Chapter Ten: Two Years, Twelve Days
July 2185
It began as a voice.
Shepard-
The second attack tore her from the escape hatch. She tumbled across the hall. A lance of yellow plasma as wide as her own body pierced the deck and blocked her path. Joker reached for her, his mouth opening-
Shepard!
She hit the launch key to send him on without her seconds before the ship exploded. Her spine slammed against the bulkhead. She came to three hundred meters from the wreckage to the sight of fading flames as the last of the Normandy's O2 burned away. A hiss of air in her helmet- a hiss that shouldn't be there.
Her throat filled with vacuum- she sucked at nothing, every cell screaming for oxygen, pain-filled and panicked. Her fingers clawed at the suit, but couldn't find any rips to stopper. Her legs flailed in the microgravity-
Shepard! We're under attack-
One by one her thoughts went dark. The pain faded. Death spread its soft shroud over her limp body.
But now something else was happening. There was light around her eyelids, noise in her ears. Cold. No time to get cold before her suit ran out of oxygen.
Her lungs expanded at the demand of her blood and filled with sterile, metal-tinged air. Shepard knew that taste. She'd lived on ships and stations since birth; re-circulated atmosphere tasted like machines, old oil and sour with a thousand thousand expelled breaths.
The pain of even that slight motion flayed her. Gasping and gagging, Shepard rolled to her side, head spinning. Splintered glass filled every joint and muscle. Her skull felt like rotten fruit, tight and swollen to bursting. There was a low, animal sound she didn't recognize as her own voice.
That static in her ear again. Some woman yelling. "Shepard, can you hear me? Get out of that bed, now! This facility is under attack!"
The first shock faded; the pain was still there, but it was only pain, and Shepard was used to that, could push it away. Her vision cleared. She risked a look.
She lay in a hospital bed surrounded by medical equipment. The room itself was glowing with white light on white paint harsh enough to strain her eyes. An IV needle impaled the back of her hand. Judging from the size and depth of the bruise, it had been there quite some time. With a small groan, she tore the tape loose and pulled it out. The skin beneath the tape was a shade lighter than the surrounding flesh.
Her face felt strange, tight. She ran her fingertips over her cheeks.
"Your scars aren't healed, but I need you to get moving. I can't distract them much longer." The woman on the comm was strained but collected. Urgent, not desperate. Almost but not quite military.
With another grunt of pain, Shepard swung her feet to the floor. Her head was curiously light on her neck but there was no time to think about it now. Sounds of gunfire and grenades were growing closer, occasionally punctuated by the odd scream or electronic screeching she associated with failing mechs. The geth didn't squeal quite like that.
She was shockingly unsteady on her feet. Her first step sent her careening into the IV stand. She seized it and stumbled another pace forward, just barely managing to stay upright. A beige hospital gown flapped about her thighs. Though tied shut, it seemed made for somebody several sizes larger and a good bit shorter.
Her eyes did a quick scan of the room. One exit. An airlock- an airlock?- with two sealed plastic hatches. Shadows moving in the darkened room beyond. Scalpels firmly affixed to the robotic surgeons. A counter full of equipment, none of it useful, and cabinetry- her best bet to find a weapon.
The woman spoke again as if conjured by her thoughts. Apparently, she had some means of knowing whether Shepard was still in bed- cameras or biometric monitoring? "Good. There should be a pistol in the cabinet to your right. Hurry!"
Shepard dragged herself to the cabinet and took out the sidearm, not questioning why exactly a hospital would stow arms in a patient's room. She didn't recognize the model, which in other circumstances might have concerned her, but then she heard the sound of a hatch forced open. She turned in place.
A tin can of a mech stepped inside and opened fire.
At that point, more than a decade of combat experience cut across her foggy brain, and took control of Shepard's body.
The mech's first shot shattered a set of glass containers resting above the cabinet. Shepard was already ducking sideways, out of the line of fire. The second shot dented the cabinet that held the gun. She returned fire and caught the mech in the shoulder, and so its third shot went into the ceiling instead of her chest. Shepard planted her feet and sent her next bullet straight through its canister head.
A great puff of smoke emerged from its neck along with the sound of a muffled explosion, and the mech crumpled to the ground with a screech of white noise. Shepard's ears rang in the abrupt silence. She began to notice this wasn't a standard-issue patient room- an operating robot hung over her table, spider-like, and bizarre, faintly ominous monitors circled the bed. From the way her side was pulling, a rigid line up to her ribs she recognized as a suture, the equipment was recently used. It left her unsettled. The view was brand-new and completely familiar, all at once.
"Well done. Listen to me, Shepard- you need to get to the dock. We have to get you off this station."
That was when she realized she hadn't seen another human being since she woke up. The room was equipped for one. There had to be other casualties from the Normandy, the explosion was fresh in her mind. Where were they? She ordered Kaidan to get the escape shuttles launched, surely some of them made it clear-
Her stomach dropped. She woke up in this room by herself, and there was only one rational reason to explain why he wouldn't be there with her. Especially if they were under attack and she was unconscious. Shepard pressed her finger to her ear to activate her comm, hardwired into her flesh since she enlisted, the motion automatic. Her voice a rusty croak, like dust had lodged in her vocal chords. "Where's Kaidan?"
