Black Widow A Mass Effect Fan Fiction By CmdrSlander
Chapter 2:
The bright surgical light flicked on above her, nearly blinding Tara. She assessed the situation: she was seated, very nearly laying down, in a fully reclined examination chair, a quick attempt to ball her fists, which resulted in no physical movement, indicated that she was chemically immobilized. The room around her was spartan, with brushed metal walls and a spotless white tiled floor, lab coated figures shuffled about, staring at data pads or interacting with the haptic interfaces that seemed to be projected onto almost every flat surface. One of the doctors walked toward her, he had a steaming paper cup of coffee in his hand and was conversing with his assistant while reviewing a data pad intently.
"I was told this subject was special, and flew out to this rock to see for myself, give me the facts." He ordered.
"She has now been in development for approximately 12 weeks, 87% of that time has been spent in the Gen Tank. Physically she is 13 years old." The assistant replied, pulling up a projection of Tara's body on her omnitool.
"Why has she not been fully immersed?"
"We have been pulling her out periodically to assess the efficacy our imprints. Her neural pathways have been forming unique connections, Doctor Harris and I agreed that verbal interaction with the subject was needed to assess viability."
"And the nanomachines?"
"Her system has begun integrating them. We implanted conduits to direct and expedite their movement two weeks ago. Aside from the expected initial rejection, we which corrected for in the Gen Tank, it was seamless."
"What of the telomere alteration? Surely that failed, our facility had to flush all 32 subjects with that modification due to failed synthesis with the selected Alien components."
"We flushed all but this one." The assistant nodded towards Tara."The selected Asari telomeres have bonded properly, though only to a limited extent."
"Life span?" The lead doctor questioned, his bushy eyebrows arched.
"We had to limit bonding to preserve the subject, but we predict 300 years, at minimum."
The pair reached the examination chair.
"May I speak with her?"
"Of course doctor."
The doctor pulled over a stool and sat beside Tara. He looked at her expectantly.
"What is your name?"
Tara spoke politely, with a young, crisp voice. "Whatever name is assigned for the given operation."
"Very good."
"What is your role?"
Tara again spoke, as if reciting from a well memorized script. "Long range interdiction and infiltration, with secondary imprints for close quarters combat."
"Who do you serve?"
"Voss-Koight Biomedical and affiliated firms."
The doctor got up from the stool and shook the assistant's hand. "Superb work, forward all your methodologies to central, this is the breakthrough of the century."
He took a long drink from his paper coffee cup, and was in the process of crumpling it when the flash bang detonated. A System's Alliance ONI officer, flanked by about at least 20 armed marines walked through the newly breached lab door. VK security teams burst through the lab's rear entrance, and did not hesitate to open fire. Several marines fell, their blood glistened particularly red on spotless lab floor. The remaining marines opened fire with their M8s, sending streams of superheated tungsten into the security team. Their numbers thinned rapidly. The doctor, who had just recovered from the flash bang hauled himself up to edge of the the observation chair and drew a small personal defense pistol from his coat pocket. Franticly, he disengaged the safety; at first it looked as if he was going to open fire on the marines, but he turned back to Tara, winced, and unloaded a round into her skull.
Tara woke with a start, she was drenched with cold sweat and teary eyed. The voices echoed around her but could not be understood. Her muscles ached. She dragged herself out of the pilot's chair, taking notice of a button that pulsed steadily yellow on the command console in front of her. She took a deep breath, rubbed her eyes, and pressed the button. Static filled the cabin of the shuttle but soon resolved into a comprehensible message.
"Unidentified Shuttle 3-1, this Omega docking control." (docking was one of the few things actively organized by any central authority on Omega, starship collisions or a "log jam" in the approach vectors was, to say the least, bad for business.)
"Omega DC, this is Shuttle 3-1, requesting a berth."
"Very well, proceed to bay 43 on the lower expansion."
