Chapter 11: Parole
The cell blocks of Purgatory, most of the ship in fact, was a cold place. Built more like a space station than a ship, it had a lot of wide open spaces for heat to diffuse through, and with her slow burning engines, stacked up with miserly application of life support meant that keeping things warm was more of a problem than keeping cool like in most ships. Making matters worse were the lack of heating elements in the cells, not like the warm inner hallways where the guards went on their time off. Some places you could take a piss and watch it freeze before you were done. It was the kind of thing that put a permanent chill in your bones, made you slow. Not that the Warden cared about that kind of shit.
And now, neither does she.
The guard in her grasp manages one scream before it trails off into a wet squelch, the crumpled remains more like the food paste from her last meal than human. Discarding the leaking corpse with a wave of her hand, head buzzing with the tight grasp of the implant in her skull, she goes to work on his partner with a snarl. The blue white flare of biotics outlines her frame, and the armoured Turian comes apart like wet tissue paper. Dark blue blood splatters her face and chest, dripping down her tats and draping over her body like a sweater made of warm stinking guts. But that warmth is nothing compared to the rush, the roaring bonfire in her stomach as she rips the scumsucker's head off. The charnel smell's just something she's just that good at ignoring. The human she didn't give a flying fuck, just another dumb idiot too stupid to live. But the Turian was one of the ones Kurill tended to sic on her if she broke his toys. She had rules about that kind of thing.
Rule one. Always get even. Always.
The black, bulge eyed expression she gets kindles the warmest thing she's felt in what seems like a lifetime before it pops like a scaly grape. She can just imagine squishing Kurill's face now.
She sees the motion from the corner of her eye, tell tale signs of hostility that set off a hiss of a hate from her lips. Number three, another rule to follow. Always get them first before they can get you. Blue light swirls and a barrier is up before she even registers the muzzle flash of the remaining guard's rifle. A hail of bullets streak across the measly fifty feet in an eyeblink before flashing to a cold stop inches from her face and chest. A bloodless curl makes its way up her lips. This one's broken. Kurill wanted her alive after all. Screaming all her rage, she lets the Spider in her head claw at her brain, little steaming icicles of ghostly pain stabbing into the hindquarters of her consciousness. A light show envelops her, draining into her fist as she charges across the intervening space in wide bounds. A burst of biotic power, and she clips him on the head, blowing off the helmet to reveal a grizzled face behind it. The sap drops his rifle to clutch at his chest, jerking free a silvery knife. It's not one of the fat K-bars soldiers sometimes carry, but a long thin thing, with a cutting edge like a scalpel.
And suddenly she's a little girl again, back in the lab, in the surgical ward with the doctor.
The doctor doesn't introduce himself to her, not like the others. He doesn't have a name, just the title, 'doctor', the cold room with the bright lights, the shackling straps that hold her tight, and the knife. The cutting edge of a knife pressing, slicing, making tiny little incisions in her skull, peeling away skin, cutting through bone. She's conscious through it all, her nerves dead, but never asleep, every sensation there for her to feel in terrifying horror as it probes deeper and deeper. She tries to scream, but her gagged mouth refuses to budge, tries to struggle, to get away from the man with the knife, but the restraints bite down tight and prevent her even from shivering. And then there's the pinch at the base of her skull, clamping down on exposed flesh and bone, the burrowing thing she learns to call the Spider, digging into her mind like an unwelcome predator. It jostles her consciousness, an alien thing intruding on her awareness like a fat mouth breather sitting in your personal space. It's all of a second of an acquaintance, and she hates it, fears it with every fibre of her being.
But the Spider is power, sweet delicious nectar that floods every pore in her body, the tingling warmth of her superiority over every other thing. Blue fire she had struggled to ignite in bygone days comes like a snap, roaring with all the hate and pain she can stuff into it. She's faster, stronger, harder than everyone else who's ever wronged her, than every fucker in the universe. The guard's gone, but the doctor is still there. She doesn't see the blue and white armour he's wearing, the ashen face twisting into a snarl of defiance. She doesn't even register the hand going for the grenade pinned to his chest. All she sees is the doctor and the knife, ready to make that cut.
But she's not a helpless little girl anymore, begging in futility for the pain to stop. Never again. Never beg like a weakling. She takes.
The knife doesn't even come close to touching her. There's no form, no grace, just raw instinct and bloodlust as she twists away from the first thrust and ducks the second slash. And then she ends it with her fist slamming into armoured carapace like a bulk lifter, polymer and ceramic inlays crumpling like a wet paper bag. There's all a microsecond of a choked cry before physics comes back with a vengeance, splattering the doctor against the far wall with all the force of a mass accelerator round. She spends all of a heartbeat blinking as she finally recognizes the cracked armour plate he has on.
Not the doctor, the sadistic bastard's dead like every other fucker in Teltin. Just another ex-guard in Purgatory. Teeth gleam from beneath her sadistic grin. Bad memories or not, it's just one less obstacle to her freedom.
The annoying wail of klaxons pick up in pitch as something blows up behind her with a roar of flames, another stab at her ass end of a home for the past fuck knows how many years. Automated doors slam shut as fire suppressant systems activate, filling the room with a cold puffy white clouds. The hallway exit itself is sealed, hidden behind a double layered blast door of reinforced steel. She snarls with the energy of the scornfully defiant. Did they really think that would work?
The Spider skitters across the web of her consciousness, stabbing little icicles of venom and pain as it obeys her command. A good pain that encases her fist in a rioting halo of blue. But before she can tear down the offending barrier, the crackle of a radio catches her attention. She doesn't ignore it, not right away. She's pissed, but not stupid. It's from the helmet of the cretin she just pulped, squawking with a voice she knows so well.
"Block D-1 is in lockdown. Squads Theta and Gamma, move in to secure Jack. Non lethal force only. Find and capture her!"
She sneers. Non lethal force? What a bunch of weak kneed pussies. The only way anyone was going to get her now was with a fucking huge bomb. Not that she'd count on that working either. When she was through with Kurill, he'd be lucky if all that was left was a stain on the wall. But maybe not today, she can wait. Right now, the only thing that matters is getting out. Somebody had woken her up, left the Spider to run riot, and she didn't believe in accidents. That meant somebody was looking for her, busted her out of cryo, but she didn't give a damn as to who or why. Maybe it's Cerberus, maybe not. Didn't matter anyway. Anyone coming for her was a scumsucker out to kill or use her, too bad for them. She isn't going to be around when the place burns. She directs her sneer back at the blast door, thick bolts of reinforced steel alloys that would take a rocket head on and keep on standing. The Spider leaps.
Doors? Fuck doors.
The hallways echoed with the chatter of firearms, the roar of flames raging despite the feeble efforts of automated fire suppression systems, the banshee shriek of twisting metal and screams of rage and pain as the battle for the prison continued. Through this all, the armoured Turian walked on unhurriedly, the squad support weapon in his claws dwarfing the assault rifles in his flanking guards. Speed was important, but rushing now would only cost them situational awareness when things were starting to come apart.
"We've got sector C-2, but we're pinned down and cannot hold! Requesting reinforcements!"
Kurill was a lot of things, most of them generally unflattering, and quite a few contradictory depending on who you asked. A Blue Suns commander, Warden over the inmate populace of Purgatory, cold blooded Turian mercenary turned extortionist, and public service provider were among the few labels he had acquired over the years he'd gone into the business of wetwork for hire. That was just baggage, bits of debris that people tended to heap on old hands like him once they'd gotten around. But to himself, he was always, and would always be, a simple businessman, if one willing to get his hands a little dirtier than most. When some corporate wanted guns for hire to quash an upstart competitor, there he was, no questions asked. When a government needed a place to get rid of dangerous criminals, he was a happy supplier of that place, for the right price of course. Businessmen did not get by on charity cases after all.
"Damnit, where are our reinforcements? We need backup now!"
And like all successful businessmen, he knew how to gauge the risks and profit of any venture. Synthetic Insights had promised a kingly sum for the intact capture of the prototype AI chassis, much more than what Cerberus had offered for Jack's release. For that kind of money, risking his reputation as a 'fair'dealer with his clients was well worth the trade off. And so long as he had Jack, who remained securely locked behind the most heavily reinforced cryogenic systems known to Citadel Space, Cerberus would have to forgive him anything. It had been, in his original estimation, a no-lose situation. However, the machine was rapidly proving to be a bigger drain on his resources than he had initially estimated. He had spent a not inconsiderable amount of time and resources gathering all the information on the war machine's performance, crafting his plans around countering them. That had been accurate. But with the rest of its compatriots, his intelligence was less so. He'd expected professionals, Cerberus had no dead weight in its numbers as far as he knew. The Turian and Krogan were a surprise to find among the human supremacist organization. Unfamiliar faces to him, but they were operating like an elite assault unit who'd spent a lifetime training together. And seeing Zaeed's face working among them was a shock.
