Jeff Moreau passed the time as he usually did during loiter-and-wait operations: considering the answer to life, the universe, and everything. That sort of thing. Not the number forty-two, though, that was mathematically proven to be unequivocally NOT the answer by the greatest minds of his age, despite the religious insistence otherwise. Joker decided he was agnostic about that part, even though the hitchhikers had a pretty elegant solution, all things considered.

Jeff's mind wandered as he programmed flight maneuvers into the autopilot computer, labeling them for mnemonic purposes. Ultraviolet-9, Bluestorm-2, Seagreen-5.

Life? What the hell was life all about? This combination of energy, of which the universe seemed hell-bent on churning out, made up of a cosmically coincidental interaction of acids that happened to eventually simulate logic, only to strive to survive in order to continue to simulate logic, only to evolve to the point where it understood its own logic system and came up with the same answers to its own questions—was meat. MEAT! Flabby, fat-fueled meat. Turians, asari, volus, humans, even the annoying hanar. They're all just meat, trying to convince themselves they aren't tasty to other types of meat.

The universe is a meat machine.

"Joker..."

This meat, this stuff, the best it could come up with was Jeff? Really? Of all the progress in artificial intelligence, the most competent pilot in the Alliance was a piece of meat. He would probably go well with barbecue sauce and an aged whiskey. Maybe Jeff was a krogan delicacy. Joker à l'oignon. He had over sixty clocks within sight range of the pilot seat, each counting time in various relativistic states, and that didn't even factor in the microprocessors and the nanoprocessors inside them. All this technology staring at him, and the best pilot in the galaxy was fueled by chemical reactions.

He was a machine made of meat, piloting a machine made by meat.

"Joker..."

Maybe that's where the Reapers came from. Chance decided on silicon-based logic and now it destroyed the galaxy every 50,000 years. Rudimentary creatures of blood and flesh. No wonder Sovereign was cocky, he was a machine-god getting tested by meat.

You know what? It wasn't fair. He knew his day was coming. Meat just wouldn't keep up. There was no denying it. He wasn't denying it, honestly. Jeff would never do that. Despite not denying it, he felt betrayed by the machines, because he wanted to be special. Little creaky Jeff, all to himself in the cockpit, flying through the stars and being a cool guy with his SR-1 hat and witty banter. Change was always on the horizon, until it's staring you in the face, and the soul-crushing inevitability of automation was looking right back at Jeff in the form of an email, from a robot, that he was pretty sure wasn't just spamming him with links to naughty extranet sites.

"JOKER!"

"Damnit, Pressly, what?" Jeff snapped out of his existential revelry, turning to face the navigator a meter to his left. Pressly stood next to a blinking red light.

"Condenser is lagging on the aft LI heat sink, you need to shore it up."

I'll shore you up. Jeff obeyed, cringing at his own silent attempt at repertoire. Standard rotations were a bit out of whack, with the Commander gone, so Jeff volunteered to take on menial technician duty, like monitoring coolant levels, while they loitered in the Boltzmann system. He wasn't doing much piloting, anyways. He dialed the aft coolant pressure point two three one nine percent. The red light turned green.

"Thank you, Joker." Hooray, Joker! He made the red light turn green! Goooood work!

Pressly sighed. "What's bothering you, Flight Lieutenant Moreau?"

Flight Lieutenant Moreau. Only his aunt and his flight officers called him that. Well, Pressly was technically his CO, but damn, the guy sounded genuine. Jeff glanced back at his personal comms, the worrying message still open.

I can help you, Jeff. Alliance R&D, cutting edge tech, balances load on forward batteries...

Jeff knew it was a robot because it used "balances load" and "forward batteries" in the same sentence without snickering. It had also been pestering him for days, breaking their comm encryption every time, making wild promises to cyberwarfare suites, engine efficiency during loiter zones, shoring up errant condenser malfunctions. It would turn all the red lights green, without Jeff lifting a weak, meat-made finger.

It also completely bypassed his VI-assisted spam blocker (don't ask why Jeff needed a VI for all his spam). It was an annoyingly smart robot. He was starting to believe some of its wild claims.

"No worries," Jeff said, deleting the message and blocking the sender for the countless time. "You know, just an existential crisis, that's all."

"Joker, you have start taking things seriously if—"

"Look, man, I am serious. This is how I deal. Back off, meat."

Whoa. Meat? Really, Jeff, if you wanted to roast the guy, you could have come up with a better skewer than that. Damn, that was actually one of his better ones.

The Normandy is perfect for this system, Jeff. If you delay, some other ship will get it, eventually. Can you afford to not be the best?

