"Liam Gregor, aged forty-three; Major stockholder in Devlon Industries, Sirta Foundations and various armor-making companies. Built a fortune from three patents: Powered Medical Exoskeleton, made for to help veterans and cripples regain movement; Sensation Gel, made for people with touch and feel disorders; and a new one for something called 'Impact Gel', designed to reduce damage taken from impacts by dispersing kinetic energy through a layer of gel." Miranda lists off, scrolling through the information give to her by Cerberus.

Interesting stuff, but not exactly what we need to know to infiltrate this guy's house. "What about his house?" I ask, lazily sprawled on the bed like a large dog.

The Cerberus agent looks through the info some more. "He lives on a planet named Juno in the Terra System." Miranda scoffs and sits on the bed, flicking blonde locks of hair over her shoulder. "Juno is a miserable little rock, where it's either freezing, just above freezing and below freezing. The terrain is basically rocks, coniferous trees, hardy shrubs, and more rocks. He lives on a cliff overlooking a town called 'June Cove'."

Sounds like a wonderful place to leave. On one hand, there probably aren't a lot of people, which is good. On the other hand, that would make us stand out like an anglerfish in a goldfish bowl.

"So, we need to land away from the settlements and approach the place on foot." I say, sitting up. "Anything else?"

"Yes, it says that Liam has a security detail consisting of no less than forty men and women, all from a small PMC-offshoot of the Blue Suns, called 'Red Waters'. Also that he has a history of anti-depressant abuse, a gaming addiction, and a subscription to Galactic Gaming Weekly." She frowns at the last bit.

"…Again, why the fuck do we need to know that?"

Miranda just shakes her head. "From what I can gather, Gregor is paranoid, so we should expect danger and tight security. This is high-risk, and it would be smart to be prepared for violence."

Take my knife, my lightsaber just in case…and besides my fists, that's all I really have for close combat besides my biotics, and close range with those would be an enhanced punch. I'll take Bagger along just in case I need the range.

I lay back on the bed, holding my arm out as Miranda lays down next to me fits to my side, laying her head on my shoulder. "So, do we have info on the building itself, or will we have to do recon?" I ask, gently stroking her side.

She flicks through the pages of information, coming to a series of pictures of a large square building that seems to be mostly made out of metal; the dark grey blending well with the bleak background, standing proudly at the top of the cliff overlooking a small town.

There's an entrance on the side of the house not on the cliff, but it's small and well-guarded, and would be harder to sneak through.

However, there is what looks like a cargo entrance on the side looking out over the cliff, but that is not what I'm focused on. Above that is a balcony where guards can overlook whatever comes in, and there's a door there that leads straight inside.

I point this out to Miranda. "Look, there's a way in. We would need to take out the guards and hack the door, but it would be easier than going through the front."

She taps the cargo entrance. "What about…no, we don't know when a shipment is coming through, that wouldn't work. Through the back door we go, then."

Ha. "We have a sky-car on board, right?" I ask, not entirely sure.

She nods and turns off the datapad, shifting to reach down and pull the blanket up around us. "It's in the cargo hold, though we will have to paint it or something." Miranda taps her omni-tool, shutting off the lights. "It's an expensive brand and would be recognized very quickly in a place like June Cove."

"Let's finish planning tomorrow," I say through a yawn. "We'll be more awake then."

"Agreed." Miranda agrees, proceeding to yawn in the most regular fashion I've ever seen.

"I have never seen anyone yawn so stoically." I tease playfully.

She doesn't bother to respond, just tucks her head under my chin and shifts to get comfortable.

"So cold-" Miranda reaches up and pinches my lips shut.

"Shut up and go to sleep." She mumbles, draping her arm over my side.

Ooh, kitty has claws. But I close my mouth and shut my eyes, inhaling her scent and nuzzling my nose in her soft hair. I really like sleeping in a woman's arms. The softness under my hands, the gentle rise and fall of her chest brushing against mine, the small puffs of air brushing over my throat and the warmth that only holding someone can bring.

It makes it really freaking difficult to sleep alone.

…

I'm the first one to wake the next…morning. Well, waking cycle is what they have on ships…but no, I'm just calling it 'mornings'.

Anywho, I feel consciousness coming back to me, brought gently by the warmth in my arms, and blearily open my eyes.

The first thing I notice is that at some point during the night, Miranda rolled over and became the small spoon, her back pressing into my chest, her curvaceous rump pressing into my morning lumber problem.

The second thing I notice is the soft thing that fills my right hand, my arm tucked under her neck and cupping something in the region of her chest.

It does not take long to connect the dots, and the stiff point poking into my palm only confirms it.

But she's still sleeping, which is good. I don't imagine she would hit me; or try to, at least. I am a trained and experienced man with jumpy reflexes and a lack of pain receptors, and she is a reasonable woman who understands that accidents happen.