"It's that damned mech! Get down, GET DO-"
The legendary mercenary had shot to infamy when he'd brought down the Verrikan from the inside with just a handful of men, earning the reputation for someone who got the job done no matter how insane, but often at the cost of most of his squad. Strangely, none of the Cerberus operatives had died yet, which made his losses all the more frustrating. This could have been explained away by the fact that Zaeed was not in command, the synthetic intelligence was; which led to its own set of problems. From the video feeds, he watched it direct the troops under its command with the kind of fluid but brutal efficiency that bore little in common with the grinding and implacable onslaught of Geth tactics, bearing more than a passing resemblance to human ones instead. No wasted motions, near instant comprehension of orders and responses. The hero of the Citadel may have been dead and gone, but Cerberus had apparently not slacked in trying to replicate his tactical proficiency. He had already lost five times the men originally projected as sufficient to overwhelm the boarding team, and they had yet to neutralize the Cerberus liaison and her bodyguard, not to mention loss of the command centre. Kurill felt put out about that; he'd trained his men to repel that kind of heavy assault and it rankled his professional pride that they were being brushed aside so easily despite the advantages of territory, numbers and firepower on their side. Compared to the way things were rapidly deteriorating into however, it was a minor case of scale itch.
"Damnit, there's too many of the prisoners! We can't hold them back! We-"
Losing power had cost him much of shipboard security and his prisoner stock before the secondary fuel cells could come online. Even then, they only had the barest minimum of power available, just enough to run life support, lights and the doors. The engineering bay had reported entire power arrays slagged from overheat; sabotage they had claimed, before they'd been overrun by the prisoners. He'd taken drastic measures then, voiding several blocks including Engineering, hundreds of thousands of credits of valuable scum sent blowing out into hard vacuum, as an example of what would happen if they continued. It hadn't worked. They were too desperate to be held back by threats, counting on him not willing to sacrifice them all with heavy handed use of decompression since it would gut his lucrative business. Five minutes ago, they would have been even right. To an extent.
"Gamma team here. We've spotted Jack, request permission to use lethal force."
He flicked a mandible, activating his suits communication system for a micro burst transmission.
"Denied."
"She's tearing us apart! We're getting slaugh-"
Mandibles clacked in frustration as the transmission cut out with a burst of static. With the same amount of dispassionate ease, he tasked another assault group from his command omni-tool on an intercept vector. The corpse of Jack would be useless to him, but alive, she was worth so much more. With just her in custody, he could lose Purgatory and still recoup his losses. If he could not capture the machine Insights wanted, then at least he would still have Jack. The remaining Arc projector-equipped troops had been retasked with the role of hunting the escapee down and bringing her in one way or another, but he had his private doubts about their chances. What few command systems still responding to his tactical net were reporting over thirteen hull breaches, all of them caused within five minutes of Jack's unauthorized release from cryogenic suspension. The only silver lining in the whole matter was that Cerberus had yet to make contact with her, the reports on former indicating that they were in pursuit, but unable to catch up before running into another clutch of guards.
"Hey asswipe."
It wasn't an encrypted broadcast, but in clear, and on a wide band send. Someone wanted everyone to hear this. Kuril did not demand the identity of the person on the tactical net, nor did he berate them for insubordination. The automatic response had been strangled in the creche at the first syllable. That the IFF system tagged the unit responding as already killed in action had nothing to do with it. He knew that voice. Not unexpected.
"Jack."
A part of him wanted to strangle the destructive ball of hate, but like all the other unprofitable impulses he had in the past, he pushed it down and kept his voice civil, if condescending.
"I'm coming for you, you Drell fucking piece of Vorcha shit, and when I'm done, there's not going to be even a smear."
"How generous."
A pack of prisoners rounded the corner and spotted him, howling with fury as they pounded forward with a variety of improvised or stolen weapons in their hands. Kurill unhurriedly put his weapon to his shoulder, letting his upgraded kinetic barriers absorb the occasional hit that connected without flinching, and pulled the trigger. His return fire was much more effective. The entire exercise took less than a second to clear and by then he had formulated his response to the biotic while he strode past the corpses. "But I have a better offer, seeing how you have nowhere to go. Return to your cell block, and I'll let you keep one leg. And maybe an arm if I'm in a good mood."
He preferred to avoid maiming his stock when he could, such things tended to lower their value as incentives for governments to pay for their imprisonment. But sometimes a stronger example than just beatings needed to be made, to keep the inmates properly docile. The response was a snarl of scorn and hate, peppered with some colourful language that made his mandibles twitch in amusement at her imagination. An intense ball of hate stronger than any Krogan grudge and biotics powerful enough to tear through bulkheads made Jack a very powerful enemy to have. He didn't wait for the litany to die down before he interrupted her.
"Or perhaps I'll just let you be reunited with certain quarters who want to see you again very badly."
There was a stream of inventive invectives before the channel died in a squeal of static.
He motioned for his guards to pick up the pace. Jack was angry, and she was desperate now that she knew what he did. Desperation drove most sentients into a very limited series of objectives, and for all her bluster, he knew the kind of creature she was. What she would seek first and foremost had already been well accounted for. He cycled through the available channels, hovering over a one time encryption key he'd never planned on using but kept all the same. Only a handful of his most trusted men had the necessary decryption protocols, the rest would have to find their own way. He activated the key, and spoke only two words.
"Do it."
Chaos surrounded Shepard, the familiar lack of order descending into anarchic violence in an cacophonous display of smoke, fire, screams and full automatic fire. It was starting to seem that no matter where he went, it would always be the same. Death and destruction slavishly followed in his footsteps, leaving nothing behind but ruin. Noveria, Eden Prime, Omega, even the vaunted safety of the Citadel. The scenery changed, but never the outcome.
Today, Purgatory burned.
He found it difficult not to find dark amusement in that particular knowledge as he stepped over the remnants of a blue armoured corpse, the cadaver having been torn apart not by firearms, but the fists and feet of desperate prisoners. For all the promises of the priests and preachers of an afterlife of one flavour or another, his meeting with the reaper had not introduced him to any incarnation of the sort. Death had lacked a place of torments and judgment that the religious spoke of, but life had given him one. That it was quickly turning into a classical depiction of hell, with fire and death in its halls... it brought a tendril of amusement to his jaded mind. Cerberus's Frankenstein project might have robbed him of a body, but it had given him a fresh viewpoint for the symbolically ironic.
Not that he had anything to do with the ongoing destruction of the space borne prison. Well, not entirely. The effects of his plan had plunged the station into the temporary darkness of total power failure, and though backups did exist to combat such an event, they were not as well protected from external intrusion as the primary systems had been. It had only been emergency reporting systems and such, but they were a vulnerability all the same. EDI had seized control of most of the command systems the moment they were reactivated, circumventing firewalls and transferring administrator privileges in the brief window of time they were exposed. Establishing communications with Miranda's team once the jamming system had been disabled was easily accomplished, but there had been complications. Though only the most direct threats, the automated sentry guns and security mechs, had been disabled, it had not taken very long for the prisoners to realize a never-to-be-repeated opportunity and broken confinement en-masse. They were unarmed and unarmoured, going against a security contingent of heavily armed guards with only their superior numbers to assail the mercenaries fortifications. The conclusion was a foregone one.
It did not take very long before the first hull breach was reported, with the loss of all hands in that sector.
All for the sake of a rampaging biotic.
As if the thought conjures her presence, the interior rings with the shriek of steel being tormented beyond all tolerance, shearing apart as some part of the ship in the distance is rent asunder by an unstoppable force. He knows it is the bulkhead giving way, a violent remodelling of the interior to produce new doors where once there was solid steel. The towering rage of a sociopath imprisoned but now free, bending local reality for the sole purpose of destruction. He knows all of this, because they have already borne witness to the destruction left in her wake. His squad, already used to the ear splitting sounds of destruction, do not falter, the Turian only pausing in his advance to share an inscrutable look from behind the opaque visor of his helmet. He couldn't see what was behind the mask, couldn't catch the twist to his mandibles or raised eyeplate, but neither was required to decipher the unspoken question.
