Pragia

Thin, bright lines cut through the rain-heavy clouds in the night sky, erupting from sites hidden beneath the canopy to reach out and occasionally touch some object that then blossomed into a fireball.

Then the answer would come, a burning comet to pound at one of the anti-aircraft sites, and a cloud of smoke and dust would rise from the impact.

"Those defenses won't hold them back for long," Layali noted.

"Best if we make the best out of the opportunity." Miranda was sitting in front of a console, typing commands.

"Is the skirmish up in orbit over?" Anika pondered.

"Looks like," Zaeed replied grimly. "Those can't work together. They'd be so damn paranoid they wouldn't get shit done, fearing that the others would stab them in the back. And trying to stab them first."

"That can play in our favor," Lawson replied. A minute later, a message appeared on her console. "We're cleared to move in."

Amari eyed her with suspicion. "How come your clearances still work? Weren't you burned?"

Miranda did not give her so much as a glance. "I'm not looking a gift horse in the mouth."

Sombra was observing without saying a word. Shepard knew better than watching her continuously, but the hacker's presence on her ship made little sense. She looked more than capable of looking after herself, an impression confirmed by how Reyes and Lacroix seemed to avoid her. And she had volunteered precious little. Something's brewing with Cerberus, and she claims 'I'm better off not knowing'?

Then the dark-skinned girl glanced at Aaliyah and smiled a cool-eyed smile, very much aware of her thoughts.

More carefully than a hunter approaching a nest of vipers, Tracer brought her ship low enough to skim the treetops, then slowly hovered towards the bunker and the silo doors.

A low rumble caused the canopy to tremble beneath them. A cloud of small flying animals took to the skies screaming.

"Localized earthquake," Mercy reported automatically. "Estimate magnitude 4.3."

Miranda was uneasy about that. "One reason this region was picked for the installation was that it was seismically stable."

"So what could have caused it?" Anika asked.

"Human or alien activity," Shepard answered at once. "Especially if they're fighting down there for control of the installation. Except that…"

"An explosion that powerful would have caused the whole facility to collapse," Astrid finished for her.

"Oh, no lo creo," Sombra commented absently. "Only very precise orbital bombardment could destroy that place. Además, those who built it kept in mind that a 'test subject'—" she accented the words "—could go nuts."

An alarm suddenly rang as Tracer yelled: "Hold on to something!"

The ship swerved brusquely to starboard as Lena took a sharp turn, trying to evade the missiles fired at their ship: "Incoming ordnance, bearing two-one-one," Mercy reported.

"Take the wheel and drop us on a flyby over the LZ!" Shepard ordered. "Layali, you cover us!"


A burst of railgun fire intercepted the missiles streaking for the Girls' Night Out. "You're in the clear," Layali informed. "Maybe it's redundant on my part, but hurry. Every second here means the zone gets hotter."

"I know," Aaliyah acknowledged her. "Lacroix, you're on overwatch duty."

"Compris." There was an element of irony in that: the most feared Talon sniper providing cover for the offspring of an Overwatch legend.

"The rest of us, on me. Let's get in there."

The entrance to the installation was nothing but a giant pair of silo-like doors, large enough for their ship to land on what undoubtedly was some sort of underground landing pad, except that these were closed. The only other structure in view was an adjacent bunker, its walls blackened and charred. Smoke still rose from ashes and cooling embers all around the place.

Miranda's clearances got the solid blast door on the bunker open for them. A pair of huge sentry guns were installed on the security checkpoint immediately behind the door, but neither reacted to their presence.

Shepard went over their briefing again. "What should we expect?" She had asked Lawson.

"Sentry drones, stationary gun emplacements, and elite security. The people here are committed and skilled professionals."

The bunker was small. It only had a couple of rooms for the guards supposed to man the checkpoint, the stores, a scarily well-stocked armory, and the elevators.

"No power, but the shafts are intact," Aaliyah noted. "I thought the protocol was to destroy them…"

Astrid continued from where she had left off. "…but there's still some triple-A operational, so whoever or whatever is in charge decided it was premature to blow everything up. Am I right?"

For a moment, Miranda did not answer, her attention focused on a console. "Power for this grid is offline," she informed mechanically. "It's been diverted to the anti-aircraft guns."

Sombra touched the panel next to the elevator doors, which opened with a metallic groan. The shaft was pitch black.

Tracer stepped forward, stretched her neck out and looked below. "That looks deep… fifty-odd meters, give or take."

