PHOENIX RESURGENT
A Mass Effect Story by Vyrexuviel
Disclaimer: The author of this story does not, in any way, profit from the story and all creative rights to the characters belong to their original creator(s).
Freedom's Progress. One of the newer colonies started by old Earth, still in it's first year, with prefab buildings comprising 95% of construction at the moment. Dull, drab and grey. And snowy to boot. The planet is colder than Earth norm, with no deserts save the arctic kind, but the colony was situated in the equatorial belt, with a nearly year-round temperate zone. Even so, the axial tilt of the planet gives a mild winter season, and snowflakes drift down to lightly settle on the armored carapace of the two figures stepping from the grounded Geth Scout.
The geth ship was a marvel of engineering. Sleek, glossy and wickedly curved, it's nonetheless extremely well-designed for it's role as a deep-penetration scout and infiltrator. An extremely high-tech system actually changed the color of the surface to make it blend into it's surroundings, and when in power-down mode emitted barely more energy than a well-armed trooper with full armor and weapons. On the other hand, it's sublight engines were enough to outrun anything in the Alliance or council fleets, though certain racers might be able to catch it. The internal structure was highly robust, able to sustain quite a bit of damage before function is impaired, though it's unique chameleon skin would be destroyed at the first shot that hit. An oversized eezo core allowed it to run for extremely long periods without discharging, though Shepard carefully concealed the way the similar-ratio'd Normandy could move without using it's reaction thrusters.
Shepard stepped quietly around another corner, moving through an emptied housing unit and frowning as she glanced around. Her armor had been upgraded a bit, getting rid of those absurd anatomically-correct nipples on her breastplate, though it had taken some persuasion to get the Geth to remove them. The second design they had shown her had included, for some bizarre reason, 4-inch heels on the combat boots, which she had vetoed instantly. After some haggling and discussion about the layout of the thrusters in both palm and boots, they had compromised on a two-inch heel to provide superior lifting power and attitude stabilizers embedded in the wrist vambrace, leaving her gloves less cumbersome. Which is quite useful now as she drew her pistol, motioning Legion to fall back and set up its sniper rifle.
"Something's not right here. There should be people all over, where -is- everyone?"
They had chosen this particular spot as it was the last known destination of one Tali'Zorah Vas Neema, along with a group of quarian commandos for some unknown purpose. Geth intelligence was good, but they hadn't infiltrated the Migrant Fleet's internal comm network, so had no idea what Tali's orders were. Shepard had picked Tali as her first recruit primarily as a balance against what the Geth were telling her. She still wasn't sure what their agenda was, and if anyone could act as devil's advocate to the Geth, it was Tali. Also, she trusted the young quarian after having dragged her all over the galaxy two short years ago.
Movement.
Shepard held her weapon ready and squinted through her faceplate. That was another aspect of her armor she liked. Unlike the thin eye-plate of the full rebreather N7-helmet, this re-designed helmet shielded her entire head with extra-thick ceramic-compostite and armorplate, with everything from her brow to her chin, and cheekbone to cheekbone exposed and armored over with an inch-thick plate of transparasteel, with multiple layers of liquid crystal displays sandwitched into the faceplate, giving her a very superior HUD, even compared to the milspec one she enjoyed as an N7 operative. It took more practice to learn how to use the displays, but a little extra info could mean the difference between life or death.
She rapidly flicked through view-overlays. Nothing on the UV band, the visual spectrum was good, but there were still large pools of shadow. Ahh, there. The thermal imaging view showed strong heat-traces in that building, and two more approaching from the other angle. To judge by the thermal spread, the two approaching figures were either human or asari, though probably human, and the ones inside the building were quarian. No mistaking that thermal signature, most of the heat being vented by a single spot on the small of the back. Five of them, no six. Shit. This could get nasty.
"Hang back until you get my signal to advance. There might be a firefight here in a bit. There's quarians down there, so don't show yourself until I've got a chance to explain things to them."
"Acknowledged." Legion's laconic phrasing was terse and to the point. So. Onward.
She murmured under her breath, 'Once more into the breach my friends...' and slipped down the ramp towards the building.
Miranda was vexed. And that was putting it mildly.