Was what you did that back there, all of that, really necessary?
He didn't answer, at least not right away, other than to wave his arm in a forward gesture. Fresh gunfire crackled as doors opened to spill forth a platoons worth of blue suns, assault rifles chattering. His squad went to cover, questions forgotten as Garrus dives behind the ruins of a collapsed cell transfer crane. Too large to take advantage of the chest height obstructions, Shepard waded forward, autocannon in his arm snarling a reply. Marching in lockstep with him was Okeer's legacy, swaddled in thick armour and the even thicker hide of his race, shotgun at the ready. Blue armoured forms staggered as they were stitched with a storm of metal, flinging them to the ground in boneless heaps. He fought on, but the question niggled at his mind.
It was redundant to ask. Necessity guided his actions, defined the man that he was. He always weighed the scales, made the choices that provided the best results for all concerned. If horror and cruelty was the only way in the time they had, then he would do so. They had made their decisions, so had he. Releasing Jack from cryo stasis while the situation was fluid was a gamble, but he had two very good reasons for taking the risk. They required a distraction to keep the forces separated, and it would be an effective test of her capabilities. If she survived, it would prove she had the power and mettle they needed for the task ahead. He loathed to use people that way, but the logic behind it was necessary. Even with the dossiers, Jack was an unknown and volatile equation, testing her now would gauge her effectiveness later. But doubts still lingered, and not only at the calculative reasons.
They were both agents of the law, Garrus in C-Sec and him as an Alliance marine. Former in both cases, but the oaths they had taken did not end with their service. The blue suns were mercenaries, their calling was money, not the law, not the governments they hailed from, and certainly not justice. But they had guarded a prisoner, no doubts as to her crimes there, one they were helping escape from well deserved incarceration. Her biotic potential was off the scale, both in the reports he had read and the evidence that lay strewn about the collapsing ship. He had seen the remains of the YMIR assault platforms, crumpled like clay men within a prizefighter's fist. Miranda and Jacob, the only two biotics in his crew, could not even begin to compare. Their need was great, nothing could be held back in the fight against the Reapers. The best of the best, every bullet, ship, and resource available to be marshaled to fight the coming tide of extinction, no matter its origins.
Subject Zero was a diminutive package of unparallelled biotic fury who could throw over thirty thousand Newtons worth of force, four times greater than the next best human on record, more than enough to crumple steel bars like empty soda cans. No matter their reservations, that kind of power was an asset they could use. A power that they desperately needed to fight the Reaper's Collector pawns. But the thoughts are an unwanted distraction, even if they are not affecting his combat performance; they are committed, and there is no place for doubts here. The crackle of his tactical communications net reminds him of that.
"You know, this makes no sense Shepard."
"WHAT"The reply is cursory, his attention focused on the nimble guard who avoided the first fusillade and is now making a getaway. He does not take his second step before a rifle cracks with lethal finality, blood erupting from his chest as his body pitches into the ground before lying still. From the corner of his vision, Shepard caught the suggestion of a shrug from the grizzled Turian as he ducked back behind the shelter of an upright steel plate. With the momentary respite, he rapped the construction with his free hand.
"This. Pop up barriers in the middle of a nice wide and open kill zone like this? It's like they want to make things easy for us."
Shepard would have smirked at the sardonic tone if he still had lips, his earlier introspection forgotten. Garrus always did have a knack for understating things. The plates had been a bit of a surprise when they had first encountered them in the prison wings, thick slabs of armoured steel seamlessly flush against the deck, snapping to position via powerful magnetic clamps at just the right height to shelter a roughly human sized person if they ducked. Since they were controlled by the security system, he could see the logic behind evenly spaced shelters you could deploy on command. Except with communications restored, security was EDI's plaything, the artificial intelligence subverting the automated shelters for their benefit and denying it to their enemies. He didn't know how well they would have stood up to conventional omni-tool hacks, but given how woefully prepared they were for heavy electronic warfare attacks, he decided that Garrus had a point after all.
"NOT THAT THEY NEED TO" He punctuated his observation with a burst of cannon fire, the stream of projectiles flaring against the barriers of a guard and knocking him down behind a fallen girder.
"Well if it's too easy for you commander, I'm sure we'll find something suitably challenging for you soon enough," Piped in another voice on the tactical net, the ID tag telling him what he already knows from the arch, slightly annoyed voice. So much for the unofficial small truce with the Cerberus liaison. Miranda had been rather peeved to learn how the insertion attempt had almost gone bad, much less being ordered back to the Normandy with Jacob, though she kept her disapproval reined in. Neither one had worn environmentally sealed armour to avoid tipping off their hand early, while most of their contingency plans required them. "Seeing how those arc projectors they're using don't seem to be up to your standards, perhaps riding out the impending re-entry would be more to your tastes."
Mostly reined in.
Garrus chuckled, unhooking a flashbang from his harness, "Thanks, but I'll pass on that. Shepard's the one for crazy rides. Word of advice; never let him drive. Especially if it's a Mako."
For once, he was glad at his machine body's inability to reproduce contextual sounds outside of human grammar or he would have groaned as yet another voice added his two credits.
"You mean the Mako IFV?" the grizzled voice of Zaeed queried, a hint of curiosity in his voice as he stepped past a ventilated corpse, pausing only long enough to give it a swift kick. "Never been in one, but damned bloody tough things I remember. Take a hell of a beating and they just keep on going. Hear they have shitty suspension though, half the time they get called vomit comets because it was bloody bouncing all over the place."
"NOT THAT BAD,"he refuted a little defensively, ignoring the chuckles of the ex-vigilante and turning his attention and grenade launcher to where the guard had fallen. Thermal sensors illuminated the hidden form, pencil-thin beams of coherent light feeding distance calculations into the micro-warhead as the weapon on his shoulder barked. The roar of its incendiaries detonating over the barrier is joined by the tormented cry of a newly-ignited human torch.
"Not that bad? Come on Shepard, you were a complete maniac behind the wheel." The Turian accompanied his rebuttal with a backhand toss of the flashbang towards the last gaggle of guards. "Calling it a vomit comet was an understatement when you drove. How many Alliance Marines can claim to have made it cartwheel off a sheer drop, bounce off a cliff face, only to land on that pirate crawler? I swear the thing would have fallen apart after only one mission with you."
Shepard refrained from answering immediately as his optics dimmed to compensate for the sudden eruption of light and sound, feeling a bit offended. Yes, he had pushed the armoured fighting vehicle hard, and the ride was sometimes uncomfortable between dodging anti-tank fire and navigating harsh terrain, but they'd all come through, more or less intact despite the incredible odds stacked against them. The complaints, he felt, were somewhat unjustified. "EVERYONE SURVIVED."
"Not that survival was much of a blessing if it meant another drop like that. Why do you think I was always running maintenance on it?" The sardonic reply was punctuated by a short staccato beat of Garrus's battle rifle. At the end of the hall, a guard threw down his ruined shotgun with a curse, darting for the holstered pistol at his side. Another triple beat, and the mercenary fell with a spray of arterial blood. "Besides, remember the Geth colossus? The one you ran over?"
The mercenary actually paused in mid-fire, retaining the presence of mind to duck behind cover before shooting an incredulous look at Shepard. "Wait. A Geth colossus? Bloody huge walking tank? You're bleeding pulling my leg."
Powering through a deployable barrier with his bulk, Shepard slew the idle thought of sending a warning shot at Garrus as he continued to elaborate.
"A lucky hit had taken out the main gun, so instead of pulling back to fix it, he charges straight ahead. Fishtailed into it right as it was turning around to hit us, knocked out half its support legs." Garrus rose to his feet, snapping off another accurate burst of fire before dashing forward. Several steps later, he slid behind a piece of debris, nonchalantly continuing as if he wasn't being shot at. "The platform went down hard at that point, clipped the Mako with its backside. One thing about that vehicle, the suspension really likes to bounce. It sent us flipping across the landscape. Longest ten seconds of my life. By the time we came to a stop, I was ready to call it quits."
He chuckled as Shepard scoured the remaining strongpoints with a withering storm of steel. "Only sheer luck we ended up on our wheels rather than upside down. But just as the synthetic starts to get up again, Shepard guns the engine and drives up its back like a ramp before parking right on top of it. Between the Geth's flailing and Shepard lighting off the thrusters on its head, we're getting tossed around inside like a bunch of marbles. And would you believe it, he's laughing all the while."