"Fifty-three," Miranda nodded.

"I'll go in first," Reyes murmured, and simply walked into the shaft. The darkness swallowed him.

Moments later, he reported: "Clear." Then: "But nobody home, it seems."

He took a good look around. There was another security checkpoint immediately next to the elevator, nearly identical to the one they had just left behind, except that there were no sentry guns deployed this time. But for some tiny red dots here and there denoting backup power for some devices, the darkness was near absolute.

"No power here either," he informed next.

"Not necessary. I can help you down that shaft," Lawson said stiffly. It struck Shepard as odd, and she scanned her guardedly for a whole second. The brunette woman was extremely good at masking her feelings and thoughts, but Aaliyah's intuition told her that —perhaps— the more of a coldly precise machine she appeared to be, the tenser she actually was.

"Everyone at once?"

"No. Two at a time, at most."

The Starwatch colonel bowed her head and thought for a bit. "Genji and Tracer, you go first."

"Wakarimasu."

"Aye, luv."

By the time the whole squad had made it down the shaft, the two Overwatch legends and their erstwhile nemesis had already cleared out the checkpoint and the hall behind it. It was almost pitch black. Shepard turned on her lamp and started looking for signs on the walls.

Then the lights turned on on their own. Automatically everyone raced for cover, but a speaker somewhere came to life: "Miss Lawson? Is that you?"

"That's a rather obvious question, doctor Archer," was the deadpan reply. "What's your status?"

The voice took a while to reply: "Our security chief here says you aren't part of Cerberus anymore."

"My authorization codes disagree with you, doctor," she retorted dryly. "Whether or not I'm on the payroll, we got here first. But if we are unwelcome, we can always turn around and leave." And leave you in the hands of the mercs, of course.

"No, no, of course not," Archer stammered, then said in a rush: "We have power, but to isolate and contain the riot we cut life support to some sectors and sealed them off. We are all holed up in hydroponics."

"How many are there with you?"

"37, between staff and guards."

Nobody missed how Miranda paled. "Understood. Hang in there. We will quell the riot, then move to evacuate you. We're going to need full admin clearances to restore or cut power to sectors and manage security." Sombra made a dismissive gesture upon hearing that. A few moments of silence followed, then Miranda added with a note of anger in her voice: "You want us to help or not?"

"Yes, yes… Hold on a second." Then: "It's done. Just… be very careful there. Subject Zero trashed everything and everyone that got in her way. Check out the camera feeds and see it for yourself."

"Thanks for the warning, doctor. We'll be in touch."

Everyone stared at the former Cerberus lieutenant. "Subject Zero?" Anika asked.

"I'm looking that up." Miranda was tapping commands into her own omni-tool. A few instants later, the portable computer presented a holographic file depicting a bald girl.

"That's… basic." Ziegler frowned. The description was annoyingly laconic. Female, 17 years old, 47.200 kilograms, 162cm tall, blood type AB+.

"The research notes should be more detailed." She selected one at random and tapped at the attached video recording. It showed the girl strapped—no, manacled to a lone chair in a large room, a multitude of suction cups with cables attached all over her body. A series of weights and barbells were piled on the other end of the room. There was a buzzing sound, and then the girl's face twisted as she struggled not to scream—and the weights turned into lethal missiles hurled every which way.

"What… what is this?" Tracer paled in shock. "That's how they unlocked biotics? By torturing their test subjects?"

Horror and anger rippled through the squad. "I didn't know," was all that Lawson could say.

"But you should know!" Lena bellowed. "You're a bloody biotic yourself! Did they do the same to you?"

"No, it wasn't like that… it was never like that for me, I had instructors and training programs."

"And to develop and perfect those programs they had to experiment on subjects like this one." Genji was quiet, but his eyes were smoldering coals fixated on Miranda.

Lawson glared angrily at him. "Nothing can be done about that now. This place was tasked with cracking biotics at all costs. A price had to be paid. If you want, you can have it at me all you want later. Right now we have a mission. We can continue talking or we can get on with it."

Reyes snorted. "Hindsight is always 20/20."

Shepard had also been perturbed by the recording, but she could not argue the point. "She's right," she said reluctantly. "We will get to the bottom of this, but we have work to do first. Which way?"

Miranda pointed down the hall. "The corridor on that end leads to the genetics lab, and thence to the living quarters for test subjects and the training halls."

