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Fifteen minutes passed before the cat-suited woman's replacement arrived, in a similarly tight fitted but more padded looking black suit. Unlike the woman, he carried a rifle on his back and a shotgun besides, and strode with a straight-backed purpose, shoulders squared and eye gazing passively but intently around him for threats. This, she knew, was a soldier through and through, experienced enough from tours and press events in her youth. Mistralian bronze and black stitched cloth or Cerberus synthetic fibers, it didn't matter. A soldiers' walk was always a soldier's walk.

An odd kind of comfort, that small familiarity, but one that had her already feeling warmer towards the dark-skinned man than his fair-skinned compatriot.

"Commander. Your supplies." The man nodded, adjusting a small hip pouch meaningfully as he joined them. The explosives, then. The soldier turned to the two Huntresses, then, and he nodded his head and offered a hand, "Jacob Taylor, Cerberus specialist. Glad to meet both of you, even if the reason for it… Isn't the best."

"Pyrrha Nikos, Mistralian Huntress." She nodded, smiling warmly and taking the offered hand. Using her home and title was possibly not the wisest move, but she would be damned a second time before she cast away civility for fear. "Glad to meet you, though I agree circumstances are not ideal."

"Huntress?" The man's brow furrowed, "What do you mean- Ack!"

"Hello, new friend!" Penny crowed excitedly, grabbing his hand in both of hers and shaking it eagerly and forcefully. Enough to stagger the larger, more powerfully built man and draw wide, surprised eyes until she released him and let him stagger to the side, grinning all the while,. "I am Penny Polendina and I look forward to saving future friend Archangel with you!"

"Maybe don't say that so loud…"

"Oh, yes. You are quite right, Pyrrha. I am sorry." The girl nodded, ignoring the man shaking his now-sore arm and giving the Commander a surprised look. "I will quietly be excited to save our future, nameless friend, who is in no way related to angles. Or arches."

"...Angels." Pyrrha corrected gently, "Not angles."

"Those too!" She smiled, head tilted to the side and bouncing on her heels.

"Penny… Gods, Penny, but you are ridiculous." Pyrrha sighed but she couldn't fight her smile, hiding it behind her hand instead and turning to the armored woman beside her. In a more serious tone, smiling pleasantly or not, she prompted her gently, "What is our plan to take our friend from the trap he wallows in, then? I assume you have one."

"Jacob, key them into our secure channel while I talk." She ordered sharply, the two women holding up their Omni-Tools, old and shoddy as they were, for him to work. While he did, she tugged an armored helmet on over her head and rolled her shoulders, sighing, "Nikos, you're pretending to take charge of this operation. I can not be recognized en mass or there will be problems, and Jacob can't be made for a Cerberus agent."

"Yeah that… That can be a pretty bad problem, yeah." The man grimaced and, holding a hand against his side, he sighed. Grinning, he shrugged and added in a cheerier, if forced sounding, way, "And I guess we don't want the little one being the pretend leader, either. At least not compared to the damn Krogan wrestler over here."

"I really wish people would drop that…" Even if it was rather amusing, and useful besides.

"Focus." The woman snapped her fingers for it, metal clanking together as she did. With their attention on her once again, she began to speak, voice low but firm and authoritative in a way that Pyrrha recognized in the same way she'd recognized the soldiery in Jacob. "Eclipse will be there and that means mechanized units, mainly in the form of their security robots. I'll take an access shunt to disable their target acquisition and differentiation protocols."

"Means they'll shoot anyone around 'em when they turn on." Jacob volunteered, giving her a smile when she grimaced. "These kind of folks don't deserve any better."

"On Omega, everyone is like them." She corrected simply, eyes hard and lips pressed into a thin line. "We don't have a police force here on the station. Those people are probably just locals trying to eat… Or do something good around here, and joined up with whoever they thought could help..."

