Thank you for reading!
Shepard was leisurely reading through her email in front of a crackling fire in the cleverly designed fake fireplace—her first experience with one, and already she was imagining the possibilities if Kaidan were here—when a message came through from Joker, asking her to meet him for dinner. The place specified, a high-end sushi restaurant, seemed like a surprising choice for Joker, who tended to subsist on a fairly bland diet of prepared food he could keep handy in the cockpit. But maybe she wasn't the only one committing to try new things during this enforced downtime.
She arrived at the restaurant at the stated time, finding Joker already seated at a table in the back.
"Hey, Shepard," he greeted her as she took her seat. "This place is serious, huh? Like 'French guy at the door serious'. Only had to save the galaxy twice to get a table. Did you see the line outside?"
"Imagine, if we save the galaxy a third time, they might let us buy out the place for a night."
He laughed, waving his drink around. "You think they know?" he asked, gesturing at the neighboring tables. "Here I am, best pilot in the universe—and a rock star! And I bet they don't even know who I am."
"My secret weapon," Shepard said, smiling at him affectionately.
"I could use being a little less secret sometimes."
"I could use being a little more secret, personally." She shook her head, opening the menu and beginning to scan the options. "You hear anything from the Normandy?" she asked, trying to sound casual.
"Ah, you know, maintenance," Joker replied, trying equally hard to sound casual. Then he gave up the pretense, since neither of them was buying it anyway. "It's hard to have a bunch of strangers poking around in my ship. Ah … your ship."
"Our ship," she corrected. "I suppose the best thing we can do right now is park her and let the techs do the work."
"Easier said than done."
"You said it." They clinked glasses in agreement.
"I just don't want anyone touching her but me," Joker said. They both thought of EDI and winced. "Er, that sounded a little weird, didn't it?"
Shepard laughed. "Not from you. From anyone else, yes, but not from you."
"Ouch." He straightened a bit in his chair. "So, Commander, your email said it was important. What's up?"
"My email?" She looked at him in alarm. "You emailed me."
"No, definitely the other way around." They looked at each other across the table and Joker groaned. "Oh, crap, I should have known it could never be just a simple dinner with you involved."
"What? I didn't do anything!"
"Not yet."
They both looked up as a skinny, twitchy woman in an Alliance uniform ran up to the table.
"See what I mean?" Joker muttered.
"Commander Shepard," the woman said breathlessly, "I'm Staff Analyst Brooks, Alliance Intelligence, and you—we've got a problem."
"Do we?"
"Yes. There are people trying to kill you."
Whatever effect Brooks had intended that to have, she clearly wasn't prepared for Shepard's resigned nod. "Every day of my life."
"No, I don't mean Cerberus, or the Reapers. I mean … other people! New people! They're … it's …" She took a deep breath and managed to pull herself together. "Someone is hacking your account. Comm channels, personnel records … They're targeting you, specifically."
"Well, that is new," Shepard admitted, discomfited. She was used to people who shot at her. People who snuck around and tried to hack her made her nervous. She'd have to get Liara and Tali on it as soon as this staff analyst had explained the situation. "Big mistake," she snapped.
"Oh, man," Joker said, explaining to Brooks, "that's her angry face. In case you couldn't tell."
"Sit down, Brooks, and take it from the top. What do you know?"
But before Brooks could reply, there were gunshots, people screaming, and tables overturning. Shepard was, frankly, relieved. This was much more her speed.
Brooks scrambled away, while Shepard and Joker flipped over their table and crouched behind it.
"I should have known," he told her. "You can never just go out to dinner."
"Hey, I tried," she protested. "They followed me!" She peeked over the table, seeing Brooks feebly struggling in the arms of a well-armed merc. "Find the crew," she whispered to Joker. "I'm going after her."
"Sure. Find the crew," he muttered, obediently crawling toward the back door. A good merc crew would have covered the back, but apparently this one wasn't top-shelf.
Shepard drew her pistol, glad she hadn't yielded to the impulse to leave it at home, and shot her way through the mercs toward the front of the restaurant, where she found Brooks huddled on the floor behind a very inadequate chair.
"Oh, Commander!" Brooks showed her a bloody hand from a wound in her side, but even as Shepard reached in her pocket for medi-gel—glad for the impulse that had led her to bring that, too—one of the last mercs started shooting up the floor. Shepard had admired it coming in, watching the fish swimming below her feet in the glass aquarium, but she was less impressed with it now, as the glass cracked under the force of the bullets.
She shoved Brooks off onto the more stable flooring near the bar and was scrambling for it herself when the glass gave way and she felt herself falling in a shower of water and fish through the floor and down past a light installation, grabbing at the individual light tubes as she went and only barely managing to slow herself in the process. At last she was able to get a good grasp and was preparing to start climbing when the tubes gave way beneath her fingers and she was falling again.
She hit a window and started sliding down it, scrabbling at the smooth glass and failing to find anything to catch hold of. At last, a metal flap came loose as she struck it and she was able to grab hold. She was hanging in midair, but at least she had stopped falling. But, looking up, she saw that the debris from her fall was coming after her, and if she hung on here she was going to be cut to ribbons by glass.
Letting go, Shepard tumbled the rest of the way to a solid floor in a warehouse of some kind, landing hard with the wind knocked out of her and only enough energy left to curl herself into a protective ball as water, glass, and fish streamed down onto her.