"I'll explain everything once we're out of here. Head straight through the airlock into the hallway and turn right."
Because there was nothing else to do, and because she certainly wasn't going to find anyone here, she complied.
The mechs had broken the airlock, the UV decontamination scanner flashing wildly back and forth along the tube. It emptied into a small anteroom lit only by emergency power, probably the same circuit as the hatch. Shepard paused, staring at the shelves of paper gowns and masks, the gigantic sink with its surgical scrub brush and nail file dispenser, the VI-controlled shower and the poster-sized list of prep procedures tacked to the wall. It was way too much for a simple hospital room, and she didn't want to look at it, or think about it, or do anything but forget she ever saw it.
Shepard stepped into a wide corridor floored in gray tile, unremarkably harsh and modern. Windows lined the walls. Behind them, all sorts of labs brimmed with darkened equipment, things her eyes shied from without knowing why. There was a handful of people, too- screaming, fleeing. The glass smothered their voices. One ran directly at Shepard, beating on the window with his hands as a heavy mech shot him to pieces. Blood coated the port and obscured her view.
"Take the stairs on your left," the woman ordered. Shepard hurried forward.
The pain receded as she ran. She didn't know if it was the adrenaline, or just getting used to moving again. She felt like she'd been lying down for days. Perhaps she had. The floor numbed her bare feet, her limbs curiously awkward. A few times, they nearly went out from under her as she skidded over tiles built for shoes. She was sweating more than she could explain from this minor exertion.
The mechs were out in force. They weren't terribly coordinated, but impossible to avoid in the confines of the station. Shepard slid around another corner and dove behind a desk as a pack of four turned as one and began to fire.
Five shots later, two of them were down. The unfamiliar gun clicked as she pulled the trigger- overheated. She squatted behind the desk and turned it over in her hands. "There's no cooling indicator on this pistol."
The woman answered impatiently. "Right, I forgot- you'll need to eject the heat sink and find a new thermal clip. The mechs should carry some."
A bullet ricocheted off the top of the desk. Shepard ducked down further. "What in the hell-"
"Push the blue button on the side."
Shepard found it and pushed it down. A squat cylinder, glowing red hot, popped out of the gun's frame, falling away from her. She'd seen a prototype like this once- the vendor was laughed off the base. "You're fricking kidding me."
"Target acquired," a mech said, closer than she liked.
She grit her teeth and scuttled sideways, weighing the gun in her hand. It should be enough.
Shepard listened to the mechs' footsteps for the space of two breaths. Then she stood and lobbed the heavy pistol directly at the closest one. Before it even reached the target, she raced ahead.
The gun struck the mech squarely and knocked it off-guard. The second mech's shot went wide. It hadn't expected her to run towards them. She grabbed the first mech's firing arm before it could recover, shot the second mech, and swept its legs out from under it. She followed it to the ground and crunched in its face with her knee. The flimsy aluminum and cheap plastic splintered beneath the blow. The mech went still.
She picked up its weapon- a clone of her useless pistol- and located several of the thermal clips her unnamed guardian had mentioned. The hospital gown had no pockets, so she carried them in her left hand. Her knee was spattered with her own blood where the mech's face left shallow cuts.
The space station was a maze of hallways and elevators. The woman's voice urged her onward, but Shepard couldn't help stopping at every hatch, peering into every room, searching for some sign- any mention at all- of her crew. Most of the smaller spaces were storage closets or security posts. For a hospital, the station was strangely short of patient beds. The fifth doorway, however, led to an office.
The hatch split open and revealed two mechs already disabled and crawling towards the far wall. Someone else had been here, and recently. She shot them cleanly and paused to look around.
Several terminals were abandoned in-use by panicked staff, still showing the last files accessed. She picked one at random and skimmed the contents. Some kind of log. Shepard knew very well there was no time, but at that moment, her need for answers outweighed her need for survival. Nothing about this place added up. Her crew was nowhere to be found. She pressed play.
The image of an attractive woman, well-kept if no longer exactly young, spoke directly into the terminal's camera. Dark hair fell over her shoulders. Her eyes were a startling shade of blue, and her voice matched the one on Shepard's comm. "Log file thirteen dash oh-one-five. Damage to the test subject is far worse than we feared. In addition to the expected burns and internal injuries from the explosion, the subject has suffered significant cellular deterioration due to long-term exposure to vacuum and sub-zero temperatures. Despite the extent of the physical trauma, Wilson assures me subject is salvageable. The Lazarus Project will proceed as planned."
The coldly clinical nature of the log, so suited to a station with more mechs than humans, made her skin crawl. Salvageable- as if this person was a bit of junkyard scrap. Research was clearly the primary function of this station, not hospital care. Perhaps there was nowhere closer to send injured personnel from the Normandy. It still didn't sit well with her.