"Didn't take you for a local, Nikos." Shepard challenged. Or rather, everything that came from her mouth, edged and tight with anxiety as it was, felt a challenge now.

"I'm not. Not really, at the least." Though she couldn't properly quantify where she was from. For her, it certainly was not from Omega. "I just… Aside from the Blood Pack, there are good people among the mercenaries."

"Not here there won't be, Red." Jacob assured her, offering a gentle smile along with the words. Her brow rose and he explained, gesturing for the group to pile into the car while he talked, "Here, they'll have brought in their professional forces. The bosses and their personal men, not local hires that run police work. Especially with the Plague situation on the far side of the station, they'll leave their best fighters here."

"Which means just the assholes. And take the front seat, you're supposed to be the leader after all." Shepard explained in answer, sliding across the backseat with Penny close behind. Past her and to Pyrrha in the front passenger, Jacob climbing in to drive for them. "All of 'em are the slaving, drug running, pirate kinds there, and freelancers that wanna be them. No one that deserves your sympathy."

"Forgive my impertinence, Ma'am, I just… Faced similar, once upon a time. I will do what I must." And only what she must, at that. Fighting didn't necessarily beget killing, and she was in a unique situation to avoid blooding her weapon properly. And she was sure Penny would do the same. "Please, continue."

"I'll deal with the automated units, as I said." She reiterated, reaching forward to pat her fist against the armored man's shoulder. "Jacob will find a place to stash our explosives that will have a good payoff. You head to whoever is in charge with your friend, feign checking in, and we'll meet up ahead of the attack proper. If we can, we crash this party and hit them from behind."

"If we can't?" Jacob asked.

"Well, then we improvise." The woman answered, a hand on the heavy Carnifex at her side and a look that met Pyrrha's eye when she turned to look over her shoulder. Pointing a finger, the woman challenged, "I look forward to what you can do, Nikos. I hope that Krogan brawl wasn't a one-off."

"I assure you it was not." And she'd only lost for the unexpectedness of Biotic furiosity, which she had shamefully underestimated. Which was not something she would repeat a second time, if she came up against another Biotic Krogan.

But really, what were the odds of that?

The path they took through Omega's weaving and meandering tunnels was different then the one Sidonis had taken them on. Be it for less familiarity or some other, tactical reason, she couldn't hope to know. It was slower, too, and that left them in tense silence for the duration. Aside from Penny's eager chatter and unanswered questions about what they were seeing fly by, or in turn flying by themselves, but the young android didn't seem to mind. Just happy to be there, she supposed.

Which… Pyrrha could sympathise with, frankly, pressing a hand to her newly nonexistent wound on her chest.

"Problems, Nikos?" Jacob asked from her side, one eyebrow raised but his eyes still ahead on the purely proverbial road.

"What?" She blinked, stiffening in her seat at the sudden, surprising question.

"Look like you're having chest pains or something, they way you're holding yourself. Are you alright?" Anxiously and self-consciously, the Mistralian forced her hands down and away, resting on the arm-rests. The man only chuckled, though, and offered a quiet, "It's fine to be nervous, kid. Fight like this and you got a friend in it without you there to help, makes all kinds of sense to me."

"Ah, yes, that." That wasn't at all where her head had been, but it was a valid point, and a probable part of the problem to hand besides. Taking a breath, and wishing the Brother of Darkness were there to so helpfully calm her emotions, she explained as best she could, "I get anxious before missions, more often than not. I… Had one go rather wrong, and was badly wounded for it."

"From how you were sitting… Shot in the chest?" The less animated and bubbly of the women in the back seat asked, earning a small hum of affirmation for it. "Yeah, I get that. Had a few rough missions myself. You should see the inside of my…"

"Ma'am?" Jacob grunted after she suddenly fell silent, "You alright?"

"Everyone has rough missions, Nikos. And all manner of scars to show for it." The woman finally grunted, turning to look out the window and, when Pyrrha turned to look, thumbing the top of her hand cannon idly. "What matters is how you deal with it. And given I've seen you wrestle a Krogan Battlemaster, I would say you have very little to be nervous about."