"YOU DID NOT COMPLAIN THEN." Were they not in the middle of a firefight, and had he better control over the amount of strength put in his motor controls, Shepard would probably have given into the impulse to chastise Garrus with a smack across the back of the head for bringing up the incident. Instead, he vented his frustrations by lighting off another missile from his arm launcher, blasting apart the last of the holdouts while Grunt charged into their midst. Yes, it had happened the way Garrus described, but it had made sense at the time!
"I think we were more concerned about checking to see if we were still alive after that stunt, commander." He interjected above the bark of his rifle.
"You talk too much Turian." Grunt's disapproving rumble carried above the crack of armour plate as he drove his fist into the chest of the last guard. The blow sent him slamming against the bulkheads with enough force to leave a dent, his chest plate crumpled inwards. "Your warlord brings you to glorious victory in battle and you complain of discomfort? Weak."
"Oh, you haven't experienced his driving yet." There was the tiniest pause where Shepard could visualize the twitch of mandibles behind a helmet, the Turian equivalent of a grin. "It would be... instructive."
Slewing his sensor pod towards the ex-vigilante, Shepard fixed him with the hardest stare he could muster with its optics. It was conceding the point, but he was a man without a body dammit. He was entitled to preserving at least a shred of his dignity. "DO YOU WANT ME TO PILOT THE GUNSHIP ON THE NEXT DROP"
It was petty, but the way the Turian's head snapped towards him in shock was very satisfying. "Isn't that against Citadel and Systems Alliance law, commander? I think they classified it as cruel and unusual punishment."
He regretted not being able to grin, settling for shifting his arm servos in the analogue of a shrug. "NOT IN THE MILITARY ANY MORE. THIS IS A CERBERUS OPERATION. YOU KNOW HOW IT IS LIKE."
"Commander, as amusing as it is to hear of your past exploits, might I remind you that we are short on time as it is," Miranda's voice on the tactical net carried no small amount of irritation as she interrupted Garrus's response, "Purgatory's orbit is rapidly decaying and Subject Zero is still a-." Her words were suddenly cut off by the toneless and unhurried voice of EDI.
"Shepard, I am detecting the simultaneous launch of Purgatory's escape pods. Sensor contacts indicate that they comprise the entirety of Purgatory's complement."
A few curses flitted through the communications net, the guttural oath from Zaeed losing itself in the Grunt's growl of frustration at the 'cowards', but Shepard only asked one question of the synthetic intelligence.
"LIFE SIGNS"
Purgatoy's primary thrusters were down, its reactor cores scrammed and would stay that way for days with only the on board resources at hand. The secondary fuel cells had been slagged, forced to overload by a pulsed override command even as they warmed up. Not all of them, enough just to leave life support and the barest of functions running. For a little while longer. Anyone in the Engineering bays would know from their data readouts and the red hot pools of chemical sludge that were their secondaries. Cold-starting the main reactors was impossible. Caught in Olokun's gravity well, its hours-long death spiral had already begun, and would terminate in the crushing grasp of the gas giant. Abandoning ship was the only sensible thing to do, about the only option left if you intended to live to see the next day. At least, the only option he wanted the inhabitants of Purgatory to believe with EDI's more subtle manipulations of the control systems.
Frankenstein's creation he might be, but Shepard was not yet a complete monster.
But coordinated mass launches like this were an unexpected variable, there was no practical sense to delaying the pods until everyone was filled. Assuming they were filled. EDI's answer came a moment later, confirming his suspicions.
"None. They are empty."
Shepard had never been one for profanity, no matter how bad things had gotten. Profanity was an emotional outlet, but pointless for resolving problems. It did not lessen the urge to blister the air with Kurill's name, like now. He accelerated, moving down the trail of destruction that Jack had left behind. It had to be a part of the Warden's plan, that meant they didn't have-
A detonation rocked the entire ship, the superstructure groaning in protest as the prison bucked and heaved. Internal gyros whined as they struggled to keep his balance in the sudden upheaval, his team scrabbling to stay upright even as the floor panels buckled beneath them. Screaming filled the air, but not from those who had accompanied him. Wall-mounted isolation modules high above were knocked loose by the detonation, tearing free into gravity's grasp. Prisoners still trapped inside shrieked as their prisons smashed themselves into pulp on the unyielding floor, or were cracked open to unforgiving vacuum while fires bloomed from shattered life support pipes, plumes of igniting oxygen scorching the walls.
But the all-consuming explosion he expected never came.
"STATUS" he demanded the moment the aftershocks subsided, receiving a number of affirmative check ins on the tactical net. And one jibe.
"Hey commander, was that your idea? Because, you totally got the sequence wrong you know? When you blow up the ship, you're supposed to be in the escape pods, and not inside getting blown to bits. That's how it's done in the action holos."
If he had eyes, he would have rolled them at Joker. "NOT MY IDEA JOKER" He had a pretty good idea who's idea it was, though the knowledge was not very comforting. He had miscalculated. From the amount of opposition that had been thrown up to intercept his group, he was expecting that the Warden would have tried to force a confrontation, possibly harbouring the hopes that he could still capture him. He should have expected the possibility it was a feint. He hadn't expected this.
"Uh yeah. That probably makes sense. You're crazy, but not that crazy. Might want to hurry it up a bit then. The Purgatory's port fuel storage tanks just went up all at once, nearly tore her in half. Thermal's showing a lot of heat signatures going on inside too, looks like fire containment's on the fritz. The way things are going, starboard tanks might go up any minute too. If that happens, it's really going to bring down the resale value."
Another lesser explosion rocked the ship, underscoring Joker's words as the perfectly calm voice of the Purgatory's shipboard VI announced the loss of life support in several decks.
"Definitely not the kind of thing you want to see up close."
Bulkheads and blast doors were no obstacle to her, ripped from their mountings or just powered through with all the fury of the Spider scuttling in her brain. Prisoners and guards alike she blew apart or crushed with equal contempt, never stopping, never slowing, but getting no closer to her goal. Another explosion tore through the prison ship, a blast of fire consuming some screaming guards before she brought a containment module down on their annoying heads like the hammer of Jack. Thumping down the hallway, she rounded on the alcove leading to the escape pods, giving no more attention to the prisoners beating on its sealed door than she would a buzzing insect. And like insects, she swatted them aside, stumping past their broken bodies to check the pod launch controls. She spent all two seconds looking at the readout before screaming in frustration.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuckthe Warden. The bastard was crazier than she'd given him credit for. Purgatory was getting blown to shit. That was good. About time it got what was coming. Except there weren't any escape pods, and that was fucking kick to the cunt. It was the same fucking thing with every pod she'd come across, all launched, none left, and the fucking ship about two steps from finishing the job of blowing itself to bits. She was damned sure she'd gotten to the pods ahead of the guards and rest of the prisoners a few times, but those were gone too. She wanted to grin despite her rage. The sadistic bastard had finally decided to take her seriously, blowing up the ship and her with it.
There had to be a way out. She fucking refused to give up like this. Rule three. Someone always fucked up, kill him before he can unfuck himself. Jack wasn't stupid, she knew her freedom had been somebody doing rule three. The guards were too well trained to fuck up like that, so that meant somebody else, probably those 'concerned quarters' the Warden had let slip. That meant they had come looking for her, probably set her loose. Didn't matter whether it was an accident or on purpose, but that meant they were probably fucking up the Warden's shit, and more importantly, they had a ship.
Jack didn't buy into that 'enemy of my enemy' crap. Looking out for yourself was therule. Everyone else has an angle, looking to screw you over. They had a ship, likely a shuttle in the only hanger bay on this rustbucket, and that meant she had a ticket out.
She just had to make sure she killed them all first.
Jack felt, rather than saw or heard the ambush ahead of her. It was impossible to miss because it was that fucking obvious. The hanger bay doors were sealed, and she bet there were a mess of guards on the other side with heavy weapons, waiting to screw her in the ass the moment she came through. The Warden was a crazy bastard, but she wasn't dumb enough to think that he was a stupid one. If the sack of shit hadn't made his getaway by now, he would be waiting there to try and snatch her, a ton of his best guards with shock sticks, rifles and everything in between. She smiled a feral grin at that, all teeth, malice and the promise of sweet, sweet revenge. Well fuck him sideways with a Krogan power fist too.
