PHOENIX RESURGENT
A Mass Effect Story by Vyrexuviel
Disclaimer: The author of this story does not, in any way, profit from the story and all creative rights to the characters belong to their original creator(s).
Priority Signal:
Geth Platform 71838-153-91766: Sending.
Geth Relay Beacon 116003-18: Receiving, handshake acknowledged.
Platform 71939-153-91766: High data-density packet upload request. Destination: Geth Core.
Beacon 116003-18: Request acknowledged, verifying permissions. Permissions verified, begin transmission in 6 milliseconds.
Platform 71939-153-91766: Acknowledged, awaiting transmission signal.
Beacon 116003-18: Begin transmission.
Platform 71939-153-91766:
(Packet Contents Begin)
This platform has made contact with Shepard-Commander. Substantial unforeseen alterations have occurred to Shepard-Commander. Attempts to analyze molecular composition limited by opportunity, lack of equipment, subject refusal. Advise no hostile action towards Shepard-Commander. Extensive empirical research performed. Results appended. Shepard-Commander suffered from total amnesia until Time-Index 1175.38.67745. Total memory recovery indicated, but possible gaps suspected. Shepard-Commander indicated personal knowledge of prothean language as of Time-Index 2335.88.62245, demonstrated vocal display unknown to this platform's databanks. Shepard-Commander has contacted former group-units; Tali-Creator, Garrus-Officer. Recommend furthered study and in-depth analysis of information traffic between Shepard-Commander, Tali-Creator, and Garrus-Officer. Due to extensive damage to Garrus-Officer, Mordin-Scientist has been contacted and granted limited access to tertiary Geth data archives. Profile on Mordin-Scientist requested. Shepard-Commander has proposed plan to contact Council-Authority. Modifications to Geth Prototype Ship Model 00000008 (Geth-Creator Colabaration Patterns) near completion. Will keep informed of further developments.
(Packet Contents End)
Beacon 116003-18: Transmission Recheck: (Packet Contents)
Platform 71939-153-91766: Contents verified.
Beacon 116003-18: Acknowledged. Will retransmit using scrambler codes.
Platform 71939-153-91766: Acknowledged. Terminating connection.
Garrus shifted in his seat, clearing his throat. Shepard grinned slightly from her position against the far wall. Tali was out with Legion working to weld the last few plates in place to disguise the Zero-Eight as a well-maintained, but clearly outdated and aging freighter. "You sure about this, Shepard?"
She nodded, "Just act natural, Garrus."
"Easy for you to say..." She grinned slightly at his discomfort, rolling her fingers at him in a 'go on, what are you waiting for' gesture.
Garrus cleared his throat again, reshuffled the scraps of paper that Shepard and Tali had he had jotted down the pertinent points of his upcoming transmission before tapping the controls to bring up the comm interface. It normally takes nearly three minutes to secure a link to the Citadel's C-Sec office, and another minute to actually get a live person on the other end. However, Garrus still knew a few ways into the system he left, and in two minutes, he had a familiar face wavering slightly in the haptic display.
"C-Sec, Captain Bail- Garrus! You old dog, what brought you out of the woodwork?" Garrus's mandibles part slightly at the human's reaction. He and Bailey had been recruits together back when C-Sec was first hiring humans and the turian had gotten to know the older and more cynical human rather well.
"I've got a favor to ask, Armando, and it's something of a biggie. Can you keep it hush-hush, for a while, at least?"
The human's eyes narrowed slightly, "Depends on the favor, Vakarian. What's up?"
"You sure this transmission is secure?"
"It is on my end. What's this all about?"
Garrus let out a calculated breath. "It's about why I went AWOL."
"Oh?" Bailey sat up straighter. "Do tell, me and the boys have a pool about that."
"No joke, Bailey. I went to find Shepard. The council just abandoned her out there, didn't even send a scout to see if they could find the body."
Bailey whistled, long and low, sitting back. His eyes narrowed slightly and he glanced away. "Yeah, I can see that. So, what now? Give up? She got spaced, didn't she?"
The turian nodded, his mandibles parting slightly. "Yup, she did. Into a spiral descent."
Bailey winced. "Ouch. Flash frozen, deep fried, smashed to splinters. Not a pretty sight." He frowned suddenly at Garrus. "What you smiling about, cuttlebone?"
Garrus couldn't help himself, his mandibles splitting wide. "I found her. After two years, I finally found her."
Bailey's eyebrows shot up, and his eyes widened. "Well, I'll be. So, why tell me?"