Sombra grinned. "I wonder what kinds of things we'll see on the way."

"I'm sure you already know," Gabriel muttered.

"Reyes, you take the rear," Shepard ordered. "Oxton and Shimada, you are on point. The rest, on me."


The end of the corridor between the entrance hall and the genetics lab was sealed by a sturdy blast door, further secured by means of a powerful shield.

"The lab has been depowered and depressurized," Miranda noted. "Hold on. I need a few seconds."

Anika approached the humming barrier of bluish energy. She tapped her omni-tool twice and held her hand over the shield. "This is a cruiser-grade kinetic barrier," she observed. "I'm not sure, but I believe not even maximum security prisons deploy barriers like this."

Sombra crossed her arms. "Cerberus deemed the research done here to be far more important than any inmate in any prison."

Genji glanced briefly at the hacker, then admitted uneasily: "I wouldn't blame them. Not after facing off against Tela Vasir and miss Lawson."

At that moment, there was a deep rumble, and the floor quivered again. The echoes of metal groaning under the strain reached them. Everyone tensed at that and waited for it to pass, then Ziegler inquired: "Mercy?"

"Another localized earthquake," the AI informed. "Estimate magnitude 4.2. I believe the epicenter is somewhere in the holding area for test subjects."

Shepard looked at Miranda. "Let me guess. Subject Zero."

Before the brunette woman could reply, there was a series of hisses and snapping sounds, and the door slowly opened sideways. Chaos and carnage greeted them on the other side. Corpses were strewn across the floor and smashed into the bulkheads — security guards, scientists, and test subjects alike. Sparks flew in a multitude of places, where explosions had wrecked lighting panels and machinery embedded on the walls.

"Holy shit… what happened here?" Shepard breathed.

Zaeed picked up a gun lying on the floor. "Talon pistol," he grunted in amusement at the irony. "The people here meant business." He tossed the sidearm at Tracer.

Lena examined it. "And they used this to put down the revolt?"

"I find it hard to believe," Aaliyah said slowly, "but if this Subject Zero is causing the quakes and trashed everything they threw at her, I get the feeling they needed even bigger guns."

Sombra was tapping commands on thin air. "Esperen. I'm looking for the security cam feeds." A few instants, and she uttered a triumphant: "Sí."

Her omni-tool projected a screen filled with chaos. Two groups of guards had run down that corridor. The first ones had been armed with riot gear, but the second wave had escalated all the way to heavily armed troopers.

"How dangerous were the rioters that they demanded that kind of response?" Astrid wondered.

The image shifted to show the riot gear-outfitted guards clashing with a large group of inmates —there was no other word for it— on some internal courtyard of sorts. At first, it seemed like they could deal with the revolt all by themselves, but the rioters had then split into two groups, one of which kept the guards tied up. The others were biotics of diverse skill, and they had flung chairs, furniture, pieces of concrete at the guards, quickly overwhelming them.

Then the second wave of guards had been dispatched, and carnage had ensued. The fighting had been bloody, bitter and without quarter, but the armed troopers had been brutally efficient and merciless. In the end, only a knot of about half a dozen biotic inmates remained, their backs to a heavy blast door, and all their power poured onto a kinetic barrier that gunfire could not breach. A brief lull had ensued, and the officer in command of the troopers had demanded a surrender, only to be answered with more makeshift missiles.

The security troops had heavy weapons. Up to that point, the officer had been reluctant to use them, but the dogged resistance of the inmates finally changed his mind. A final warning had gone unheeded, and then the rocket launchers had been aimed and fired.

And right before impact, the inmates' barrier had blinked out.

Yellow alarm lights and warning klaxons had rung throughout the pitched battle, but as the rockets broke through the door and tore it apart, the warning lights turned red, and the guards' had gotten in each other's way to get out of the courtyard—right before there was a blast of blue and white and the recording stopped.

"They clearly knew what was behind that door," Lena noted. No one failed to notice the note of concern in her tone. Only a sneak attack or a trap had a chance of knocking Tracer out, as the incident on Illium had shown. But could she stop a biotic of such power?

Reyes knew how to read that tone. "We'll know soon enough," he commented hoarsely.

The lab itself was in an even worse shape. The exquisitely delicate machines used for genetic sampling and editing had been smashed to bits, the work tables upon which they had been set upturned, containers and boxes strewn every which way.

