Chapter 09: Detention
"Got a minute Shepard?"
All things considered, between standing in the command deck hallways waiting for something to happen and staring at the airlock door, it was an academic question. They had nothing but minutes, but the former C-Sec investigator had a habit of prefacing his real questions behind meaningless small talk like that. On the other side of the hallway, Shepard didn't say anything, but the commander bodded his sensor pod as a means of reply. The turian suppressed an involuntary shudder. The nod was a gesture of assent common to most species, and he knew it was the same Shepard inside, but seeing a mech do it felt distinctly unnatural. The airlock access between the helm and the rest of the command deck was far enough that nobody could have heard them over the hubbub of activity, but he lowered his voice all the same.
"Ever get the feeling that we're, I don't know, that we're not really making the best use of our time?"
If asked, he'd admit straight away that this wasn't the best place to start this sort of conversation with the commander, or if there ever was a good one since they had started on this near insane mission. Secrecy didn't mean much on a thoroughly bugged Cerberus ship like this, but the crew weren't close enough to listen in, and the krogan standing watch on the far side discouraged passerby. And when you were up against the Collectors, with all those myths and half legends about them having enough backing to be taken seriously, there was no time like the present to ask.
"CLARIFY"
"I know we're running a little short on combat effectives to take on the Collectors-"
"A LITTLE" the commander interjected, getting a brief chuckle out of Garrus.
"Ahh, we don't really need a lot of people to take on the Collectors anyway. Just the two of us should be more than enough to finish the job before breakfast right?" The amusement didn't last for very long, and Garrus quickly sobered up a moment later. "Seriously Shepard, I know the Collectors are bad news and we need all the help we can get to fight them, but shouldn't we be focusing on tracking them down instead of trying to pick up some kind of unstable biotic?"
"NOT ENOUGH CLUES TO CREATE A PATTERN. RANDOM SEARCHING WOULD NOT FIND THEM. WE BUILD A WORKING TEAM AND WAIT FOR AN OPENING" That sensor pod shifted, giving Garrus the distinct feeling that the commander was thinking hard. "I DO NOT LIKE IT"
"Yeah, the waiting is the hardest... oh?" Letting his voice trail off as the implications of what the commander had said hit him. Like a really good serial killer, the Collectors had left too few clues to find a motive or pattern, other than a tendency to pick off human colonies. You didn't catch perpetrators like these by running around looking for anyone who might be suspicious, it only put them on their guard. Playing it smart meant staying low with eyes open waiting for them to show up so you could bust them. It was the calm and collected thing to do, but it had nicked a little harder on his conscience each time the former C-Sec investigator ran across a body they were too late to save. Playing with entire colonies this way, Garrus would have been sick to his gut knowing he couldn't do anything until the Collectors struck, but what about the Commander? Would it stick in his conscience the same way it would have years ago when he was still an Alliance marine, or did coming back like this change the human he'd been, more willing to sacrifice the innocent for the objective? No matter how often he told himself it was the same Shepard underneath that mechanized shell, the same human who never compromised on his principles, he only had to look at the Cerberus logo stamped on this ship for the doubts to niggle away at him. Especially whenever he thought about what they were about to do.
"IT IS THE BIOTIC YOU ARE CONCERNED ABOUT"
Garrus grunted as if he'd been punched, rebuking himself for forgetting that out of all the things Shepard wasn't any more, unobservant wasn't one of them. He waved a hand by way of explanation, "come on Shepard, you know who I used to be and what makes me tick. I left C-Sec because the bureaucracy kept letting low lives get away with their crimes. Coming to Omega was the only way I could have made a difference without being tied down by the red tape, but I always did what was right. And now we're going to help a mass murdering biotic walk free? I can see the merits of people working off their crimes Shepard, but even if this could turn into a suicide job, it's a lot to ask me to accept."
"WILL IT BE A PROBLEM"
The turian gave a brief shake of his head in resignation. "No, as much as I don't like it, the Collectors really are the bigger problem and we need all the help we can get. It twists my guts to admit it, but if you can get Jack to cooperate, I won't make it an issue."
