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Shepard had sent James back to the shuttle so they had someone on the outside waiting to catch Cerberus if they got out of the archives. He wasn't happy about it, but he took the order. Shepard didn't mind a bit of insubordination as long as he got the job done, so she let the attitude slide for the moment.
"Is he going to have our back?" Liara asked.
"James is a good guy. He'll grumble, but he'll be there," Kaidan assured her.
Shepard nodded in agreement. "Let's move out."
They ran into various Cerberus troops along the way, but nothing they couldn't handle. They also found evidence that a human doctor who was relatively new to the site was working with Cerberus, and had taken down the facility from the inside out, cutting off the tram access to the Archives they needed to reach. Liara was devastated, blaming herself for not paying enough attention in her focus on translating the Prothean documents she had found.
"Stopping the Reapers is the only thing that matters," Shepard told her. "You were right to focus."
"And if we're wrong, and there's no way to stop them?" Liara turned a tear-stained face in Shepard's direction. "If these are our last days and we waste them trying to solve the unsolvable?"
Shepard put her hand on Liara's shoulder. "This isn't you. We can't give in to despair. The Protheans fought for, what, a thousand years? And they almost did it. And we have their records, and it's only been a few hours since Earth was struck." Hard to believe, really, that she'd woken up in that room in the Vancouver facility just this morning. "We can do this."
"Yes. Yes, we can," Liara agreed, her voice coming stronger. "I don't know how you do it, staying focused even in the worst situations."
"How can we not come out on top if we work together? I always have a good team around me—with you, them, I can't fail." She thought of Thane, and Wrex, and Garrus, and Jack, and Grunt, and Mordin … Glancing over her shoulder at Kaidan, she caught him looking at her with a troubled expression, a wistful, hopeful look in his dark eyes that went away as he shook his head, and she sighed. Apparently he wasn't finding it as easy to trust as he had promised.
He cleared his throat. "If we can find a short-range communicator, we could trick Cerberus into sending the tram back, tell them the Alliance forces have been taken care of."
"Good idea," Shepard agreeed. "See what you can find."
Liara looked sidewise at Shepard. "The Major has become very … capable."
"Old news, Liara."
"Yes, of course." There was sympathy in Liara's look, though, and Shepard sighed inwardly. Yet again, there was simply no time to think about her personal life—about the looks Kaidan kept giving her, about Thane in the hospital on the Citadel and how much longer he had. She wondered briefly what it would be like to be a normal person.
Kaidan's voice calling her name cut into her moment of self-pity, and she hurried to join him next to the body of a fallen Cerberus soldier. He removed the helmet, which contained a transmitter, and recoiled in shock and horror.
Shepard knelt next to him, horrified herself at the decaying face of the man inside the Cerberus armor.
"He looks like a husk," Kaidan whispered.
"They've done something to him," Shepard agreed. He looked like a human-husk hybrid. Disturbing.
Kaidan stood up, looking down at her, frowning. "By 'they', you mean Cerberus. They did this to their own guy. Is this … is this what they did to you?"
Shepard stood, as well, meeting his eyes. "How can you ask me that? You see me, standing here in front of you."
"I see you, but I don't know what you are. Or who. Not since Cerberus rebuilt you. For all I know, you could be their puppet, controlled by the Illusive Man himself."
In the heat of her anger, she tried to remember that she had had the same concerns once, worrying about what they had put inside her, what they had used to rebuild her, what that made her, and she forced herself to breathe, to calm down.
"Don't bother to explain," he snapped. "I don't think I'd understand anyway." He turned away, then back again, his dark eyes searching her face. "I just want to know, is the person that I followed to hell and back, the person that I loved … are you still in there somewhere?"
Instinctively, remembering what they had been to each other, remembering the man she had loved, she reached out and touched his shoulder. "They didn't change me, Kaidan. I'm still the person you knew, the person who loved you. That's … well, things have changed and I'll tell you all about that when there's time, but you are still special to me. You always have been, you always will be." She sighed. "But words won't be enough, will they?"
"Probably not."
She smiled. "Stubborn."
He laughed. "Me?"
Shepard shrugged. "Come on."
They found the Cerberus mole downloading the archives. She got away from them, running at almost superhuman speed up to the helopads. Shepard was able to stay within sight of her, but only at top speed, and she had no energy or breath left when she reached the helopad, able only to watch helplessly as the Cerberus shuttle took off, gasping into her comm for Joker, Vega, anyone, to stop the shuttle before the blueprints were out of their reach for good.
Vega swooped in with the Normandy's shuttle, ramming it into Cerberus's. The Normandy's shuttle came to a rather wobbly stop, but Cerberus's rolled over and over, pieces shearing off of it. Everyone aboard was dead, which meant finding the blueprints, especially intact, was going to be impossible.
Then the woman they had been chasing rose from the wreckage.
"She's a freakin' robot!" Vega shouted from the open door of the shuttle.
"Yeah, who knew?" Kaidan muttered, pulling his gun and firing into the robot's chest even as it closed the distance between them. Not slowed in the least by the impacts, the robot knocked the gun from Kaidan's hand and lifted him by his helmet.
"Kaidan!" Shepard ran for them, her heart pounding with fear as she saw him dangling from the robot's grip. Leveling her weapon at the thing, she said desperately, "Let him go."
The robot touched a comm link at her ear, miraculously still working, as if asking for orders. She nodded, turning, and bashed Kaidan's helpless body against the side of the burning shuttle, again and again.
A red mist of rage blinded Shepard. She threw her gun across the helopad and rushed the robot, grasping its head from behind and, with a strength she'd never known she had, ripped the head off the body.
The robotic body sputtered and spat sparks before collapsing. Kaidan fell to the ground, unmoving, and Shepard's heart stopped within her. "Kaidan." She knelt next to him. "Come on. Say something. Kaidan!"
She felt a gentle hand on her shoulder. "Shepard. We need to get him to the Citadel."
Liara had to repeat the words a few times before they sank in and Shepard nodded. "Right." Her head began to clear as she stood up. "Right. To the Citadel. Vega, can you—?" She gestured to Kaidan's body, and Vega nodded, taking Kaidan's shoulders while Shepard got his legs. Behind them, Liara gathered up the pieces of the robot.
"Why are you bringing that … thing?" Shepard asked her.
"Never waste a resource. Besides, somewhere in here, she has my blueprints."
They got Kaidan settled aboard the shuttle and Vega took off, heading for the Normandy.