Was he going insane? Probably. If he was, though, how would he know? Do crazy people know they're crazy? Was the robot listening to the conversation? His thoughts? Maybe it was just really good at guessing. This was his reality now. Forever tortured by an email virus he probably picked up on Omega. Most people got to have fun before the pain and the itching and the topical creams were necessary.

Waiting sucked.

"Joker, I know you don't respect me like you do the Commander, I get that, but protocol isn't just a word in a book you can ignore."

"I'm not—look, I'm sorry, alright? I know you didn't choose the command life, it chose you, and all that. I can't just sit and wait and look at all the pretty ships going to and fro, wondering if my Commander is on one of them. I mean, look at this." He brought up a live feed of the data they were gathering on the ship traffic in the Boltzmann system. "Business as usual, right? But Alliance data estimates eighty-three percent of human trafficking goes through this system. Eighty Three! Humans traffic more humans than batarian slavers, man, and it's happening right there!" Jeff pointed at the data-pins swarming around the various planets. "There's no way to know if Shepard is on one those ships right now, jumping through the Relay, and disappearing forever."

Pressly sat down in the co-pilot chair, eye-level with Jeff.

"Do you know why I didn't take the promotion to captain?"

Jeff sat still, letting the old guy talk. Pressly didn't deserve to be called names, the guy was doing his best. He was just meat, after all.

"I didn't take it," Pressly continued, "because I know my limits. I pushed myself just to get chief navigator. Memorized schema breakdowns of dozens of ship types, human and alien. Flew on most of those ships, some in simulations, a lot in actual meat space."

Jeff eyed him. You called him "meat," dummy. It was a joke.

"Anyway," Pressly said, backing away from the attempt at humor, "I guess I'm trying to say, know your limits. You're the best damn pilot I've ever seen. You out-maneuvered the geth. You aren't a machine, though. You gotta give yourself a break every now and then."

"Yeah, I guess you're right." He wasn't a machine, man, and he never could be. Meat, always and forever.

"Plus, I think Garrus has this. He shaped up Ashley and Zaeed pretty quickly back there. He'll find out where the Commander is and we'll swoop in like big damn heroes."

Pressly just complimented a turian. He meant it, too. Jeff really was going insane.

Let me prove it to you. Give my system a test.

Like hell. Test the machine that will eventually replace you, that sounds like a great idea.

Delete. Block. Repeat. Try that on, Sakurazaka.

The suit monitors on the bridge's dashboard beeped a familiar warning. How many times did Shepard lose shields, or get her stress levels into the red-line? How many times did her suit's medigel applicator trigger? A lot. Jeff lost count. It took a while to get used to it, just looking at your friends, your CO, in a deadly situation, but powerless to help them. Eden Prime was nerve wracking, but Therum was when Jeff almost lost it. Volcanoes and geth and krogan mercenaries, scary stuff. Shepard always came back, though, sweaty but stoic. Jeff was almost immune to the sound of the shore party getting into danger. Almost.

"Shepard isn't on planet, she's in a ship!"

Beep! Beep! Beep! went the monitors. The extranet probably thought he liked the noise enough to recommend ambulance sirens for vid searches. He subjected himself to it often enough, anyway.

Finding ships in space is easy. They practically glow like fireworks against the background of nearly zero Kelvin, but the real trick is figuring out which ship you're supposed to be looking for when there were dozens in the system, and half of them here wore non-standard IFF tags anyway. Pressly was actually some sort of genius at doing this, though, and spotted the cruiser-class vessel they were looking for in his well-annotated notes.

"You've got to be kidding!" The navigator jumped out of the co-pilot chair and rushed off to the CIC.

"What? It's this one? How do you know?"

"Because it's picking up shuttles from the estate, and, just look at the scans." Pressly practically sprinted down the corridor. "Garrus, we can't allow that ship to leave the system, I'm afraid evac isn't on the way."

Jeff looked at Pressly's notes on the MSV Alabama. He didn't see what the big deal was. Standard civilian Cruiser-class. Model on the pricey range, even for a starship. It looked like a pleasure cruiser for hosting wild parties and touring exotic systems. It had a big, flat, design, kind of like a squashed banana, just shy of a kilometer from stern to bow. She had a big eezo core and a light GARDIAN system and a big plated section in her cargo hold—

Ah, crap. It was a carrier.

The scans revealed a massive power output to the ship's hull, too, so it probably had something heavier than GARDIAN for defending itself, which made sense as a vessel in the Terminus systems. The Normandy couldn't go toe-to-toe with it for any extended length of time. A pleasure cruiser would be a nice juicy target for pirates looking to capture wealthy individuals to ransom, the eezo core was a retirement package in itself. The cargo hold, though, was completely retrofitted, looking like it could hold a dozen or so fighter-class vessels. It was a baby carrier. Cute and terrifying. They could defend or conquer entire worlds with a ship like that, if other cruisers didn't get in the way.