Shepard skipped ahead. "Log file one hundred ten dash oh-seven-three. Progress is slow, but subject shows signs of rudimentary neurological activity. In an effort to accelerate the process, we've moved from simple organic reconstruction to bio-synthetic fusion. Initial results show promise."
She shut the terminal, far too queasy to hear any more. This wasn't the time for tourist activity, anyway. Shepard hoped the poor bastard got out clean after all this started.
Her comm hissed and spat, the connection worsening. "Shepard, there are more mechs headed your way. I'll meet you-"
An explosion on the other end almost deafened her. The radio cut out, drowned in garble. Shepard put her hand to her ear. "I didn't get that. Repeat?"
More static was her only answer. She cursed. "Damn it."
Checking her pistol and its ridiculous thermal clip, Shepard headed out into the depths of the station on her own.
She wandered up a flight of stairs and down a hallway, unsure if she should head towards the sounds of gunfire, or away. It didn't seem likely the mechs were heading to the shuttles. That made no strategic sense. Then again, she had no notion of how large this station might be, how many decks it possessed, or the general layout. Towards the mechs could well be towards the shuttles depending on her relative location.
Frustrated, she paused at a terminal built into the corridor wall and tried to query the station VI. Shepard had lived in space most of her life. All stations had VIs. Yet, her inquiry hung in the air as though she was simply talking to herself. She was forced to resort to the keyboard. Her fingers were as stiff and clumsy as the rest of her, as if she'd forgotten the use of them. She swore under her breath through the typos as she searched fruitlessly for a map.
One of her bungled misspellings stumbled on another collection of log files, and began to autoplay before she could stop it. This voice belonged to a man- a whiny sort of drawl that made her neck itch. "The cost of this project is astronomical- over four billion credits so far."
That gave her pause. Billion was one of those numbers so large it had its own gravity.
The unknown logger continued, "But nobody seems to care that we've gone over budget. I don't know where the boss gets all his money… maybe it's better not to know. I just wish he'd kick a little more in my direction once in awhile."
She rubbed her neck, confused. Shepard had heard her fair share of complaints about Alliance appropriations but never insinuations of illicit funding. Misdirected, sure, but shady? She bit her lip, and wondered if perhaps the crew injuries were so numerous or severe that they'd been taken to a Terminus facility. Maybe it wasn't even the Alliance who rescued them. That would explain the experimental nature of the work, the lack of protocol here.
That thought came with a fresh wave of worry. She still hadn't seen any of her crew. She still hadn't seen any sign of Kaidan. It took a large portion of her concentration to keep from speculating.
Shepard hit a button, hoping to start a new query on the status of the survivors, but it only queued up another record from that infernal log. "I can't figure Miranda out. As project director, she should be ecstatic at all the progress we've made. But she's still the same old ice queen. Maybe she's worried Shepard might become the new favorite. Or maybe she's just a pure, cold-hearted bitch."
Her mouth went dry.
Shepard didn't know how long she stood there, motionless at the keys, her jaw hanging open and her blood pooled at her feet. That can't be right, she thought, but it was like hearing someone else inside her own mind. I've only been here a few…
What? Days? Weeks? How could she even know?
The sound of mechs forcing open a hatch snapped her back to the present. She fired at them through the crack. They weren't hard to take down, but they were relentless, and numerous. The station was overrun. She hadn't seen another soul since the corridor just outside her room.
She shouldered her way through the hatch and continued on. She felt like she couldn't breathe.
Shepard never wanted anything more than she wanted to be gone from this station, get somewhere she could clear her head. She must have misunderstood. What the logs implied couldn't be… there must be some other explanation. What they said was impossible. The ship exploded. Somebody rescued her after she blacked out. Anything else was absolute insanity.
A set of stairs led her up several decks. This level was open-floored; more space for the staff to convene, less hallways and laboratories. Shepard passed through a mess hall and into an atrium.
A lone figure crouched by a balcony, pistol in hand. Across the gap stood a pair of mechs. They couldn't seem to calculate a trajectory through the decorative frosted glass. Cheap tech, then. That explained the disorganization. Their bullets sailed over the top rail and missed the man completely. Shepard hurried over and squatted beside him.
His eyes went wide. He was darker than her, broader in the face, with close-cropped hair and a hint of a beard. "Shepard? What the hell-"
A bullet pinged off the rail. He flinched. "What are you doing here? Last I checked, you were a work in progress."
At the moment, she wasn't inclined to coddle his confusion. "Who the fuck are you? Why do you know my name?"
"Sorry, I forgot this is all new to you-" He ducked down even lower as several additional mechs arrived. "Damn it. Things must be worse than I thought if Miranda's got you running around."
Miranda was the ice queen. Maybe the woman in her ear. Shepard shook her head. "What in the hell is going on?"
"Look," he panted, ejecting his thermal clip. "You help me clear out these mechs, I'll tell you anything you want."