Besides, what kind of relationship could be built on someone getting hit for the littlest things?

I try to pull my arm out, but Miranda shuffles a bit and groans in her sleep. I tickle her hip, but she giggles a little and tightens the hold she has on my arm, and I am surprised. For one: she can giggle. And two, I just made the situation worse.

This must be done carefully.

Slowly, I roll myself out onto my back and pull Miranda onto my chest, my hand still clutched to her breast, and then…I forget where I'm taking this idea.

Shit. Well, I can pull my arm away, waking her quite rudely in the process, or do my best to slowly slip out of her grasp, possibly waking her in the process and making it sort of awkward.

Or, hidden option C, I could say 'fuck it' and just do the first thing that comes to mind.

Fuck it.

I kiss her neck gently, just behind her ear and squeeze the breast in my hand softly. Miranda moans and shifts, but doesn't wake. I move down her neck planting small pecks along her smooth skin, and her left hand unconsciously reaches up to rest on my shoulder as I reach her collarbone and gently suck on the junction of her throat.

I can feel her other arm moving…and there it goes, resting on my hair. I quickly slip my arm out from under her and slowly cease my ministrations on her skin, and her arms fall back to the bed.

With that done, I vacate the bed and head to the shower. Once there, I take a moment to open up my omni-tool and tap out an email to Tevos.

Over the years, I've been saving up every credit I could find and have been dividing it into to pools: Equipment and War.

Equipment was my personal account, the credits there going to buying and maintaining my weapons and other such things like food and clothing. I've been sinking a few thou into getting a one-of-a-kind custom weapon, but there's been very little success on that front.

War, on the other hand, is for the upcoming battles I know we'll need an upper hand in. Tevos has been developing weapons and tech that will definitely help when the Reapers come, a good few of which came from my ideas and the omni-tool I took off that big bastard a couple months ago. Besides being a giant asshole, he had some good ideas stored in there. One of which is what I call a MAC Launcher, which was totally not stolen from another universe where humanity was being beaten by a mysterious threat hell-bent on wiping out humanity, no sir.

Besides, all the guns here have a similar technology, just miniaturized. So bigger would be better, right? If a pistol has the power to shave off a piece of metal the size of a grain of sand, then accelerate it to the point that it punches through armor, why in the hell wouldn't you make a bigger one? One that could, hypothetically, punch through giant cuttlefish-shaped ships? I already know some ancient civilization did so, so why the fuck didn't they?! Or we, I suppose.

Angry rant aside, about half of the credits I got from jobs or…'appropriating' would be the right word, I guess, from dead bodies and hacked accounts went into War, and the rest into Equipment.

"Jade, how is the leech doing?" I ask quietly, discarding my pants and hopping in the shower. Hot water splashes over my face and runs down my body, driving away the remnants of sleep under a tide of hot liquid.

"…what?" Jade replies distractedly.

I pause. "The leech? The one we planted in Randes' accounts? How's it doing?"

The embarrassed tingling spreads over the back of my head. "Oh! Well, we've started shaving off a couple hundred credits from each purchase and those have been transferred into your accounts." She relays quickly, sounding slightly mortified about something. "At the rate we are going at, we'll reach eight hundred thousand credits at the end of the week."

I stick my head under the water to rinse the shampoo from my hair. "Isn't that a bit much?" I mean, I do rely on her for the math, which has never been my strong point, but it sounds like too much.

"Oh no, it's barely a scratch on Randes' accounts." Jade says. "Most of his ships sell for millions of credits and are seen as a status symbol among the 'elite'. Taking a few hundreds off the millions won't even register as a blip."

"Well, that's good. Do you have another prepared for Gregors' accounts?" I ask, turning off the water and stepping out of the shower.

Jade is silent for a second. "Yes," She says, "I might have to modify it when I'm in the system, the information does make it a point to note his paranoia."

Good point. Dressed and dry, I sneak out of the bathroom, through the bedroom and make it down the stairs. "I'll need you to disable the cameras in his compound. With the security we'll be facing, though hopefully avoiding, I doubt I'll be able to get into the system quick enough to cover our tracks."

"Don't worry, I'm on it. I just need to get in range before I can start." Jade assures with confidence in her voice.

My eggs are fluffy and cooked when I hear Miranda stumble down the stairs in the dressing gown she's fond of sleeping in. "Morning!" I greet easily, scooping the other half of breakfast onto another plate, which is set in front of her with a quick kiss to her temple.

Freezing, my mind races. Did I just…? I did. Miranda doesn't react beyond grunting sleepily. Alrighty then.