Jeff flexed his fingers and started a countdown clock, then gently pushed the Normandy toward Bekenstein. The Alabama "drifted" in low orbit at a mere four kilometer per second velocity, made possible by lowering the ship's mass. Jeff did some quick mental calculus as he plunged toward the blue planet.

"Joker," Pressly's voice came over the intercom, "ease to attack position bravo at my coordinates, we don't have a lot of time if they try to bug out."

If the Alabama wanted to bug out, it could escape with a second's notice. There would be NO time to disable it without making the attack first, but Pressly was setting up an intercept course; fine for pirate frigates up against Alliance patrol boats looking for a fight, but this cruiser could just bully its way past the Normandy for an FTL vector and be at the Relay in seconds. Jeff looked back over the scans.

By lowering their mass so much, the Alabama was effectively a floating paper plane. Kinetic shields relied on the energy generated by the drive core, so if it was splitting output between running the ship and lowering mass, the shields would fail quickly. The Normandy could probably disable or destroy it with a couple shots from her forward battery, but if Shepard was on board, that option was off the table; they'd just as likely kill the Commander along with the ship.

Ships like the Alabama couldn't rely on thermal radiation alone to get rid of all their heat, so they cooled off with a process of vaporizing liquid and then venting it out into space as a plasma. Killing the liquid coolant tanks on the ship wouldn't disable it, but there's no way it could attempt to rabbit into FTL without overloading the drive core.

The only problem with that strategy was that the tanks were closest to the underbelly of the Alabama, the side currently facing the planet. Torpedoes could target those sections accurately, but any helmsman worth a damn would just focus barriers on that partition of the ship once they realized what was going on. A single torpedo volley might disable the shield, but it wouldn't rupture the tanks.

He couldn't rely on these guys being idiots. He'd have to come up with something too crazy to be anticipated.

He could get fully under the Alabama to target the tanks, and then angle a tungsten slug perfectly to not break the Alabama's spine and send the ship crashing into Bekenstein. Dropping into atmo was impossible with stealth systems engaged for exactly the same reasons the Alabama couldn't maintain full barriers while at that altitude, so they had to come out of stealth, make the shot in atmosphere, and get away before the Alabama's superior firepower destroyed the Normandy, and do it all fast enough for the fighters to not pursue.

It would be a kilometers per second knife fight. Yeah, no problem.

"Limit coil detection to point three, threshold of sixty angstroms," Pressly commanded the deck technicians sprinkling into their stations from off-duty. "Adams, how long do we have on the IES?"

"Uh," Adams' voice came through on the deck. "Joker's doing something, what's this clock for, Jeff?"

"Everyone," Jeff announced, "strap in or get your mag-boots on, I'm going to cut non-essential systems in a few seconds."

"What?!" Pressly started back toward the cockpit.

The clock ticked. Beep! Beep! Beep! went the suit monitors, the shore party still fighting.

If Jeff could cut the gravity and kinetic barriers at exactly the same moment as they dropped stealth, they could push the entirety of the Normandy's Tantalus drive into a variable mass sequence to prevent them from burning up while they made a supersonic pass. It would be just like an old-style jet fighter, but Jeff wasn't sure if the Normandy could hold up to the intense atmospheric conditions. She wasn't the most aerodynamic ship; built for stealth in space, not flying faster than the speed of sound in atmosphere.

Only problem left to address was the angle of the cannon. The Normandy was a starship, and in space, angling your attacks usually just meant altering the pitch or yaw of the vehicle. They didn't make mass-driver cannons big and allow them to aim, they typically ran the length of the ship's spine to give the most punch. GARDIAN lasers couldn't punch through the hull and shields of the cruiser, they'd be scraping paint. Only a low-arc, mass driver round, from an upside-down Normandy could make the shot to hit those coolant tanks.

Pressly dropped into the co-pilot chair. "Joker, what are you up to? We already put the Normandy through her paces, you don't have to keep testing her!"

"Strap in, Pressly, we're doing this."

"I can order you to stop this, Joker." Pressly was strapping himself in, bringing CIC data up to the bridge.

"Pressly," Jeff glanced to his copilot chair, "no offense, but this isn't your bag of tea."

"I'm curious to hear what Jeff has planned," Adams said through comms from the engineering deck, "What do you need me to do?"

Jeff flexed his fingers again, the clock kept ticking. Instruments on his dash relayed more information than he could possibly assimilate, the shore party's battle swinging wildly among dozens of other readings he could worry about, but he blocked it all out. There was only the maneuver, the single, inscrutable truth of a pilot's execution.