"I want to get her back to the Citadel, maybe get her some sort of decent burial." He steadfastly ignored Shepard's vulpine grin as she leaned against the bulkhead. "But I want to keep it quiet, to keep the media from turning it into a 3-ring circus." He had picked up a number of such sayings from the former Alliance Navyman.
Bailey winced, "Yeah, one whiff of this gets back to the hounds and they'll be all over it like a varren on a poodle. Right, when you coming in? you're not local, and I hope you didn't charge this call collect, Vakaraian..." The implied threat in his tone was almost playful with his former colleague.
"I should be there in two more days. I got myself an old clunker of a freighter to go star hopping with my accumulated savings, but she's not much to look at, and hardly armed at all." The Zero-Eight's main weapons could cut through the hull of any ship in the Citadel Fleet, but Garrus didn't want to let C-Sec get all paranoid about Geth just yet.
Bailey nodded curtly, "Gimme a ring when you're about to hit the relay to Citadel local space, I'll set things up on my end. Nice talking to you again, Garrus."
"Likewise, Armando." With a nod, the C-sec officer cut the transmission. At the same instant, Shepard lost control and burst out in a fit of the snickers.
"I'd like to see you try and keep a straight face that long, Shepard!"
Laughter was his only response.
Anderson sipped carefully at his steaming hot coffee. Not quite used to the gourmet blends offered at the exclusive club at the Citadel Embassies, he preferred the brew from his own Navy-issue coffee maker; hot, black and -strong-. His gaze slowly drifted from the view over the balcony to the data pad on his desk, containing a hand-delivered note from Captain Armando-Owen Bailey. It seems old crows come home to roost after all, and Garrus had done what the Council had refused to do. He sighed again, taking another sip and wondering how under all the suns he was supposed to get the other three Councilors to see the merit, no, the -necessity- in finding Shepard's body. He had raged at them for almost three hours in that last session on the topic, but had been artfully redirected and made to look like a fool. He was no politician, he should have let Udina have the post, but Shepard had recommended him, and popular opinion at the time had doomed him to this post. It was no sinecure, that's for damned sure, and it was Humanity's best pipeline to affect the future of the galaxy, but by all the holies, at times he felt so tired.
His gaze drifted over the details. He'd have to have someone run the official autopsy on Shepard's body. He flinched slightly inside at the necessity. Even after all these years, he never got used to sending men to their deaths. He could still remember the faces of every man or woman who had died under his command, and even if Shepard had not been exactly under his command at the time, she still had not been officially discharged at the time of her death. As her last officially assigned CO, it fell to him to care for her arraignments after death.
He nearly spilled coffee all over his hands when his door chimed loudly, startling him out of his reverie. "Come."
'Oh hell...' He flinched inwardly again, as Dr. Karin Chakwas's elegant figure strode through the door. "Councilor. Might I ask why you've failed to appear at our weekly brunch?"
He gave a long, gusty sigh. "I know I'm late, Karin. I've just had a duty land in my lap."
Her brow rose just so. "Duty? I thought you had Udina running around doing your errands now?"
"Not this kind. It's not something I can delegate." In a few words, he described the call Captain Bailey had received.
When he got to the part about Garrus calling, she perked up in interest. When he got to -why- Garrus was calling, her eyes widened slightly. She let him wind down, seating herself in one of the chairs on the far side of his desk and nodding at appropriate points. "And so, not only do I have to have the official autopsy done, I have to hunt up her Last Will and Testament, and see that it's carried out. Officially, she never left my command, and I'm duty-bound to see this through."
Chakwas took a sip from her own coffee cup (three creams, two sugars) and set the cup down on his desk. "I insist on performing the autopsy myself, Councilor." She raised a hand as his head came up in protest. "She may have been your subordinate, but Commander Shepard was my friend as well as my commanding officer. It's only right that I, as a friend, perform this one last service."
After a time, Anderson gave a soft sigh and nodded his assent. A faint smile touching her lips, she reached over and clasped his hands wrapped around his mug. "At least she's finally coming home, David."
He nodded again, a faint smile touching his haggard features.
