Chapter Two
Rise
I'm gonna wake up, yes and no
I'm gonna kiss some part of
I'm gonna keep this secret
I'm gonna close my body now
Madonna: "Die Another Day"
Two Years Later
Time can be funny when one is drifting in and out of the world, dreams and visions become reality. Kate Beckett wasn't sure when the blackness she'd drifted into after she'd been thrown clear of the Normandy wreckage and her air ran out had begun to release its grip. The blackness was still there, but had become punctuated by half-heard voices antiseptic smells and the feeling of being weighed down, a dull throb in her chest where some part of her was sure pain should be. But her eyes opened and though hazy, her vision began to clear.
"Miranda," a woman's voice stated from out of her field of vision, "she's reacting to outside stimuli, showing awareness of her surroundings, she's waking up."
Suddenly a woman's face appeared in her field of vision, red hair tied back in a severe bun, eyes cold as ice, before a second woman dark haired, equally severe but her pale blue eyes radiated something more compassionate.
"Dammit, Nieman, she isn't ready yet," the dark haired woman snapped, clearly in charge of the situation,"give her the sedative!"
The dark-haired woman gently clasped the hand Kate managed to work free and tried to calm the flight or fight response taking hold as her heart-rate climbed. Kate had heard the word "sedative" though and struggled even harder to free herself from the rest of the medical restraints.
"Captain Beckett, don't try to move," the dark haired woman soothed, trying to keep eye contact with her "just lie still, try to stay calm."
"No!" a voice in the back of Kate's head commanded, "you have to get up! You have to get free, have to find Castle!" She continued to fight and struggle in barely controlled panic, but she couldn't seem to move, her arms and legs responded like lead weights encased in putty... useless... sending her spiraling further.
"Heart rate still climbing," the redhead - Dr. Nieman, she thought she'd heard the dark haired woman... Miranda… call her - stated coldly, "brain activity is off the charts."
"Captain Beckett," Miranda continued to soothe, "you're safe here, please try to stay calm, everything will be all right."
"Stats pushing into the red zone," Dr. Nieman reported, "it's not working!"
"Another dose," the dark haired woman... Miranda ...yes that was her name... commanded. "Now."
Suddenly the warm feeling of "the good drugs" flooded Kate's bloodstream and took the edge off her fear, her vision began to gray out and a soft, comforting haze slowly fell over everything.
"Heart-rate dropping, stats falling back into the normal range." Nieman echoed softly as Kate began to drift out. "That was too close, we almost lost her."
"I told you your estimates were off," Miranda snapped. "Run the numbers again."
The last thing Kate saw before the gray haze once again gave way to the black was Miranda's face, her pale blue eyes radiating calm. Reminding her of the blue eyes of her husband as she slipped away, a soft smile on her lips as more pleasant memories of his touch drifted up to greet her.
Sixteen Days Later
"Captain Beckett, wake up!" a familiar sounding voice shouted over a speaker, followed by a rumble that sounded like thunder which shook and rattled instruments on the table nearby.
"Captain Beckett, do you hear me?" the woman's voice asked. "I need you to get out of that bed, you're in grave danger!"
The room shook again forcing Kate to slowly shake off the cobwebs and and sat up.
"Captain, your scars aren't fully healed, but I need you to get moving!" the voice urged again. "This facility is under attack!"
When those words hit Kate's ears, she tugged the IV needle out of her arm and groaned as she rose from the hospital bed in her bare feet and set of clean hospital scrubs. For the first time hearing automatic and heavy weapons fire, the rumble of explosions and the screams of wounded and dying people. It didn't take long for the fog to lift and her instincts to kick in. Her first thought was that she couldn't walk in what amounted to pajamas.
"There are clothes and a pistol in the locker on the other side of the room," the voice urged, apparently as aware of her needs as Kate was. "Hurry!"
Kate swung her head to the right and left until she spied the locker in question in the far corner from her bedside and padded in her bare feet to it, finding the promised clothing and pistol as well as a complete set of N-7 grade tactical armor. She looked warily around again, not sure she wanted to see the scars the voice had warned her about.
"You don't have time to wait around, Captain!" the voice admonished in her ear, galvanizing her into action as she stripped off the scrubs and put on undergarments followed swiftly by the military style uniform tailored to fit her, but colored black with orange trim instead of Alliance blue and white. Once fully dressed, she slipped into a pair of boots with a sturdy four inch heel – she'd been unaware it was even possible for such boots to be rated for all environment combat gear - and put on the combat hard-suit, testing the fit and checking her joints for freedom of movement. Last but certainly not least she checked the pistol, a Carnifax hand cannon dialed in to her preferred specifications. Whomever her mysterious benefactors were, they'd certainly done their homework.
"This pistol doesn't have a thermal clip," Kate noted out loud, feeling a bit strange speaking to a disembodied voice.
"There's an arms locker just outside med bay," the voice replied, then the sound of weapons fire. "Damn it!"
"Somebody's hacked the security mechs trying to kill you." the woman explained. "You need to get to that arms locker and get a thermal clip for your weapon."