The woman was older than her, and with age came wisdom even if Pyrrha hadn't already reached the same conclusions. Still, reaching a decision and enforcing it were wholly different matters, and she could do little but ignore the tightness in her chest. It was the usual, and likely unhealthy, approach, to be certain. But hey, it worked well enough for her.

At least for now.

"Coming in to land, Ma'ams." Jacob grunted simply as the sky-car angled down, towards a large parking area full of other sky-cars of varying designs. And levels of maintenance. "And… And do I hear gun fire?"

"What?" The helmeted woman pressed a button and a window lowered, the air whipping in as the sky-car lowered.

And, carrying with it, the distant staccatos of automatic fire and the intermittent thump of explosions. She'd worked, trained and fought with Nora enough to recognize the sound well enough. Leaning forward in her seat, she flicked her hands and her weapons shot up and over her, into her hands. Beside her, Jacob did similar, drawing a thin Predator in one hand and piloting them down with the other.

When the sky-car shuddered to a landing and they piled out, the sounds were louder, funneled by the building complex the mercenaries had staged in.

"You're late, damn freelancers… Fight's already started!" A blue and white armored Batarian called out as they disembarked, weapons ready but attacks withheld as they approached. True to their plan, the threesome behind her fell in further back, and the man addressed Pyrrha for it. "The hell have you freelancers been? And your answer had better be pretty damn good, too, or I'll send you packing."

Not likely, to say the least…

"We were told to be here ten minutes from now." She argued simply, offering a small shrug and then nodding past him towards the distant sounds of fighting. Doing her very best impression of the apathetic mercenary, she crossed her arms, weapons glinting meaningfully, and asked, "I'm sure you know who I am, and why you want to permit me through these doors."

"I mean, I do feel like I recognize you…"

"She's the crazy bitch what went in on a brawl with a Battlemaster." Shepard tossed over the Mistralian's shoulder, leaning on it and cocking her head towards her and affecting an odd, off-kilter and backwoods sort of voice. "I saw the bruises myself, too. Damn good fight, that. Wouldn't 'ave signed with anyone else, tell you that."

"That… N7 armor?"

"Sure is, all right." The woman laughed, pushing off her pretend-leader and flexing an arm to show off the red stripe. "Killed one and took her armor, since if fit and all."

"Hmph. Guess you might be useful, late or not. And hell, no skin off my teeth, you rushing in behind the other freelancers." The man sighed and shrugged, then, seemingly apathetic to whatever would be coming. With a final, larger, shrug he grunted, "Head through, then. Straight into the fight, down the hallway here and through the main causeway."

"Got it."

"And don't go in any of the doors, neither." The Batarian grunted shortly, leaning forward to get in his face and breathing his rancid breath into her eyes. While she fought the urge to wince, he went on in that same snide, demeaning tone, "Real mercenaries are in there gettin' ready to come in behind you Freelancers when you're done playing war."

"Got it. Thank you for the warning, sir." She repeated, offering a small smile and laying a hand on his chest for the briefest moments. Then, when he stepped back, and flicked a finger to gently push the armored plates with her Semblance. He staggered and nearly fell over a step beside him and she cautioned him, "Be careful! We might need you real mercenaries to come and help us after all."

Was it a bit cold and callous of her? Most certainly. But it wasn't like he'd know she'd done something, Semblances weren't a known quantity in this galaxy, much less on Omega. And she was fairly certain Darkness enjoyed a spot of mischief, besides. And while being spiteful wasn't something that had always been natural to her, her time at Beacon and on Omega had taught her to get her little digs in so it would be easier to let people's slights and insults go.

"What now, Ma'am?" She asked when they were through the door and turned down a long hallway, a massive barricade closing off the main thoroughfare itself blocking their way. "Time does not appear to be on our side any longer. Tarrying may cause bigger problems than a few robots are likely to."