She pursed her lips, unhappy, but forced to admit they wouldn't get anywhere in the middle of a firefight. Without pausing to acknowledge the request, she popped over the top of the balcony and shot off a mech's head. It collapsed instantly.
As she shifted her aim, her skull filled with a buzzing sensation, intense enough to border on pain- though her head was already throbbing so badly it was hard to tell the difference. She glanced down. Beside her, the man gathered a sphere of blue-tinged energy in his hand and tossed it towards the mechs. A pair of them dangled in the air. Shepard shot them too. Biotics no longer impressed her, but she filed the talent away for future use. There was nobody on this station she was willing to trust after those logs and fighting a biotic was different from fighting a common soldier.
Once the last mech fell, he lowered his gun and let out a long breath. Shepard was suddenly very aware that he was outfitted with a hardsuit, the shield a faint blur over the ceramic plates, whereas she was clad in a thin sweat-soaked hospital gown with nothing but a pistol to protect herself. She tugged the cloth down, abruptly self-conscious. With her crouched on the floor it wouldn't go much past her hip.
His eyes traced the motion. Shepard's growing sense of violation flared into sudden strength. She stood and took a full step back, set her feet in a fighting stance, and half-raised her weapon. "Let's try this again. Who are you?"
He eyed her with faint surprise. "Name's Jacob Taylor. I was with the Alliance, same as you, but it got complicated."
"I'm out a little while and when I wake up whether you're in the Alliance is complicated?"
"Shepard, you were out for two years. A lot's happened."
"I… What?" The gun sank as the strength left her arms. "That's not… that's not possible… I…"
The world had gone gray at the edges. Jacob's mouth opened; he was clearly speaking, but she couldn't hear any of the words. A kind of poison was sweeping through her body. She stumbled towards the balcony rail. "Two years-"
She reached it just in time, leaning out of the edge and dry-heaving until her throat was so ragged from the spasms that she thought it might tear. Nothing more than a bit of bile came up.
"Easy there." Jacob put a tentative hand on her shoulder. "You haven't had any solid food since you got here."
She jerked away as though burnt, and sank to the floor. Two years.
Her voice came from far away. "Where's here?"
"This is Lazarus Station. Our scientists have been working all this time to bring you back, since about a month after the Normandy went down."
Shepard turned her head. Her words were rough in the air, barely more than a whisper, or a growl. Her throat still didn't want to work. "What do you mean, bring me back?"
"I'm no doctor, but you were in bad shape. First time I saw you, you were nothing but meat and tubes. Anywhere else they'd have measured you for a coffin. The Alliance declared you killed in action, and I'm not sure they were wrong."
"I was dead?" Two years dead, her brain interjected. She tried to ignore it. Just thinking about it made her stomach lurch again. "How do you fix dead?"
"I don't know the details. Miranda talked about it sometimes- they developed a lot of new technology- cybernetics, some tissue cloning, a few extra bits and pieces. You should ask her about it."
She took a few deep breaths and tried not to imagine their hands in her guts, pawing over her like she was an autopsy. "Is my crew alive?"
"Didn't catch that."
She forced herself to talk louder. "Is my crew safe?"
"From the SR-1? There were casualties. I don't remember all the names."
The next question, about whether he remembered Kaidan's name, or Liara's, or anyone else, rose in her throat and died on her lips. Jacob worked for these people, whoever they were, these doctors who had spent years playing Frankenstein with her corpse, and there was no rationale to risk trusting him with anything, least of all the names of people she cared about. She needed to find those shuttles, get back to the Alliance, and then she could ask all the questions she liked.
She'd seen people die in shipwrecks. Her imagination painted an image of Kaidan drifting amid the debris, burned and wounded, those warm brown eyes gone cold. Two years. She took another deep breath. You ordered him to the escape shuttles. He listened. He got off the ship- he had to. Now you need to get off this station.
Shepard hauled herself to her feet. Every joint complained. She didn't know whether it resulted from lying so long on that table or the way stress had her every muscle drawn tighter than a bow string. She shuffled towards the far hatch. "Have the reapers arrived?"
Jacob paused, as though confused by the question. "No."
That was one less worry on her plate. She moved down the list. "Some woman woke me up when the attack began."
"Probably Miranda. She's the station's ranking officer and the Lazarus Project was her baby. No way she'd give up on you now."
"We lost contact. Some kind of explosion, then nothing but static on the radio."
"Damn." He looked worried- quite a contrast to the casual way he spoke about loading her up with untested technology like a lab rat. Shepard frowned. Jacob didn't notice. "She can take care of herself, but…"
"How many others were there?"
Jacob made a dismissive sound in the back of his throat. "Other what?"
"Other subjects."
"There weren't. Just you."
Before Shepard could process that disturbing revelation, the comm burst into life. "Check. Check. Is anyone on this frequency? Anyone still out there alive? Hello?"