Kate moved quickly and quietly through the door out of med bay and spied the arms locker. With a touch of her hand the door opened, clearly keyed to her biometrics. All of the weapons were gone, but she grabbed a pouch of thermal clips and affixed it to her belt then grabbed a loose one from the locker and slapped it home in her pistol. For the first time since waking up to this nightmare she felt better now that she was at least able to respond with more than course language should anything hostile cross her path.
Lazarus Station
Security Server Room B
Dr. Kelly Nieman sat at the terminal in the locked server room. Her security level as the Stations Chief of Medicine for Project Lazarus granted her full access to all systems. With the project nearing completion as an unqualified success, she felt it was time she collect the payment she was due. She had kept very careful, precise notes on every aspect of the project to bring Captain Kate Beckett back from the dead. The project had gone over budget twice in the last two years, but The Illusive man behind Cerberus had simply transferred more credits.
She had been careful to keep her connection to one of the most prolific serial killers in the twenty second century out of any and all records, which was quite the feat in modern society, though much easier since he had spent much of the last decade in suspended animation at a very upscale hospital on Elysium under the pseudonym Michael Boudreau.
With the careful notes she'd kept on the project – not to mention samples of Captain Beckett's DNA taken before and after each phase of the project - and the right laboratory setup, she was certain she could streamline the process for a more limited budget. It would help that his body was not nearly as heavily damaged as Beckett's was. Soon, her lover could be brought back from the brink of death. His body had been kept in all this time by the most modern techniques available to medical science, but soon he would be free to live and kill again.
She would have her lover restored to her and as an added bonus take revenge on the woman who'd shot him back on earth and left him for dead, her husband left to suffer, wallowing in his guilt that he couldn't save her. She took pleasure in the near perfect symmetry of it all. It was a shame really, Kate Beckett had a truly lovely face, such perfect cheekbones and nearly flawless skin, much like her genetically perfect benefactor.
Genetically, Miranda Lawson had been engineered to flawless perfection, but she, too was becoming a vexingly burdensome problem, one that would have to be dealt with. As much of a shame she thought it would be to destroy such a perfect example of human engineering perfection, Nieman could not allow Miranda to foil her plans by saving Beckett. This station and everyone on it needed to disappear, - preferably from a reactor core breach - to destroy any evidence of her betrayal and keep Cerberus from discovering her machinations. To that end, she disabled the station's primary communications array, jammed the internal comms and sent the bulk of the heavy YMR security mechs to D-wing to finish off Director Lawson. There could be only one "Lazarus" and she was determined that it would be Jerry Tyson.
It hadn't taken long for Kate to run into the errant security mechs Miranda had warned her about, a squad of the humanoid appearing LOKI class sentry mechs turned in her direction and immediately opened fire on her. She fired a quick burst with her pistol as she dove for cover, hitting one squarely on its forehead cowling - blowing its head apart - and destroying the gun hand of another.
"Allied force casualty," one of the other mechs stated in a cold mechanical tone, "additional units..."
Kate popped up from cover and hit it with a five round burst before it could finish the query, feeling a significant level of satisfaction when its head promptly exploded.
"Please reconsider your aggressive actions," the next mech's prerecorded statement declared as the remaining four mechs opened up on her with heavy pistol and sub-machine gun fire.
"Captain Beckett," Miranda offered over the comms, "we noted your untapped biotic potential while reconstructing your neural pathways and made the needed modifications to enhance that potential, granting you limited biotic abilities. Concentrate on the nearest mech and sweep with your left hand."
Kate did as instructed and swept her left hand and was rewarded when the nearest mech was lifted from the deck and sent crashing into two of the others. She dispatched the fourth with a quick burst then put a few rounds into the other three just to be sure and took stock of her handiwork as she swapped out her overheated thermal clip for a fresh one.
"Nice work Captain, the coast is clear for now," Miranda stated into her headset. "But don't waste too much time patting yourself on the back, there's reinforcements on the way and I can't keep the heavy mechs distracted for long. Take the elevator down one floor and follow the yellow arrows, they will lead you to the shuttle bay on the other side of the station."
Kate took the open carriage freight elevator down a level and followed the yellow arrows on the floor as indicated, horrified at the number of dead bodies she passed along the way. Most of them were unarmed, a few clearly still dressed for bed or for an exercise run. Many of them shot in either the head or chest with small arms, and though a few were contorted by the effects of exploding heavy rounds in a confined space.
"Your doing... Captain... Head to the... meet you..." Miranda's voice cut in and out as the comms began breaking up and her words became increasingly lost in static, "Beckett, can... read me? I've got... closing in... position..."
The last thing Kate heard from Miranda's end before the comms went down completely was the sound of heavy weapons fire.
Miranda Lawson was supremely pissed off.