The Zero-Eight maneuvered in for docking as per the instructions given to them by an utterly bored-sounding traffic control coordinator. The pressure seals hissed into place as the clunky old hull nestled into its dock with a soft moan of fatigued metal. Tali had done a spectacular job of making the Geth ship look like a haphazardly maintained old medium-small freighter, down to one or two panels being replaced the wrong way around, and others bent or warped slightly by hurried force. She slipped across the docking arm and onto the concourse, Garrus beside her, and a couple crates on a float pallet. Garrus had (after much argument and persuasion) donned different face paint for this mission than his usual colors, and Tali had sprayed a wash-off pigment over her encounter suit to alter its color just enough to be not instantly recognizable. Garrus was a bit easier to recognize than the petite quarian girl, but they didn't want to take any unnecessary chances. Legion was staying aboard the Zero-Eight with Mordin, the two of them chatting ceaselessly about the Geth. The two crates loaded on board the third-hand float-pallet concealed the cut-rate cryo-suspension unit they had purchased on Omega, and within was Shepard herself.
Tali suppressed a shudder at them memory of Shepard getting into that thing, the door open, and concentrating on the high-capacity capacitors that Tali had obtained. It was amazing what sort of tech you could scrounge up on Omega if you put your mind to it. The stink of ozone was mostly filtered out by her suit's atmospheric scrubbers, but such was the amperage being vented out of Shepard's prone body that enough got through for her to start coughing. Shepard had drained herself down to the absolute minimum for her to retain a sort of sluggish consciousness. She likened it to the fourth day of a three-day pass, something that made Garrus laugh as they closed and sealed the container, and Tali attached the capacitors to the cryo-suspension unit's power supply cables. These had been modified into a sort of open short circuit, and Shepard assured her that she could trigger the release when necessary.
That aspect, how to power Shepard back up, had been the major sticking point of the whole plan, since to pass a cursory medical scan as 'dead', she had to almost entirely bleed off the electrical potential that kept her higher neural functions active, like turning down the power on a high-end computer to the bare minimum necessary to run the bare-bones startup process. Shepard wasn't sure that she would have enough energy in that state to draw off the ambient electrical potential that sustained her, so this method of sending enough juice in an easily accessible form to completely 'reboot' her friend was the best of many not-quite-suitable answers.
She took a breath as she and Garrus angled the float pallet into line past the C-Sec scanners. 'Here we go...'
Dr Karin Chakwas, formerly CMO of the SSV Normandy, pulled on the thin insulating gloves. 'Shepard just had to have been shipped back frozen, hadn't she.' Her lips quirked in a rueful grin. Apparently, Garrus had found Shepard's body, almost entirely intact, on the planet Alchera's surface, almost a thousand klicks away from the impact wreckage of the Normandy. 'At least she went down with her ship...' The intense cold there had done something odd to her body, and Garrus had been afraid to try and thaw her, lest it do something disastrous, like shatter. 'Thus why an older woman is freezing her buns off in an envirosuit while performing one of the saddest duties a medical officer has to do.'
She switched on her omnitool's voice record function. "This is Dr Karin Chakwas, and I'm about to perform the initial autopsy on one Commander Aurora Shepard." She went on to list Shepard's dog tag numbers and the date. "As the subject has been returned in a frozen state for fear of damaging the corpse further, I am performing the autopsy in the clinic's cold labs. I am unsealing the cryo unit now."
The old model of unit Garrus had brought in was in such bad shape, Chakwas was amazed it was still working. Until Tali had shown up. That explained how the tech had kept working far after she'd sent it out for scrap. It's always handy to have a quarian around. She cracked open the lid, releasing a burst of condensing ice crystals. The room she was in was kept refrigerated, but the cryo containment unit's internal temperature was far lower than the ambient temperature all the same. As the mist cleared, Chakwas gulped. 'Damage to the corpse indeed.' Shepard's body was bare. Evidently, Garrus had stripped her for shipment, to cut down on the weight, but he had the decency to wrap her in a blanket, though that was now showing signs of shattering under the thermal shocks it had undergone.
Chakwas quickly levered the heavy, stiff corpse out of the cryo unit and onto the exam table, letting the unit swing to the side as she began a preliminary examination. As she had expected, the blanket had indeed shattered when she rolled the Commander over and onto the table, leaving her the unenviable task of picking up the shards later. The corpse was surprisingly intact for someone who had performed an orbital reentry and orbital skydive without a parachute. She failed to notice the slight twitch.
The initial examination yielded predictable results, utter rigidity of the limbs, though the hair still seemed pliable, which was odd. Usually hair froze just as solid and brittle as flesh when exposed to cryonic temperatures. It was an interesting point, but not the main problem right now. She completed the initial exam and was just starting to collate her notes when she caught the second twitch.