Jacob stifled a sigh as the overbearing woman stalked (there was no other word for it) down the catwalk, SMG at her side, and fairly radiating fury. Things had not gone well for the apple of the Illusive Man's eye. They had tried and failed to recover Shepard's body, and that was when things had started going downhill. Miranda had grown more and more erratic of late, as the Illusive Man piled more and more responsibilities on her in the wake of Shepard's death. The brunette was near the cracking point, and Jacob wanted to be behind a wall when she finally did crack. A -thick- wall. A long way away.
Miranda smashed her fist into the activation plate of the next door, and it snapped aside.
Guns were swept up with well-trained reflexes. ARs clacked as they chambered their thermal sinks, and Prazza's voice called out, "Stop right there!"
"Who the -fuck- are you?" a feminine voice retorted. Human. Tali quickly shut down the holovid projector, letting Prazza's squad handle it for the moment. Which is why she was the only one to notice the second door unseal. The voices of Prazza and the unknown woman (it sounded like a human, but she couldn't be sure without looking) dwindled to a background hum as she snapped her head up and stared into a face she knew. A very familiar face indeed. An impossible face.
"Sh-Shepard...?"
'Ohhh, I am SO saving that image!' ran through Shepard's mind as she grinned at the UV-enhanced image of Tali's thunderstruck face. Then the quarian was bouncing to her feet and taking a stride toward her. Tali paused, her own pistol held ready, though not pointed at Shepard, who had wisely put her own pistol away.
"Shepard? Is that...you're alive?" The wistful, surprised, wanting, no -needing- tone in Tali's filtered voice made Shepard's heart surge. Tali. Her dear, sweet Tali.
"Yes, Tali. It's me. I'm back." She spread her arms, took a step forward and was nearly bowled over by the energetic quarian, who hugged her back just as tight as ever she could. Shepard couldn't help grinning like a fool, though she eventually noticed that Prazza's squad had their guns divided about equally between the two humans (she was right, there!) and her. She made a gentle 'weapons down' gesture that had a few of them lower their weapons, though they didn't holster them.
Jacob's attention was mostly centered on the guns being pointed at him, but he couldn't help notice the smaller quarian in the back embracing someone that was suited in a very unusual armor. He couldn't get a good angle on the face, especially with his attention divided like this, but one look at Miranda's slack-jawed, bug-eyed, flabbergasted face told him something big was up.
The woman was dithering as Shepard gently peeled Tali off her, the Quarian making an effort to get her emotions under control. She still was young for her race, though she seemed to have moved up in the world, if she was commanding a commando squad. "What're you up to here, Tali? I thought you'd be back on the Migrant Fleet after your Pilgrimage."
"I was, I'm on special assignment from the Admiralty Board this time." Tali's voice held a note of glee that had Shepard's lips twitching slightly. Thank goodness Tali couldn't get a good look at her face right now. The faceplate filtered her blue-tinged features back to a more normal human-pink. She looked like an animated frozen corpse, the few times she'd looked at herself since her memories returned.
"What's up? It's unusual to find Quarian Migrant Marines this far from the Fleet." Her gaze glanced over to the two humans, and her eyes narrowed suddenly. "It's also unusual to find Cerberus operatives on a human world. I wonder if you had something to do with the colonist's vanishing."
Her reflexes were just as fast as ever, slipping quickly and efficiently through the quarians to stand before the two humans. Both of them had prominent Cerberus logos. She had grown to loathe the shadowy organization during her rush across the galaxy. She'd found project after project of Cerberus's across the Attican Traverse, every one of them seeming to have thrown every ethical rule out the window.
The two operatives stepped back, the dark-skinned man raising his shotgun instinctively. 'Systems Alliance trained, bygod. He's either a deserter or a convert.'
The woman stepped forward again, her sculpted face glaring back at Shepard. "I'm Miranda Lawson. We've been looking for you, Commander Shepard."
"Really. Most Cerberus operatives I've found before usually wanted me to go away as fast as possible, punctuating the point with bullets. Give me one good reason why I shouldn't shoot you right here."
The woman had steel in her, she barely flinched as Shepard leaned close. "Human colonies like this one are disappearing. Every last man, woman and child, gone. The Council doesn't care, and the Systems Alliance is too bogged down with red tape to do any real good. Only Cerberus has a chance to do something positive to find and stop the ones responsible."