Somebody with top level security clearance on Lazarus Station was trying to sabotage her project, the most ambitious undertaking The Illusive Man had ever asked of her and she had a pretty good idea whom that might be. Dr. Nieman was the only person on the station whom she hadn't vetted personally who both had the clearance to the station's computer servers server and had enough access to Project Lazarus to know how close they were to completion. She'd be damned if she was gonna let that creepy, squirrelly bottle redheaded bitch destroy two years of hard work.
Miranda hit the lead YMR mech with overload to take down its barriers then lifted it completely off the deck with her biotics to send it crashing into the other three as if they were bowling pins - reminiscent of what she'd walked Beckett through only minutes before, but on a much larger scale.
She brought up her M-4 Shuriken Machine Pistol and pumped a full burst into the head of the YMR she'd sent flying as it began to right itself, causing it to explode. The subsequent systems overload triggered the detonation of its mass effect core, reducing it and the three others it was still tangled with into twisted scrap metal.
Miranda Lawson might look like a cross between an exotic dancer and a teenage boy's juvenile fantasy of a science fiction heroine, but she was a highly intelligent, dangerous woman to cross. Kelly Nieman had no idea whom she was messing with. She swore to herself that even if she had to personally dismantle every mech between between D wing and the shuttle bay by hand, she was damned well getting herself and Captain Beckett off this station alive.
Should she happen to run into Dr. Kelly Nieman on the way and time permitted, she'd make it a point to tear out her errant chief medical officer's spine and beat her to death with it.
Kate Beckett moved quickly and quietly through the empty corridor passing more dead bodies along the way. Clearly the mechs were employing a corridor by corridor grid grid search and had recently passed through this way. She could hear the sounds of small arms and heavy weapons fire in the nearby corridors. The screams of the injured and the silence of the dead.
The arrows she was following had led her down two stairwells and several access corridors until she reached her current location. In the next room, she could hear small arms fire as well as angry, panicked shouts.
"Dammit! I wasn't trained for this!" Vikram Singh swore, breaking cover to fire wildly before taking cover again. 'Sign on with Cerberus,' she said, 'it'll be great,' she said. Put all that computer and tech knowledge of yours to work and pay off all those student loans at the same time. Miranda sure as hell never said anything about this!"
He activated his omni-tool and targeted the nearest two mechs with an EMP pulse, fusing the systems of one and scrambling the targeting subroutines of the other. Vikram keyed another sequence on his omni-tool to release a nano-virus that hacked into the damaged mech and realigned its friend or foe acknowledgment system. The targeted mech turned and opened fire on its fellow mechs, taking out two more before it suffered catastrophic system overload and exploded.
"Yes!" he hissed to himself, Kate was certain that a fist pump likely took place, though she couldn't get a good look at the man from her position in the doorway before another spray of automatic weapons fire spattered his hiding place, eliciting another muttered curse.
Kate opened fire, knocking out the last two remaining mechs harassing the beleaguered computer tech.
"Captain Beckett?" Vikram choked out when the firing stopped. "What are you doing here? Miranda said you were still a work in progress."
"Look, pal, I don't know where I am or how I got here, plus my head feels like an overripe melon ready to split open. How about you fill me in a little?"
"Damn," Vikram muttered, "things must be worse than I thought if Miranda's got you running around. This must be all new to you. Sorry about that. Name's Vikram Singh, computer systems analyst. I'll fill you in as best I can, but we should probably get to the shuttle bay evac point first."
"I know this might not be the best time," Kate snapped, "but I'm tired of stumbling around when I don't know what's going on."
"Fair enough," Vikram shrugged, "I'll give you the quick version. Your ship was attacked and destroyed. You were killed. Dead as dead can be when they brought you here. Miranda's team of scientists spent the last two years putting you back together. You've been comatose or worse the entire time. Welcome back to your life."
"This doesn't look like an Alliance facility." Kate asked, a little dumbstruck.
"It isn't," Vikram replied, "I'm not sure if I'm allowed to say much more than that for now. The Alliance officially declared you killed in action. The whole galaxy thinks you're dead. If we don't get to the shuttle bay they may end up being right."
"Were there any other survivors from the Normandy?" Kate asked, her eyes pleading, though Vikram seemed oblivious to the name she was really fishing for. He took in a breath to answer her, but was interrupted when the door at the opposite end of the corridor snapped open and a squad of mechs walked in.
"Hostile forces detected," the lead mech's prerecorded statement declared coldly before they opened fire, sending Vikram and Kate ducking for cover yet again.
"Tell you what?," Vikram offered snarkily. "You get us clear of these mechs and I'll play twenty questions with you all the way to the shuttle bay."
Without skipping a beat, Kate nodded and with barely a glance in the mechs' direction, opened fire with her pistol, critically disabling the first mech in line then sweeping the second aside with her newly discovered biotic powers, sending it crashing into the others then slammed them all into the nearest wall, where they promptly exploded, leaving shattered mech parts scattered about the deck.
"Sounds like the best offer I've had in the last couple hours," Kate quipped.
"Show off," Vikram replied, earning an eye roll from Kate. "Okay, I promised to answer your questions. What do you want to know?"