And now, 'tis a man who dares assault the sky.

"Shift to field oscillation," Jeff said, "variable power, directly out of stealth. Can the skin-sinks absorb heat in atmosphere?"

"Absorb heat, out of stealth?" Adams asked, "Why would we do that?"

"I don't have time to explain, can we do it?"

"Of course, that's what they're supposed to do, but too much energy and they'll vent. Lithium and O-two don't like each other. What kind of numbers are we talking?"

"Uh," Jeff really couldn't mentally calculate specific heat equations for a ship-wide burn, and he didn't have a textbook in front of him, so... "lots. That's my answer."

"Yeah, hmm, we've got them pooled up from loitering, but if we have a second to cool them beforehand, we should be okay."

Jeff wasn't sure if they would have a second. Running the heat-sinks in atmosphere was probably suicide, but he wasn't going to let the Commander slip away from them again.

"Alright, I think I can make that work."

Jeff took in a deep breath. Beeping monitors didn't bother him anymore. Messages from robots didn't concern him. The dashboard with its thousands of instruments, and his peripheral focus, faded away. He was the best damn pilot in the Alliance. There weren't any machines that could think like he could. He'd prove those asshole robots who's boss.

He recalled a few of his maneuver packages and stored them in the auto-pilot memory to be executed at a button-press if he needed it.

Don't fail me now, girl. Joker gently patted the dashboard.

"Hold on to your butts, everyone. Here we go, on my mark." The clock ticked while the Normandy dropped toward Bekenstein.

The altimeter read 5200 km, 3000 km, 2300 km...

Three.

Two.

One.

"MARK!"

All the non-emergency lights on the deck dimmed to nothing as the frigate shuddered, mass shifting from their Newtonian baseline to the equivalent of a heavy cruiser in less than a second. Jeff's stomach lurched from the altered G-forces, and every non-secured datapad, stylus, and errant coffee mug jumped away from its resting position.

Jeff executed Sunshine-1 in the autopilot, letting the computer figure out the Delta-V budget for their planned path, while he manually controlled the Normandy's roll.

1000 km, 500 km, 300 km...

As their altitude dropped, their velocity increased. The Tantalus drive shifted the Normandy's mass in variable microbursts of compensation. The mass-power reader on the dash looked like a music player's visualization, except instead of hearing heavy synth, every warning klaxon on the ship screamed in ambulatory panic. Even a weapons lock let out an angry chime, likely the Alabama mistaking the Normandy for an incoming torpedo. Air burst in fury around them, turning the ship into a veritable fireball of speed as it slowly pitched nose-down, lateral up from the planet's surface, turning the ship upside down. The hair on the back of Jeff's neck stood at attention better than he ever could.

He ran Ultraviolet-2 and Seagreen-5 and Wheatgrass-11.

They hit mach-6, over two kilometers per second, in atmosphere, while leveling out. The Normandy shook from the strain. Increased G-forces, along with the insane heat—some of the sensors completely failing—rocked the whole ship in a furious concert of vibration. The artificial gravity struggled to keep the crew from turning into paste against a bulkhead, thresholds on every system red lined, most of them were off the damn charts.

Jeff had to rely on the model and his remaining instruments to time everything correctly. The outer hull of the ship was an inferno, impossible to see out of. There was no time to hesitate, no method to visualize the attack, he executed based on the clock, haphazard calculus, and pure instinct.

He punched the cannon and maneuvered the ship simultaneously, fingers dancing like a pianist's, executing Bluestorms and Sunshines in rapid succession.

The Normandy rocked hard from the mass-driver releasing its attack. The slug, a few kilograms of dense metal, instantly turned into a sun-bright flash of fire, crossing the distance between the ships and erupting like a bomb against the hull of the Alabama in less time than it took to blink.

The Normandy completed its arc, rising up, pitching down relative to itself, and raced back toward the stars. The entire maneuver, from the moment they disengaged the stealth systems, took less than seven seconds. Jeff exhaled, adrenaline pumping.

"Status report!" Pressly strained against the chair as the Normandy climbed and gradually stopped threatening to shake itself apart.

All external sensors malfunctioned. Minor hull breaches patched themselves temporarily with omni-gel. Most advanced starships wore a thin skin of the stuff beneath their hulls to prevent depressurization in the event of something like this happening, though Jeff doubted the engineers ever considered supersonic atmospheric entry as part of their safety systems. Still, pressure looked stable. The targeting lock faded away, but several other sirens still blared. Engineering was completely offline. No radio, no camera feed, no HVAC sensors, no motion detection. Nothing, except an overworked Tantalus and its supporting systems.

"Adams, report!"

Silence.