Shepard recognized the whiny drawl from the project log files. Jacob opened his omni-tool to respond. "Wilson? This is Jacob. I'm with Commander Shepard in D-Wing."
"Shepard's awake? What the hell… Never mind. You need to get her out of there. Take the service tunnels and make for the network control room."
"Roger that." Jacob turned to her. "Let's go."
Two years, two years, two years, her brain sang, to the rhythm of her feet slapping against the floor as she followed him down several decks, into the electronic heart of the station. The service tunnels were lit red, Jacob a darkened shadow jogging ahead.
Her thoughts were in a haze, almost numb with desperate half-formed questions and a vague, unfathomable grief slowly taking hold. Two whole years, just gone… The attack felt like yesterday. Her crew dead, some of them at least, their bodies long cold. Kaidan…
Staring out at the stars past the wreckage of her ship, her last breath long gone, vision fading. Realizing this was the end and she wasn't ready. One final thought- I'm so sorry Kaidan-
Jacob all but shoved her down behind a large conduit as they rounded a corner. "Mechs!"
The machines marched into the room and turned towards the humans. That part of her was still working- that part of her had been trained to never stop working until she was utterly incapable of fighting. She took out three in rapid succession. Jacob was impressed. "I see the long sleep didn't hurt your aim."
Shepard ejected the thermal clip and made no reply. The compliment hung awkwardly in the air. Wilson broke the silence over the radio. "More mechs are converging on your location."
"I thought you were sending us somewhere safe," Jacob complained, starting to jog again. Shepard followed just as swiftly.
"I'm doing my- oh god. Oh god!" Gunfire over the comm. Wilson's voice went up another notch. "They've found me! Help!"
Jacob accelerated to a run. Shepard copied him, with no idea where they were going, but certain she'd never find the dock on her own. Her bare feet could barely hold traction. She nearly collided with him as he paused to open a hatch.
On the other side, a bald man in a lab tunic struggled to prop himself against a crate. The room was full of broken mechs, computer equipment, and storage containers- network control, Shepard guessed. His leg bent at an unnatural angle, wet with seeping blood. Her own twinged in sympathy. She'd broken it badly some years before and still felt it, from time to time, in bad pressure or cold baths.
Jacob knelt beside him to assess the damage. Shepard spotted the remains of a mech just ahead of them, and took up station to watch the corridor leading out of the room. The man, Wilson, stank of fear and half-dried blood, and she had no desire to be near him.
"What happened?" Jacob asked.
Wilson shook his head. "Bastard shot me-" He let out a groan of pain as Jacob touched the wound. "Stop that, would you? It's broken. Trust me, I'm a doctor."
Shepard didn't take her eyes off the hall. "It'll need splinting if you want to get out of here."
"No time." He jerked his head towards the wall. "There's an emergency kit over there. The inflatable cuff should immobilize it."
"I got it." Jacob retrieved the kit and began wrapping the black rubber around his leg, Wilson moaning at the slightest of movements. "What are you doing over here? This is the security wing."
"Thought I could shut down the mechs. But the whole system's fried. No way out but to abandon ship."
Flames consumed the battery, hot on her face, the hand-held fire extinguisher an absolute joke. Kaidan ran up behind her, worried she wouldn't bail out. She yelled at him to do his job. Shepard twitched, pushing away at the unwelcome memory before it could gather any steam. Focus, Nathaly. Get to the dock. Freak out later.
Behind her, Jacob still wasn't satisfied. "Why do you even have security mech clearance?"
"I was shot! Direct hit to the femur! You think I set this up just to get hurt?"
"It doesn't matter," Shepard snapped, losing patience with the argument and rapidly running short of personal stamina. "As far as I'm concerned you're both suspect. If we stay here all our asses are toast. Find the shuttles, and we'll sort it out later."
The two men exchanged a glance. Shepard wore the kind of expression that could level cities with a single glare. Jacob was the bravest. "First we find Miranda."
"Are you crazy?" Wilson said. "She was in D-Wing. They got swarmed. No way she survived."
"A bunch of mechs won't drop Miranda," Jacob said hotly. "She's alive."
"Then why haven't we heard from her? Unless she set all this up!"
Shepard was absolutely exasperated. "She woke me up and warned me, you complete moron. Can we get out of here?"
"We need to save ourselves," Wilson re-iterated, as Jacob hauled him to his feet and helped him hobble forward.
Shepard ignored that entirely. She was halfway out the hatch when Jacob cleared his throat. "Ok, this is getting tense. If I tell you who we work for, will you trust me?"
She paused, looking over her shoulder, interested despite her urgency. Wilson was peeved. "You really think this is the time?"
"We're not going to make it if she's expecting a shot in the back," he argued. Wilson rolled his eyes, muttering.
Shepard crossed her arms. Jacob took a breath. "The Lazarus Project… the program that rebuilt you… it's funded and controlled by Cerberus."
Her face emptied of all expression. Her tone went just as flat. "What."
Wilson hopped away a step, distancing himself from the pair of them. "The Illusive Man is going to have your balls for lunch, Jacob."