Anika approached two such boxes. Refined eezo had leaked out of one, and the other had contained some kind of red dust, of which only traces remained now.

"Red sand, I believe," she noted. "Someone scooped up most of it."

Reyes approached next. "There was a lot of it," he said as he held the container, now a useless hunk of metal. "Enough to put a hundred biotics in orbit."

Sombra took the box off Reyes' hands and sampled a bit of the dust. "Whoever cooked this knew what he was doing. Miss Lawson here could get higher than a flying kite with no permanent damage."

Zaeed grinned. "I could make a fortune out of that if I got the formula. Red sand with all the punch and none of the bite?"

"Except for the addictive potential, that is. Withdrawal would mess you up."

Shepard's mind involuntarily made a connection that sent shivers down her spine: "I get the feeling they got people hooked up for… No. Not for control. Addicts make poor test subjects," she thought out loud. "What could they be using it for?"

"I don't know as much about biotics as I should. Perhaps they used it to induce the awakening of biotic skills?" Anika shook her head. "Forget I said anything, it's just a shot in the dark."

A neighboring annex had apparently escaped the worst of the riots, for it was relatively tidy. Tall, cylindrical containers lined one wall, with the opposite one consisting of a series of large fridges. A series of work tables outfitted with medical machinery and some desktop terminals completed the picture.

"I've seen this before," Reyes murmured. "Lacroix had been put to sleep on a cylinder like those."

"So this is a cryogenic facility of some kind," Shepard ventured, struggling to conceal her unease. She noticed the dust on a work table. "Nobody's been here for a while. Odd."

Sombra approached a terminal, tapped her omni-tool a few times, and frowned. "This annex is independently powered… oh."

"What is it?"

Sombra's right hand hovered over her omni-tool, then she looked at Miranda. "No mires, chica. You won't like it."

Lawson frowned. "Why?"

"Are you sure you want to know?"

Miranda gave the hacker an icy look. "If it was that bad, you should have kept it to yourself."

A shrug. "Don't say I didn't warn you." Another tap, then in unison, the protective metallic covers of the cylinders slid open, exposing their contents.

"Bloody hell!" Tracer exploded. Everyone else was struck speechless.

But it was not the case with Miranda. The woman blanched, then slowly fell to her knees.

For each of the eight cylinders contained a perfect facsimile of her.

"Anika, talk to me," Shepard ordered tersely.

Sombra gestured at the medic. Ziegler approached her, and read the terminal output. "They are not exact clones, their DNA varies slightly between each other… I'm not sure… but if I'm reading this correctly… these were all successive iterations." After further reading, she added: "The last entry… was logged on October 21st, 2114… nineteen years ago."

"What was the purpose of the program?"

After a few seconds came the reply: "It's not clear at first glance… I may be wrong, but… it would appear that the goal was to achieve genetic perfection, combined with potential for great biotic skill…"

Shepard frowned. "Eugenics."

But Anika did not agree. "I'd say that, but… they always used the same DNA as a starting template, even after it was suggested that alternatives were used, in light of the extensive 'corrections' that were necessary."

Aaliyah approached the stricken Miranda, and softly laid a hand on her shoulder. Her face was frozen solid into an unmoving mask, eyes staring at the tanks without really seeing them. Cloning was not exactly news; the science behind it had been mastered over a century ago. That did not diminish the brutal impact of finding out that she was a clone herself.

There was yet more to follow: "Hold on… this doesn't make sense…" Anika kept reading for a few seconds: "It's as if they left that on purpose…"

"Later," the Starwatch colonel said brusquely, both out of a desire to have her team refocus on their mission, and to protect the catatonic Miranda. "This is not what we're here for. Download everything and we'll evaluate it later."

"Yes, ma'am."

Aaliyah softly shook the brunette woman's shoulder. "Miss Lawson, I'm sorry. But we have to go."

That simple gesture seemed to switch her back on. "Of course. Please excuse me." She turned on her heel and followed after Reyes without a word or a last look.

They retraced their steps back through the wrecked lab and moved on. At every point they came upon more evidence of the chaos that had raged there: bullet holes, wrecked machinery, broken power lines, and corpses of guards, scientists and test subjects alike. Shepard and her crew noticed this, but now there were no barbs directed at Miranda, who had apparently sought refuge into her professional guise; her motions were precise and sharp as she guided them through the wrecked compound.