Jeff melted into his seat. Had he gone too far? The Normandy was designed to trap heat inside the ship, not shrug it off like a shuttle, so making an attack run at supersonic speeds probably overloaded the sinks.

Jeff checked the engine room cameras. Static. He flipped to the nearby cargo bay, but the camera was just reporting a black image.

Good work, Jeff. You might be a person, but a rogue AI would at least have an excuse for killing its own crew, turning them into transistors or something. You're not supposed to fry your friends.

"Can someone get down to freaking engineering and check on them?!" Jeff called back to the technicians, but they were still pulling too many Gs to safely unstrap.

He went over the facts again in his head. Was there another way they could have disabled the Alabama? Maybe a really lucky orbital strike, but the force was more likely to crash the ship than just disable its FTL. In the end, he would trade the engineering crew for Shepard. They all signed up for this, willing to make the ultimate sacrifice if necessary.

Jeff still felt like shit, though.

That was impressive. Imagine what you could do with our systems on your ship?

What if he accepted the robot overlords? Could he have pulled off that maneuver without cooking the crew? What if, what if, what if.

Godamnit. With nothing to do, his hands were shaking. He had no way to work out the adrenaline. Stupid fight or flight response. He could punch the dash or something, but he'd break every bone in his hand. Vrolik syndrome strikes again. He couldn't even sneeze without risking injury. He couldn't take this crap, this waiting then panicked action then waiting. He was going to lose it.

They escaped atmosphere and drifted to orbital position. Jeff started rebooting systems to get the scanners back online and maybe calm himself down. One by one, systems started reporting in. The artificial gravity kicked back on. Engineering still read dark.

The dash radio clicked. "Adams here, sorry about that, took me a while to find the radio."

Holy shit, I didn't murder Adams!

"Absorbing heat from the hull pushed a lot of energy through us really quick. Fried the intercom and some cameras. We'll need a bunch of new fuses, but, critical systems are green."

"Thank God," Pressly said, then started pulling up radar and LADAR detection data. Most of the important sensors were internal unless in use, as external antennae would degrade quickly in radiation-bombarding space, or make easy eyes to poke out for GARDIAN attacks.

"Let's see if your stunt was worth it, Joker."

Jeff leaned forward to watch Pressly's terminal. An image of the Alabama appeared on screen, flying away from Bekenstein at subluminal speeds.

"Hell yeah! Take that, robots!"

A chorus of relieved laughter came up over the radio and throughout the ship. Jeff deleted the robot message and blocked the sender. Again.

"Congratulations, Joker," Adams said with a laugh, "but please never pull something like that again, at least until we retrofit the girl to be purposed for flying through a sun."

Jeff leaned back in his seat, feeling better than he had in a long time. Hopefully the Commander wasn't being held too close to those damaged systems.

The radio clicked back on, but instead of Adams, Garrus' voice piped through.

"Garrus here, we're on our way back to the Normandy."

"You guys alright?" Pressly asked, "we've had some, uh, technical difficulties up here. Can't seem to get suit data."

"Bruises and burns and some hurt egos. We're coming in Liara's shuttle, looks like I'm not getting the deposit back on mine. Massani can tell you all about that."

"Liara's with you?" Jeff asked.

"Yeah," Garrus sighed, "but Vido and his wife escaped."

"Don't worry," Jeff said, "they're running at sub-light speed, it will take them days to get anywhere."

"You got their ship? Can you send me the info?"

Pressly uploaded the data through the radio connection.

"Got it, thanks, and I think I got a plan. Straight out of Shepard's handbook. Joker, you'll probably like this one."

"Oh, God, not again," Pressly groaned.

Jeff grinned. "What's the plan, Garrus?"

"Depends on if you've kept up on my vehicle maintenance while I've been gone. How's the Mako running these days?"

Jeff limped his way down to the bottom deck. Twenty-three stairs, two corners, and three button presses later (the elevator's voice recognition was terrible, he should really pull the disability card to get it fixed, but the brass would probably just call it a 'security feature' and stonewall him. Pfft), he emerged to the sound of Garrus working on the Mako in the cargo hold. Ashley stood where she usually did, at the weapons locker, setting up a bunch of rifles Jeff wanted nothing to do with.

There would be plenty of time to formulate a plan and put it in motion. The Alabama wanted to escape and the Normandy was too quick to be attacked, but the Normandy couldn't assault the enemy, either. The fighter bay opened and swarmed the Alabama in an escort pattern as soon as they were able while she fled toward the Relay. With stealth systems offline, the Normandy lost its edge in a space battle.