"The last thing I remember was the Normandy breaking up," Kate said, but she wasn't about to tell this stranger that the very last thing she recalled was Castle telling her he loved her... twice. That was personal and none of this fucking new guy's business, but she had to know that Castle survived. "Did anyone else make it?"
"Just about everybody," Vikram replied, "XO Pressly and the low watch were killed either in the first salvo or when the CIC was hulled. A few of the servicemen in the lower levels didn't get out. Other than that, everyone else, including the non-alliance crew members, survived."
Though Kate silently mourned for her XO, and the members of her crew who'd perished, it eased her mind a little that Castle and her alien volunteers had made it out alive. Though she kept her true feelings well hidden, inside she felt like crying. As long as Castle was still alive there was a chance to make things right.
"Do you..." Kate breathed, then stopped and started again. "Do you know what any of them are doing now?" She wanted to ask about her husband by name, but she was afraid of what he might tell her. For the last two years she had been... dead. Had he mourned her and moved on? Had he fallen victim to the same demons that had taken her father from her too after her mother died? What about his daughter? She choked those questions back because she wasn't sure she could handle what the answers to them might be.
"I don't know, Captain," Vikram replied, "It's been two years. Most of the crew were reassigned and moved on. The aliens left Alliance service and your husband dropped completely off the grid shortly after returning to duty a year and a half ago. They could be anywhere."
"They were my team," Kate implored, "if they know I'm alive, they'll come back."
"Maybe you can track them down after we get off this station," Vikram replied, then his voice got quiet, "if we get off the station."
"You said they spent two years rebuilding me." Kate asked. "Exactly how bad were my injuries?"
"I'm no doctor, but it was really bad," Vikram shuddered a little at the thought. "First time I saw you, you were little more than meat and tubes in a cryo tube. Anywhere else, they would have shipped you home in a flag draped coffin and informed your next of kin, but Project Lazarus was different. Cutting edge technology."
"What can you tell me about the project?" Kate asked, "Were there any other test subjects?"
"Project Lazarus had only one subject," Vikram replied. "Just you. That alone was a major challenge. The best scientists and the best technology money could buy... and believe me, this project was incredibly well-funded."
"What do you mean?' Kate choked out incredulously, doing her best to take in the scope of the effort to bring her back. "Cloning? Cybernetics?"
"I don't know the details," Vikram offered, "you'd have to ask Miranda, or Doc Nieman, but I'm pretty sure you're not a clone. They wanted to bring you back exactly as you were. You're still... you... but you might have a few extra bits and pieces now."
"When I first woke up," Kate said, "somebody who called herself Miranda... was talking to me over the comms, we got cut off right before I ran into you."
"That would be Miranda Lawson, the station's ranking officer," Vikram responded. "She's the team lead for Project Lazarus. I'm not surprised she tried to save you, it was her job to bring you back to life, no matter what and when she's given a job to do, she doesn't back down until she finishes it. She's spent the last two years putting you back together. she wasn't about to give up on you now."
"Do you know anything about this attack?" Kate asked, burying her feelings deep as she began interrogating Vikram in earnest. "Who's behind it or what they're after?"
She didn't know a damn thing about Vikram Singh - even less about Miranda or Doctor Nieman. She certainly wasn't sure she could trust any of them. There was a swirl of contradictions swirling around Vikram and this attack. He'd demonstrated enough advanced technical skill to hack the mechs, though he didn't seem quite incompetent enough to get caught in the backlash of this mess if he'd been the one to set it off. As a trained investigator, she could tell that his body language was off. There was something he wasn't telling her, something he was holding back.
"Damned if I know," Vikram replied, suddenly distinctly uncomfortable at being put to the question under Kate's direct scrutiny. "I was on my way to my quarters after collating the biometric data from your most recent scans... then BAM everything started going to hell. Every security mech went active and started shooting! I'm no soldier, this was the first time I'd fired a gun outside of the practice range."
"And?" Kate prompted.
"If I had to guess," Vikram replied with a shrug, "it had to be an inside job. Whoever did this would need top level security clearance to access the secure server and re-write the friend or foe designation software on all of the mechs. I would know, I wrote most of those subroutines, did my damnedest to make them hard to crack. Didn't expect to have my own handiwork turned on me though."
"What's the quickest way to those shuttles?" Kate asked, her voice softening a little.
"That depends on where the mechs are, but we..." Vikram began, but was cut off by the comms.
"Hello... is there anyone on this frequency?" a woman's voice interrupted, one Kate found vaguely familiar. "Is anyone still alive out there?"
"Doctor Nieman?" Vikram replied over the comms, "It's Vikram, I'm just outside D wing with Captain Beckett."
"Beckett's alive? How the hell..." The voice muttered, to Kate's ears almost sounding disappointed at that prospect, but she hoped it was just her imagination or the stress of the current situation. "Never mind, I'm in the network control room and I need your help."
"Understood, Doctor," Vikram replied, "Stay on this frequency, we'll circle back to you."
"Lets get the doctor and get out of here," Kate ordered, waving Vikram forward.