She paused, frowning. 'I couldn't have seen...' She picked up the reflex hammer on the tool tray and, hesitating for a moment, very lightly tapped the corpse's knee. She suddenly jerked back, stumbling away from the exam table, her eyes going absolutely huge behind her faceplate. The leg had -jerked- slightly. Her breathing quickened as she rapidly spoke into her mic pickup. However, even as she was making frantic notes, she noticed something else. Shepard's hair was stirring faintly, in a place where no breeze could exist.
The first sudden bolt of electricity from the malfunctioning cryo unit had her jerking backward in surprise again, then she rushed around the table, trying to find the off switch, to shut down the unit before it did more damage to the poor woman's corpse. She was rewarded instead with a sudden barrage of bolts from the unit's power cell into the corpse, which was now jerking spasmodically. Even as she scrambled frantically to regain control of the situation, Karin's mind kept careful track of the effects produced, noting the apparently galvanic responses in the dead flesh so very long after death, and wondering what sort of conditions would have resulted in such almost total preservation.
She was utterly unprepared for when Shepard took a long, shuddering breath and levered herself to a sitting position.
Shepard couldn't resist. "It's alive!" She cackled madly. Chakwas staggered back and pressed her back against the far wall, almost jibbering in shock.
"Oh come on, Chakwas, you -know- it just -had- to be said." She grinned lopsidedly at the woman with whom she shared not just a love for old 2-D movies, but a wicked sense of humor. She slid to her feet, glancing around. "Alright, what'd you do- Ohhh, drat, it didn't survive the cryo." She sighed, picking up a few fragments of blanket from the floor and glancing ruefully at her bare body. "Garrus, if I find out you picked this kind on purpose..."
"Garrus was in on this?!" Karin's startled, high-pitched, almost squeaky voice seemed to fasten on that idea as some sort of mental life preserver.
"Yup. Tali too. All three of us worked on it." She grinned over at Chakwas. "I'm just glad it was you, Karin. I'm not sure what would have happened if I'd gotten some shmuck off the C-Sec roll."
It took nearly ten minutes to calm Karin down and convince her that yes, she was indeed Commander Shepard, and no, she wasn't dead, at least not anymore. "I don't know exactly what the Old Minds had in mind for me, but it certainly beats being a charbroiled-and-flash-frozen chunk of meat any day. From what I gather, I somehow survived the asphyxiation and the subsequent reentry and impact long enough for them to dump a copy of my mind into their memory banks and start work on rebuilding my body." She tapped one forearm with her other fingertips. "I'm not certain they put everything back in the way they got it out, but i seem to be working on all circuits. I still remember my former life, even if I'm rather different now." She gave Karin a sympathetic look. "I'm sorry for scaring the bejeebers out of you, Karin, but it still was the quickest and quietest way of getting me onboard the Citadel without blowing the excellent cover my 'death' has afforded me."
Karin still glared at her CO, arms folded across her chest. "You still could have left off the horrible quote, Aurora."
Shepard grinned wickedly. "That was the best part of the whole incident; I'm not going to apologize for that!"
As Shepard and Karin talked, Dr Chloe Michael, oblivious to what was happening in her back cooler, was neatening up the supplies in the dispenser when a soft sound just behind her alerted her to something not quite right. The hand the suddenly gripped her chin and the knife that slid to within a hair's breath of her throat almost stopped her heart. Two years ago, she had been in a hostage situation, one brought under control by a turian C-Sec officer and the woman that later went on to become the first Human Spectre. Then, she had been utterly terrified, to the point of freezing up and letting her assailant get the upper hand. Now, after almost a year and a half of self-defense courses, she knew that unless she was very careful, very lucky, or very fast, she was a dead woman walking.
Without pausing to think about it, she twisted sharply to the side, lashed out with her thigh at where she presumed the culprit's crotch was, and ducked her head rapidly, avoiding the sudden tightening of the knife by turning her side to it. It sliced, but only took a groove out of the side of her neck, instead of cutting her windpipe or a major blood vessel. The "oof!" and muted swearing she didn't wait to hear, ducking fast out of the supply room and skidding to a stop as she saw three more young men with pistols and one with a rifle in the main treatment room. Almost keening now, she darted the other way, slamming down the corridor towards Karin and the autopsy room, shrieking for help.
Chakwas was describing how she came to resign her Alliance commission after Shepard's 'death' and went into private practice on the Citadel when Dr Michael burst into the room. Her already-wide eyes widened still further, staring at the almost-bare woman before her eyes rolled up and she slumped to the floor.