Eventually they came upon the courtyard they had seen on the video Sombra had obtained from the mainframe. The hall was shrouded in a penumbra only occasionally perturbed by sparks flying here and there. A pile of corpses lay against a wall, blood seeping out staining the floor almost from end to end. On the other side, the blast door had been blown away. Nothing moved.

Not even they, except for Sombra. "Ella no está aquí."

Shepard eyed her. "Where, then?" She whispered.

"She's been trying to dig her way out. Deep into the test subjects holding area."

Anika blinked. "So that's what the quakes are about?" Then she breathed out slowly in shock. "Just how strong a biotic is she?"

"Enough to warrant being designated as Subject Zero," Aaliyah muttered roughly. "Oxton and Reyes, you're on point. Get moving."


The 'test subjects holding area' was a prison in everything but name. Each of the tiny cells had once been sealed by impregnable sliding doors, but most of those were open now. At the end of the hall there had once been another cell, but now a passage had been blasted through the wall and into the bedrock that stretched on into the darkness.

Once again, the numb Miranda had had to reconnect the sector to the power and life support grids, as the place was dark as a tomb, and the oxygen levels were severely depleted. No one said out loud why it was like that, but the idea hovered on everyone's minds: that approach had been tried to contain the riot, and brutal as it was, it still had failed.

Gabriel and Lena spearheaded leapfrogging past each other, one covering the other as they went. That allowed them to spot it first:

"I got movement," Reyes whispered. "Someone is coming down the tunnel." He gestured at Tracer behind him.

The tunnel ahead did not appear to be straight, for the bluish glow that reached them seemed to come from around a corner, and after a few seconds, a bald girl appeared. She was surrounded by a translucent bubble of blue light, her body completely naked and ablaze from head to toe, but her movements were erratic and drunkenly. Oxygen deprivation was taking its toll, Ziegler thought at first, but then she noticed how her face and hands were smudged with red dirt.

Be very careful! She texted over the squad network. She's probably taken some of that red sand!

More like most of it, doc, was Reyes' reply.

Still, unsteady as her gait was, her face was not. She seemed intent on reaching their location. Had she spotted them, Shepard thought — then realized that when the life support systems had kicked back on, the air had quite likely freshened enough for the girl to notice it.

She had had time enough during their tour through the devastated research complex to think how to deal with her, but she had not found a satisfactory answer. A simple enough solution was to have Oxton or Reyes knock her out and drag her out of there, but the moment she regained consciousness she would go berserk — which would of course be bad news if it happened aboard their ship. Killing her would not help anyone, and she was not about to murder someone whose life had been enough of a hell already. And simply trying to talk to this girl could very well end with most of them ground to fine red paste.

Could Miranda parry her attacks? She knew from her meldings with Liara and Valena that it was possible for skilled biotics to deflect or block incoming strikes, but the likelihood of that depended on the strength of the attack — and if Lawson's power proved insufficient then she would be swatted aside like a fly.

She stole another glance at the girl, peering cautiously from behind cover, and noticed how emaciated she was, her ribs clearly visible. No way that girl weighs a hundred pounds… when did she eat for the last time?

Shepard's mind was torn between two thoughts now. One, this biotic prodigy could crush them without effort. Two, she was too weak to fight on for long.

But she herself had been pushed to that limit, back on Earth, when she had taken the Interplanetary Combatives Training course. It had taken all of her willpower to keep on going, and she had been a trained and hardened soldier. This girl had none of those advantages.

So she gambled. After a warning look and a gesture at Miranda, which she acknowledged with a nod, she stood up and turned on the headlamps on her armor.

Immediately the bald, naked girl's eyes flashed at her. Without call, cry or warning, she raised a crackling fist, then punched forward. Lawson saw the attack coming, advanced one step, and loosed a riposte, looking to drive a wedge through the incoming wave of force—

—but for all her skill and superior perception, she could not even begin to hope to counter the overwhelming strength of the biotic girl's onslaught. The attack blew her away, knocking down Shepard behind her, and sending Miranda herself flying some ten-odd steps; her kinetic barrier absorbed part of the attack, but the assault still was powerful enough to smash her against a wall and knock the breath out of her lungs.