If they called in the Alliance, the whole system would become a warzone. The Normandy still had its third party IFF installed, looking like a civilian vessel. Blatant military presence would incite a response, the situation would escalate, and the Alliance would be seen as bullies, using the Commander's situation as an excuse to steal territory. The success rates for boarding a ship and recovering a prisoner weren't good; the Normandy was really the only ship capable of pulling it off, but that was with her stealth and her Commander online. Preslly called the whole situation a crapshoot. Jeff agreed.

"Joker." Garrus didn't turn away from his work on the Mako, he must have recognized Jeff's awkward gait.

Garrus stared at his his omni-tool while guiding a welding bot on the vehicle's undercarriage. A series of medi-gel patches stuck to his face where his right mandible connected to burnt scales, the aftermath of the ground battle. Seeing as how the turian wasn't sitting in the med-bay, Garrus probably objected to Chakwas' typical motherly aid and drew the line at patches. It looked painful, and this was from a guy who broke a bone once a month.

"Garrus, how's she look?" Jeff was hoping to make a pun about the welding and whether turian women like guys with scars. The moment evaporated quickly, though.

"Should hold, provided we don't get blasted on the way in. You can get us close enough?"

Jeff sighed, too tired to elaborate much. "Yeah, I think I can pull it off."

"Good," Garrus said. "This is going to work, Joker, it has to."

"I know."

Jeff hobbled into the engine room. The smell of burnt electronics and a haze of ash-colored smoke filled the air. Adams and his team were busy ripping wiring out of walls, panels sat in piles, and Jeff found the chief engineer wearing a breather mask, flashlight activated on his omni-tool, spanner in hand quickly prying bolts off assembly panels.

"Bypass the L-One capacitors completely, Chase, we'll need the extra throughput to the secondary sinks. Watch out for leaks while you're down there, the omni-gel is only a temporary solution."

"Aye, Chief."

"Adams," Jeff said, his own reflection appearing in the mask's visor. Adams nodded toward a spare breather mask hanging on the wall that read SAFETY in big red letters, a few fire extinguishers notably missing. Jeff put the mask on.

"Adams, I'm sorry for—" Jeff trailed off, the mask respiring in tune with his inhalation. What was he supposed to say? Sorry, I almost murdered you and nearly blew up the ship you love? I'll buy you a drink next time we're in port, that should square us away, right?

"Joker," Adams said, his voice a characteristic calm. Jeff's faceless visage centered in Adams' visor. "Don't worry about it, we're all still alive down here." He turned away and yanked off another panel, tossing it into pile of scrap.

"I am worried, man. I should be court marshaled for doing something like that. I should lose my wings. I almost killed you." Jeff started pacing with his hands, the kind of anxious movement he couldn't really pull off with his stunted legs.

"In AFT," Jeff continued, "when professor Schwartz was going over the static assembly protocols for drive core classes, I dickishly pointed out that static electricity doesn't build up and that either their physics, or their terminology was wrong. She proceeded to bust out every damn proof, from basic trig up to advanced electrical current physics, in order to explain why starships have to shrug off static after FTL travel. She devoted the entire lesson to shutting me up, and finished by saying, 'Zat is why we say discharge static to ze pilots, instead of positron differential transportation and diffusion, Joker, lest you go kill your crew wiz my blessing'."

Adams stood up from his mess of wires and instruments on the deck, jumpsuit pocked with stains and scorch marks. The sound of each mask pumping clean air in turn was oddly soothing.

"Joker—Jeff. Look, they give you a hard time in flight school about the lives of us greasemonkeys and knuckledraggers down here, and for good reason. If every pilot tried to fly the way you do, no one would would ever want to touch the deck of a starship ever again." Adams took a step toward Jeff and put his free hand on his shoulder. "You, on the other hand, actually pull off the crazy shit, and no one got hurt."

Jeff shook his head. "Someone should yell at me. Why is everyone okay with what just happened? How can you be so damned calm?"

Adams cocked his head, warping Jeff's reflection in the visor, and took a step back. "Joker, you know what the fill rate is for Alliance engineers getting jobs in the private sector?"

Jeff didn't know.

"Somewhere around eighty-seven percent. Some guys just retire, but it's easy to find a cushy job after working on starship engines for about a decade. You know what pilots do after their typically much shorter active duty?" Adams pointed an accusatory spanner in Jeff's direction.

Jeff shook his head.

"They wind up teaching at AFT, retiring as heroes, drunks, or dead. Just look at what happened to Atkov, or Ryder, or Grissom. You guys are the ones who burn out, so keep your head on straight before I shut down the drive core to straighten it back on for you, got it?"

"The drive core is in a self-actualizing fusion reaction, it doesn't shut down."