Shepard arched an eyebrow, thinking fast. The Geth had noted a pattern of sudden complete communications blackouts among new-founded human colonies of late, though it was anybody's guess what had happened to them. It was one of the reasons why Shepard had finally decided on gathering up her old teammates to find out the answers to the mound of questions. Cerberus might be an intrinsically ethics-free organization, but they -were- quite efficient with their little projects. No. The taint of Cerberus ran too deep. All those deaths for no reason at all.
"Best get out of my sight, Miranda Lawson. If I ever see you again, it will end badly for you." She leaned forward and, on a whim, dropped the filtration layer of her faceplate, letting her blue skin show through untouched by artificial coloration. Her lips quirked slightly as the woman's large, pretty eyes went wide and she stumbled back a few steps. Shepard restored the color tint to her faceplate and turned back to the quarians, pointedly turning her back on the Cerberus Operative.
Miranda gulped. If that was the woman she had been supposed to revive, she was glad that Lazarus Project had been scrapped. She would not have liked to have to try and control -that- sort of woman. And good GOD, what had -happened- to her on Alchera? That blue skin, white hair and deep-blue eyes was just, unnatural! At least for a human. Miranda suddenly thought that it might be quite prudent to leave Freedom's Progress poste haste. She'll have to explain to the Illusive Man why she came away without any leads, but, well, aside from the quarians and, and Shepard, well, nothing else was here.
She took a steadying breath. Yes. That's what she'll have to say. Nothing was here, just like the last two colonies. Nothing and no one.
'A YMIR Mech. Why did it have to be a YMIR Mech?' Tali crouched behind a stack of boxes. Prazza, the idiot, had hared off on his own as she and Shepard had been catching up. She most emphatically did -NOT- trust the Geth that Shepard seemed to be lugging around, but after it had actually -talked- to her, she had decided to give it the benefit of the doubt, pending disassembly and decompiling of it's source code. But all that could wait until after dealing with this freaking annoying hunk of metal and bullets. A rocket whooooshed past her cover, making her glad she'd requisitioned a full envirosuit upgrade for this mission. Her previous suit would have been cut open by the whickering fragments from the rocket's detonation.
At least the Geth seemed to be on their side, having slipped into a nearby building to snipe at the Mech, mostly drawing it's attention away from the pinned down human and quarian. But Shepard had this annoying habit of dashing out of cover to try and get close enough to do some real damage with that pistol of hers. Why oh why would the woman never listen to her and get herself a sensible weapon like a shotgun?
Shepard rolled out of cover at the same time Tali did, both of them snapping off shots, just like old times. Despite their predicament, the still-young quarian felt her heart lift as it hadn't in the last two years. Shepard's occasional snarky comments were just like old times, and even the Geth seemed to at least expect them, if not understand them.
"Come on you sonofabitch... THERE!" Shepard rolled around the other side of the cover she and Tali shared, dashing to another pile of crates, the YMIR's machinegun stitching the plascrete floor just behind her heels. Good grief, Shepard was fast. Tali tried to distract the mech with a few pumps of her shotgun, but only succeeded in attracting it's next missle.
"Readings indicate that the target's shielding has dropped by fifty three point zero five percent." Tali was still getting used to the flat, inflection-less voice of the Geth.
"Roger, Legion, see if you can disable one of it's legs. Tali, if you've got any tricks up your sleeve for handling these things, now would be a good time." The mech was slowly eroding Shepard's less-durable cover, the ex-marine darting out when it's weapon reached it's preset heat limit and it switched to a rocket. At least the rockets it fired were dumb-fire, they'd all be dead if they were smart munitions.
"Sorry, Shepard, this latest model of mech is sealed against my old tricks, I'll need to tap into my contacts on the extranet to find their weak points." Another five rounds, and eject. These new thermal clips were a quick way to get more ammo downrange, but they took forever to discharge the heat they accumulated.
"Damn. Well, time to try something different." That was the only warning Tali got. She watched in horror as Shepard rolled out of cover and started sprinting -toward- the mech, ignoring the fusillade of fire that quickly whittled down her shields, the energy field failing with a peculiar purple-violet flare. Still Shepard charged, impressively, no -impossibly- fast. 'is she using biotics or something?' the thought had barely flashed through the quarian's mind while her well-trained hands pumped more rounds at the Mech, the THOOOM of Legion's overbore sniper rifle cracking out, the flare of the mech's shields failing just as Shepard slammed into it with the force of a small bomb.
