Chapter 3: Reveille

January 23rd, 2211. 1700 hours – Aboard the SSV Hippocrates, Deck 1, Prometheus Lab

12 seconds after Outbreak.

A female technician let out a sharp, ear-piercing scream that was cut abruptly short as what had been Dr. Messner drove his cabled arm through her chest.

As she began to mutate before my very eyes, I immediately screamed for everyone to evacuate as loud as I could. My voice jolted the remaining technicians and scientists out of their trance and they all began fearfully scrambling for the exits as fast as they could.

Alarms pounded across the lab and frantic screams punctuated the air as I raced out the door and into a hysterical mass of fleeing scientists and lab technicians. I jammed a finger onto the communication set I wore in my ear.

"Percival, Cade, the Reaper Core went haywire, it started a fucking outbreak of some kind, expect rapid mutation of crew through direct contact. Regard as lethal," I spat.

"Shit!" cursed Percival over my comm. set. "I've used my Spectre Authority to log into the ships control, containment doors are currently closing and closing fast, but I've managed to set the doors at Containment Airlock 2 into diagnostics mode, that should buy you a couple of minutes."

"Roger that," I responded. I immediately changed directions towards Containment Airlock 2, dashing perpendicular to the hysteric crowd of lab personnel headed towards Containment Airlock 1. I opened up another channel to Sarah.

"Sarah, do you read?" I shouted, "This is Cloud, do you read me?"

"I read you Cloud? What happened? Containment alarms are going off-"

I cut her off. "There's no time to explain, take the marines and meet me at Containment Airlock 2, tell the security fireteam there that I'm on my way and to expect hostiles."

"We read you, Spectre. We're en route to Containment Airlock 2. Don't keep us waiting, sir." Responded Rake over the channel.

I muttered a quick thanks and began opening up a third channel to Cade but was met with sheer silence. Panic and fear gripped my chest, I tried to contact Percival and the marines again but was met with more radio silence. Something or someone must have been jamming our communications.

I resumed my dead man's sprint down the hall, arms pistoning at my sides in an aerodynamically efficient motion, lungs drawing massive gulps of air as deep down as I could, maximizing alveoli exposure to oxygen necessary for optimum respiration, and measuredly exhaling carbon dioxide to alleviate the build-up of lactic acid in my muscles.

I had just sharply turned a corner when something crashed into me. I toppled to the ground with a gasp of pain as I felt cold metallic claws break the skin on my arm. Something big and heavy had ran right into me, bringing me to the ground with a heavy thud felt like it had nearly shattered half my ribs.

Time seemed to slow down, my mind took on a razor-sharp focus as adrenaline flooded my systems and my reflexes kicked in. I raised my fist in a clenching gesture, firing a Stasis at the thing on-top of me, freezing it in place.

I looked up and saw huge, foot-and-a-half metal claws jutting from a half synthetic, half human arm mere inches from my heart. Whatever it was now, it had once been human, and its face was half a foot from mine, gaping maw stretched wide open, studded with razor-sharp, jagged metal teeth and disturbingly what looked to be the teeth of the human that this creature had once been, right down to the metal filings.

I shoved it off of me, shaking in fear at the close call. I pressed down on my freely bleeding arm, cursing my lack of a pistol, and continued my run, wanting to put as much distance between it and I before my Stasis wore off. Off in the distant reaches of the lab I could hear even more screaming and a rising cacophony of angry, almost hungry, howling.

I vaulted nimbly over a railed divider. Ahead of me I could see two more of the shambling monstrosities, their labcoats in tatters with their flesh splitting open to reveal synthetic metal skin and wires, the hair on their heads a mangled, brittle mess.

The corridor was too narrow for me to use a biotic Throw to toss them aside, so without breaking stride I threw another Stasis that froze them in place and slid underneath their outstretched metallic claws before deftly standing upright and resuming my run.

Behind me the Stasis had worn off on the first Corpser and with an angry howl it had also begun chasing me. Three more joined it, before I had even made it another dozen meters I knew that the Stasis had worn off of the two that I had slid beneath.

Thirty meters from the Airlock doors, I ran into a fireteam of living, breathing security personnel led by a stone-faced human marine. Beyond them I saw the airlock doors. They had started to close.

"Get the fuck back out!" I screamed, waving at them with my hands.

"Negative, Spectre! We'll cover your retreat!" shouted the fireteam leader.

I cursed inwardly, I didn't have the luxury or the time to stop and argue with them. I watched the fireteam leader throw a quick salute my way as I dashed by. My eyes met with his for a brief moment and I nodded to him, a part of me hoping that he knew that I would not forget what he chose to do. I still didn't stop, instead I kept sprinting towards the doors closing in the distance, trying my best to distance myself from the angry howling behind me.

The fireteam should have run, could have maybe held them off from outside the airlock, but instead they had chosen to trade their lives for mine to ensure that I got out. I sprinted pass them towards the doors, not understanding why they wouldn't run, why they'd willing stay and get completely torn apart by those monsters.