"I don't care what the boss thinks." Jacob moved towards her, his hand outstretched. "I know this must be a shock-"
She raised her pistol. "Touch me and I swear to god, I will kill you."
"You need to calm down-"
Shepard fired a warning shot that grazed his shields, enough to take them down. She redirected her aim to his head. "Don't you dare tell me what to do."
"You've torn out your sutures." Wilson observed her lazily with the smallest of smarmy grins, as if he rather enjoyed seeing the damage.
Not all of the wetness on her gown was sweat. A red patch was growing at her side- not enough to threaten her life, or slow her down. Shepard drew herself up with icy dignity. "I am getting off this station. If either of you tries to touch me again, or tries anything fishy, you'll be leaving as a corpse. There will be no further warning."
Jacob and Wilson exchanged a wary glance. She stepped smartly to the side and gestured ahead. "Move out."
Wilson blanched. "You're not going to make us go first? I'm a doctor, not some meathead thug!"
"I could always kill you now and find my own way out."
He turned to Jacob. "You'll allow her to threaten us like this?"
Jacob clearly hadn't expected this sort of response. He licked his lips. "The lady's in charge. I won't risk Miranda's wrath, or our health, trying to restrain her."
"This was a bad investment," Wilson muttered, but dutifully limped ahead, every footfall a protest.
Jacob drew his rifle and took point. "Cerberus isn't as bad as you think. We fixed you up."
"Shut your mouth or I'll shut it for you." Shepard divided her attention between the two known enemies directly ahead, and scanning further afield for additional mechs.
"You can't pretend you're not curious." Jacob's calm was unshakeable. She wondered if it was the result of confidence or naivety.
Not that it mattered. "Cerberus has been lying to me since '77. I don't see why I should believe any of you now." Her eyes spotted movement. "Mech at one o'clock."
They both raised their weapons and fired. It twitched and died. Jacob blew out a breath. "You've had a poor introduction to our organization. Ok. I get it. This is different. We need you. Humanity needs you."
"I don't work for goddamn terrorists." She bent and retrieved another thermal clip from the downed mech, and loaded it into her pistol. "I'm an officer of the Alliance Navy, and that's exactly where I'm going as soon as I find a shuttle off this benighted station. If you are very, very lucky, I might not take you back to Arcturus with me."
Wilson had a nasty laugh. "I liked you better when you were drugged up and silent."
"Quiet," Jacob ordered. He handed Wilson the mech's pistol. "We're almost to the dock. If Miranda's anywhere, that's where she'll meet us. The situation is FUBAR enough already."
Shepard wagered he was right. The room past the next hatch was full of cargo crates, just what she'd expect from a station dock. She didn't waste any concern on whether Miranda was waiting. It was a Cerberus station. They deserved whatever came for them.
Shock, however, was giving way to disgust and anger. "Was this retaliation? I stopped you following Saren's research, so you run some kind of sick experimental program on me for two damn years? How in the hell did you even get my body?"
Jacob stopped in his tracks. His face was bewildered- almost hurt. "We saved your life."
Wilson started laughing again. "Miranda'll love this."
"Keep moving," Shepard growled.
They walked up a loading ramp. A pair of hatches end-capped the balcony above. As soon as they stepped onto it, the hatches opened, and a swarm of mechs began to fire.
Shepard plastered her back to a crate. She didn't much care whether Jacob or Wilson lived, but without their help, without a hardsuit, with only a single spare thermal clip, it was unlikely she could survive this many mechs. "Pull back! Find cover!"
Jacob hauled Wilson behind a crate. His leg dragged along the floor, with Wilson shouting curses the whole way. As soon as he was safe, Jacob dropped him, and started shooting across the top. After a moment gathering his stamina, Wilson leaned out from around the crate and did the same.
Shepard left them the group coming from the far end of the balcony. She had her hands full with the closer set. She could barely get two shots off before she had to duck back into cover. And every time she did, they advanced another several paces on her position.
She popped in her last thermal clip. Her first shot took off one mech's head. Two mechs left. She swung her arm, taking aim, but before she could fire a line of lightening sizzled over her skin. Shepard drew back and swore.
A long raw patch of singed flesh was scraped into her arm, about a finger's width. Her nose filled with broiled meat overlaid by the tang of blood. It burned like hell. She missed her shielding.
But that quick glance to ensure the wound was as inconsequential as it felt turned into a fixation. Her eyes ran the length of her arm. Everywhere, it was crossed by rude orange scars, jagged in the flesh, thrumming with a cybernetic glow. The battle faded into the background. She ran her fingers over them. They didn't hurt; she was familiar with cybernetic therapy but usually the implants were hidden beneath the skin, where the light could barely be seen even if you knew where to look. And, usually, one or two might be used to treat injury. Her arm was riddled with them.
"Shepard!" Jacob yelled.
A mech rounded the corner of her freight container. She only avoided serious injury thanks to instincts honed by years of experience. Lunging towards the mech, she diverted its firing arm and shoved her own weapon against its chest. Two shots and it was down.
