The Semmel hung in space, the orange-brown clouds of Naxell passing beneath it. Tali, Kal, and Miranda ignored the splendor of the gas giant, focused on the sensor data from derelict mining station A-7.

"It was originally built to mine helium-3 from the planet. The companies that built it went bankrupt decades ago, and the technology's too outdated for anyone to be interested in it now," Miranda had explained. "Cerberus picked it up for next to nothing – through shell companies, of course. An unobserved position near Illium is useful to them." Tali had noticed the slight hesitation before "them," when Miranda might once have said "us."

They had flown to Naxell and matched orbits with the station without incident. Miranda had spent most of the flight prying for information about the Semmel's IES system. She was clearly very interested in how the quarians had managed to equip stealth technology on an even smaller ship than the Normandy. Here Tali wasn't required to be evasive, because she genuinely didn't know the answers to Miranda's questions. She had passed on her notes on the Normandy's technology, but she hadn't been involved in the design of the Semmel and her sister ships.

She hoped that Miranda wouldn't be on board the Semmel for long. The scout ship's IES and drive core occupied most of the hull, leaving the living space cramped. There was neither storage for levo food nor sleeping spaces suitable for beings that didn't wear envirosuits. And as was usual for quarian ship designs, there was an absolute minimum of privacy. These all struck Tali as good reasons to find a way on board station A-7 as soon as possible.

Tali gestured to the schematic of the station displayed on the viewscreen. "It looks like they've only powered up these sectors at the top part of the station," she said. "They're mostly quarters and life support, plus a pair of hangars. The mining, processing, and cargo-loading sectors are still shut down. There are possible docking points for the Semmel there, but without power we'd have to force our way in, and that would run a risk of detection."

"It sounds like you have another approach in mind," Miranda said.

Tali gestured at Miranda's combat hard-suit. For the mission, she had changed back into her familiar black and white. The Cerberus insignia had been carefully excised from the armor. "Can your suit hold against hard vacuum?"

Miranda frowned a little. "Yes, although… I'm not certain I like where you might be going with that question."

Tali smiled at her, even if the effect was lost given the helmet. "You had to know there was a chance you'd be going out the airlock."

Getting everything read took them almost a quarter-watch. Tali fretted over every delay, fearing what Cerberus might be doing to their captives. Realistically, she knew that careful preparation was important and that this delay was minor next to the time she and Kal had already wasted on Illium. That last thought wasn't particularly reassuring.

The Semmel's tiny airlock didn't have room for three. Since Tali was nominally the ship's captain, Kal and Miranda went out first. While the airlock cycled, Tali checked in one last time with the three crew members staying on board. All had offered to accompany them, but Tali wasn't confident in their combat training. A three-person squad seemed optimal for the close quarters aboard the station, in any case. She had gotten used to the way Shepard did things.

The airlock was ready; she stepped in and waited for it to cycle, then emerged into space. Kal and Miranda were clinging to handholds some distance aft of the airlock. Tali swung over to join them, and Kal clipped a tether to her suit. He briefly leaned over so that their helmets were touching.

"Lock your suit when you're ready, ma'am," he said.

Tali gave the voice command to her suit, and its material went from flexible to rigid. Kal took both women's arms and gently pushed off from the Semmel so that the trio slowly separated from it. Looking ahead, Tali could see the bulk of the mining station, but her view of the top was, according to plan, blocked by the quarian ship. Kal was moved about, making minute adjustments to the orientation of the three spacewalkers. Tali started up the orbital mechanics program in her suit; Kal knew what he was doing, but it had been thoroughly drilled into her that program results should always be double-checked.

Once Kal was satisfied with their position, he fired a quick burst from his maneuvering thruster. The Semmel slowly slid away above them as the gap between them and station A-7 began to narrow. Save for the low hum of Tali's suit, everything was silent. The lack of engine noise felt strange, subtly wrong. She asked the suit for verbal readouts of the distance to the station every 100 meters; the repetition of the mechanical voice was oddly soothing.

The station loomed before them. 600 meters… 500 meters… 400 meters…The pockmarked metal surface filled Tali's forward view. She unlocked the suit – no danger that movement would cause them to miss the station now – and magnetized its arms and legs. 200 meters… 100 meters… The station reached out for her, and she hit the surface with a jarring thud despite the suit's attempts to cushion her. The magnetic locks held her close to the hull. On her right, Kal'Reegar hit the hull in the same way, but Miranda rebounded off the station and started drifting away. The tether holding her to Kal went taut and strained, but held, and he pulled her back in.

Miranda touched helmets with Tali. "I'm sorry," she said. "The magnets didn't hold." Her voice was composed, but her eyes were a bit wide. It was both shocking and oddly endearing for Tali to think that Miranda might be afraid of something. She gave Miranda a nod. Her hard-suit didn't have all the capabilities of a quarian envirosuit; there was no point in blaming her for that.