Lifting an arm, the commander placed the weapon sheaths on Garrus's shoulder in a gesture of camaraderie, though the sudden weight nearly forced him to his knees before Shepard quickly drew the limb back.
"SORRY STILL GETTING USED TO DELICATE MOTIONS" Shepard rumbled by way of apology before continuing, "MAYBE IF WE ARE FORTUNATE JACK WILL NOT BE COOPERATIVE"
The chuckle that came out of Garrus's mandibles was genuinely amused, the previously grim mood abating as he tossed his head in the direction of Grunt who was just making his way up to the airlock, Zaeed following closely behind. Both members of the ground team were in full environmental kit, helmets on and normally exposed joints sealed against anything from gas attacks to hard vacuum. "I kind of doubt that commander, especially since you managed charm your krogan friend into accepting you as battlemaster after all. Though I wouldn't mind if you made less of an effort in recruiting this one," he added in a conspirational tone, eliciting a brief nod of the sensor pod from Shepard.
"On the other hand, it could be the warden who ends up uncooperative," he gestured with the carbine in his other hand, one reminder of the contingency they had planned for. Though his preferred sniper rifle still hung on his back on it's magnetic locks, the weapon would see little utility in the likely cramped quarters of the prison ship, not that it would impede him much if it became necessary. A mandible twitched irritably. The only reason why they had this contingency was on the chance that the warden would hope to collect twice by double crossing them, which had it's own set of moral implications that clashed with what Garrus had always held as right and true.
"IT WAS SIMPLER IN THE OLD DAYS"
Garrus chuckled at the truth in that statement, but said nothing as Grunt and Zaeed finally joined their little gathering, the former giving him a curious look while the latter simply leaned against the bulkhead with a patient expression. He didn't bother explaining, suspecting neither would really understand, or care. It had been simpler then, with just their wits and whoever had thrown their lot in with the Normandy against an omnicidal race of machines and their turian puppet, clean and to the point morality he had no qualms about. Oh, there had been grey areas before, choices on whether to spare a monster or give them a choice, back door dealings with corporate power brokers for an edge, but nothing like what they were doing now. Those days were gone forever he feared, much like Shepard's flesh and blood body. Dealing with a corrupt slave trader, the warden was selling prisoners to the highest bidder it seemed, in order to free a biotic with over a hundred charges of murder. He shook his head. Just so they could improve their chances, they were dealing with people that should have been shot at first opportunity, that seemed to the be norm now. "Well, let's just hope that-"
He was interrupted by an electronic warning tone and the sardonic voice of the ship's pilot, "Sorry to interrupt you guys waxing about the good old days, but I'm picking up a lot of activity coming to our front door and couple of spacewalkers, and I don't think it's the welcome wagon."
There was a faint hum of electronics as Zaeed and Grunt unpacked their weapons, accelerator rails extending to their full length with the promise of pain to anyone on the wrong side. The krogan, he noted, was grinning excitedly, while the mercenary looked as bored as he had been earlier. Garrus shared a quick look with Shepard, the commander only shaking the sensor pod in that close-but-not-quite-alive way.
"THIS PART HOWEVER IS STILL THE SAME"
Garrus chuckled, and raised his rifle by way of reply, feeling the increasing pace of his heart in anticipation of the upcoming events. This was familiar, the build up of expectant action, knowing full well the next few moments would decide whether you lived or died trying to make that difference in the status quo. Their goals were noble, the means... he couldn't accept, but understood the need. That was his difference, the line he would not cross, one he hoped Shepard would never do. With a practised motion, he jammed his helmet on with a hiss of pressure seals.
"You're right Shepard, let's hope it never changes."