"Come on," Vikram pointed in the opposite direction toward a side corridor, "the service tunnels are through here."
Kate took point, and with Vikram giving her directions they wound their way through the service tunnels. All seemed quiet... until they were jumped by a squad of Loki mechs who had had them caught in an intersection, pouring down fire from two side tunnels.
"Dammit, Doc, this section is crawling with mechs!" Vikram shouted.
"The whole station is crawling with mechs," Dr Nieman's voice replied coldly, "I'm doing the best I can."
"Find us another way to you, Doctor," Vikram shot back tartly, "preferably one that doesn't lead us directly into an enemy squad!"
"Just keep moving toward the control room," Nieman ordered. "Don't get pinned down, I'll see what I can do."
"Shit, shit shit," Nieman thought to herself as the terminal she was working on spat out a shower of sparks and went dark- likely a Cerberus security measure to prevent unauthorized access with the station on alert. She'd tried to reset the mech IFF system to list herself as a non-combatant after setting that squad of mechs after Beckett and Vikram, but with the secure terminal fried she was unable to get back into the system. An unfortunate turn of events which left all of the station's mechs irreversibly locked in autonomous mode and all humans on the station- herself included - tagged as hostile alien boarders with lethal force authorized. A Cerberus contingency plan she'd used to her advantage after a little careful reprogramming to swap asari DNA for human in the mech sensor packages.
She'd planned to ride out the carnage in the secure server room then issue the stand down command when the rest of the crew was dead. Afterward, she'd have had more than enough time to set the self destruct and escape in a shuttle. With that plan blown to hell, she found herself temporarily in need of Vikram's hacking skills and moderately higher security clearance in order to get to the emergency evac area and off the station before Cerberus dispatched a ship to investigate the lack of updates. As soon as they were clear of the station, she would, of course, have to arrange for a convenient "accident" for him and apparently the now fully resurrected Captain Beckett as well.
She really didn't like having to think on her feet, being more of a wheels within wheels sort of girl herself, but desperate times bred desperate measures. For Jerry Tyson to live, Katherine Beckett must die.
She almost didn't see the lone Loki mech as it stepped into the room behind her.
It was a swift, dirty fight in the tunnel, but they used the mechs' lack of self preservation programming, not to mention available cover to their advantage and she counterattacked with a ferocity Vikram had never witnessed before.
Kate used her newly discovered biotic skills to great effect, growing more confident with every mech she lifted off the deck and smashed into the floor, or other mechs behind them. Castle was alive. It gave her something to fight for, which made her brave. The mechs never stood a chance.
Kate barely had the opportunity to look over her handiwork when the moment was broken by the comms.
"Vikram, I need your help..." Dr. Nieman groaned through gritted teeth in Kate's subdermal communicator. "... the mechs... they found me."
"Where are you Doctor?" Kate asked, not waiting for Vikram to reply,
"Server room B," Nieman groaned in reply, "I got it... I think... just hurry."
"Up those stairs, Captain, "Vikram pointed up the corridor to a stairwell at Kate's arched eyebrow, "turn left first door on the left."
After charging up the stairs, pistol at the ready, Kate swept carefully around the corner. She stepped as carefully around the bodies sprawled in the corridor being as respectful as she could under the circumstances. Even under casual inspection it was clear that two of the bodies nearest the door lacked gunshot wounds. She stopped only briefly to kneel and brush her fingers on each of their necks before moving to the door marked "Server Room B" in block letters.
Kate nodded at Vikram, motioning him to take cover on the opposite side of the door and motioned for him to wait there before keying the door. With military precision, Kate swept the room to find a single mech crawling across the floor toward the primary terminal. She put two rounds into its head and continued her sweep. When she checked behind the terminal, she found Dr. Nieman behind the desk, tending to a bullet wound in her thigh.
The Doctor looked up at her with the coldest hazel eyes she had ever laid eyes on as she kept pressure on her wound. As if the woman were looking right through her.
"I recognize you," Kate muttered. "You were there the first time I regained consciousness."
"Yes," Nieman replied, her voice clear betraying nothing. "That was me. How about we save the knitting circle for after we fix my leg?"
When Kate nodded in reply, the doctor pointed across the room.
"I scanned it with my omni-tool, it's a clean through and through," Nieman stated with more clinical detachment than Kate thought even a doctor would have after being shot in the meaty part of the thigh. "There's medi-gel in the first aid kit on the wall."
Kate retrieved the medical kit and handed it to Nieman who applied the biogenic first aid gel and used her omni-tool to generate the ultrasound frequency to activate it. Almost instantly, the gel formed a seal to the wound, applying not only direct pressure to cut off blood loss, but also regenerate both blood vessels and muscle tissue. Within moments of application and activation, Dr. Nieman was tottering to her feet.
"What are you doing here, Doctor?" Kate asked, as if they were sitting across from each other in an interrogation room. "Shouldn't you have tried to get to the evac point?"