"Whatever," Adams waved his spanner about in the air, "I'll disable a coupling and effectively shut it down. Point is, I'm calm down here because I can't afford the stimulation, but you rely on it, it actually makes you better at your job. Killer instinct and all that. I don't want to have to worry about you and the electronics."

Jeff nodded. So many things could have gone differently above Bekenstein, and he just went for the throat, the most appetizing option, without really considering every outcome. Without being able to consider every outcome.

"L-One's bypassed, Chief," Chase called as she crawled out of a duct. Adams nodded in her direction.

"Joker, look. Let's just focus on getting the Commander back, okay? We have no way of getting the primary heat sinks to hold a charge now that their capacitors are blown. Auxiliary sinks are green. She'll make FTL but no stealth systems. Got it?"

"Yeah."

"Don't beat yourself up over what could have been. Keep looking forward. You did good, kid."

"Thanks."

Jeff turned to leave, pealing off the mask and hanging it back on the wall.

"Joker," Adams said. Jeff turned around. Adams still stood in his pile of cabling, spanner in hand. "If I had the choice. Between me and the Commander. You know what I'd do?"

Jeff nodded. Adams pointed the spanner in Jeff's direction, and mimicked the nod. "Good, now get off my deck, jerkface."

"What?"

"You wanted someone to yell at you, so there. Go. Scram. You're sucking up dangerous chems, freak."

Jeff wanted to laugh. "Aye, Chief."

Jeff left the engine room, took the corner, carefully pressed the button to call the elevator, patiently waited for the doors to open, stepped inside, pressed the door-close button, then pressed the button for the crew deck, waited the five seconds of gravity-shifting transit that put pressure on his ankles and knees and thighs and back, waited for the doors to open, exited the elevator, took the corner up the twenty-three stairs up into the CIC, crossed the CIC, avoided bumping into any transitory crew members, stepped up the ramp, limped down the bridge corridor, and crawled into the helmsman's station.

Jeff realized he had to pee.

He produced his medically prescribed catheter—because they didn't make starships with latrines near the cockpit—starting the familiar song and dance of checking the deck for wandering eyes, unzipping his pants, fitting the catheter on, trying not to draw attention, and directing his own eyes at his personal terminal.

Tick Tock, Jeff. You haven't given an answer, which means you're still considering. One test is all I need to prove this system capable.

Jeff zipped his pants up, sanitized his hands, and starting bringing up telemetry data again. Same as before he left the bridge: the Alabama was heading straight for Relay 61, and had stopped their initial burn. They were just coasting, now, falling through space at an almost constant velocity.

"They've stopped their burn?" Pressly's voice appeared somewhere behind Jeff.

Jeff almost jumped out of his seat.

"Holy crap, Pressly, don't sneak up on me like that." Pressly cocked an eyebrow.

"We seem to be ready, Garrus, meet you in the CIC?" Pressly walked back down the bridge tunnel, talking to the radio on his wrist.

It was time. Jeff felt nervous, again. Like he'd cheated death a few too many times and karma was going to catch up to him. He followed vids of guys obsessed with extreme sports and their addiction to the adrenaline and their inevitable career-ending injuries. Jeff understood the draw to action, but failure in this case wasn't just going to result in a few broken bones. Broken bones were old hat to him. Failure meant the death of one of the most important people in the galaxy, a huge stellar incident, and probably the only person with the capacity to understand and stop the Reapers. Everything relied on Jeff to pull this off.

If the Alabama got to the Relay, they lose. If they called in the Alliance, they lose. Desperation is a bitch, and both sides were damn close to it.

A crowd gathered in the CIC to hear Garrus' plan. Jeff turned on a monitor to watch it and split his attention between the briefing and figuring out how he was going to execute the plan. The galaxy map turned into a virtual rendition of the Alabama, ten fighters protecting her in an escort pattern. Velocity static, bearing on the Relay.

Ten fighters wouldn't be much of a problem in a straight up fight. Ten fighters assisted by GARDIAN and mass-driver turrets and whatever else this cruiser had, was a losing proposition any way to look at it. The fighters couldn't be drawn away, either: they were protecting the ship from being boarded, not destroyed. Jeff's face fell into his hands as he listened to Garrus give his rundown.

"We get in under the fighters, like this," the image conjured up a virtual Normandy, going backwards, and opening its cargo bay door, "and we release the catch. The Mako drops in, the Normandy covers our entrance, and we find an airlock on the hull."

Even if they could get under the fighters, it was still a bold plan. The cannons would rip them apart, and could even target the Mako in transit, if the fighters didn't. The Normandy couldn't maneuver while setting up a zero-G drop for the Mako, either, so the fighters became even more dangerous. It was ludicrous. Nuts. It also looked like the only feasible way to board the ship.

"Suicide," Pressly stated.