It is said that there is no stealth in space. Engineers and physicists will tell you that any artificial object, any living thing, would be detectable by even the most rudimentary of sensors that any spacefaring ship or planetary astronomical observation grid can pick up. And for the most part, they are right. Embedded thermal sinks, cold gas thrusters, even plain old radar and LIDAR absorbent plating don't make you invisible, only less detectable to any potentially hostile sensor net. Anyone could look out the window, and if your eyes were good enough, see anything attempting to hide. Not that many did with the paltry capabilities of organic vision compared to artificial ship mounted ones. Sergeant Caska was counting on the fact as the nondescript maintenance hatch noiselessly opened in the vacuum of space. Using hand signals, made sluggish by the weight of his powered down armoured suit, he motioned for the rest of his team to join him on the Purgatory's exterior, just under the airlock bay where their prize awaited. Not waiting for their silent acknowledgement, he reached for a handgrip sunken into the hull and pulled himself out with a tug.
The batarian let out an impressed whistle as he cleared the portal, the sound audible only in the pressurized spaces of his sealed combat helmet. He was not the sort to be awed or taken in by flashy and powerful ships, save only in how they affected his own mission if he ever had to lead a raid on them, but the frigate sidled up to the Purgatory projected an aura of grace and power with it's smooth lines that he could not deny. The warden had been right, this would be worth double crossing a client once they claimed it for their own, assuming they didn't damage it too much in the process, which was going to be a challenge. There was no crew manifest to look over of course, but the ship was large for it's class in his estimate, large enough to have an on board security detail that could consist of anything from nothing at all to a full squad of marines fitted with heavy power armour and high end weapons supported with heavy mechs. Given that the client was expecting Jack of all the prisoners to be transferred on board, Caska had placed his estimations on the generous side.
Nineteen other Blue Suns followed him out into space, gripping handholds and pulling themselves along as they crawled across the hull of Purgatory, resisting the urge to look anywhere and succumb to the zero-g, zero-reference, panic inherent in all species. That would have killed them as surely as a bullet in the head. There were no tether lines, and no extravehicular packs mounted on their armour, not even a bottle of emergency cold gas to redirect their motion, using any of those would have broken their cover too early. If someone lost their grip and could not recover quickly enough, not only would it raise their chances of detection, it would mean death by asphyxiation when the ten minutes worth of air in the suits ran out. But no one complained or backed out when he had told them about their insertion method. Caska had done a lot of risky things that had earned him his rank, and he looked out for his subordinates, something that went completely against his species reputation. If Caska led from the front, his men would trust him to make this work.
They moved in silence without a wasted motion, each action deliberate and efficient as they pushed themselves across the intervening space of the docking gate, searching for the maintenance hatches their earlier scans had provided. Sealed in the highly personal world of his suit, Caska counted out the ticks of the mechanical timepiece strapped to his wrist, calculating how much more time they had left to make their move. Theirs was the second half of the entire operation, the first being a boarding attempt. While they had gone into the vacuum, another team would soon attempt to force their way in through the airlocks and distract the security forces on board. Their job was to get in through the cargo bay and disable the distress beacons and engines before anyone could think of escaping. Too early, and they would tip off their hand, too late and they would not only lose the advantage of surprise, they would be out of air. The Blue Suns sergeant however, was not overly concerned about that. His men were a known factor, but the ship, despite everything they had done to minimize possible risks, wasn't.
Starship's, as a rule, did not carry anything less than weapons designed to hit other starships, fighters or planets, but the GARDIAN missile defence system with it's precision high powered lasers would cut through body armour just fine. Sensors hadn't picked them up, but there was no question that they were there, all warships had them. Moving from the sheltering bulk of Purgatory and crossing the last intervening space would put them in full view of any defence systems it had, with nothing to protect them but their lack of power signatures to draw unwelcome attention. He waited on the lip of the airlock bridge, counting out the seconds of the timepiece, and feeling his entire body tense as the final hand approached the marking point. Behind him, the rest of the team did the same, making their own preparations for the deciding moment. The hand struck zero, and Caska pulled himself over the edge.
And nothing happened.