"I was trying to do just that, but I was cut off," Nieman replied with out batting an eyelash, or betraying any hint of emotion. "I took cover in here, and tried to access the system to shut down the mechs, but whomever did this fried the entire system rendering their tampering completely irreversible."
"Right now, it doesn't matter who set up whom," Kate replied. "Those mechs are shooting at all of us, we'll sort it out once we're on a shuttle and far away from here."
"We need to find Miranda first," Vikram stated, "we can't just leave her behind."
"Forget about Miranda," Nieman interjected before Kate could say anything, "she was over in D wing. The heavy mechs were all over that sector, there's no way she could have survived."
"It'd take a lot more than a few YMR mechs to drop Miranda," Vikram shot back. "If anyone could make it out of there, it's her."
"Then where is she?" Nieman retorted coldly. "Why haven't we heard from her? I can only see two possibilities, she's either dead, or she's a traitor."
"Then why did she wake me up and warn me about the attack?" Kate replied, already not liking this woman one bit. Something about Kelly Nieman made her skin crawl and the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. It was clear to her the doctor had something to hide.
"Perhaps not, but that doesn't change the facts," Nieman responded coldly. "We're here and she isn't. We need to save ourselves. This project's only goal was to bring you back so we have to get you to one of those shuttles. Miranda would not want us jeopardizing two years of work bringing you back for any one person, not ever her. Is that not correct, Mr. Singh?"
Vikram nodded grudgingly. He had the greatest respect for Miranda Lawson, hero worship mixed with just a little bit of a crush on her. They'd worked together on and off for years, even before she convinced him to officially sign on to the project as lead computer tech and systems analyst. He was no soldier, nor was he a hero like Captain Beckett, but the thought of leaving her to the mechs' tender mercies twisted in his guts. Unfortunately, he knew that Dr. Nieman was right. She'd be pissed if he let the last two years of work go down the drain on her account.
Kate waved them forward, stopping only to pry open the weapon locker near the door, to find two M-8 Avenger assault rifles. She pulled one from the charger and checked the action before inserting a thermal clip. It never hurt to have a little more firepower.
Vikram caught the suspicious glances Kate was shooting not just doctor Nieman, but himself as well.
"Beckett, if I tell you who we work for, will you trust me?" Vikram asked.
"This really isn't the time, Vikram," Nieman warned.
"We're not gonna make it very far if she loses focus because she's expecting a shot in the back," Vikram replied.
"If you want to piss off the powers that be," Nieman shot back icily, "it's your funeral."
"The Lazarus project and this station," Vikram choked out, "it's funded and controlled by Cerberus."
"That name sounds familiar," Kate replied, her mind scanning back to intelligence briefings she'd had prior to her posting on the Normandy. "Some kind of pro human splinter group, right?"
"That's what the Alliance wants people to believe, but there's more to it." Vikram replied. "The Alliance declared you dead and washed their hands of you, but Cerberus agrees that something needs to be done about the Reaper threat, while they're still out there, not pouring through the relays to wipe us out. It's why they spent a fortune to bring you back. To be honest, I'd be suspicious too, considering their past history, but we have to work together if we want to get out of here alive and I thought you deserved to know where you stood. Once we're off this station we'll take you to see the Illusive Man. He'll explain everything, answer all your questions. I swear."
"The Illusive Man?" Kate asked incredulously, the name sounded like the sort of code name Rick would use in one of his Derrick Storm novels.
"That's not his real name, of course," Nieman added derisively. "Nobody knows who he really is."
"It's a code name the Alliance used for him," Vikram added, "it kinda stuck."
"I don't care what his name is, as long as he answers my questions, all of them."
Once they had Dr. Nieman able to walk well enough to keep up, they once again started for the shuttle bay. The corridors were strangely silent as they backtracked to the main corridor. Too quiet. At a raised eyebrow from Kate, Vikram shrugged. He'd programmed the mechs with basic military tactical doctrine. Up until Beckett had awakened they been met with little more than token resistance. None of the minimal security staff had been prepared for their own mechs to turn on them and start shooting.
"They may have fallen back to consolidate a defensive position around what they perceive our objectives to be. If they see us as an invading force, taking the shuttle bays would be a primary objective. We should expect resistance when we get there."
"All right," Kate ordered. "Find someplace to hole up near the shuttle bay and I'll see about thinning the herd."
With Vikram and Dr. Nieman securely hidden in the cargo bay office, Kate turned her full attention to the primary evacuation area, which was crawling with Loki mechs. She wasted no time opening fire with her assault rifle, coming on hard and not giving the mechs time to coordinate their defense. Her entry point through the cargo bay provided her with the ample cover of both load lift machinery and cargo crates – which also served as makeshift biotically launched projectiles to deal with more concentrated groupings of the mechs. The fight was over relatively quickly, followed by a comm to Vikram which brought him and Dr. Nieman running. The latter of whom swept straight for the access door to the shuttle bay evacuation point.
"Follow me," Dr. Nieman stated with little preamble, "we're almost at the..."
She was stopped fully in her tracks when the door cycled open to reveal Miranda Lawson, her genetically perfect form marred only by a few cuts scrapes and burns, her crystal blue eyes glaring with seething anger.