"Joker got the Mako in under the geth on Ilos. This will be an easier maneuver, just more guns pointed at us."

"It's ten times the maneuver!" Pressly countered, but Jeff stopped listening. He was staring at his terminal, hands on the haptic keyboard.

Okay, a test: What am I looking at?

Jeff sent the message, heart racing, finger hovering above the ENTER key after pressing it.

He tried to figure out what might happen based on a spectrum of possibilities: the Best Possible Situation would be It doing all the things It promised without any weird or dire consequences. Worst Possible Situation was It vented all the air and overloaded the eezo core two milliseconds after it had access. Jeff figured the true ramifications were somewhere in the middle.

How did he figure It was a machine? A century ago, people had programs on their smart phones capable of passing a Turing Test, so text-based interaction wasn't a clear indicator. It triggered something like the uncanny valley, though; the speed at which the system broke the Normandy's firewalls while loitering and stealthed on all bands of the spectrum, convinced Jeff this program was more than just software upgrades. It didn't just carefully skirt around the VI, probing for weakness and exploiting bad port-protocol or something like that, It outright bypassed everything, like network security wasn't even there. Its intentions should spell out whether It was going to go all murder-bot on them.

The machine needed the ship, that much was apparent. It wouldn't blow it up, but would It vent all the O-two and get rid of the annoying meat-bags? Jeff didn't think so, or at least, not at first. The robot was interested in the ship, that much was clear, and It needed Jeff to invite It on board. It was probably capable of forcing its way through the firewalls without his permission, given that It bypassed his VI so easily, so that led him to believe the machine's true goal was to earn the trust of the personnel.

But to what gain?

"We have to account for these fighters in our approach," Pressly continued to argue, "if we can't out-maneuver them, we get torn apart. Towing the Mako in means we have ONE approach vector available. Any pilot or targeting system is going to blast us apart!"

"Not necessarily," Garrus countered. "We FTL in, which masks our approach, we reduce velocity while still under mass, make the drop, then scramble the defenses while the Mako's in transit. It's a classic Cabal Run."

"Cabals are groups of biotics, capable of working together to pull something like this off, we just have one biotic available. Plus, Cabal groups have incredibly high casualty rates, if I have my intelligence correct."

You're looking at the MSV Alabama. You need to board it to retrieve Shepard.

The machine was quick, but speed wasn't surprising. How It knew their intention was far more disconcerting, especially when Jeff hadn't figured out Its intentions yet.

Wrong. We want to destroy it, but our weapons aren't functional to the task.

Jeff tried misdirection this time.

Garrus' idea was sound, but they couldn't exit FTL accurately enough to make a precision drop like he wanted. The Cabal Runs he referenced were incredibly prone to disaster. Maybe the turian had more faith in Jeff than he had in himself, or his own people. More pressure Jeff's shoulders.

"Liara can make small adjustments, and Joker can make the drop accurate enough. This is the only way."

You're misdirecting. My data suggests the Normandy is more than capable of engaging the target. You believe my system to be aligned counter to your goals. I assure you, the system is safe. Lab tested for tens of thousands of hours with every flight scenario in the books. We need a field test. This situation would be perfect.

Jeff thumbed a beat on the dashboard, trying to think. No one pulled off an FTL to subluminal transition in under five hundred kilometers. Space might be big, but FTL made it really, really, small. Margin for error shrunk to nothing when pulling light-speed-scale tactics, and humans just aren't capable of zero-margin execution.

Meat wasn't perfect.

"Joker," Pressly said, voice piping out of the speaker and down the tube at a slight echo, "Can you do it?"

Sheesh, even Pressly was starting to believe in him.

"Yeah," Jeff said, contrite, "I can do it."

OK. I accept. Here's the situation, and if you screw us over, there will be hell.

If he was making some sort of Faustian deal, he'd like the record to show that he was at least hesitant about it.

Confirmed. Simply install the attached data packets, and your system will be optimized with the Enhanced Defense Initiative.

A/N:

Okay, we're rolling now. Took a while to find the right "voice" for this series, and I think Joker is the perfect POV for that. Equal parts philosophical, crazy intuitive, and smarmy. Exactly what I expect from a guy that sits at the helm all day responsible for everyone else's lives.

I like the idea of Jeff having to struggle with the fact that he's reliant on machines to do his job, and EDI is kind of a perfect foil for him, another place I felt the games missed an opportunity.

Side note: I wish FFNet was a little more friendly to different fonts and formats. I hate resulting to bold/italics to signify text-speech.

More updates quicker, and it's getting easier to fit chapters into my outline. Hopefully this trend continues.

Thanks for reading. Next chapter is partially from the perspective of one of the more controversial characters. Should be fun.