No ruby red beams of energy lanced out from the ship, nothing boiled away at his thin skinned armour to roast him alive. He let out a breath of relief even as his arms worked quickly, aligning himself against the hull of Purgatory and coiling his legs under him. With a kick of his legs, he launched himself off Purgatory, closing the distance to the frigate on inertia alone in the space of seconds. A sharp jerk of his torso rotated him in the weightless environment, aligning his feet with the hull of the frigate as the distance between the two rapidly closed. He mentally counted off the seconds to landing, allowing himself a moment of exultation as the soft soled boots of him and his team entered inside the safe radius, too close to be detected by external sensors, or hit with anything the ship carried now.
He was right, but he was also wrong.
The first sign that something had gone wrong was when the ship broke free from the airlock bridge in a sudden noiseless eruption of explosive decompression. Only one of the team saw it, lifting an arm in alarm to call the attention of the others. And then Caska saw it, a moment of dread starting to filter into his consciousness as the ship moved underneath him before his magnetic locks could engage, the hull moved and rotated. The last thing he saw was the stylized white lettering 'SR-2 NORMANDY' rapidly filling up his entire view. And then he never saw another thing ever again.
Two minutes ago
Ambushes and double crosses are very contingent acts that share more than a few things in common. Both allow a much weaker party to turn the tables on the stronger, while frequently getting back much more than they invested in the effort. But they also share the same core weaknesses. One particular case for example, is that the success of the plan often hinges on the would-be victim never seeing it coming, or if they did, it would be too late to do anything about it. That did not apply here.
Shepard had seen it coming literally light years away, and had made good on his preparations with Miranda's cooperation. Not willing to tip their hand to the warden early, especially if the commander's suspicions had proven unnecessary, the Cerberus operative had acquired the schematics for a new sensor array best suited for the job. Originally built to supplement topographical planetary surveys in a timely manner, the Argus satellite array had been re-purposed to serve a far more militaristic purpose as an additional set of eyes to the Normandy's already comprehensive sensor suite.
Barely the size of a human thumb, the micro satellites serenely orbited their parent frigate. Disguised as the usual space debris of ejected garbage, sweeping the Purgatory with miniature optical apertures and guided on their paths by seemingly normal bleed off from the ship's artificial gravity systems, the surveillance systems tracked every inch of the prison vessel. Individually, the resolution from each drone's cameras would be poor, only just able to resolve a human sized face at a hundred meters. But the hundreds that floated in cold vacuum painted together a picture of the prison ship far superior to even the frigate's advanced internal sensors. When the minute maintenance hatch had popped, the Argus system had seen it. When the teams had begun their slow exit into cold space, Normandy's AI had known, relaying their positions to all members of the ground team.
When they had waited for their distraction team to play its part, Shepard was already in motion.
Hidden inside the ship, secure in the knowledge that they would not be detected, the distraction team had left their eezo cores running, bullet stopping kinetic barriers powered and on standby. It didn't save them. Cutting edge gravimetric sensors had already detected the micro gravity distortions caused by the exotic element in their suits, even through the background wash of the both ship's eezo cores. Their positions and movements were already being fed into the encrypted tactical network the commander shared with the rest of his team even as the Blue Suns flooded into the terminal gate. The two prison guards who crouched by the exterior airlock with cutting charges, hiding beneath the shroud of a tactical cloak to fool optical sensors, worked quickly but confidently, unaware that they were already being tracked.
Not until the airlock door unexpectedly hissed open.
There wasn't even time to blink.
A storm of red hot death roared as the doors slid open, scything down the cloaked guards in a single instant of unrelenting fury, their kinetic barriers flaring into existence before splintering underneath the concentrated firepower of Shepard's fireteam. The other members of the boarding party scrabbled away from the deathtrap of the airlock corridor, chased by the storm of deadly metal and a toroidal metal object that bounced once on Purgatory's deck. It's ballistic arc terminated a dozen meters away from where it had been thrown, vanishing in a brilliant flash of radiation and sound that blinded eyes, unshielded sensors and ears with equal ferocity.