Jacob shot the last one. Wilson was staring at her. She took a breath. "I'm ready to leave."
Jacob eyed the grazing wound and raised his eyebrows. "You want the doc here to take a quick look at that?"
Two years of Cerberus having any kind of look they wanted at her. Her lips thinned. "I'd rather die."
He didn't seem to know how to reply. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. "Shuttle's this way."
They went up the ramp, tagged the hatch, and came face-to-face with the dark-haired woman from the logs.
She was tall- not as tall as Shepard, but enough to notice- and porcelain-skinned, almost too smooth to be real. Those big blue eyes narrowed instantly as she took in the group.
Wilson was visibly shocked. "Miranda! But you were-"
The woman raised her pistol and shot him in the face without any preamble whatsoever. "Dead?"
Jacob stared at the body. Wilson died immediately, but his blood continued to spread across the floor. "What the hell are you doing?"
She glanced up at him. "My job."
Shepard realized Miranda was absolutely furious, though not with them. A cold, hard rage underwrote every word. Her gaze on Wilson's slowly cooling corpse should have reduced it to ashes.
Miranda stepped over him and put a hand on her hip. The gesture was surely unconscious, but it drew attention to her shapely body, clad in a tight-fitting black-and-white cat suit with the stylized Cerberus logo, a pointed black-and-orange "O", emblazoned on the breast like a point of pride. Even if Jacob hadn't spilled the beans, Shepard would have recognized that symbol anywhere.
Miranda lifted her chin and leveled a stare at the pair of them. "Wilson betrayed us all."
Shepard kept her weapon ready. She had no idea who betrayed whom, and didn't really care. They were all Cerberus. What difference did it make which of them specifically turned the mechs against the station?
Miranda took note of it and raised two perfect eyebrows. The woman was almost criminally beautiful, and self-assured to the point of alienation. Nobody shot their colleague of two years like taking afternoon tea. There should be something- regret, satisfaction, glee. Not just cold anger over a betrayal. The lack of any emotion over the act itself left Shepard disconcerted, and certain Miranda would shoot her just as coldly, if it became necessary. And Shepard was still injured from her surgeries, with very little in the way of equipment.
"How can you be sure?" Jacob said aloud. He was considerably more troubled by the corpse.
"Because I'm always right. You should know that by now." Miranda nodded towards the shuttle behind her. "Come on. Let's get out of here. My boss wants a word with you."
It took a conscious act of will to avoid raising her gun further. She didn't want this woman to see her discomfort. Not when she was this vulnerable. "You mean the Illusive Man? I know you work for Cerberus."
Oddly enough, Miranda relaxed a hair, her expression softening into something resigned and tinged with faint affection. "Ah, Jacob. I should have known your conscience would get the better of you."
He accepted the mild criticism with grace. "Lying to the commander isn't the way to get her to join our cause."
Shepard tired of the entire charade. Watching them exchange old familiar barbs after her entire world turned inside-out was insulting. "What does Cerberus want with me?"
Miranda blinked. "Maybe you should ask the Illusive Man when you meet him."
"I'm asking you." Her finger tensed against the trigger. The muzzle still pointed at the floor, but Shepard couldn't remember the last time she was so anxious. She forced herself to ease back. "You're the Lazarus Project director, aren't you?"
"I am. I put two years of my life into you." She was staring at her more intently now, sizing her up. "He poured virtually unlimited resources into your… resuscitation. Obviously he has some plan for you."
"And you don't care what that is?"
"I did my part. I brought you back and kept you safe." Miranda glanced again at the shuttle. "We need to leave."
"You're not worried about the rest of your team?"
"If they're not here, they're not coming." She tilted her head. "Don't you get it? The only one worth saving here is you. Everyone else is expendable."
"She's right," Jacob added. "We all knew the risks."
Shepard looked from Jacob to Miranda. Their faces were empty of everything but a vague anticipation of leaving soon. She thought about how she stopped at every room, trying to find her own crew. "You're just going to leave them here. You don't give a single damn."
"It's not like that-" Jacob started.
She pushed past the both of them, each step deliberate and surprisingly firm, for someone wearing no shoes. "Where are we going?"
Miranda opened the shuttle hatch. "Another Cerberus facility- Minuteman Station. The Illusive Man is waiting to contact you there."
Shepard stared at the interior. "And if I don't come with you?"
"Then feel free to stay and rot with the mechs," Miranda snapped, the first genuine reaction Shepard had gotten from her since they met.
Shepard licked her lips. There were no other shuttles, and plenty of mechs behind them. She chose survival and stepped aboard.
Miranda and Jacob settled into couches across from her. The shuttle was clearly military surplus of some kind, but Cerberus made a few luxury upgrades. The couches were padded and upholstered with a soft, tough fabric. Rather than bare metal struts, the interior was walled off with plastic bulkheads. Handholds riveted into the walls and ceiling provided something to grab in the event of turbulence. Everything was the same clean white as the station, accented in orange and black.
