All of their missions seemed to end up more complicated than they'd bargained for. Their search for the salarian doctor Mordin Solus, for example, had begun as a simple fetch quest and turned into a campaign to end a rampant plague. Miranda was used to it by now. Commander Shepard, she'd quickly learned, would never turn a blind eye to injustice. Miranda supposed that meant she'd put her brain back together correctly.
But hell if it wasn't inconvenient. She, Shepard, and Jacob were currently locked in a vicious firefight with a bunch of vorcha, and their thermal clip supply was dwindling. They were mostly relying on biotic abilities at this point to keep from being overrun. Much of their trip through the Omega slums had been like this, and it was getting wearing.
That was probably why Miranda failed to notice the vorcha sneaking up behind her until Shepard shot it in the face. The nearby shriek made her jump and whirl around just in time to see the creature fall, gurgling its last breath. She threw Shepard a grateful glance. "Nice shot!"
Shepard, in the midst of slamming a new enemy into the ceiling with her biotics, laughed breathlessly. "Did you just pay me a compliment, Lawson?"
Miranda chalked up the butterflies in her stomach to battle nerves. At least Shepard was laughing again instead of grieving the old Normandy day and night. Miranda might have tried for a quip, but her attention was soon absorbed in the gunfight again. Particularly the vorcha that was now encroaching on Shepard's cover from the side. Were they just taking turns getting distracted?
"Watch your flank!" she cried, leveling her gun at the vorcha.
Needlessly, as it turned out. Shepard acted first, blasting it away with crushing force as she retreated to a safer spot.
That spot was, incidentally, the same one Miranda had already claimed. The commander slid down into a crouch beside her, close enough for Miranda to see the fire reflecting off the green of her eyes and the sheen of sweat behind her helmet.
Oh, was her first, fuzzy thought.
Then, oh, hell as Shepard caught her slack look and grinned.
Flustered, Miranda focused on loading her last thermal clip into her pistol and not getting shot.
This might be more of a problem than she'd thought.
…