The shuttle VI picked up a data packet containing the exact location of the berth and all docking protocols as soon as the controller finished speaking. It banked the small craft towards the lower docks. Within a few moments it had nestled into a massive bay with scores of larger merchant and mercenary vessels. A docking bridge extended, clamping onto the side of the shuttle. Tara picked up her pilfered Sniper Rifle and pistol, holstering them as she made her way to the airlock. The hatch opened with a loud swoosh, as the air pressure equalized Tara took in Omega's unique and unwelcoming scent: ozone from ionized plasma discharges (the tell tale sign of a recent gun battle), spicy noodles, decay, and unwashed rabble. A Batarian approached the airlock as Tara stepped out, he had a shotgun trained on her chest.
"Docking fee: 205 Credits." He demanded, charging his shotgun.
Tara didn't have a credit to her name, but that wasn't a problem. With a simple thought from Tara, her omnitool flickered to life and fired a mild Neural Shock that dropped the Batarian to the ground in seconds, the alien writhed on the floor, both hands clutching his head in pain, but Tara felt no remorse, despite his current state he would be up and around in a few hours. Plus, under Aria's direction, docking on Omega was free of charge, as this laissez-faire approach brought in more business to her far more lucrative clubs and drug rackets. Therefore, the Batarian was in fact representing little more than a small time shake down operation and not an agent of docking control, which consisted primarily of overworked, stimulant-addled salarians.
Tara proceeded to the transport hub, pushing through mingling hordes of the galaxy's lowliest scum to clear a path. The rusted, abused cab stand had an antiquated capacitive touchscreen that was smeared with fingerprints and more than a little blood. Tara selected "Level 19 - Katian District" and futilely tried to wipe her hands on her jumpsuit before realizing it was almost as dirty. A beaten up air car with a sagging roof and cracked windows sputtered up to the stand, it attempted to open its passenger door to allow Tara to board, but failed to do so, irked, Tara lifted the gull wing door up manually and climbed inside. The air car ascended and joined the swarming traffic that coursed through Omega's dim, smoky thoroughfares, turning tightly around decaying blocks of apartments, most plastered with flickering holographic ad panels displaying a mix of Unified Trade English, Mandarin, Turian, Asari, and Salarian lettering or graphics (with occasional patches of simplistic Elcor and Vorcha markings) .
The air car made a last turn, slowed, and settled like an inebriated baby bird into a parking slot near the top of one of the housings blocks. Tara pushed the broken door open again and stepped out, sending the air car away with a swipe across the haptic interface projected onto its hood. From the parking area she took a rickety elevator up to floor 106 and proceeded down a poorly lit hallway, her hand instinctively moving closer to her holstered pistol as she walked. Finally she reached apartment 601. Tara placed her hand on a scanner next to the door, it beeped a moment later and opened the door.
The Cerberus safe house was a gleaming beacon of cleanliness compared to the rest of Omega. Tara stepped inside, and as soon as the door closed, let herself relax for the first time since stepping off the shuttle. Constructed as a prefab module and then installed in place of an apartment which had been burned by Vorcha gangs, is shared its layout and aesthetics with the highly functional, decently comfortable, Cerberus barracks that were common to all their outposts. It took Tara a moment for her eye's to adjust to the remarkably bright and even white lighting, when they did, she surveyed the room; two Cerberus operatives were sleeping on their bunks, a third was cleaning his Mattock heavy rifle at a small workbench.
"Operative." Tara curtly acknowledged the only other conscious person in the room.
He barely turned to look at her and replied, equally brief, "Contractor" before returning to his work.
The back of the room was lined with ranks of storage lockers, most were unused, Tara selected one and put her weapons inside, closed the door, and locked it with her unique DNA signature - standard Cerberus procedure. She then proceeded to the small room in the back corner that was separated from the main living space by a thin metal partition, it housed the shower. She undressed quickly, pulling off her hideous Purgatory jumpsuit and throwing it into a reclamation bin, watching with reserved glee as it was melted into omnigel and pumped off to be reused somewhere else on Omega. Tara turned on the shower, and stepped into it, she closed her eyes and luxuriated under the stream of hot water - it was her first proper shower in at least a month.
A polite synthesized voice from the shower control panel reminded her that water was rationed all times on Omega, and that her three minutes of daily bathing were almost at an end. Hurriedly she finished washing herself and was done seconds before the water cut off. Fans on the walls of the shower stall blew her dry.