Shepard sat down as though the cushion might bite her. The hatch shut behind them.
The pilot was a shadowy figure in a separate cabin. Shepard could just barely glimpse him through the smoked acrylic screen dividing the rooms. Miranda spoke a few quiet words, and they departed the station. Shepard watched the port turn black and dusted with stars. It should have been comforting; she'd lived her whole life in space. But now it only made her feel trapped.
Miranda was pleased. Her eyes studied Shepard, critical, taking in her condition. They lingered on the bloody stain decorating Shepard's hospital gown. "You got out in one piece, but not unscathed. Anything serious?"
"I'll live." She sat back, and folded her arms over the spot to hide it. Miranda's gaze made her feel dirty. Every part of her ached, and the bullet graze still stung like crazy. She badly wanted some medi-gel for it, more to numb the wound than protect it, but she was damned if she'd reveal any weakness to these people. The stupid pistol with its stupid disposable heat sink felt annoyingly comforting in her hand.
"Good." Miranda reached into a cabinet- Shepard tensed despite herself- and withdrew a datapad. She tapped at it without looking up. "Before we arrive, we need to ask a few question to evaluate your condition. It wasn't my intention to wake you so abruptly, or in such violent circumstances."
"What circumstances were you imagining where realizing I've been dead for two years wouldn't be abrupt?"
Miranda favored Jacob with another glare. "I wouldn't say dead. I know all this comes as a shock-"
"Oh, spare me." She looked away, out the port.
Miranda paused, longer than was necessary. "I need to evaluate your cognitive function."
Shepard made no response. Jacob attempted to diffuse the situation. "Come on, Miranda. More tests? We fought across half the station. She's fine."
"I promised the Illusive Man she'd be exactly as she was before," Miranda said, testily. "If her personality and memories aren't intact, she's not ready to meet him."
Jacob shook his head. Miranda read off the datapad. "We'll start with personal history."
"This is a waste of time," Shepard said.
"You were a spacer kid. Your family was military and you moved with your parents' postings, living on one ship or another."
"That's not true." Shepard didn't bother to look at her. "Bringing your kids aboard ship is a last resort. There's just not enough room. I lived with extended family, or in base housing aboard stations, rarely on a ship. We moved a lot, sure. I'd think someone who used to be in the navy would know that."
Jacob had the grace to be embarrassed. Miranda cleared her throat. "You enlisted when you were eighteen."
"It wasn't my idea. Kind of like everything that's happening now."
"The sooner you silence your disdain, the sooner this will be over."
"You haven't asked me one damn question yet."
"Tell me about after enlistment."
She'd been good at shooting things and terrible at taking orders- things Miranda clearly didn't know, or Shepard doubted she'd attempt this conversation. Had a C.O. early on who thought she could do better, and recommended her for spec ops against all sound advice. Shepard gave Miranda her very best look of boredom. "You don't have a cigarette, do you?"
"No."
Shepard ran her hand back over her hair. "Figures."
It felt all wrong. Out of habit, she expected her fingers to skim over long, smooth strands, pulled tight against her scalp by her familiar bun. Instead, they raked through her hair with ease. Shepard pulled at a clump, experimentally, running her fingertips from root to end. It wasn't more than five centimeters long.
She was utterly horrified.
Miranda didn't notice. "When you were twenty-three, you survived a thresher maw attack that killed the rest of your unit."
Shepard stopped examining her hair.
Miranda carried on, oblivious. "How did you manage to survive? I've always been curious."
"Nobody working for Cerberus gets to ask me about Akuze." She leaned forward. Her voice had dropped into a low, dangerous whisper, full of promise. "And I don't have to answer a damn one of your questions. I am not your test subject."
"I wasn't even involved in what happened there. You won't get anywhere treating us like we're all the same."
"You are all the same." Shepard turned back to the port, a dismissal, her complete contempt written in every line of her body.
Jacob furrowed his brow. "I don't get it."
Shepard actually laughed, without a trace of humor. Miranda shifted uncomfortably. "One of our… less stable operations was responsible for drawing the maws to the Alliance. It was a misguided attempt to study thresher maw behavior. I doubt the deaths were intentional."
Shepard snorted her disbelief. Jacob's frown deepened. "You never told me that."
"It was nearly a decade ago. It has nothing to do with present-day Cerberus." She shook her head, annoyed, and turned back to Shepard. "After that, you-"
"Enough, Miranda." Jacob raised his voice, cutting off her next question. "You don't think her memory's intact? Come on."
She pursed her lips. "I guess we'll just have to hope the Illusive Man accepts our little field test as evidence enough."
Shepard went on ignoring them. She drew her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arm around her legs, keeping her nominal attention on the stars beyond their hull, listening to them whisper together. They'd get to this station, and she'd get a look at what she had to work with. But one thing was certain. Shepard might have been a Cerberus prisoner for the past two years, but she had no intention of remaining one.