"Miranda, but you were..." Dr. Nieman began but was cut off again, this time by a gunshot as Miranda brought up her pistol and shot the woman between the eyes.
"Dead?" Miranda continued contemptuously as a pool of blood began to spread around Kelly Neiman's body lying face up on the deck. Kate snapped her own gun up and trained it on her.
"What the hell are you doing?!" Vikram exclaimed, cutting Kate off before she could say anything.
"My job," Miranda replied coldly as she put her gun away, "Dr. Nieman betrayed us all."
"I had a bad feeling about her this whole time," Kate agreed as she very slowly lowered her own weapon, but not taking her eyes off of Miranda for a second, "like she was just waiting for a chance to shoot me in the back."
"Good instincts," Miranda replied, her voice softening only a fraction as she rolled her eyes at Vikram. "Some people are far too trusting to ever see that coming."
"Why didn't you take her alive," Kate asked testily, "see what she knew?"
"Too risky," Miranda replied, "I've put too much time and effort into bringing you back to life to let you get killed now."
"You really think Dr. Nieman was capable of that?" Vikram asked. It was clear that he'd begun to like her. '
She really must have poured on the charm on him,' Miranda thought to herself.
"Not anymore," Miranda stated with cold finality, sparing only a single glance down at Kelly Nieman's rapidly cooling body on the deck just inches from the toe of her shoe.
"Convenient that you show up as we're leaving," Kate snarked at her. "Where were you during the attack?"
"Besides trying to save your life?" Miranda snarked right back at her. "Nieman figured out I was helping you and sent an army of mechs to take me out. I got here as soon as I could... probably a little too soon if you could ask her."
Miranda nodded toward a row of UT-47 Kodiak Shuttles - all painted with an identical white on black color scheme with orange trim - making her intended destination for them clear.
"Come on, let's grab one of those shuttles and get out of here, my employer has been waiting for two years to speak to you."
"You mean the Illusive Man?" Kate challenged. "I know you work for Cerberus."
"Ah, Vikram," Miranda replied, her eyes tracking in his direction before returning to Kate, seemingly unruffled. Kate's attempt to shock the woman clearly had not gotten the desired result. "I should have known your conscience, or maybe your wandering eye, would get the better of you."
"Lying to Captain Beckett isn't exactly the best way to get her to work with us," Vikram shot back.
"Well, since we're getting everything out in the open," Miranda sighed leveling another eye-roll at Vikram, before again turning to address Kate, "is there anything else you want to ask before we go, Captain?"
"You're the Lazarus Project's director, aren't you?" Kate asked.
"That's right," Miranda replied without a hint of boastfulness in her tone, "I put two years of my life into this project... and into you."
"What does Cerberus want with me?" Kate asked.
"Maybe you should ask the Illusive Man when you meet him," Miranda replied. "He poured virtually unlimited resources into Lazarus. Obviously he has some sort of plan for you."
"What about the rest of the people on this station?" Kate asked.
"This is the evac area," Miranda replied coldly. "If they're not here by now, they're not coming."
"We can't just leave. Not without knowing for sure," Kate challenged, she hadn't abandoned the Normandy until she was sure all of the crew was off, and she couldn't in good conscience to less for these people, in spite of whom they worked for. "We need to go back and look."
"Don't you get it?" Miranda shot back, "The only one here worth saving is you, everyone else knew they were expendable when they signed on."
"Hey!" Vikram complained, but once he made eye contact with Miranda, his expression sobered with a sigh. "But she's right, we all knew the risks when we signed on. Without you this whole project was a waste of time and all these people died for nothing."
"Where are we going?" came the next question.
"Another Cerberus facility, the Illusive Man is waiting for you there."
"I've had enough of this station to last a lifetime" Kate replied.
Kate had been kidnapped back when she was an NYPD detective, sucked back into Vice to do an undercover drug buy, but even that wasn't as strange a twist of events as this one. If Miranda and Vikram were telling the truth, this began with more a theft of her corpse than kidnapping. Just like back then, she figured she'd better play along until she was in a better place to make good her escape back to Alliance space. She needed answers and only this Illusive man seemed to have them, something she was certain that Miranda Lawson was not happy about.
At least she wouldn't be spending the trip to see their boss bound hand and foot in the back of a truck only to be pawed over by an overeager bodyguard like last time. She also hoped it wouldn't end with her in a cold basement being shoved face-first into a vat of ice water either.
"Or two in your case," Miranda replied. "Come on."
Meanwhile
On the fringes of Council Space
A small ship floated in the darkness of space.
Though she had begun her life as the Gallipoli class troop transport SSV Nemesis, which had seen service in the First Contact War. Her original mass effect drive core, aft cargo and troop transport pods had been removed and she'd been retrofitted with a small scale trial version of the Tantalus drive core, then later the heat emissions sinks as an early proof of concept trial for the IES stealth system. Once the tests had been completed, she'd been scheduled for demolition, but had disappeared under mysterious circumstances.