The mechanical shutters that had closed over Shepard's optics at the last instant had only begun to raise, but the krogan was already through the window of their slackening fire. Roaring a war cry as he brought up the shotgun to bear on a blinded mercenary, the krogan fired a fistful of micro pellets that shredded the man's failing kinetic barriers. Disdaining the use of his weapon on his reeling opponent, Grunt smashed his head into the stumbling guard, the crack of the crumpling helmet and skull loud even over the echoes of the shotgun. Quieter but no less deadly, Zaeed sprinted from behind, smoothly smashing the butt of his rifle into the face of a mercenary fumbling for the grenade pinned to his chest before slamming the weapon through the opening under the chin with the crack of cartilage snapping.
Stamping behind with a deceptively sedate pace, Shepard cleared through the airlock, his autocannon sweeping from side to side as it tracked the power signatures his sensors were feeding him, wordless orders transmitted to his team through the tactical network as he prioritized targets. To his left, a missile team found themselves on the receiving end of Zaeed's incendiary grenade, turning them into screaming torches before they could even get a shot off. Beside them, a squad with a grenade launcher withered beneath the angry roar of Shepard's autocannon, the sole survivor diving to grab the dropped weapon when Garrus's carbine chattered, the prison guard's head vanishing in a spray of blood and bone. An alert blared in Shepard's consciousness, warning him of an outgoing transmission attempt. Targeting reticules bracketed the source, a Blue Sun's commander in the back of the terminal marked by the energized armoured plates he wore on his shoulder, already screaming into his helmet microphone.
The grenade launcher on Shepard's shoulder was a throwback to the days pre-dating mass effect technology, using a simple magnetic coil mechanism to accelerate it's payload to it's lethal velocity. But there was nothing primitive about the load sitting in it's firing chamber. Accelerating to it's high subsonic velocities, the grenade screamed across the intervening space between Shepard and the mercenary commander in less than a second. Blue white light flared as the powered armour's computer registered the threat, kinetic barriers flaring into existence to stop the projectile. There was a metallic 'crunk', distinct even in the roar of battle, as the grenade squashed it's head against the unyielding barrier of solidified air, triggering the arming mechanism and subjecting a milligramme of element zero to a powerful negative electrical charge.
The laws of physics in a five meter radius were rewritten for an instant in a blast of dark energy, kinetic barriers losing their potency as gravitationally solidified air lost it's consistency. The second charge fired, channelling the power of fifty grammes of military grade explosives into a liner plate, the blast liquefying and accelerating a hypersonic bolt of molten uranium-titanium alloy through the breach in the kinetic barriers and into the batarian's chest. Nano-woven armour plate designed to stop small arms fire and dissipate hundreds of degrees of heat failed under the combined assault of kinetic and thermal energy, jetting away in puffs of ferrous vapour as the bolt bored through the underlying ballistic mesh with contemptuous ease. The liquid projectile erupted through the back of the batarian's torso, spraying charred viscera and molten armour plate as the entire back and spine were torn away in a steaming cloud of boiling blood, white hot fragments battering the barriers of his bodyguards and sending the disembodied head spinning into the air trailing smoke as it's torso-less limbs fell apart in a burning clatter.
The Blue Suns counter-attack momentarily trailed off, those who were still standing frozen at the sight of their commander's steaming remains. Shepard's team had no such compunctions. Another Blue Sun prison guard went down to fire from Garrus's carbine, rapid fire bursts shattering barriers and armour to tear at soft flesh underneath while another literally disintegrated from a point blank discharge of Grunt's massive shotgun. The Blue Suns snapped out of their temporary paralysis, opening fire with the ferocity borne of desperation, but more than half the Suns down and their reduced firepower was starting to show. Shepard began to stride into the thickest cluster of their defences, accepting the fusillade of shots that rammed into his unyielding kinetic barriers as he raised his autocannon to reply in kind.
