to join him. "Sensor systems just got power. Traynor's ad hoc comms are down, damned Reapers are jamming that, too. Network is overloaded with civilians freaking out, so even emails are slow and it's all we've got right now."
She peered around his arm as he brought up a menu that undoubtedly was reporting the same information in the war room and to the CIC. At least that wasn't reliant on the network. "What about Major uhh…"
"Alenko."
She nodded. "Major Alenko and the Lieutenant. Where are they?"
As if to mock her question, the gunfire emanating from the cargo bay sputtered out and ceased. Hopefully because there was nothing else to shoot at and not because they were dead.
"Shit. Not here, their IDs aren't in the system."
"Would they be?" she asked as she crossed over towards one of the secondary command terminals that communicated with the CIC. She might not be at the galaxy map communications terminal, but she might be able to access it and do something about communications. That was her expertise and why she'd been contracted for this job in the first place.
Adams turned and looked at her after reading a message on his terminal. "Please tell me you know how to use a gun. No offense, but I don't want to hand my engine room over to a civilian."
She didn't take any. "Shotgun. Grew up on a farm."
Adams heaved a sigh of relief, while her breath quickened.
Which was how she found herself, two minutes later, with an Alliance grade shotgun from the storage room just off engineering, standing just outside the elevator in the cargo bay with two other Alliance soldiers - not marines, 'cause she'd worked with them in the CIC and both had come from an Alliance Lab based out of New York, but at least they'd gone through basic and maintained their weapons training. And they weren't dead, which was promising.
But the fact that they'd requested another body after a swarm of creatures had nearly overwhelmed the docking ramp didn't bode well. She shoved that thought out of her mind as she monitored the doors on the far side of the hangar, trying not to focus on all the bodies outside the ship. Especially the ones wearing uniforms. People fleeing the building, attempting to make it to the ship only to be run down.
Three minutes later, she'd shot her first demonic creature of the day. Five minutes later she was covered in blood and bits of she didn't even want to know what, eyes hard on the edge of the docking ramp waiting for the Major and the Lieutenant to get their asses aboard the ship so she could do something useful. Standing next to the ramp controls to close the bay ramp as soon as their boots were aboard, which would signal the pilot that they were ready to get the hell out of there.
She still had that idea about communications, but as long as they had to wait for Major Alenko and the Lieutenant, she was stuck in the cargo bay.