Kal started up the laser drill and placed it against the hull. After a moment, he turned off the drill, shook his head, and shifted over. Tali shifted over and illuminated the small hole with her suit lamp. It led into an enclosed bulkhead full of machinery. Kal had moved over a few meters and appeared to have found a better place to enter – he already had a hole wide enough to accept a quarian half-outlined with the laser drill. He completed the circle with the drill, shut it off, and gave the disk of metal a gentle push. Still glowing around the edges, it disappeared into the station's interior.

The three of them let the metal cool before carefully slipping into the hole, wary of sharp edges that could puncture their suits. Tali unwrapped one of the temporary patches they'd taken from the Semmel's supply. She stretched it to cover the hole, then moved her hand along its edge to create a molecular seal with the metal of the station's hull. Miranda had questioned the necessity of sealing the hull breach behind them, but Tali and Kal had successfully argued that this would lower the chances of their entry point being spotted. If she had suspected that a quarian reluctance to leave an unpatched hole in a ship was also a factor, she had stayed silent.

The interior of the station was still. Occasionally the floor transmitted a low vibration through the bottoms of Tali's boots, but there was no atmosphere to carry other sounds, and they did not dare risk radio contact. They plodded through the station, Miranda in the lead, passing through vast chambers full of dormant machinery. Tali constantly checked their progress against the rough schematic they had drawn up based on their scans and Miranda's knowledge of the place. She noticed with disapproval how many bulkhead doors had been left open when the station was abandoned. Her people would never have decommissioned a ship in such a sloppy manner.

There was little sign when they reached the boundary of the inhabited part of the station – just a bulkhead door with a few blue and red lights glowing on it, where the other doors they encountered had been dark. This was what they had expected, and they knew that forcing it would most likely alert everyone on the station to their presence. Tali felt along the wall next to the door until she found the cover on a data port. Nothing happened when she pulled on it. It had frozen in place, and she had to pry it away from the wall using a lever extruded from her omni-tool.

The port cleared, she connected her omni-tool to it. The 'tool easily recognized the archaic interface – in the Migrant Fleet, an interface that wasn't archaic would be an oddity – and suppressed the intrusion countermeasures that attempted to fire. Cerberus had definitely been in the system, augmenting the security and linking it to their own systems, but after her time on the Normandy, Tali was highly familiar with Cerberus security. They might have updated their codes and ciphers, but the basic architecture hand't changed. She looped the security readout on the door so that it would continue to read as closed, disabled the atmospheric sensors in the room beyond, and finally sent an override command to the door itself.

The door ground open, followed by a howling rush of air. Tali, Kal, and Miranda hurried through the door, and Kal punched the panel to seal it. Tali checked the atmospheric readouts in her suit and nodded in satisfaction – there had been a notable pressure drop, but the effect on the station as a whole shouldn't have been picked up. The room they had punched into was empty as expected. There were many doors into the powered part of the station, and Cerberus didn't have the manpower to post guards at all of them. Probably they didn't consider an incursion from within the station likely, if they'd thought about the possibility at all.

Miranda pulled off her helmet. "Good work, Tali," she said crisply.

"Thank you," Tali said absently as she reconnected her omni-tool to the Cerberus security systems. "Hmm. It looks like the Cerberus activity is concentrated in two areas. There's a dorm in the living quarters… Hold on… It looks like they've got a mech in there; I think I can get a video feed from it…"

Projected from her omni-tool, the scene came to grainy life. A sleeping area had been converted to a makeshift prison. The robot's view was fixed on a group of quarians who had been locked into a room intended for two workers. They slumped against the walls, suffering, Tali guessed, from abuse or malnutrition – but still moving, their suits still showing vitals, still alive. She let out a breath that she hadn't known she was holding.

In the foreground, three bored-looking Cerberus troopers were sitting at a table, sparing their charges only the occasional glance. As far as she could tell from the low-quality image, they were playing Skyllian-five. The sight brought back a nostalgic memory of winning credits from Daniel and Donnelly in the Normandy's engine room. They had been too used to watching faces for tells.

"I count five prisoners, ma'am," Kal reported. "Looks like the ship's crew, but none of the engineering team. You said there were two areas of activity?"

"Yes, it looks like they're also using a hangar, but…" She gave a frustrated shrug. "I can't get any information on it. It looks like they've cut it off entirely from the station network. It's completely signal-dead."

"Does that mean they have no communication with those guards?" Miranda asked, gesturing at the card players.

Tali thought for a moment. "Not necessarily. They might have run a dedicated line between the areas."

"If they did, could we cut it?" Miranda asked.

"Probably," Tali said. "When they tried to communicate over it, though, they'd know something was wrong. I don't know how often they're checking in."

Kal said, "I'd recommend we cut the line, free the captured crew, and then move on the hangar. They look to be in poor condition, but they can at least guard our backs – and they might have some intel about what we're heading into."