A threat alert blared in his consciousness, instantly warning him of a targeting laser illuminating his bulk. High speed servos slewed his sensor pod to the left, spotting a trio of guards with unfamiliar, boxy weapons in their arms, the business ends glowing with a brilliant blue aura. Something screamed inside of him, instinct and experience bundled together shouting a warning.
"NOW JOKER. N-"
Three bolts of lightning arced into the air, effortlessly shearing through kinetic barriers to strike with a crack of immense power. Armour plate burned and blackened where the lightning struck, but the true damage was transmitted deep within the mass of electronics that comprised his body. Emergency cutoffs and failsafes burned themselves out in the engineered bid to prevent catastrophic damage, but many other parts failed completely, systems shorting out as they were overloaded by voltages that they were never built to handle. Powered limbs quivered under a chaotic stream of corrupted commands, sight and sensor readouts instantly vanished in a hail of intermittent static as electricity arced and danced across his body.
In a single moment of sight, he watched in horror as the same lightning wreathing his body lancing out to strike at Garrus, the turian stiffening where he stood under the electrical assault before collapsing, his forward momentum sending him down in a tangle of twitching limbs. Auditory sensors picked up the sounds of Zaeed turning the air blue with curses, his rifle chattering away before another whipcrack of artificial lightning brought him down with a yell. Something in Shepard's knee actuator gave, corrupted data streams crashing their error checking systems and causing them to fall to his knees. A ragged cheer went up among the Blue Suns, not seeing the weapon arm slew jerkily to face the trio. The mental command to fire failed to reach it's goal, almost. With an angry roar, the autocannon concealed in his arm sprayed the team with their lightning weapons, but the aim was off, clipping the kinetic barriers on one of the guards before his control over the weapon died in a shower of system errors. The emotionless voice of the onboard VI intoned the status of secondary systems, counting down the seconds but the Sun's weapons had began glowing again, charging for another strike. For the first time in a very long time, Shepard felt the taste of desperation permeating his consciousness.
With an ear splitting shriek of tortured metal, the airlock gate behind them sheared free of the superstructure, torn away from it's mountings as the Normandy departed on his desperate orders. The local atmosphere screamed through the gaping hole in the ship, pulling the Blue Suns off their feet in a hurricane of howling air. The heavy weapons squad stumbled, their aim thrown off in the sudden panic of explosive decompression despite their sealed suits. Bellowing defiance amidst the maelstrom of evacuating air, Grunt bounded ahead of the stricken commander on magnetic boots, disintegrating one of the trio's kinetic barriers with the roar of his shotgun. The three recovered quickly, turning their weapons on him and wreathing the krogan in a storm of lightning mid-charge. Even in his state, the commander could not help but feel a brief moment of vicious glee, comprehending the real nature of the weapons, and what they would, or wouldn't, do to a krogan's physiology.
Grunt didn't even slow down.
"I!"
Trailing wreathes of arcing electricity, the bellow terminated as Grunt bodily smashed into the trio with outflung arms, pained screams from three throats filling the air as the deadly, incapacitating energies conducted through their suits, electrocuting them with their own weapons.
"AM!"
A powerful krogan fist mercilessly pummelled the tangled bodies, crushing trigger hands into red ruin and knocking a man down with a hammer blow punch. He didn't even have time to struggle before Grunt drove his massive foot into the man's chest with the crack of crumpling armour plate. Driving his shotgun downwards, the resulting blast took a man's leg off at the thigh, the windmilling guard stumbling backwards only long enough for Grunt to grab the sparking chestplate and deliver a headbutt that snapped the guard's head at an unnatural angle. Another Blue Suns guard attempted to blindside the krogan with a shotgun, only to be stretched out on the floor by Shepard's autocannon, secondary systems rebooting and restoring weapon functionality.
"KROGAN!"