"Give me the explosives." She ordered simply, neither contesting or agreeing with the Mistralian's words. Jacob did, sliding the little pouch off his waist and pitching it to the woman, and she went on, "I'll disappear here and deal with the robots and whoever else is the most opportune, you three join the fight."

"Aye, Ma'am." The two humans murmured quietly.

"I am combat ready!"

Without further to say the woman rolled her shoulders and her body seemed to crackle, as though electricity were crawling along her it went, it seemed to disintegrate her, the black armor vanishing in its wake. Soon enough, all that was left was nothingness, before one of the doors along the hall opened to, presumably, admit her through it. She caught sight of a single robot before the door sealed and shrugged her shoulders.

"Well I suppose-"

"That's awesome!" Penny crowed as quietly as she could manage - so, a small roar - as she bounced on her feet. Still excited, she followed the other two as they went and murmured brightly, "I too want to turn invisible! I could see so many interesting things if no one could see me… Oh, the things I could see!"

Pyrrha actively chose to force her mind to take that as innocently as possible instead of other ways it could be interpreted.

Down the hallway and past a turn, they were let out into the thoroughfare, and sound returned in full. Mercenaries in a variety of armor of varying qualities, from shoddy, poorly maintained and apparently shieldless suits to those mora akin to what Archangel had worn when they met, or the bodysuits like Jacob wore. Of the former, she saw one stand and fall back, bleeding from a hole in her neck. Of the latter she saw one also stand to fire and be tossed back, hands anxiously clutching at a smoldering pockmark of his armor. After a moment, the Batarian rose, scowling, and retook his place on the barricades.

"Ignore everything." Shepard's voice was quiet and crackled in her ear,tinny sounding and coming from a small earbud she'd long ago been given to use with her Omni-Tool. "I've hacked the bots and am planting the charges. Do nothing, just get through."

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"Understood, Commander." Jacob's voice answered while the Commander reset the bot's targeting parameters. EDI's program bypasses only deactivated the targeting parameters, but she grinned and, using her own talents, bypassed the activation controls entirely and routed it out through her 'Tool. With a grin, she listed to the former Alliance Marine chime in quietly, "Uh, is that… You, Commander?"

"You've just been routed control of the mech's activation sequences." She answered with a smile, yanking the used shunt free and chucking it back, beyond the tunnel and the mechs where no one would see it. "I'm going silent to plant charges. When they detonate, activate the bots and set 'em loose. They'll cause all kinds of havoc."

She didn't wait for the man to respond, instead cutting her input from the channel and rising from her kneeling position to press the little button. A passing man in Suns armor on the other side blinked and staggered to a stop, eyes flicking to either side in confusion. Still invisible she stepped forward and brought her fist forward into his throat hard enough to crush it. The other wrapped around an arm and she pivoted, hurling him into the mech bay to choke to death on his own blood.

Leaving him there she stepped through and turned towards the sounds of fighting, slinking along with a small, vengeful smile.

Down the hall and through a door, she came out just in time to dodge a dying man's floundering fall from the middle barricade. She paid his gasping and grunting no mind, instead kneeling beside him and extracting a pair of remote charges. The barricades were a mix of gnarled metal scrap simply hoisted into place as well as more proper, heavy and armored, military barricades. The latter wouldn't be easily destroyed by simple, basic det-charges, but they were poorly anchored to an old, shoddy floor, and the additions could be ruined completely besides.

Laid on her stomach, she planted the two charges at the base of the barricades, where they would be flung up and scatter the ramshackle add-ons. The handful of freelancers standing on it and firing what she was sure were meant to be suppressing shots were none the wiser to her, of course, as she rose and continued on her way.