Tara summoned some clothes, an unmarked version of the Cerberus officer's uniform, from the mini-facturing wardrobe's haptic console, it whirred and produced in seconds the desired garb in the correct size, delivering it in a folded, neatly pressed rectangle from the a slot at the base of the wardrobe. She set the clothes aside for the moment and set about fixing her hair, brushing it into a conservative, parted style that was common with female military personnel. As she looked at her reflection, Tara thought that, in 200 years, when nanomachines and the conduits required to host them were common on all but the most indigent people, she may be considered pretty, after all, she had a well proportioned face, with sympathetic green eyes and full lips (all genetically engineered to be attractive of course). For now, however, the nanomachine conduits running down every limb, the pulsing blue nanomachine colonies that inhabited her pupil's and migrated occasionally into her irises, as well as the shifting flecks of blue under her skin (stray nanomachines) were considered freakish and undesirable, especially after Saren's fate had become an open secret. She pushed this useless flight of speculation out of mind and finished getting dressed.
The Quantum Entanglement Communicator pad occupied a small secondary room of the Cerberus safe house, Tara stepped onto it, standing stock still as it scanned her in. Moments later, Tara found herself in The Illusive Man's lair via telepresence. The Illusive Man was sitting in his trademark chair facing the boiling sun, Tara heard the telltale clink of ice cubes against crystal as he lifted his glass to his lips and drank. Emptying his glass, he turned the entire chair to face Tara.
"Contractor Voss, I am glad to see you survived the incident aboard the Purgatory." He began.
"Your doing, I assume." Tara replied.
"One of our cells was involved, yes." The Illusive Man reached into his jacket and extracted a cigarette case, with a thoughtful look he removed one of the slender white and green cigarettes, lit it, and began to smoke.
"Should I be flattered?"
"No, I am afraid your recovery was not an objective. You are valuable, but replaceable." He took a long drag from his cigarette.
"No surprise. I believe your exact words were: 'Due to stability issues, Contractor Voss is no longer an asset to Cerberus operations.' Also, firing me with an extranet message, an extranet message written in the third person no less, most unkind, Harper." Tara's voice remained even in volume, but grew increasingly annoyed.
"You know I do not like that name."
"And I do not like being hung out to dry by the same fellow who called me his "personal angel of death" no more than two weeks before. Empirical evidence suggests what we like is immaterial to what occurs." Tara's clinical vocabulary and cool voice masked a serious desire to personally fling The Illusive Man into the gravity well of the dying star he was so fond of - but not before taking one of his ridiculous synthetic eyes as a trophy. He knew nothing of true biosynthetic fusion…
"You do realize, Miss Voss, that you are only standing in my safe house at this very moment - the only non-current contractor ever to do so - because I value your unique skill set. I do not wish to make an enemy of you."
"Very well, you can start by giving me my job back. The Suns cleared out my credit account and Omega is not a friendly place to a poor girl, much less so to one with my, shall we say, aesthetic disadvantage." Tara motioned towards the nanomachine conduit on her right arm, which was pulsing enough to be seen through her uniform.
"I'm afraid that is impossible at the time. The majority of our funds have been directed to an operation that I cannot discuss at any meaningful length with you, and it takes precedent over all other endeavors. I know how to contact you if a contract more suited to your abilities becomes available. You may stay in this safe house as long as is required, unless I deem you to be abusing the privilege."
"What am I supposed to do then?" She asked, almost rhetorically, Tara had expected rejection and begun formulating alternate plans as The Illusive Man droned.
"You were engineered to adaptive and clever." He switched now to thinly veiled sarcasm. "So, if you want my advice, assess the situation, adapt, and be clever about it." The Illusive Man smirked in a self congratulatory fashion, having uttered what he perceived to be a witty repartee and a brutal dashing of Tara's hopes all in a concise sentence. "Thank you, do not contact me again."
The QEC channel closed and Tara found herself back in the tiny, closet-like comm room.
Tara strode out of the comm room , cleared her armaments out of the Cerberus locker, and headed for the exit.