She walked down the hallway, tapping the walls periodically until things squared with the mental map in her head. She'd seen the interior of the hanger once, when they'd brought her in. Like every other place she'd come across, she'd kept all the important details in that corner of her mind labelled 'escape routes and weak points'. And right now, she needed a weak point right where she could kick the bastard in his scaly balls. She stopped walking at a junction, just another featureless corridor of panelled walls and floors, at least, that was how it would look like to anybody else. To her, it was perfect. The floor fell away as she fed the Spider all her hate and rage, the other presence in her mind encasing her body with solid blue fire. With an ear splitting howl, she hurled herself at the wall, punching through screeching bulkheads like a freight train through wet waste paper.
The bulkhead tore open in an explosive shower of deadly debris as she rammed through them, a particularly large chunk flattening some schmuck in blue before he could even turn. But there were a lot more figures in blue with guns, and a few of them had already started shooting. Jack didn't waste a second, pulling at some of the debris with a flick of her mind and sending the rest of it scattering into the hanger bay. Two heartbeats later, and a chunk of steel the size of an aircar slammed into the closest bunch of guards like a freight train. The rest scattered and dove for cover as the rest of the former wall hurtled their way. It wasn't much, but it was enough for her to land on the crane without taking a shot up the ass. She didn't pause to admire her handiwork, only stupid idiots did that, but scuttled along the crane's loading arm, pausing only to grab a loose fuel tank and slam it into a cluster of guards who tried their luck with potshots over their makeshift cover. Their screams as the tank broke and ignited sent up a warm feeling in her belly.
"You feeling that, you bastards?"
She jumped, tearing down the crane behind her in a shower of sparks. The container in its grasp broke free, the improvised missile crushing a gaggle of guards with an almighty crash as it came down on their heads. She landed a moment later on the twisted pile of scrap and rolled with the impact, bouncing to her feet before the rest could correct their aim. She spent all of a heartbeat swivelling her head left and right, looking for the scaly shit who ran this miserable hell hole and finding nothing. She scowled at that. The Warden was somewhere around here, too many of his goons to be anything else. Well, she had the answer for that.
"Come out you asswipe!" the ex-convict howled as she tore through another cluster of guards, bowling them over with a blast of dark energy and smearing a few across the floor like crushed fruit for good measure. Assault rifles chattered and shotguns roared, storms of flechettes halting just inches from her face as the Spider hissed and webbed them. She sent them back, with exploding canisters for interest. One of them had a rocket launcher, she blinked at that, giving him points for having the balls to use it inside a ship. And then she took his balls away with a well aimed throw of torn piping. The improvised spear punched through his kinetic barriers and pinned him to the wall where he flopped like a dying fish. His screams were music to her ears.
There were at least thirty more moving bodies in blue with guns. She had no armour and no weapons. But she didn't need either. The Spider was a weapon, the Spider was loose, and so was all the cargo in the hanger, this was her playground now. Flechettes and grenades were met with the Spider's web, never touching her. She flailed with her power in broad sweeping strokes, slamming armoured figures into unyielding walls with resounding crunches. A gesture with her forefinger, and a head popped clean off the neck it was attached to. A wordless snarl, and a man was torn from limb to limb. But they weren't him.
"Come out and fucking die already!"
A sudden burst of fire caught her attention, a hail of flechettes sparking off the floor just in front of her.
"So nice to see that you're punctual, Jack."
That was when she saw him emerging from an opened cargo container, that smug flare to his mandibles making her blood boil. Turians all looked the same to her, but she made it a point to memorize that distinctive face paint, and that oily bastard voice. How convenient that he had gone without a helmet so she could find him easily. Even better, he was standing next to a shuttle with its engines primed and ready for takeoff. She grabbed a loading crate and tossed it at him, but the bastard was faster than she had accounted for, ducking under the missile before snapping off a few rounds. They slammed into her barriers harder than the other times she had been shot at. The Spider chittered under the strain of holding it up, exacting its toll with a pulsing migraine.
"Be a good prisoner and be so kind as to drop on the floor." He responded laconically between bursts of fire. "I'd prefer to have you undamaged... permanently that is."
She howled and lunged forward, biotically kicking off a shattered support for better acceleration. That was when the Warden tapped a button beside his rifle, and the underslung barrel barked.
Two disc-like objects whizzed towards her, slamming into the shield of dark energy she had drawn up at the last instant. One moment was all it took for her to recognize them, and she raised her hands protectively. That was when the world went white, and all thought became impossible except for an infuriated, 'Fuck, my eyes!''
But she didn't go down, and didn't stop, clinging on with all the stubbornness she could muster with her fury. She didn't need her eyes to use the Spider. She didn't even need them to navigate, she remembered where everything was well enough. Then the pain hit her. It felt like kissing a live wire, every muscle in her body jerked and spasmed as she danced to the electric tune. Her mouth opened to howl in fury, but all that came out was a strangled cry of pain and frustration. Every part of her body didn't want to respond to her rage no matter how she forced it.
Blinded, deafened, immobile. Helpless for the Warden to scoop up. Vulnerable.
Jack managed to scream at that thought, biting down on that pain and riding it like a brutal lover. She'd faced worse than this, she'd lived worse than this, she wouldn't give up like a fucking pansy. By sheer force of will, she clamped down on the Spider, squeezing it to do as she willed. The swirling pulse of biotic power filled her, not to strike out, but encasing her limbs with a suit of dark energy. Nerveless fingers that refused to clench surrendered to the constricting aura of light, limbs bending to her will. She was going to make them pay, every single fu-
Another live wire struck her chest and she screamed at the pain, the swirling corona of energies around her fist trebling as spasms racked her body. The Spider chittered, nearly squirming out of her grasp as her control over her biotics faltered. But she held on, howling as she strangled the Spider into submission. Dark energy flared and pulsed, sending everything not nailed down flying. Guards yelled with panic, music to her ears that encouraged her to press on. She got shocked again for her resistance, twice in rapid succession, nearly dropping her to her knees as her body writhed under the assault. The Spider slipped it's leash, skittering away into the darkness for one horrible second before she wrestled it back. But her hold was tenuous, nearly failing from the overwhelming pain. Rifles chattered, and her barriers flickered, barely stopping the bullets while the Spider screamed in agony.
But she clamped down on the torment, hanging on by sheer fury alone. The pain was nothing, nothingcompared to the torture Cerberus had put her through. She would survive. And she was going to make them pay.
Every single fucking one.
Things go wrong. Plans run into unexpected circumstances, invalidating previously held assumptions and viable courses. To the cynical minded, nothing is more natural, no situation more normal, than everything ending all fouled up. In that same mindset, nothing is more unnatural than a plan working to perfection the first time, a flawless operation without hitch, last second improvisation or just plain luck to stave off disaster. As a corollary, the more complex a plan you make, the greater the probability that not only will something go wrong, that it will do so in a big way. With that in mind, Shepard had gone with simple objectives and crafted his strategy accordingly. The original goals, should the Warden prove hostile, had been to take control of the ship's systems, find Jack, release her from cyro-stasis, give her the twenty second run down under fire, reactivate her implants and fight their way to the extraction point through the pre-plotted route while Joker fended off Purgatory's defenses and its fighter escort long enough to launch a recovery craft.
That had been the optimistic plan. So of course it went wrong.
Between Jack's rapid exit before they could link up, the mass launch of empty escape pods and the, likely deliberate, detonation of the fuel tanks now threatening the entire ship, that plan, not to mention Plans B through D were now obsolete, E had insufficient preparation time to make it work, and F was little more than making it up on the fly with a few educated guesses. The good news was, they knew where Jack would most likely be heading with all other avenues of escape cut off. The bad news was, the Warden would be waiting there with whatever remained of his troops, heavy weapons and prepared ambush positions. And given her pace, there was no way they could link up with the convict before she ran headlong into the ambush.
She would last a while, he had no doubt about that given what he had seen in her passing. But biotics had limits, and the Warden had captured her before. Even if she destroyed the ambush before they arrived, she'd likely escape on whatever means Kurill had stashed away and they would lose their last opportunity. Haste had become the only priority, they had to find Jack before it was too late, even if it meant making a direct assault into enemy fire.
To be fair, he had been expecting weapons fire to greet him the moment he breached the hanger bay doors. Getting struck by a screaming mechanical missile was not among the things he had been accounting for.
It happened in an instant. The hanger doors had been sealed shut, the controls locked out. So they had been blasted open with breaching charges, his team pushing through the instant the doors came apart. He was the first through the breach, trusting to his shields and armour to absorb the expected attack. And then the projectile was there, howling scrap code as it blew past the smoke and headed for his head.
