Strange Bedfellows
Shepard woke up in the med lab hours later, Doctor Chakwas dozing on the bed across from her. She sat up and rubbed her face, ran her fingers through her hair, and considered her situation. I need a drink for this. Leaving a note for Chakwas, she slipped out and headed to the Port Lounge. It appeared to be empty, but Shepard wouldn't put it past Kasumi to be hiding in a corner of the room.
"EDI, where's Kasumi?"
"Miss Goto is on the Engineering deck playing poker with Mister Donnelly and Miss Daniels."
"Well, good luck to them, then," she mumbled to herself as she poured a shot of whiskey.
The door slid open and Zaeed appeared. She wasn't sure she was ready to deal with him yet, but she couldn't exactly leave, and sooner or later they would have to work it out. The job she agreed to help him with, liberating a mine from the Blue Suns, was more about getting revenge against the man who betrayed him twenty years earlier than saving the workers. Zaeed almost got the workers killed, along with her and Jack, and she had very nearly shot him in turn for putting her through the trouble.
"Shepard." He paused, clearly wondering if he should leave. "You still pissed off at me?"
She tossed back a mouthful of whiskey and poured another, then poured him a shot. Holding the spare glass up, she waved him over.
"I'll get over it, but it you ever do anything like that again, put your own needs ahead of the needs of the crew-"
"You'll shoot my goddamn ass." He came to the bar and took the drink. "I owe you an apology."
Shepard raised an eyebrow at him. "And?"
Zaeed let out a harsh laugh and raised his glass to her. "And I'm sorry."
She lifted her glass, touched it to his. "Here's to us saving the galaxy." She emptied her glass and poured another shot.
"You okay? You never struck me as much of a drinker."
"I'm..." She paused. Not wanting anyone to be distracted by anything as they went forward, she decided to keep her conversation with Hackett to herself. "I'm just thinking about stuff."
"Kid, you can't beat yourself up over this. You did the right thing."
"Doing the right thing doesn't always feel like a fucking victory."
She tossed back her whiskey and reached for the bottle, but Zaeed caught her wrist. "What are you doing, Shepard?" His voice was gentle, concerned, not gruff and full of bluster, and it caught her off guard.
"I don't know, Zaeed. I just feel like I'm between a rock and a hard place right now, and I'd rather be somewhere else, you know? But...I have a galaxy to save, right?"
He let go of Shepard's wrist and gave her hand a pat, a gesture that reminded her of her father and seemed completely out of character for the grizzly bounty hunter. "You'll figure it out, kid. Get some sleep."
"Ha. I would not have expected this from you, Zaeed. You gettin' soft on me?"
"Anyone else would have killed me for the shit I pulled on Zorya. Hell, you probably wanted to, but for whatever reason, you didn't. I won't forget that, Shepard." He looked her in the eye and gave her a curt nod. "Now get your goddamn ass to bed. Big day tomorrow."
Shepard clapped a hand on Zaeed's shoulder. "Right. I'll see you in the morning."
x ~ X ~ x
The reaper was neither entirely dead nor alone in space. The geth ship alongside it went a long way to explain why the Cerberus scientists had stopped reporting in, Shepard reasoned. She took Tali and Garrus with her to search for the IFF and found that the truth was not quite what she expected.
Personal logs and official reports indicated that the science team had slowly been indoctrinated by the reaper ship, which still had a certain amount of power in spite of extensive damage it suffered during some ancient attack. Shepard had to assume they would find the scientists eventually, in the form of reaper husks. The ship activated kinetic barriers, trapping them inside, and EDI announced that they would most likely find the barrier controls in the wreck's mass effect core.
"Be advised, this core is also maintaining the reaper's altitude."
Shepard muttered a curse under her breath. "So when we take down the barriers to escape, the wreck falls into the planet?"
"And that means everyone dies. Yeah, I got it." Joker quipped.
"If any helmsman can get us off this thing before it hits crush level, it's you, Joker. We'll make a sweep for survivors and recover what data we can. Stand by."
"Aye, aye. Happy hunting!"
Shepard urged the team forward, stopping to listen to log entries, collecting anything of value. The quiet of the ship was rarely punctuated by the odd mechanical noise, so it came as quite a shock to all three of them when two gunfire shots rang out in quick succession. Two reaper husks fell into their line of sight from a hall to their left, and Shepard's team froze.
"Sniper," Garrus whispered into his commlink as they approached the bodies. "I couldn't see the shooter. Survivor from the science team?" It seemed unlikely.
They edged forward and peered around the next corner, the large chamber there quiet. Shepard was about to relax when she heard the telltale unintelligible shoutings of reaper husks. A substantial wave of the monsters rose from behind crates and machinery, and pushed her team back. They were able to use the more confined space of the hallways to their advantage, funnelling the mindless creatures into a smaller kill zone, and eventually made their way forward again.
Shepard paused to watch another video of a Cerberus employee rambling on about gods and the reaper and shook her head with a sad sigh. This was becoming all too familiar.
"This looks familiar, Shepard," Tali said gently.
Turning around, thinking that Tali was referring to the process of indoctrination, she stopped short and gasped. Tali and Garrus were both looking at clusters of spikes located around the room, some with scientists and guards still impaled upon them.