"I think we should cut the line and hit the hangar first," Miranda said. "Their C&C is probably there. If we take out their leadership, they won't be able to respond effectively."

"They might panic and start shooting their prisoners," Kal countered.

"Please believe I don't want that," Miranda said. "But if the other quarians are in the hangar, we run that risk either way."

Tali considered. Admiral Xen would definitely say that the engineering team was their top priority, but Kal was probably right that the crew, despite their condition, would make useful support. Keelah, how did Shepard make these decisions look so easy? She had to decide, and the state of the prisoners on the video swayed her. "Kal, we'll go with your plan. We free the prisoners, and then move on the hangar immediately."

She half-expected Miranda to argue, but she gave a quick nod of agreement. She remembered the many times she had seen Miranda give Shepard the same nod, once the Commander had made a decision. It came as a shock to realize she was being shown the same respect.

They set off down the dingy corridors of the station, Kal taking point. Finding the dedicated comm line proved trivial – Cerberus had run a cable under the door of the living quarters and down the hallway. Tali wondered why Cerberus had gone to this effort instead of using the existing network infrastructure, which her scans showed to be perfectly intact.

"On the count of three, I'll cut this and we'll hit the door," she said, keeping her voice low. "I'll handle the mech; you two, focus on taking down the troopers."

Kal saluted her in acknowledgement; Miranda settled for a quick nod.

"One, two, three!" Tali counted, and used her omni-blade to cut through the cable. Kal and Miranda hit the door seconds later, Tali just behind them, already setting up the power surge from her omni-tool. As the door open, Tali spotted the YMIR mech turning to target them and triggered the power surge. Energy ripped into the mech, overwhelming its shields and triggering a flurry of sparks from its head. The mech staggered and stumbled, and Tali unleashed two shotgun blasts into its head. Its central processing unit obliterated – and how did putting that in the head ever survive the design committee? – the mech collapsed.

None of the Cerberus troopers had made it out of their chairs, their bodies shredded by the combined power of shotgun blasts and gravitational anomalies. (After her time with Shepard, Tali thought she was probably one of the galaxy's experts in the effects of gravitational anomalies.) Any sympathy she might have felt for the outgunned enemies was stifled as she looked at their prisoners. Their envirosuits were covered with warning lights, flashing in angry greens and ambers. Tali and Kal ran for the door to their makeshift cell. Overriding the simple lock took only a moment, and then they were inside and cutting the prisoners free of their restraints.

"A-Admiral?" one of them gasped, taking in Tali's suit. Miranda raised her eyebrows.

Tali scanned her suit in turn and found the rank markings she was looking for. "Captain Loesa'Vasel vas Marra?" she asked.

"That's me," the captain confirmed. "You have to get to the engineering team. Cerberus is using them for some sort of… project…" She took a deep, shuddering breath.

"Do you know what Cerberus is doing here?" Tali asked.

"No. But they knew why we were on Illium… about the cargo, Admiral Xen's device… They threatened us to get the engineers to cooperate… the only reason they left us alive…"

"Do you know where the engineering team is?"

"No, I'm sorry…"

"It's all right." Tali surveyed the quarians again. In their condition, they'd be more liability than help in combat. "Captain, I need you and your two strongest crew members to hold this point. Take their weapons," she gestured to the Cerberus dead, "and if anyone but us comes through the door, open fire. Understood?"

Captain Vasel nodded. "Yes, Admiral."

Tali reflected that Miranda might have been right that they should hit the hangar first, but this was no time to dwell on that. She appreciated that Miranda wasn't bringing it up. "Miranda, Kal, let's move. We need to get to that hangar before they realize something's wrong here."

"Admiral…" Captain Vasel paused for breath. "Make them pay."

"Keelah se'lai, we will," Tali said, and then she and her squad were jogging back down the corridor. At least, she thought, the cable should lead us right there.

Miranda cleared her throat. "Admiral?"

"It's just a formality," Tali said. Her face flushed red, and she was glad again for the concealing envirosuit. "I'm really not… you know, this is no time to discuss this."

"Later, then," Miranda said, with an expression that Shepard would have called "smirking."

Ahead of them, the cable disappeared under another access door. Tali raised her omni-tool to scan it. "Locked," she reported. "I should be able to override it, but I don't know if I can do it without alerting them. Be ready."

Her team nodded acknowledgement, moving up to flank the door. Despite the unknown territory beyond the door, there was a sense of comfort in having a squad she could absolutely rely on. It was so different from her first command on Freedom's Progress. Was this feeling the source of Shepard's famous confidence?

The door opened in response to her override, and Tali heard human voices shouting. Miranda and Kal darted through the door and took cover behind pallets full of crates and boxes. Tali moved up to take cover by the doorframe and quickly surveyed the room. What she saw stopped her in her tracks.