The last surviving guard threw down his gun and tried to flee, but Grunt snapped forward, grabbing the man by his leg. With a sharp jerk, Grunt pulled the man off his feet and began swinging him around like a ragged doll, the captive Sun's shrill screams fading in the rapidly dissipating atmosphere before the krogan let go. The armoured guard went sailing out the tear in the airlock, limbs flailing wildly as he exited the local gravitational field and shrank into the void. Shepard watched the guard dwindle into nothingness as his systems completed their reboot phase, rising to his feet as the others of his squad picked themselves off the ground, still feeling the effects of their sudden electrocution. Knowing personally what it was going to be like, Shepard felt a pang of sympathy for the doomed guard's fate.
Almost.
"Ladies and gentlemen, we are now going to zero-g and conducting evasive manoeuvres, kindly return your trays to the upright position, buckle your seatbelts and hang on to your lives!"
It wasn't the most auspicious of take off messages the pilot could have given, but it did get the results he was hoping to get when he disabled the Normandy's artificial gravity. Not that there would have been time to worry about slackers with Shepard's urgent command still hanging in the air. There was the familiar lurch of his stomach in the sudden free fall as gravity went to zero, but no one panicked or yelled in surprise and everyone on the command deck secured in their stations, so that was a plus. He sincerely hoped that everyone was strapped in though, because what came next was not going to be enjoyable to anyone in free fall once the thrusters hit. Becoming a two hundred pound missile in a room full of hard surfaces and sharp edges would ruin anyone's day. Fingers dancing across the holographic haptic displays, he sealed the primary airlocks and fired up the starboard yaw thrusters. The Normandy groaned underneath him at the first roar of thrusters, but a moment later she pulled through just fine, breaking free of that prison ship and it's airlocks in the wash of escaping atmosphere from the tear she left in it. Shepard was inside, but there weren't any worries about spacing the commander this time. This had been planned for, and the pilot had more things to worry about right now than the immediate predicament of his commander.
"Bugs on my windscreen" he hummed, naming the first order of business he'd have to deal with, simultaneously executing a full 360 roll with another pulse on the Normandy's thruster array. She rolled a little heavy, probably from still having bits of the Purgatory airlock stuck to her, but that was something the normally perfectionist pilot couldn't deal with now. Even through the thick armour, numerous thumps and cracks of something impacting the hull managed to permeate into the command deck, though nothing that worried the Cerberus pilot very much, at least about the ship's integrity. The would-be hijackers however, were probably having a very bad day as Joker's frigate sized boot greased the lot of them against it's hull. The contacts on his tac-screen vanished, or went very far away at very fast speeds as Normandy completed it's barrel roll, and Joker chuckled. "Bug-be-gone, good thing Gardner's the ja-whooaaah!"
Joker had all half of a second to respond to the sudden threat alert that blossomed on the tac-screen, a thermal build up that was anything but thruster emissions. A competent Alliance pilot would have taken a fraction of a second to register the threat, another fraction to formulate the appropriate response. Joker was no mere competent pilot. He skipped the second half, stabbing down on a control that burned more anti-matter reaction mass, sending the Normandy into a corkscrewing dive, and not a moment too soon. An intense blast of focused infrared energy seared the intervening space between Purgatory and the Normandy, only the last instant manoeuvre turning a strike that would have speared the Normandy's primary thrusters into a glancing hit that burned a dark helical scorch pattern on it's armour. Normandy had been built strong, her multi-layered ablative armour plating rated to weather dozens of GARDIAN strikes on any point before failing, but it was not a guarantee that Joker wanted to test. Besides, he had his pride as the best pilot there ever was.
More threat alerts popped up on his screen, and the pilot punched the Normandy's engines to full bore, powering through evasive manoeuvres that were half instinct and all Joker, minimising the impact of the laser strikes by keeping the ship constantly rotating against the Purgatory's GARDIAN batteries. Flashing his hands across the numerous control interfaces, he managed to find the spare concentration to dart an eye to the terminal beside him, feeling justifiably annoyed at how things were turning out. Another beam of energy lanced out from the Purgatory's GARDIAN defences, scoring a long line on the port hanger deck that boiled away paint and scorched refractive armour layers meant to withstand just such an assault. "EDI, I thought you were jamming their targeting sensors!"