Automated threat detection routines registered the threat in under a microsecond, and kinetic barriers flared to life at the speed of light. The white and black form of an armoured FENRIR mech struck the barrier, coronas of dark energy flashed and rippled dangerously for an instant as conflicting shield systems tried to cancel each other out. A lightweight human form LOKI type security mech would have been instantly bowled over at the sudden impact even had it been shielded. But a YMIR assault class mech was a stable platform, more than a ton of armour, servos and power systems supported by thick sturdy legs. Against the thrown two hundred kilo mass of the doglike mech, it would barely have stumbled. With it's kinetic barriers, even one as battered as his, it would have been a negligible nuisance. But he was no creation of silicon and quartz, no coolly calculating machine intelligence. Despite everything that had been suppressed or stripped out, he was still at the core, human, and reacted as only an organic could.
Shepard flinched, over a ton of heavily armoured machine falling back a step as the doglike machine crumpled against his barriers and exploded.
The detonation was the final push, his kinetic barriers collapsing in the face of flensing shrapnel. They rattled off his body, thick armour plate proof against the improvised missile. But his sensor pod was less well protected. A spear of twisted metal the length of a human arm punched through the protective glass, smashing the camera feeds. The hanger bay disappeared behind a storm of white static before blacking out entirely. Threat alerts blared in his consciousness of incoming fire even as the world vanished. His shields sparked and sizzled as they tried to initialize while a barrage of fire hammered into his armour, system warnings droning of imminent catastrophic breaches. Despite being in the middle of battle, he couldn't help but hold just one grimly amused thought. At least he wasn't beheaded this time. But with the initiative lost, blinded and caught in the open, he should have died there and then.
If he had been alone.
"Fire in the hole!"
From behind his sheltering bulk, Garrus's under rifle attachment thumped, a dark projectile arcing high into the hanger before it erupted as a newborn star. Incoming fire slacked off and pained cries rang out from all around as his tactical net, unhindered by the loss of the sensor pod, fed him Grunt and Zaeed's positions. The mercenary and the Krogan swept out into the bay, their weapons thundering as they immediately began cutting down the most obvious threats. A moment later, sight returned, emergency protocols building a composite image from the cameras embedded into the helmets of his team, layering the data over uploaded plans and hijacked security footage to feed directly into his brain. The feed was distorted, disorientating from the odd way the angles appeared, but it was enough. He raised his arms, a veritable arsenal spitting death at blue armoured forms as he tried to pinpoint their objective.
She was there, out in the open and impossible to miss. A hurricane of metal and debris surrounded her with a cloud of whirling death as she flung parts of it at anything her sights fell on. He felt as moment of relief at the sight. Not captured, still an effective, her combat potential confirmed as worth all the trouble they were going through to get her.
"OBJECTIVE LOCATED. PATTERN ALPHA."
Alpha was as simple tactical manoeuvre. Stay in pairs, move fast, and keep enemy positions suppressed while rear elements neutralized them with heavy weapons. As the most obvious target, his job was to draw enemy attention and the Blue Suns went along with his plans amiably.
Enemy fire that had slacked a moment ago returned in full force, slamming into his newly-reinitialized shields with a desperate tempo. He pivoted to the side and accelerated, moving towards a pile of shattered cargo containers for shelter while his arm-mounted autocannon roared in defiance. The stuttering roar overshadowed the chatter of assault rifles, forcing blue armoured figures to dive behind cover as he swept withering fire at their positions. Return fire sparked off his armour whenever the stream of shots passed them by, the mercenaries jumping out when they were in the clear. Minor damage alerts began intruding on his awareness as the fire picked up, more defenders focusing their efforts on him. Taking advantage of the lack of attention, Garrus's rifle barked twice in quick succession, each shot punching through the helmet of a less than cautious mercenary while Zaeed vaulted over the cover of a sheltering Sun. The shotgun in his hand bucked, silencing the surprised cry as the veteran brutally smashed in the head of another guard with its butt. A moment's hesitation gripped the enemy forces as they split off their fire, long enough for a nest of guards to promptly disappear in a ball of flame when Shepard's missile struck.
Attention immediately fell back on him.
Through it all, he kept advancing, dividing his attention between Jack and the Suns. The former was still paying attention solely to the mercenaries, using her biotics to smash them with gravity and thrown containers. The latter were slowly falling back, unable to hold their positions between the two forces, but where was the Warden? He had to be somewhere- his attention suddenly swerved back to the convict. The motion was slight compared to the chaos of battle, so much so that he would have missed it had he been slightly less attentive. Jack had raised her arm. And it was pointed at him.
There was no time to think, only to react. The shoulder-mounted grenade launcher swivelled into position just as a wave of dark energy manifested around the convict. Fast as he was, she was faster. The blue aura flared and lanced out like an arrow. Deck plates warped and burst apart as the wave engulfed them, forming a line of destruction straight for him. The grenade launcher barked trice in rapid succession. Arming safeties overridden, contact fused high explosive rounds met the edge of the wavefront. Thin skinned metal housings twisted and broke, setting off their payloads. Concussive force and pulses of dark energy warred in a roiling cloud of blue tinged fire, the blast rocking Shepard back on his heels with a whine of abused actuators.
A heartbeat later, the convict burst through the cloud of flame, trailing an aura of biotic energy and murder in her eyes as she raised a corona engulfed fist. The same fist he had seen her drive through solid steel moments earlier.
"JACK-"
He never finished his words as the convict came in swinging. Training kicked in, and he evaded, sidestepping her biotic lunge with a quick shift of his body weight. The right arm swung, jabbing at her exposed flanks with the tips of his gun sheathes, but the convict reacted faster. An elbow jammed into the exposed muzzle of the rocket launcher in his arm, tearing apart the hardened alloys with a sudden flare of biotics and shower of sparks. Power to the limb immediately failed as emergency cutoffs engaged. She pivoted, sweeping a leg out that would have, should have, smashed itself uselessly against his armoured legs. Seeing the flare of biotics, he turned with her kick before it could connect, the limb whistling against the air too close for comfort.
"WE ARE-"
"Fuck you!"
The blue pulse of biotics around her frame gave him only a split second warning. Actuators whined in protest, compacting his frame even as the pulse caught him. Gravity inverted, gained momentum and sent his multi ton bulk flying. He slammed against the bulkheads with a deafening shriek of crumpling hullplate. Motive power to his internal gyro failed, the system locking down his legs as it underwent an emergency reboot. So much for making contact, was the wry thought that flitted in his awareness between the cascade of error reports. Jack advanced, screaming as the flare of biotically created barriers stopped incoming fire from so much as scratching her. Time to do it the old-fashioned way then.
"EDI-"
The convict lunged, her fist glowing with blue fire as she aimed it right at his chest. Time seemed to slow down.
"SHUT-"
Internal sensors, those not already destroyed in his mangled head, painted the distance. Close.
"OFF-"
Too close. Half a meter to go. On his tactical display, Garrus's icon flickered with movement, the Turian rapidly approaching his position to assist. But the conclusion was obvious. He would never make it. Her fist began to come down where it would terminate against his chest. It would go through, punch into his brain casing. There wasn't enough time.
"HER-"
The fist crossed another twenty centimetres. He'd die.
But not today.
Power hissed from his microfusion core, dumping nearly it's entire output into the single remaining functional limb. Actuators screamed as his left arm lanced out. Purple blue barriers caught the leading edge of his gun sheathes, friction searing off the paint with a bright pop of short lived flame. But the arm was simply too massive, too mass heavy, to be stopped. With a flare of collapsing barriers, his arm punched through, catching the convict straight in the solar plexus.
"Hrk!"
Pliant flesh met with unyielding steel, momentum carrying the convict forward even as her torso refused to follow. The blue flare of biotics flickered and went out as her eyes bulged, limbs and arms going askew as her body was brought to an immediate halt. Phlegm and digestive acids splashed against his chassis as she reflexively gagged.
Time resumed its normal pace.
"-IMPLANTS. SHUT HER DOWN"
With a snap shut motion of his gun sheathes, he clamped down on either side of the convict's torso, pinning her in place. She reacted immediately, pain becoming a snarl of hate, the fading aura of flashing anew as she aimed a kick trailing blue fire at his chest-
"Of course Shepard. Disabling Subject Zero's implants"
-only for the biotic aura to vanish with a pop, the convicts foot crunching against his armoured glacis plate with the audible crack of snapping bones. Jack hissed in pain, drawing back her bloody boot as she struggled to break out of his grip. Flashes of blue fire surrounded the convict, arm mounted actuators groaning as they were subjected to forces they were never meant to withstand. But the flare of biotics was intermittent, her control insufficient without the implant to break free. It didn't stop her from filling the air with curses and aiming ineffectual kicks, struggling to break free.