Across the way she spotted a dozen or so Blue Suns mercenaries in a little alcove that in a more peaceful time looked like it would have been a shop, complete with a refuelling terminal and an old, alien ATM in the back corner. Now, though, the atm was dark and useless, stacked high with ammunition crates and surrounded by soldiers, though the refuelling port was clear. Drums of Eezo were laid to the side of it and, had she a way through the guards there, the target would have been an ideal one.

Instead, she set one on the lip of the door, where it wouldn't be noticed. Not in the time they had to notice it, at least.

Moving on, she rounded the barricade and caught sight of her team in the distance, about to hop the front-most fortification and 'assault' Archangels position. In their wake was a sheltered vehicle bay of sorts, with two guards by the doors just inside and an armored engineer repairing a gunship. A gunship that she had zero doubt would intervene if they left it alone. And missile and heavy cannon oriented intervention was not something she wanted to deal with.

Luckily, she had a high ordinance solution for that particular heavy caliber problem currently hanging off her ass.

Three steps on the way towards the bay she flinched and slid to the side, pressed against the front of the middle barricade. Turning she saw the source of the footsteps, in turn the source of her sudden panic, as a small squad of soldiers led by a heavily armored woman strolled through towards the gunship.

"-deal with him easily enough, once the Freelancers are gone." The woman was saying, briefing her team on the go most likely. In the same clipped, oddly concerned tone, she went on, "Load up and prepare to breach the upper windows. Commander Tarak will be piloting so if you fuck up, he's going to see it, and I don't want to have to deal with him trying to come down on one of you."

Great.

She was a nice one, and for all her training and lack of care who she fought Jane hated killing nice ones. It always felt contradictory, somehow, to do that. She'd never been able to put it into words, though, and had rapidly given up trying to.

A moment later the next squad of soldiers passed by, led by an agitated looking Batarian she assumed to be Tarak. He stopped to shout at the engineer who'd been working on the gunship for a moment while his men loaded up and assistant technicians to finish reloading the gunship's weapons. After a few minutes the dozen and change in mercenaries was loaded in and Tarak had climbed into the cockpit, lifting off and back before soaring away, taking with it her hopes for sabotage. The bay, then, was mostly abandoned as the assistants filed away to other duties, with the head engineer left alone to clean up and prepare for any further repairs it might need later.

But that didn't mean she couldn't cause them future problems. Normally she'd not have bothered, leaving people and things that didn't need dealing with alone. But of course, normally they weren't trying to off her best friend, so she didn't feel a need to treat this like a normal occurrence.

Once the others had left she stood and made her way to the bay's entrance, hiding all but one of her charges around the door. The last she gave to the wall beside the front barricade where even now Eclipse and Sun mercenaries were huddled, shoulder to shoulder and without a scratch of knowledge of what was coming for them.

Sucked to be them, she supposed.

But hey, not her problem in the slightest. At least outside ammo count and the cost of her explosives, as morbid as that consideration sometimes was.

Once in the bay she found a button and closed the heavy, rolling doors. An action that drew looks from the mercenaries at the barricade but, given the literal bullets pinging intermittently off their barricade, their attention was quickly off of it. The view dealt with, she stood and turned to look at the distracted engineer who had his back turned to them and grinned as a plan began to form.

Lifting her Omni-Tool and rolling her shoulders, she retook control of the drones from Jacob and activated them. In the same moment that she heard the distant staccato of light pistol and submachine gun fire, she set off the charges she'd at the front barricade. The explosion shook the room she was in hard enough she almost fell, instead kneeling and setting off the one next to the Suns she'd seen earlier. Less were there now, she was certain with the gunship, but the cascading whump thump of the charges and the Eezo was still satisfying. And no doubt catastrophic to the command chain she was fairly sure had been stationed there.

"What the hell? Were those… Fuck me." She heard the engineer cry when the explosions stopped, grabbing a fire extinguisher and rushing towards the door control. Stopping beside her, but unaware of that fact, he reached for the button and snapped, "Who the hell shut this damn door?!"