The AI's holographic globe popped into existence above the terminal, replying in that oh-so-calm voice that grated on Joker.
"I am currently employing all of the Normandy's electronic countermeasures to maximum effect Mr Moreau." Joker didn't sneer at the intelligence's defence, because he was too busy avoiding ploughing into one of the extended prison blocks of Purgatory in the midst of it's active GARDIAN defenses. "However, our close proximity to Purgatory is reducing the effects of our jamming systems and does not prevent optical tracking from being employed in place of compromised sensor systems. I suggest we increase the distance between both vessels if we are to avoid taking further damage."
"They're eyeballing it? And I thought I was the only one with the ship full of crazy." The sarcastic comment however, did not stop Joker from taking the AI's advice, redundant since they were already heading away as fast as their sublight drives could push them, to heart. Another pulse of energized radiation burned it's way across the hull as Joker pulled the ship into a drunken corkscrew, arcing away at a shallow dive that put them beneath the Purgatory and out of sight from most of the weapon's arc, but not all. Their departure was still chased by several more spears of focused infrared energy, but they were fewer than before and spinning hull of Normandy prevented the impacts from doing more than scorching the hull metal. Even that didn't last long, as the impacts grew less and less accurate as Normandy continued to put distance between it and the Purgatory until the shots were missing completely. When the third consecutive shot missed, Joker let out a sigh of relief he'd been holding in. Outside of eyeballing range, they'd have to rely on sensors to hit reliably, something any Alliance pilot worth his license could avoid. Joker could do this in his sleep. Of course the fact that they were outside of the effective range didn't hurt either.
Not that they were out of the woods yet.
"I am detecting increased broad spectrum sensor tracks from the external perimeter Mr Moreau. Telemetry suggests Purgatory's fighter escorts have begun their attack run."
Joker spared a split second to shoot the artificial intelligence an irritated look. "I can read a tactical display just fine mom, sheesh."
They were lighting up the edges of the globular tactical net like a swarm of insects, taking an approach vector that had them closing in from just about everywhere in front of them. The IFF library tagged them as Sickle class fighters, not quite top of the line like his baby, but they packed a mean punch above the usual weight. Not just the usual double bulges under their fuselage, they'd be carrying pulse lasers too. The math said that Normandy could be expecting eighty disruptor torpedoes in less than half a minute, and that same number loaded with plain old explosives once their barriers were down, and of course a lot of fighter class lasers trying to cut his ship up once they got in range. That didn't worry Joker very much, their tactics were bog standard, and eighty to one odds of jinky, but downright dumb, missiles was just warm up practice. Not to mention the fact that Normandy's GARDIAN suite was no slouch either.
Raising a hand, he ticked down the seconds on his finger, and just as the last one closed into a fist, the tactical display lit up with more contacts, the tracked velocity indicating that they were indeed the torpedoes he had predicted. "Man did I call it or what?" the pilot muttered to himself, arming the GARDIAN system and preparing to let the laser system fly, "these guys are using tactics so old school you can see it from light years away-"
Joker trailed off as eighty tracks on the display suddenly split and quadrupled in number, accelerating to speeds a conventional disruptor torpedo wouldn't have been able to match. Instead of the leisurely original thirty seconds, they had about two thirds that before impact. The pilot rubbed his stubble covered chin with a free hand as he stared at the now very crowded display.
"Oh-kay... that's new."
A/N: A bit shorter than my usual chapters, but I've decided to break up the chapters a bit for the Purgatory section since at it's full size, it's going to stretch around to a mini-arc length. That being said, it makes more sense that Kurill would have something like that lightning gun for it's riot breaking potential on the more valuable prisoners and I can't really see Cerberus playing Santa Claus, showering Shepard with weapons and armour like they do with the DLC.