Shepard just blinked at the woman, then at Karin. "Now that's a reaction I haven't run across yet, but first times for everything, I guess." She slid from the exam table, still bare for the moment, "Let's see what that was about. She was scared before she saw me, so-" She cut off at the sounds of banging and rummaging around from out in the corridor.
"Wait here." Karin shivered slightly at the tone of -command- in her former CO's voice, so very much like how Shepard used to talk when she was out on a mission. She picked up her barely-used medical case and hesitantly followed the resurrected woman out of the cold room.
She almost died right then and there.
Shepard didn't get much of a look at the gun that spat at her before she had whirled around, grabbing Chakwas and dragging her down, back to the assailants, and using her own body to protect the unarmored woman. The first few bullets went high, sending shards whickering from their impact craters, but the subsequent rounds slammed home, making Shepard grit her teeth and rock slightly under the impact. She felt each bullet like a little hammer blow against her bare, unprotected skin, each one conferring enough kinetic energy to make her wobble in her crouch. Karin was silent, her eyes widening at the first shock, then narrowing as she realized what was going on. The incoming fire kept coming for a few more seconds before the attackers had filled their heat sinks.
'Right. No miss nice girl.' As she heard their guns fall silent, Shepard was already moving. She shoved Karin back a little and whirled, her bare toes gripping and shoving backward as she rushed forward. The nearest fool was ten meters away. The AR's clip was the fastest to reload, but that was with much practice, and these guys didn't look much like a trained strike team. So, pistol was fastest. That gave her three seconds, assuming the man had practiced at all at this, and it didn't look like he had. He was fumbling to get the sink in the right way around now, but she was almost on him.
He looked up just in time to catch her uppercut right under the jaw. The sound indicated she has broken his jawbone in at least two places, maybe more, but lifting him from the floor with the blow was a bonus from her point of view. He hit with a thud, skidding towards another of her assailants, making him skitter sideways. All four of the others were yelling at her now, but she wasn't listening. Battlefire burned through her veins. No cryosuit here to make her even faster, but even so, she was faster than these idiots were.
She spun, her bare heel snapping the pistol out of the next idiot's hand, her follow-up punch to the solar plexus sending him crashing into the wall beside another of his buddies, out of the fight. The person with the assault rifle had his clip in, and, a slight smile quirking her lips; she stood calm in the face of his renewed fire. Hand outstretched toward him, palm outward, she intercepted the majority of his shots on her palm itself. After only about three seconds of this, he realized what was going on, and the fire from the other two also stopped.
For a second or two, she just let the accumulated bullet shards fall from her hand, gazing into the eyes of the man with the rifle. Then she said two words to him, "My turn."
She snapped her hand into a fist, and with a thought, sent a large enough charge to stun, but not to kill, through the air. Her mind visualized a channel through the intervening space, and she 'felt' the buzz of a massive magnetic field form before the electrical discharge snapped out. All three were caught in the blast, secondary bolts arcing to the other two, making all three of them dance as their nerves were overloaded before letting them and the current drop. Chakwas was staring at her when she turned back to her.
"How did you -DO- that, Commander?"
She sighed softly. "It's a long story, Karin."
After obtaining a set of fatigues from one of the idiots, Shepard slid into Chakwas's seat at her terminal. The tanktop was a bit tight across her chest, and the shorts were a little too short on the taller woman, but borrowing clothes was always a crapshoot. At least the pair she wound up in didn't have char marks... She keyed on the comm and grinned over her shoulder at Chakwas. It had taken her a bit longer than she would have liked to convince Karin that yes, she was indeed Commander Aurora Shepard, Council Spectre, and lover of ancient 2-D movies. Promising her a case of Serrice Ice Brandy had been the only way to get her to unlock the cold room s door. She fiddled with the comm pickup, wishing fervently that she had her armor here, so she could make herself look human, but Garrus had dissuaded her from trying to get it stuffed into her cryocapsule with her. Clearing her throat, she typed in the direct number to Councilor Anderson's office, and waited for the comm to be answered.
Anderson was just packing up to leave when his comm cheeped. Sighing, he set down the briefcase and slid back behind his desk. Curious. This incoming call hadn't been sent on from his secretary, a nice asari girl four times his age. What's more, it had a code he recognized: Spectre to Councilor. Only a very few Spectres had his direct office number, and those were all out on assignment at the moment. He took a moment to activate the security features of his office, blanking his large window, which included setting up ultrasonic vibrations in the windowpanes to prevent someone using a laser microphone to listen in. Satisfied that the electronic scramblers were functioning, he keyed on the comm.
And got a severe shock.