"Sorry." She snarked, letting her cloak crackle away and pressing the head of her Carnifex into the soft armor of his throat. "Was that supposed to stay open? No one told me."

"Mother fucker…"

"Now that's just rude. My mother happened to be very pretty, but I'd never be a mother fucker." She grunted simply, pressing the pistol into his throat to force him back and away from the door. With a heavy clang, he let the extinguisher go to raise his hands in surrender and she smiled, walking him back towards his maintenance rig. "I think you should apologize."

"Apologize…?" The Batarian's eyes narrowed but then he blinked in realization, the smart one that he was. "O-Oh, right, yeah. I'm sorry I called you a mother fucker. That was, uh, rude of me."

"See, now I'm going to feel bad."

"For what- Ack!" Her fist, augmented with cybernetics as it was now, punched considerably harder than she'd meant to. Hard enough he spun on a heel and flailed, crashing into his tools and scattering them.

"For framing you, obviously." She answered quietly, kneeling beside him and lifting his arm up. Finding his 'Tool was easy enough, as was accessing it with her superior Omni-Tool and access programs. While she framed him, routing explosives and bot-shunt controls into his Omni-Tool and doing it obviously, she rambled to herself, "I mean, you don't know I'm framing you. Not yet, obviously. But you, uh, yeah. You will."

Once that was done she smiled and lifted the man's arm, pressing a button on his Omni-Tool. In answer, the door behind her, and safely out of blast radius of course, detonated violently. Old concrete, rebar and the heavy rolling doors were shorn away in a spray of debris that scattered across the room as the door came down. Thankfully it fell out rather than in, crunching down in a tidal wave of heavy metal layers that caught several soldiers under it and crushed fully half of the already badly damaged front barricade.

On the other side mercenaries, of the blue and yellow varieties, staggered away and coughed at the dust. By the time the dust settled, though, her cloak was crackling back to life and the security drones - heavy Ymir mech included - were beginning to attack the soldiers between the middle and front barricade. With the Commander herself invisible and the droids distracting them, she knew her plant would work.

Sucked to be him, but she could keep her involvement under wraps, at the very least.

"Jacob." She murmured quietly, making her way towards the entrance, "Report. I've neutralize the robots, sabotaged repair for the gunship, and tied up the forces not deployed actively. What's happening on your end?"

"Suns are coming in the damn windows!" He answered, pausing long enough to correspond uncomfortably with a distant crack crack of his rifle alongside a heavier punch of Garrus' sturdy sounding Mantis. When he came back "I'm up top with the asset, the girls are down below, in the access tunnels trying to keep the 'Pack at bay and seal the doors. We're fine, but they have three ways in and two of them to try and handle them."

"Which will make securing an area enough to seal it hard." She nodded, "Are they holding well enough at least?"

"Yeah." He answered, "Or at least, they haven't said they aren't, and we don't exactly have Krogan crawling up our backs or anything."

"Eclipse is about to send their own people across and in the front, too." And in spite of the bots shooting them in the back if they did it, too. A couple dozen of them were clumping up to make the push, though, while a couple Asari hurled Biotic fury back towards the entrance. "Two dozen, lightly armed. I could intervene here, when they rush out, or-"

"No." The man snapped hotly, foregoing decorum for his focus on the fight to hand. A slip she could more than forgive, considering. "I can hold the window and the door long enough. Get the girls and then come in to help. If the 'Pack is down there, Garm is too, and the asset says he's a Battlemaster."

And a Battlemaster was something that Nikos hadn't been able to handle in the past…

"Hold on." She ordered simply, turning and trotting through the entryway and towards the building across the bridge as she did. "I'll seal up the access tunnels with them and then come and support you."

"Understood, Commander."

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The Prime Cronos :

Glad you liked it.

Dr Killinger :

Yeah, one does not simply piss off Mama Shepard.

Blaiseing Fire :

Yus~!