I've never actually been in the cargo hold aboard the Space Whale, despite traveling on this bitch for about a month. As a far as holds go, it's not that big. A couple cases of luggage and a red sky-car, nothing else.

The sky-car is the expensive type and it stands out with just how clean it is, but at least it isn't painted with the Cerberus colors or the logo, which is good. But it'll stand out to much on a planet like Juno.

Luckily, there's something I have that can fix that: My fist. More specifically, the omni-tool around it. Opening it up, I make a nozzle on the front and spray omni-gel over the red paint, coating the entire vehicle with light grey foam.

All I need to do is type in the right commands; relay those into the gel through my omni-tool and bam: the omni-gel hardens into a shell over the sky-car, covering up the bright red with dark blue, along with spots all over it that make it look beat-up.

That should do nicely.

…

June Cove is a little town tucked into the base of a cliff. Most of the people that live here are miners or contractors, as the main export from Juno is ore, mostly tungsten, steel and heavy metals used in ships or for industrial applications like buildings. There's not a lot in the way of business here, a few shops, homes, a couple of restaurants and I think a club or two, and that's it.

It's night time on Juno. The standard solar cycle here is 28.5 hours, with a little more than half of that being lit up by the moon instead of the sun.

Our disguised sky-car flies through the air, well above the town but well below Gregor's house and out of sensor range. We park at the base of the cliff, next to the rock wall.

Miranda probes the houses' network with her omni-tool while I gather a few shrubs and cover the car. "I can't get a strong signal from here, but what I can gather is that the sensor network would set off an alarm if a sky-car came too close, but it should let human-sized objects slip through. I'll know more when we get closer."

She shuts off her tool and starts feeling the rock face. Apparently satisfied with something, she grabs on and starts pulling herself up carefully, checking her next handholds and footholds.

What is she doing? "What the fuck are you doing?" I ask incredulously.

She looks down at me through her helmet, and I swear I can feel the exasperation on her face. "It'll take us hours to scale this; we need to get started now."

Does she not realize I have a Jetpack? I lift off and hover behind her as she climbs up. When she's thirty feet away from the ground, I reach out and tap her shoulder.

Miranda looks back at me as I do a little spin to show her the activated pack on my back with the audio disabled. "Oh." She reaches out and wraps her arms around my shoulders and I take us up into the air. "Don't say a word."

"I wasn't."

She fiddles with her omni-tool some more as we get closer. "Hold here." She orders, focused on lines of code scrolling over a screen, fingers deftly typing and tapping keys.

Finally, she looks up. "Alright, I've cleared us in the sensor array. We're good now."

Ten feet from the overlook, Miranda taps my shoulder. "Any closer and the guards will hear us. We'll have to climb the last stretch."

I hover near the cliff and let her grasp onto the face, waiting until she's secure before I do the same. I'm not afraid of heights, but I make sure not to look down as I scale the rock face.

My fingers curl around the edge of the balcony and just as I'm about to pull myself up, I hear words.

"-here to take over."

"Finally. Nothing interesting ever happens here. It's so boring!"

"No shit, why do you think the boss lives here? It isn't for the view, that's for damn sure."

"Yeah, that's true. Have fun looking at nothing while I get some hot grub and sleep in my bunk."

"Yeah, yeah, shove it up your ass."

I hear thumps as the previous guard walks away, followed by a door closing. Looking up, I can see the guard just next to edge, looking over the cove while leaning on the railing. His helmeted head swivels left and right, before he reaches down to his codpiece and I look away.

He groans in relief as a stream of steaming liquid falls over the edge, just missing my hanging body.

Eye twitching, I hang on by my left hand while my right slowly draws my knife. He zips up and I tap my fingers gently on the metal. "What?" He says, looking around.

I tap again, and I see him look down, kneeling to look at my fingers.

I reach up and jam my blade through the side of his throat and pull down, cutting his throat. Still holding my knife, I grab his collar and pull him off the side and watch his body disappear into the night with a gurgle.

Once I pull myself up, I reach down and help Miranda. We sneak to the door, and as she hacks into it, I signal Jade to start her own hack.

The door opens and we slip in, a guard sitting at a station looking up. "Get back to-"

I flick my knife, the blade flipping through the air and stabbing through his left eye. He hits the ground, dead.

I pull it out of his head and wipe the blood off before getting started on the terminal. It's got camera views and alarms, but besides that, nothing vital. I tap in the commands to make the system loop the next few seconds over and over again for the next few hours and erase my presence in the system.

"There aren't any schematics here, but I've disabled the alarms and cameras on this level. I'm also taking the visual data and compiling it into a mini-map." I relay to Miranda, who nods and heads deeper into the mansion.

Keeping an eye on the small screen at the bottom left of my HUD, the loading bar finishes up and small map pops into existence, showing Miranda and myself as blue circles and the guards as red triangles. It's not complete, so I'll have to find another terminal and update it.