Her IFF transponder currently had her listed as ISV Serenity, captained by a man named Malcolm Reynolds. One of Lt. Commander Richard Castle's more colorful cover identities as Councilor Montgomery's agent to quietly gather intelligence on the Reaper threat, a pursuit he could not officially engage in under the current political climate. Not since the council had officially disavowed the Reapers' very existence in the wake of Captain Beckett's death.
Though Serenity was barely half the size of SSV Normandy and her heat sinks could only hold for twelve hours without cooking her small crew alive, she was the perfect ship to move quietly through both Citadel Space and the Terminus systems to poke around not only documented Prothean dig sites but to seek out some of the lesser known ones as well. Preferably without anyone being the wiser.
Though the AI known as Vigil had been completely been wiped out when power to its "blue box" had been cut off, when powered up, the original VI interface with the same name very pleasantly collated all collected data remaining in the former AI's archives about the reaper invasion - then subsequent destruction - of the Prothean Empire as well as the locations of previously unknown Prothean data caches, which Castle went on to visit.
His unique ability to interface with Prothean biotechnology via the Cipher - simply by touching things he found where they had been - had been invaluable, but it drained him. The rest of the small crew saw little of him for days after visiting a Prothean site – not that he'd been very good company when he did turn up - and they were surprised by his sudden appearance on Serenity's compact bridge.
"Zaeed Massani received a ping recently," Castle explained, "we've been ordered to follow up on it. Wash, disengage IES, purge the heat sinks and spool up the FTL for a jump to the nearest relay that will take us to Omega. Zoe, you have the deck."
What he hadn't told his pilot or his executive officer, was the nature of the job Zaeed Massani had been hired for. Cerberus wanted him for a team they were putting together under the command of Kate Beckett, the former Spectre and hero of the Citadel to investigate the disappearance of human colonies outside of Alliance space. His new orders from Montgomery had brought all of the pain he'd buried right back to the surface from the deep dark corner he'd buried it in. Not that he could ever forget the woman he'd loved, married, then tragically lost when the Normandy burned.
For a week after a Navy Commander in full dress uniform had handed him the folded flag from Kate's empty coffin on behalf of a grateful Alliance, Alexis had kept him from sinking too deeply into himself. He'd practically had to push her onto the shuttle back to the Grissom Academy, promising her all the while that he'd be okay. She'd believed him because he had never lied to her before.
But he had lied. Right through his teeth.
He hadn't been okay and he'd known it. He simply hadn't wanted the single greatest gift he'd received from and given to the universe to have to watch him self destruct. After three days in the silent, empty house - which he and Kate had shared for a blissful three months after their wedding - alone with his own demons, he'd finally fallen apart. He'd drunk himself numb more times than he could recall, until the last person anyone would have expected to come to his rescue eventually had.
Javier Esposito had shown up at the drunk tank near the Beckett Memorial Chapel where he'd been hauled in for drunk and disorderly, vandalism and resisting arrest. Though he had only hazy memory of it himself, he'd apparently thrown an empty whiskey bottle at Kate's monument, while shouting almost incoherently that he wanted his wife back.
It hadn't taken much for Espo to talk the local magistrate into dismissing the charges, given whom he was. Half the city had already "adopted" him out of sheer sympathy for the "Savior of Elysium's" widower. Javier however had no such sympathy as he dragged his ass sorry ass back to the house and spent the next week mercilessly detoxing him. Shortly after he had been declared fit to travel, Castle received notification that Admiral Hackett had rescinded his leave of absence and ordered him to report for duty on the Citadel.
On paper, he'd been assigned as Roy Montgomery's military attache, along with a grade increase to Lt. Commander. But his true mission was to use the the abilities granted to him by the Cipher to find any information he could on the Reapers. So he put his pain in a box, took command of ISV Serenity and set off on his personal crusade to finish the job Kate had started.
His new orders were officially to look into the Cerberus, collect any intel that he could on the self styled "human survivalist" organization which claimed that Captain Beckett was not only alive and well, but working for Cerberus. But he had his own ideas.
Rage was a powerful motivator, which – like grief – left its own unique biological marker.
He was going to find whomever had dared to impersonate the woman he'd loved and lost- who had dared to sully her good name with treasonous lies. When he found her, he'd hit her with a singularity so powerful, what was left of her remains would fit into a teacup.
He'd do it for Kate.
**Author's Note** Sorry it's taken me so long to update this. Christmas rolled up on me and then My Nephew stayed through New Years so I was busy entertaining like I do every year. Once I'm back to work I'm gonna try to alternate between this and Dragonslayer until one of the other is done.
Yeah, I know it's a bit dark at the moment, but hey... it's me. Were you really expecting sunshine and bunnies from the Dark Lord of the Fic?
Their meeting will be a bit like Rise and a bit like when Castle caught on to what Kate was up to in 8x08 and confronted her about it. Castle will be out for blood and Kate will be beginning to investigate the missing colonies in an uneasy alliance with Cerberus.