"OBJECTIVE SECURED" He reported, forcing the convict to the ground as his gyroscopic systems completed their reboot sequence with a faint whine of leg actuators unlocking.
"Jesus Christ Shepard," Zaeed swore over the chatter of his assault rifle "You cut things bloody close don't you?"
"IT IS NOT OV-
" Before he could finish the word, a warning flashed on his tactical net.
ALERT. MICROFUSION SPIKE DETECTED
Shepard swore.
"GET DOWN"
A large shipping container exploded, streams of fire lancing out from the roiling cloud of smoke. Zaeed cussed as his cover was promptly turned into confetti, the mercenary barely keeping ahead of the trail of destruction. Another blinking line turned a stripped out shuttle into a ball of fire, sending Grunt sprawling to the floor as it exploded. Garrus ducked, barely avoiding losing his head as a third line of fire clipped the top of the wrecked crane he was hiding behind. Still holding Jack on the ground, Shepard brought his grenade launcher online, aiming a blind volley into the debris cloud. Flashes of light and sound thundered as the grenades vanished into the cloud.
A whipcrack of supersonically displaced air punctuated the grenade launcher's violent destruction in a shower of sparks and fragments, electrical feedback shocking his consciousness as the bulkhead behind him cratered from the impact of a hypervelocity large calibre round.
The dust cloud boiling away, rising on pair of ducted fans, a predatory shape lifted off from the wreckage of the crane, twin linked gun turrets on either side of its forward blade tracking the members of his team who stayed behind cover. Mounted on top of the lean, tan and beige vehicle was a heavy mass accelerator cannon, it's still-smoking aperture pointed directly at Shepard. Three superficial scorch patterns marked its armour where his grenades had struck, apparently to no effect. With the faint hiss of ozone, the air around the vehicle became a shimmering haze, indicating the presence of a high yield kinetic barrier. In the sudden silence, the message was clear. They were out-gunned, and out-armoured, one wrong movement was all it would take. And then it's speakers activated, amplifying a familiar and smug voice of the assault vehicle's pilot.
"Ah, the elusive AI Shepard, we meet at last. So goodof you to take down Jack for me."
"Holy freaking shit!" Joker swore, bolting upright from his helmsman chair, the tactical feed telling him everything he didn't want to know about what was going on groundside. Creed Land Dynamics weapons platform blah blah, bah, he didn't want to know that! He knew the Blue Suns were one of the best kitted out mercenary outfits there were, but how the hell had the Warden gotten a hovertank of all things? The damn thing had come practically out of nowhere, scans had completely missed it until the fusion core startup. He shelved that thought under "not very important" and focused on the important bits. Like how the heck Shepard was going to get out of this one outside of a body bag... forklift, whatever.
But a moment later, he calmed down. This was Shepard, of course he'd have a plan, no matter how crazy sounding it was. Anyone who fought Geth armatures and colossus's on foot with nothing but an assault rifle and a bandoleer of disc grenades was chock full of crazy, but coming out of the fight as the last man standing made it the winning brand of insanity. Facing a tank was Tuesday for Shepard's bad guy crotch-punching galaxy tour.
"You've caused me a lot of trouble for a machine, but since you took down Jack for me I'm willing to let it pass," the Warden's voice carried across the communication net."Surrender, and we can end this with a minimum of fuss."
"H'yeah, right." The helmsman snorted at the obvious lie, but kept his eyes glued to his tactical display. He was getting a lot of feeds not just from the Normandy's sensors, but the ground team too. Fingers flashed across the haptic interface display as he brought the Normandy around, sidling up to close to Purgatory. Whatever plan the commander had up his sleeve, Joker put good odds on Purgatory exploding at the last minute as part of the package. Or maybe a shambling horde of swamp zombies. Ok, that might be a little bit on the ridiculous side, but after what happened on that colony, he wasn't going to discount that. Either way, Shepard and the rest of crotch punch squad was going to need a ticket out fast as soon as they got the chance...
"NO REASON TO TRUST YOU"
Joker blinked, sliding an eye to the ground team data feed. Nope, no one shooting yet. Ok, that was... yeah, that was new. Normally a dozen rounds would have been exchanged by now.
"C'mon commander, what the heck are you doing? Hurry up and kick his ass before you get that one way ticket to- huh..." one of the communication terminals had just lit up with Shepards authentication key. Instead of an audio feed though, a short burst of raw data was being streamed through. Joker's eyes flicked through them, rapidly putting together the numbers into a coherent picture. Telemetry, timing, squad locations, route calculations... fire lanes? His jaw dropped.
"Oh no. No no no. This has got to be a joke." He protested to no one in particular. A finger hovered over the transmit button, but the commander had already shut off the channel. "That's the plan you want to use? Really?"
A holographic blue globe popped out of the terminal next to him. "It would appear to be so Mr. Moreau. I have confirmed the telemetry and authentication codes. It is accurate."
Joker turned a jaundiced eye at the overgrown golf ball. "Then it's got to be a joke. This isn't just crazy, this whole thing it's," he waved his hands in frustration, guiding the ship on foot pedals and manoeuvring thrusters alone, "just plain suicide. This is the kind of thing that gets you in the record books for dumbest stunts ever."
"I disagree Mr. Moreau," The golf ball's scanning light flickered. "Calculations indicate the chances of success of this method to be approximately 0.0001 percent with the loss of all deployed squad members. It is an acceptable risk."
Joker felt like his eyes were going to pop out of his head.
"That was a joke."
The pilot opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again and finally closed it with a click as he glared at the glowing ball. "You totally need to work on your comedy, because-" He stopped, staring disbelievingly at the communication terminal where Shepard had sent a single text message.
"ON MARK."
"Crap." Fingers flashed across the controls as he fired the retro thrusters, coasting the Normandy to a stop at the optimal position for what was going to probably be the most insane stunt Shepard had ever pulled. "He's serious."
The next message that came through totally didn't fill him with confidence either. It only had three simple words.
"DO NOT MISS."
"MARK."
T+ 0.00 seconds
On the transmission of a single encrypted burst, many things happened all at the same time. From behind his fragile cover, Garrus dropped his rifle, throwing himself prone as the Turian curled into a ball with his hands covering his head. Inside the ruined husk of a cargo container, Zaeed mimicked the ex-vigilante, bracing himself against the walls of his shelter. There was no hesitation nor confused pause to the warning. Every part of the team had been told what to expect in such a contingency well in advance. Shepard followed suit, folding in on himself, hunkering down and reducing his target profile with the high pitched whine of actuators. The convict in his grasp recognized his actions for what they were almost immediately, curling herself up into a ball in a flash of movement. But the most significant part, the one that best guaranteed their survival, was not in their movements, but rather, their suits.
Constructing kinetic barriers was always a balancing act between performance and endurance, the limited space of modern combat suits dictating the demands of modern infantry design. An active barrier could be made to last for weeks on end with the limited reserves stored in a suits power banks, but be unable to protect from little more than the least of small arms fire. Those built to take tremendous punishment before failing could weigh the same as their lesser cousins despite larger Eezo cores, but only last hours, if not minutes before their power levels were completely drained. Better protection invariably meant larger, and bulkier, power reserves. Myriad combat suits had been built and designed around this paradigm for centuries, becoming the de facto standard of infantry protection.
It was an often overlooked truth that it was not just the size of the eezo core that dictated protective capacity, but the power that flowed through the system. But brute forcing the system with raw power was inefficient and crude, a method widely ignored in favour of more efficient solutions by designers everywhere.
Shepard had learned that particular factor a lifetime ago, and today, he used it.
T+ 0.53 seconds
In a single moment, power cells and capacitors were flash drained, the very safety systems that were designed to prevent such a discharge stripped out long before they had entered Purgatory. Communication channels winked out and power assist motors froze from lack of power, tactical displays going blank as non-critical systems were starved of energy. Weeks of power reserves were poured in their entirety through electrical channels. Suit temperatures instantly spiked as resistance converted wasted energy to heat, but the rest flowed through into the system. Supernova-forged elements within their ceramic and polymer prisons flared with actinic light, bathing the members of the strike team with vivid blue fire.
In the same instant, a mere dozen kilometres away and hidden in the depths of space, a crippled helmsman swore under his breath, and pulled a trigger.