The biotic strode towards the prone Shepard. Aaliyah looked up, saw her coming at her — and all she could do was to roll backward and out of the way, still aware that it would not protect her from another assault—

There was a flash, and Tracer blinked into existence right next to the bubble surrounding the naked girl, and then another flash as she vanished where she stood. The crackling fist aimed at her struck bedrock instead. A deafening blast, and the makeshift passageway started to cave in. Anika shouted a warning, but Lena had already reacted and hauled off Shepard to safety before she was buried under the rubble. They thought for a second that their attacker had suffered that fate, but then another thunderous explosion had the Starwatch crew duck behind cover to avoid the deadly hail of debris, and she emerged from the collapsed tunnel, still surrounded by the bubble and ablaze in blue.

Both Gabriel and Lena understood that this was not the time for subtleties. Tracer drew her machine pistols and fired at the biotic again and again, each time blinking between places — and that only made the girl angrier as she hurled attack after attack at her without success: bricks, rocks, pieces of concrete, even the heavy doors to the cells, anything was good. But not good enough.

Lena's guns were not good enough either. Nor was Reyes' signature move, as the biotic's barrier simply pushed his nanites away, and solidifying and shooting her would only get him blasted to bits: only Tracer was fast and nimble enough to evade her strikes. Both Aaliyah and Astrid saw this and hurled their hardlight casters at Lena, who snatched them on the fly and pointed them at the biotic. Twin streams of light wove a deadly cat's cradle around their attacker—

—only to end with Lena unceremoniously smashing herself against a wall when everything and everyone around the biotic became weightless and started hovering, as the bubble that surrounded her became thinner and expanded outwards. The girl clenched her teeth, fists bumped together as she irately regarded the helpless Tracer.

A null gravity field…

Shepard knew then that they had lost.

Fuck me, she thought bitterly, knowing that it was her gross misjudgment that was going to get them all killed. What a stupid way to go.

"Wait!" she yelled. "Take me, but let them—" she was cut mid-sentence by a blast the biotic threw her way without looking. She saw a wall approach her so fast she could not even blink—

—but then, as suddenly as she had been struck, she froze in midair, weightless again. She went numb with relief for a moment, thinking that she had managed to get through to the biotic, but that idea died quickly as she saw her still focused on Tracer, ignorant of what just had happened to her—

—then, out of the blue, Sombra materialized, turned ablaze with blue-greenish fire herself, and loosed a shower of kinetic bolts on their attacker, catching her completely by surprise. The bolts threw her around like a ragdoll, as if a boxer was mercilessly bearing down on a winded opponent, and the last such strike actually knocked her out cold exactly like an uppercut would as it took her under the chin.

Shepard hit the ground with all the grace of a sack of potatoes and needed a few instants to catch her breath and stand back up on her feet.

"You fucking bitch," she heard Reyes say in the way of Sombra. "So on top of everything you can also bend spoons."

Miranda was astounded enough herself that she had momentarily forgotten her shell shock: "How did you manage that?"

The hacker smirked mischievously. "A lady must have her secrets."

"Bullshit." For once Shepard was glad to have Reyes around. "You've had a few helpings of blue flesh, haven't you."

"Y, eso ayuda," Sombra conceded, acknowledging that cannibalizing an Asari had helped her develop that capability. "But there's more to it. Before getting here I didn't dare to do any more than scaring up people. You know, Silthea's gimmick."

Lawson kept her eyes on Sombra. "You needed accurate information on the exact workings of biotics."

Ziegler was dumbstruck, having pieced some of what was being said and unable to believe it. "How?" was all she could say.

"The answer, doc," Gabriel quipped, "is on that nifty staff you're lugging around. What does it do?"

"It's a nanite dispensing system… the nanites reconstitute tissue…" Anika was already numb with shock, and even so, this new discovery managed to jolt her again. "So that's… that's what happened to you? My mother—"

"She meant well. Much more than the asshole I was deserved. Let's just leave it at that for now."

Martinsson approached Shepard. "Lady Doomfist? You okay?"

"Yeah, yeah, never been better," she joked acidly, having heard the whole exchange and deciding it merited further analysis, but now she directed her gaze at the unconscious biotic that had very nearly killed them. "How do we deal with her?"

"I can manage that." Reyes approached Subject Zero, turned her limp body face down, and literally shoved his fingers into the back of her neck. Everyone was greatly disquieted by that, except for Sombra. The hacker was bobbing her head in approval.

"What have you done to her?" Shepard asked, having inferred something but not quite sure.

"She will only be able to move if I agree to it."

"Muy inteligente, señor Reyes." She then explained to the others: "She can't move her limbs if her nerves are intercepted."