"Dragon's teeth, your people call them." Tali shuddered visibly and turned away. "The geth used them on Eden Prime."
The clusters and the platform were set at even intervals before the center of the room where much of the reaper's systems ran, as though the scientists had gathered here to sacrifice themselves to the reaper.
"Look at this room. It's set up like an altar," Shepard muttered.
"Why would anyone want this?"
"You heard the logs. They were seeing and hearing things, being indoctrinated. We can't help them now, but at least their bodies won't be used by the machines. Let's keep moving."
Down another hallway, around a corner, through an airlock, tense and on guard. When they entered another cavernous room filled with plenty of hiding spots, Shepard waved Garrus and Tali to opposite ends of the space and paused. The hairs on the back of her neck stood up and she tried to make sense of it. It felt as though she were being watched, and the feeling was overwhelming. She barely had time to react when two gunshots rang out. The bullets whizzed past Shepard's head, one to the left and the other to the right, and she heard bodies fall behind her. A husk approached her and she dropped it with a shot to the head. Turning to see two reaper husks on the floor behind her, she looked back in the direction of the shooter. What she saw stunned her speechless.
A geth unit stood on a platform at the opposite end of the room, a sniper rifle in hand. It lowered the weapon, revealing that it had a piece of N-seven armor attached to its right side, and spoke.
"Shepard-Commander." She heard it, as clearly as she could see the machine in front of her, although the words were accompanied by the digital beeps and stutters she was used to hearing from the geth.
Tali and Garrus were as shocked as she was and the three of them stood and stared as the machine turned, reloaded its weapon, and left.
"Since when do geth speak to organics?" Garrus asked when he found his voice again.
"It shouldn't be able to talk. A single geth doesn't have any more intelligence than a varren." Tali didn't sound convinced.
"Then could you please explain to me how it knows my name and managed to say it? Because that was really unsettling. Shit, keep your eyes open for that thing. And let's find this IFF and get out of here."
She checked her omni-tool and saw that they were getting close to the coordinates EDI had sent to her. Stepping into a short hallway, they spotted a lone computer terminal halfway to the door at the opposite end. Recovering the actual IFF barely took five minutes and Shepard sighed with relief. One step closer.
"So the Cerberus team did recover the IFF. But where are they now?" Tali asked. The three of them turned to look at the door before them.
"Oh, I don't know. Why don't we go take a look in there?" Shepard smiled. "I'm sure there's nothing in there."
Garrus chuckled. "Wandering around in dark spaces, waiting for monsters to jump out at us...this is just like the old days."
When they opened the door, the blue haze of a barrier prevented them from entering the room. The geth unit they had seen earlier was standing at a terminal within the room, its hands hovering over the keyboard. Several reaper husks were approaching it from behind, and before she could say or do anything, the geth turned, pulled a weapon, and killed the husks with startling efficiency. The barrier preventing them from entering the room disappeared and a second later the geth unit vanished behind a wave of husk.
The reaper's mass effect core was at the top of the ramp, just behind the terminal the geth had been using. "We need to overload the core! Do what you can to keep the husks at bay, and I'll work on that." Tali and Garrus acknowledged Shepard with a quick nod and they took cover wherever they could.
"How many people does Cerberus usually have on a team?" Garrus asked, looking at the steady stream of shuffling husks that were moving toward them.
"No clue. Tim doesn't tell me these things, and EDI's shackled. Let's just say too damn many, shall we?"
It wasn't an easy task overloading the core; its shields kept activating. This gave Shepard time to help fight back the husks, allowing Garrus and Tali time to regenerate their shields, which proved a good thing in the end. Finally, the core began to overload, forks of lightning flicking around the field and shooting out into the chamber.
"We have to move." Shepard yelled out. "Grab that thing!" The geth unit had crumpled to the floor, and seemed inactive.
"What? Shepard, you know what that thing could do to the Normandy and to us. Leave it!" Tali protested.
"You said an intact geth could be invaluable. I understand your reservations, but I want to know what it was doing here and why it helped us."
Another wave of husks appeared at the end of the platform they were on. "There's no time for debate. Joker, come get us! Garrus, help me with this thing."
The hull of the reaper was compromised near their location and Shepard and Garrus got as close to the edge as they could without losing gravitational pull. As the Normandy came into site, Shepard asked Joker to open the port airlock and nodded to Garrus. They hefted the geth up and out toward the open airlock and watched it drift over the gap and land just inside the Normandy.
"All right, go!"
While Shepard shot husk after husk, Tali threw herself over the gap. Garrus took a running jump toward the Normandy and nearly landed on top of the quarian. Shepard took a quick look at the Normandy, looked back at the husks and shot a few, and then turned and ran. Hurtling herself off the platform, she sailed through the air toward the Normandy, landing somewhat gracefully between Tali and Garrus.
"We're clear, Joker, get us out of here!"
The airlock closed and they were off. Shepard hoisted the geth over her shoulder in a fireman's lift and proceeded to carry it past shocked crew members to the tech lab. "Kelly, I want Jacob and Miranda to meet me in the comm room. We have some important business to discuss."
A/N: My thanks to readers, reviewers, listers, and Bioware. Zute and Zevgirl, you keep me laughing! Please review, because I love hearing from you. Cheers, Biff