T+ 0.68 seconds
Aboard the Normandy, flickers of dark energy coiled along accelerator arrays, buoying an ellipsoid shape in a sphere of twisted space where mass had no meaning. Banks of capacitors discharged their load through high capacity conduits, feeding systems with an instantaneous burst of life. The hardened projectile remained motionless for only a fraction of a second, and then the accelerators hummed with power. Invisible magnetic fields caressed the loaded shot, imparting it with kinetic energy as the fields pulsed in rapid sequence, flinging the projectile like a thunderbolt across the blackness. Only a fraction of the frigate's full power was expended on the shot, not even measuring a hundredth of the muzzle velocity from a dreadnought's fearsome armament.
It still crossed the distance to Purgatory in less than a second.
T+ 1.35 seconds
Starship grade kinetic barriers that should have stopped the errant projectile, that would have laughed at the understrength velocity of mere tens of kilometres per second, failed to manifest. With Purgatory's main reactors off-line and her backup systems teetering on the edge of depletion just from keeping life support, not a spare joule could be spent on external shields. And even had the barrier generators been provided power without end, the artificial intelligence aboard the Normandy dominated every aspect of the prison ships control infrastructure. No protective aura of twisted gravity appeared, leaving the shell to strike with it's full fury unimpeded.
T+ 1.36 seconds
He saw the flash of light and electrical discharge, the light warping around the hovertanks cannon in a display of mass accelerator technology at work. A single moment of threat warnings as the hostile fire indicators lit up in that haze of heightened battle senses. One moment, a frozen slice of time for the awareness to thread through of what was going to happen.
T+ 1.37 seconds
At full power, five kilogrammes of hardened superheated tungsten should have converted to energy on impact, becoming a rapidly expanding plasma cloud consuming armour and flesh with equal ferocity. At its reduced velocity, the shell retained its armour penetrating capabilities, meeting space rated hull metal and punching through, boring through the alloy which offered all the resistance of foam. Metal parted in its path, melting down to white hot temperatures in a split second, coating the harbinger of death with a sheathe of metallic plasma. In less than a microsecond, the shell speared through the inner hull, boring down on its target in surrounded by a hail of incandescent shards. Blue suited forms in the open were transfixed by the glowing missiles, their protective barriers shattering in the same instant that they died.
Amongst Shepard's team, overloaded shields blazed with azure fire, white hot chunks of shrapnel that powered through their cover disintegrating against the barriers in a pyrotechnic display. Warning tones flashed into Shepard's consciousness as electrical systems burned out, the power coursing through the wiring far greater than they had ever been designed to channel. Temperature warnings spiked as waste electricity became heat, the soaring heat becoming triggering emergency venting of his stored coolant to keep from being cooked alive. A particularly large spike of molten steel speared his barriers, the impact nearly knocking him over. But the barriers held.
Amidst the carnage the main body of the projectile continued its flight, striking at the tank like a bolt of lightning. Onboard threat systems reacted with the speed of light, kinetic barriers flaring into existence as a shield against the fury of a warship. Light scintillated, blinding all eyes as unstoppable force met unmovable object, fighting against each other. Only for a single moment.
Then the barriers failed.
It happened before anyone could register the events. Shepard's only warning was the sudden flash of light as the shell punched through the top armour of the combat vehicle. The projectile speared the hovertank, melting through components, body armour and flesh with impartial impunity to explode out through the bottom and penetrate the deck floor beneath. Capacitors in mid discharge were breached, releasing their stored energy in a single catastrophic detonation. The shot in its arrays went wild, striking the shattered hanger entranceway with a whipcrack of buckling steel. The tank bucked and careened, detonations from the ground launching it into the air. A moment later, internal explosions racked the ruined tank, a powerful blast sending its turret flying off into the air as its engines simply cut out, the burning hulk smashing to the ground with a floor rattling crash. The charred turret came down a moment later, trailing fire and debris as it collapsed on the wreck of its parent body.
T+ 2.97 seconds
'Come on, move'
Very slowly, Shepard felt his body respond once more to his commands, myriad warning alerts slowly flicking away as repair systems began recovery operations. Capacitors that had been drained earlier feebly drew power from the still active microfusion core, the burned out electrical pathways preventing immediate reactivation of all non-essential systems as the onboard VI prioritized available resources. Motor functions came back first, the abused motive systems groaning in protest as they came back to life. Like an old man, the machine body he inhabited creaked upright, hissing smoke rising from exposed joints where coolant fluid had been flushed through in an attempt to keep from overheating.
Short ranged communications and secondary sensors came back next, painting a composite picture of the surroundings from the suit feeds of his team. His attention immediately went to the immediate surroundings, searching for any remaining threats.
The hanger bay was a scene of total destruction, the deck plating holed in hundreds of places where supersonic shrapnel of various sizes had embedded themselves. Shuttles and loading cranes were perforated so badly that none of them would ever work again. A few of the latter were on fire, leaking pools of burning fuel that consumed the wrecked shuttle craft. No piece of machinery larger than the smallest aircar was left untouched, some of them bearing punctures where finger sized bits of spalling had punched right through while others were little more than twisted ruins of blackened metal. Looking upwards where the shell had punched through, Shepard caught sight of the blue tinged aura of a barrier, the emergency system deploying a low strength shield to keep the atmosphere within the ship. Beyond it's translucent haze was the dark red haze of the local gas giant, it's swirling storm clouds visible even at this distance.
Of the Blue Suns who guarded the place, none of their suit power signatures showed up on his sensors. Bodies were strewn about, blasted apart by shrapnel and pressure wave when the shell had landed. Most were scorched black, twisted corpses lying where they had been speared by burning bits of metal. Without exception, those had been torn apart, body armour and the softer bodies within ripped open or torn off by the hail of death that had killed them. Others had their limbs bent at unnatural angles, the Suns tossed at fatal speeds against unyielding bulkheads when the explosions had ripped apart their positions. There were no survivors as far as he could see.
The hovertank the Warden had been using... was a burned out wreck, its armoured chassis torn apart and nearly split in two from the jagged tear running through its chassis. It's turret was lying upside down on the ground, it's main weapon shattered while flames merrily crackled from inside the turret ring. Shepard felt a brief spike of vicious glee at the sight. He doubted the Warden ever saw it coming.
"-pard, can you hear me?"
Joker's voice came through the communications net as power was finally restored to the long range telemetry feeds, the worried face of the bearded navigator appearing in a small window inside his consciousness.
"SHEPARD COPIES. AREA SECURE" He paused as the muffled groans of his ground team began to filter through the communication net. He hesitated a moment, calling up the life sign monitors from each suit they wore. All of them were elevated, but nothing within the immediate red line. "GROUND TEAM ALIVE"
"Speak for yourself, you overgrown tin can," Zaeed spat out between curses, digging himself out from under some rubble that had fallen on him earlier. "I've been through some real shit, but that was bloody insane." The mercenary gave himself an experimental pat on the chest once he was out. "Hell, I'm not even sure I'm still alive."
"ALIVE ENOUGH TO COMPLAIN" came Shepard's deadpan reply, getting a short bark of laughter from the grizzled mercenary.
Further down the hanger, Grunt rose to his feet, casually brushing away metallic debris from his heavy frame with a sweep of his hand. "Warlord," The Krogan began, turning his keen eyes towards the commander, "that, was a glorious end to your enemies."
'Well, no surprise there.'The unspoken thought ran through Shepard's brain as he turned his attention to the ex-prisoner still in his grip. A moment of worry spiked through him as he caught sight of the convict lying limp between the gun sheathes, her eyes open but unfocused. Barriers or not, the shockwave could be devastating to anyone outside of fully sealed armour. But his worry evaporated when she twitched sporadically, her eyes slowly coming back into focus. She would need to be checked out by Chakwas, but going by the available evidence, the mission was a success. He turned his attention to the final member of his team.
"AND WHAT ABOUT YOU"
"Well, complaints eh?" Garrus's flanged voice carried an amused tone. The Turian had risen from behind the thick slabs of spare hull plate he had been hiding behind, resting an arm on them as he leaned forward. "Then I certainly would like to put one in, Commander."
He paused, letting the silence drift for a second or two before continuing. If he could have smiled, Shepard would have. It didn't take a genius to guess what the Turian was getting at.
"When I said to never let you drive? I'm going to add never letting you call in fire support to that list."
A/N: Sorry for the long delay for this update. Between writing various tribbles (that shall go unpublished until I actually put some serious work behind them) and real life, I haven't been able to muster up the creative energy to quickly finish this chapter until recently. Putting this together was one of the hardest efforts I had to go through, but I hope you'll all like it.