The hallways are mostly bare, with only lights overhead and doors as the decorations, which is pretty shitty, but also in-line with the intel. I'd imagine a paranoid guy's house would look like this. Well, either this or underground.

The mini-map shows two red triangles heading towards us, just about to go through the door at the end of the hallway. I press myself to wall on the left side of the door and Miranda does the same on right just as the door slides open.

The one on her side is a human female, the one on mine is Turian male. She nods at the two draws her stiletto, crouching behind the lady guard as I come behind the guy.

The Turian is taller than I am, so I get a foot up on his leg crest and push myself up, bringing my knife down in his neck and riding him to the ground where he expires in a small puddle of blue blood.

The lady guard collapses next to him with a smile in her throat and twitches before dying. Killing the guards will probably be taken as an attack on whoever this 'K' person is, and it might make him tighten his security, though I do have a feeling there's not much farther up on the chain we can go 'til we reach the top. At least I hope so.

As we stealth down the corridor, I can't help the tingle going up my spine. For a paranoid nutjob, four guards in this stretch of space is odd.

The door opens up into a wide room, carpeted with red and holding three pedestals and several framed pieces of paper. One of the pedestals holds a small model of the Powered Medical Exoskeleton, the others hold little cubes of the gels, and the frames have certificates, diplomas and letters, mostly from small children who received the PME and wrote a thank-you letter.

And now I feel bad stealing from this guy, fuck.

The door at the other end of the room opens, showing two figures, one guy and one girl, in what is definitely not the Red Waters red and blue armor.

Thieves. Not just thieves, but other thieves.

My hand falls to my knife and the woman of the duo darts across the space separating us and kicks it from my grasp, planting her foot and spinning into a roundhouse aimed at my head; I duck and strike at her groin and she locks her leg around my arm and pulls on my limb, trying to knock me off balance.

It doesn't work. I yank my arm back and up, sending her up in a flip; mid-rotation, I reach out and grab her around the waist, angling her head down and move to slam her on the ground. She plants her hands on the carpet and slips away, sliding between my legs and hopping onto my shoulders with her legs around my neck.

I shrug forcefully and throw her off, turning to aim a kick at her in air. I miss and she rolls to her feet, standing up in a fighting stance. I feel Miranda's back press against mine and her elbow tapping into my side.

"You go high, I'll go low." I mutter to her over our channel. She nods and I duck under her spinning high kick and spin myself, punching at her enemies' stomach.

The guy of the duo bends out of the way just in time and counters by throwing his fist at my face; I deflect it with my right hand and seize his wrist with my left while following through and elbowing him in the face with my right, pulling him forward to embed my knee in his gut.

Dazed, he stumbles back and pull his left arm again, throwing my forearm into his chest and pivoting to throw him on the ground, dropping to my knees to punch him in the face and end this fight.

He shakes it off and rolls away, my fist missing and landing in the carpet. His foot thuds against the side of my helmet and I reach out and grab his ankle, pulling him forward while I lunge from my kneel to tackle him to the ground. He hits the ground on his back and as I draw back, he crosses his arms over his face to defend himself. My fist hits and the armor he's wearing cracks along with the bone, and he shouts in pain.

I draw back again to end it when I hear his partner yell in panic. "Keji!"

Wait, Keji? A thief named Keji?

He senses my hesitance and boots me off, jumping to throw a kick at my head; subconsciously, I grab his leg, grab his thigh and throw him at the nearest object. Which so happens to be the pedestal with the little PME model. Which is also probably alarmed.

He shatters the glass, knocking the model into the floor, and I can really only say one thing as I ready for the alarms to begin screeching.

"Shit!"

…

…

A/N: There you go, next chapter up. I felt it took too long to get to the fucking point (the infiltration) so I ran a little long. Hope you enjoy it.

Don't try to guess who the other thieves are, I bet most of ya already know, and I like constructive criticism a lot more than shit we already know.

So I'd like to say something: I'm not going to pretend that I've got a sturdy soap-box or a holy right to say what I say. I can be an asshole and I know it.

However, threatening to kill someone over fiction, fiction, something that isn't real, is not okay. The whole point of fanfiction dot net is to unleash your imagination, which means that if you don't like someone in canon, you can change that. It also means that if you don't like how someone writes, you can change that, because that's the whole fucking point!

…

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this chapter, and I will do my best to have the next one out before Christmas.

Read, Review, and Enjoy!

Stay Awesome!

~Soleneus

P.S.: If I don't, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukah and Kwanza or whatever you celebrate. Enjoy the time with family and friends while you can, shit happens and you never know if it could happen to you or them.

Stay Awesome Some More.

~still Soleneus