The mech rocked back, Shepard's weapons slung, both hands digging into the metal of it's chest carapace. That was the most heavily armored part of the mech, what the hell was Shepard thinking? "Shepard!"
A soft grunt through the commlink, "Erff, sonofa- Gotcha!" There was a rending sound, as the 5cm-thick armor plate started to rip free of the front of the mech. Servos whined as the mech tried to bring it's weaponry to bear, but the angle was awkward. It wasn't designed to try and fire at a being that was literally tearing it's armor off. As Tali watched, slack-jawed, Shepard managed to shove her right forearm up under the bent armor plate.
Afterward, Tali reconstructed what happened. At first she wasn't sure if Shepard had found some sort of override or had just ripped out a hunk of electronics, at least not until the sudden loud snapping crackling from the Mech. Arcs of electricity started flowing out from it's chest, like little miniature lightning bolts. The stink of ozone, fried electronics, and burnt insulation floated across the empty loading bay, mercifully filtered out of Tali's sensitive nose.
The mech had gone into an electronic version of an epileptic fit, flailing and screeching mechanically, Shepard wrestling with it, her forearm stuck into the rent she had torn in it's armor by main force alone, blue-white light flashing from that opening until the Mech had gone limp, sinking down on it's knee-joints and dragging Shepard down with it. She gave a soft grunt, a sigh, then her forearm slid out of the tear and she fell to the ground, unconscious.
The mech was dark and inactive, but it still took Tali a full five seconds to figure out that it was fully dead. By the time she had scampered over to Shepard's side, and Legion had arrived from whatever spot it had taken refuge in to snipe, Shepard was getting up again, but seemed a bit woozy.
"Wow. Remind me not to do that again." She smiled at Tali through her faceplate, her face still healthy pink despite her somewhat weak words.
"Alright, just what did you do, though?"
Shepard gave a wry, apologetic smile. "Well, I figured that if your old tricks weren't working, that meant they had to have fixed the bugs inherent in having a wireless access to the mech's programming. Which ment that the damn thing had to be inside a Faraday cage. The problem with Faraday cages is that they tend to conduct electricity, and this suit of mine has a very -very- large power source." She ducked her head in apology. "I figured that if I could get my forearm inside that cage, I could give the electronics a good hard jolt, and fry the mech's control systems. It was worth a shot, and it worked."
"W-Well, yes, but that doesn't explain how you managed to force open the armor plating! That's supposed to stand firm against vehicle-mounted weapons, and you just tore it open with your bare hands!"
"Not quite my bare hands, Tali. This suit has a whole lot of external muscle augmentation systems in it. Triple-redundant exoskeletal amplification can produce a -lot- of force when switched into override mode."
The explanation sounded accurate, but something still niggled at Tali. Shepard sounded, if not out of breath, at least tired. True, it -was- hard to control exoskeletons, she'd even heard about a poor quarian who was testing one out and broke an arm when it overextended after a too-vigorous swing. But Shepard seemed more fatigued than if she just had had to control an overpowered exoskeleton.
Shepard turned to the building that the mech had obviously been guarding, "Well, shall we see what this big hunk of junk was guarding so assiduously?"
'Poor Veetor.' Shepard watched as the remnants of Praza's squad helped the young, infected Quarian out of his hidey-hole. 'No one so young should have to go through something like that.' She should talk. Memories of the slave raid and massacre on Mindoir suddenly sprang into her mind with crystal clarity. The blood, thunder, screams and cries, the laughter and the buzzing sound of shock sticks. Her hand clenched and she turned away, scanning Veetor's pieced-together footage into her Omnitool. She nearly jumped when a gentle hand touched her shoulder, turning to see Tali, her face concerned inside her helmet.
"Shepard... What now?" She couldn't quite suppress a smile. Sweet, young Tali, always looking up to someone for guidance.
"We find the bastards that did this and make them pay for it. Just like last time." her lips quirked upward slightly as Tali nodded her head in vehement agreement. 'But first, we figure out exactly what happened to me...'
Author's Note:
Well, here we are, another chapter down. Please Read & Review! I'm sorta hitting a blank on the next bit, so it may be two weeks before I get the next chapter up, depends on how hard the Muse hits my head with that big mallet of hers...