"No limb movement means poor biotics control," Miranda informed mechanically.

"But not no biotics," Aaliyah asked.

Sombra shook her head. "That can't be helped."

"You know, girl, I have a question for you," Reyes asked, turning to face the hacker. "If you can already do biotics yourself, why bother with this? She goes nuts aboard the ship, she's going to get us all killed."

The hacker's smugness turned into unease. "While you have a point… this girl was not created like señorita Lawson over there. I copied biotics by munching on an Asari and scarfing on eezo like it was chile con carne, but true mastery needs training and a degree of fine control only a biological interface can achieve."

"By 'munching on an Asari'," Shepard repeated deadpan.

Sombra eyed her coolly. "No asesiné a nadie, coronel. She was after a bounty on my head. She lost."

"I guess Silthea tried to bite more than what she could chew." Reyes smirked grimly at his own choice of words.

"Good thing Valena isn't here to hear this," Astrid noted quietly.

"Yeah," Aaliyah agreed. "Let's look around for an usable stasis tube and contact the scientists—the people running this place," she corrected herself in disgust, then tapped her omni-tool to contact the Girls' Night Out: "Garrus, report. How are things going out there?"

"Very timely on your part," the Turian answered flatly. "I was about to contact you. The Batarians have blown up some of the mercs and scared away the rest. We got twenty minutes, tops, to get to safety before they can interdict us." After a brief pause: "I don't want to think you're trying to keep us in the dark from something we should know."

"I have to keep almost everyone in the dark on this," was the angry reply. "I can tell you, probably these people didn't discover anything you don't already know. But they told ethics to shove it in the process."

Aboard their ship, Garrus frowned. "And you fear you can't use that if people learn how you got it."

"That's about it, more or less," she agreed.

"You humans are full of sensibilities. If it had been us, we would have accepted it as the cost for completing the mission in time."

From a strictly military point of view, Shepard wanted to agree with him. Achieving biotic capabilities decent enough to stand up to the Citadel if it proved necessary had been a critical goal for the Alliance ever since the clash over Pokhara. But the cost, as evinced by the research notes on Subject Zero, was appalling.

"Yeah, I know you would," she replied dryly. "We're done here. Stand by for extraction."

"Roger."

"You heard him, crew, time to get out of Dodge. Miranda, can you rig a self-destruction sequence or something like that here?"

There was the briefest glimmer of hesitation in her face before she answered with a nod.

"Are we leaving her… her clones behind?" Anika asked haltingly.

Aaliyah cursed under her breath. Yes, they were totally innocent. No, it was not right to leave them behind. No, they did not have time to spare. And yes, if she did leave them behind she would be on the same level of the people that had ran that charnel house.

So she turned to Miranda. "Get me the director of this place."

A minute later, a man's voice spoke anxiously through the speaker on her omni-tool: "Is it done?"

She spoke harshly and quickly: "You got eighteen minutes to get everyone ready to go, and that includes evacuating the subjects on your eugenics annex. If you haven't brought them to the elevators by the time we get there, I'm leaving all of you behind. Get moving, mister." She cut the link, denying the man the chance to argue against it. "Sombra, make sure they can't tamper with the self-destruction sequence once Miranda sets it up."

"Como usted diga, coronel."

They made a detour through the wrecked med bay to fetch a stasis tube they could use to safely transport Subject Zero, and arrived at the lift in time to see the security troops arrive in turn hauling the suspension tanks containing the clones.

"What are you carrying that tube for?" a scientist demanded. He was a middle-aged, auburn-haired man with a slight beard. The tag on his lab suit read 'ARCHER'.

"What we came here for," Aaliyah answered bluntly.

"Subject Zero? Is that Subject—"

Shepard stepped forward, grabbed Archer by the collar of his suit, slammed him against a wall, shoved her face into his and muttered through gritted teeth: "Two things stop me from leaving you to the Batarians: one, nobody should get their hands on the data you've developed here, the Hegemony least of all. And two, professional ethics. But nothing says I can't wish I had a motive to shoot your ass, so if you know what's good for you, shut the fuck up and go."


Author's note: This chapter and the previous one were harder to do than usual. I rewrote large chunks of them. I'd have gone astray if BrokenLifeCycle and kyro2009 had not helped as usual. The brainstorming session with kishinokurobi was very useful too.

(BTW, If you're into Bloodborne and RWBY, go read kyro's fiction. He's been putting a lot of effort into it.)