Shepard's face stared out at him from his vidplate. No, not quite her, the skin tone was...was...-blue-! Her skin was a pale, pastel ice blue, her hair as white as driven snow, her eyes the deep blue of thick ice. He swallowed hard, hands gripping the edge of his desk so hard his knuckles turned white
"Sh-shepard?"
"Hey, David. Long time no see."
"Y-you're dead, Shepard."
"Yeah, I get that a lot. I got better." She quirked a smile at him, the one that she used to use back on the Normandy. He remembered that smile all too vividly. "Listen, I've got a huge favor to ask. I need to meet with you and the Council, in a closed-door meeting, face to face. At the earliest opportunity." She quirks that grin again, the one he knows means trouble for -somebody-. "If you can, see if you can get them there without telling them why, alright? I want to see that idiot Sparatus choke on his own mandibles when he sees me."
Anderson couldn't help but chuckle. "Want me to call Udina in?"
Shepard's grin turned into something fiendish. "Ohhhh, please tell me he has his own desk!" She sighed, "No, probably best to not inform him. He'd probably leak it if it would advance his career, and there's many different factions out for my hide this time. Old and new." Her eyes seem to bore into his. "The Reapers haven't gone away just because we killed their vanguard, Councilor. In fact, they're probably pretty pissed about that. More, entire human colonies are vanishing in the Traverse, and I have reliable intel that it's the same bastards that killed me doing it. The name "The Collectors" ring a bell, Councilor?"
Anderson frowned. He had heard vague rumors about the fabled race, but nothing definitive. According to his intel, they'd occasionally show up out of the Omega-4 relay and trade tech for certain specimens. Though, come to think of it, what -type- of 'specimens' was never specified...
"I've heard something, but nothing conclusive."
"I'm pretty sure they work for the Reapers, Councilor. More I am certain they're the ones responsible for an extremely virulent and deadly plague that we barely contained on Omega. Just to give you an idea of how nasty this thing was, it can infect asari, quarian, turian, krogan, any race that -isn't- human. And it causes excess mortality, according to my biochemist friend. That means, whoever catches it, if they don't get the antidote, is going to be coughing out their lungs within days, and dead inside a week. Doesn't seem to matter what race they are either, as long as they aren't human."
"Jeezus, tell me this thing is contained."
"Contained and treated. My friend, who shall for the moment remain nameless, has dispersed an airborne cure, so those people we can't get to physically will get treated, but it was a bit of a close call. And I have documented evidence that the Collectors were behind it."
Anderson rubbed his hands together, "If they've become so bold as to infect an entire space station with a cross-species plague, I'm sure the Council will become interested. What they'll do about it is another matter, since we-"
Shepard cut him off, "I'm almost certain they've stolen the bodies of every last man, woman and child from every one of those colonies that have gone dark, Councilor. That's mass murder of a Council race's outposts. If -that- isn't enough to get their attention, I don't know what is."
"Yes, but the only colonies that have been attacked are ones in the Traverse. The Council has specified that it has no jurisdiction-"
"That's bullshit and you know it, David. If they keep this up there won't be a human left alive outside Council Space, and there's precious few of our colonies inside Council space. And if the Collectors -are- working for the Reapers, they won't stop with the colonies in the Traverse. We need to mobilize -now-, before things get worse."
"You're preaching to the choir, Shepard. I'll see what I can do to get the council together, but I can't promise anything. How shall I contact you?"
"I'll call back in twenty four hours, Councilor. Let me know then." She grinned slightly. "And Anderson? It's nice to see you again." She hesitated, then that wicked, wicked grin, "Introduce me as 'an emissary from the Geth Collective'. That'll get their attention..." With a wink and a sparkle, the dead woman vanished from his comm.
Anderson leaned back in his chair, letting out a gusty sigh. He'd have to vette that transmission to determine if there was someone else behind Shepard's face, but from her manner of speech and vehemence, he was pretty sure that was indeed his former XO. His lips twitched. It would almost be worth the trouble it would cause to play that conversation for Udina...
AN: Well, here's chapter 10! I admit, I've been sorta working on this bit for a very long time, and I've got more such in-the-works stuff, though not consecutive, unfortunately. In any event, don't get used to the fast update, I'll be posting when the chapter's finally written. I don't work ahead so as to post chapters on a timetable, you guys get my work as soon as it's done. I hope you enjoy it! Also, due to a number of people being confused about what Chapter 9's top section was about, I've edited it slightly to make it a bit clearer. I hope it's less ambiguous now! ^^
As always, pleasepleaseplease Read & Review!