Behind me I heard the fireteam leader directing his men to lay down suppressive fire. I heard rattling Avenger fire hammer at wave after wave of howling, moaning monsters behind me. The sound of their rifles getting quieter and quieter as the men who fired them screamed as they were pulled apart.

January 23rd, 2211, 1758 hours – Aboard the SSV Hippocrates, Deck 1, Pedestrian Corridor 16B

58 minutes after the outbreak

I slowly backed away, my Predator trained on the door separating the Chimera from Sarah and I. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Sarah gamely mimicking my motions, Predator held in a slightly trembling but resolute two-handed grip. Our breaths were heavy as we waited, expecting the Chimera to come bursting through the doors or the deck any minute to tear us apart like it had Corporal O'Neill.

After a few more moments of utter silence I decided that the Chimera had moved on and relaxed my stance. Sarah did the same thing beside me, lowering her gun and letting out a heavy sigh of relief.

My comm. set crackled to life, "Cloud, it's Percival, you still alive?"

"Negative," I responded. Despite the best efforts of Soph, the communications channel she had set up was patchy at best and still limited to extreme short range transmissions.

"Roger, one asshole Spectre listed KIA. What's the status of the VIP?"

I glanced over at Sarah. Despite having just seen a bunch of pointy freakshows tear their way through a squad of trained security personnel and a 40 foot-long monster made up of a bunch of her fellow scientists spear a grown man through the chest, she had adapted remarkably well to the situation.

She currently had the flashlight on her Predator aimed down the corridor behind us, covering our rear. I had half-expected the combined trauma of losing her husband, witnessing the horrific transformations of the crew, and the overall gravity of the situation to render her into a catatonic mess, but it seemed like she was keeping a tight rein on her panic.

"VIP is green. Fully operational. How's Rake?" I asked. After my sticky grenade failed to kill the Chimera, the marine had put himself between me and the angry, deadly beast and had been batted away.

"He's alive." Percival answered.I let out a sigh and briefly closed my eyes in relief, the stupid asshole could have been killed. "I have Doctor T'lana taking care of him right now. We pumped him with synthstim and a bit of adrenaline to get him up. No broken bones somehow, but he's got a concussion and some bad bruising on his back. I'm gonna keep him out of the fight as much as I can for the time being."

"Acknowledged, thanks Perc," I responded. "We're proceeding with Containment Breach Protocol Phase 1. I'm going to take Dr. Messner to the Secondary Engine Room and turn on the back-up generators, then head to the Data Archives to retrieve the Prometheus Project data."

"Negative, hold your position and wait for us to rendezvous at your location. We'll proceed to the objective together," Percival ordered.

"Perc, we don't have much time, the outbreak is spreading," I objected. "We need to get to that data now, before we can't get to the data at all."

"I'm looking at the ship schematic now, there's a door partway through the Main Central Passageway that leads to maintenance corridor-"

"There's no time," I countered. "Look, get to the Bridge and set up a defensive strongpoint. We need somewhere secure to fall back to after we've retrieved the data, and we need somewhere to receive and triage potential survivors."

"I'll send the scientists and the rest of the marines ahead, then I'll link up with y-"

"No, Percival. Rake's out of commission and T'lana has to assist him. You'd be leaving them with only six able bodies," I vehemently argued with him.

"The rest of the marines are green, and the two security personnel and the salarian scientist are combat-capab-"

"And you want to send them up the Main Central Passageway to the Bridge, the area with the highest population density and therefore the highest probability of encountering those things. You want to send them to die," I finished flatly. "They'll die without you, Percival. They'll never make it to the Bridge"

Percival was silent. Sarah kept glancing back towards me with interest, quietly observing our little spat but otherwise keeping silent watch on our six.

One second of silence, then two, then ten. "I thought you were all about the mission," he finally answered.

I pinched the bridge of my nose and closed my eyes. "I am, and the mission involves evacuating and destroying the ship afterwards and we need to secure the Bridge to do that," I resolutely stated, "trust me, Lancelot. I can do this myself."

There were a few more moments of silence on his end. It was a sneaky, underhanded move, calling Percival by his first name. It was the one surefire way to get him to really stop and listen. I had known Percival for almost half a decade. As brave and as dedicated a soldier as he was, Percival had always had a weakness for his friends. His actions on Bahak had proven that.

"Alright, bring the back-up generators back online and retrieve the Prometheus Data. I'll escort and round up any survivors that I can and meet you at the Bridge," he reluctantly conceded.

"Roger. I'll keep an eye out for Cade. You said he was probably headed for either the Data Archives or the generators, right?"

"He knows protocol, those are the locations that I'd be headed if I were him. You two find each other and you two stay safe, you copy?"

"I copy, dad." I rolled my eyes and grinned a bit, even if my friend wasn't there to see it.

"We'll probably lose radio contact as you proceed towards the back-up generators."

"I know, ship schematics indicate that the archives are approximately 112 meters north-west and about 7 decks up, and the back-up generators are situated about halfway between in the secondary engine room. We'll be well out of communications range."

I proceeded to check my armor, looking for any defects or damage that may have occurred during the fight. My arms were still bare so the armor wasn't vacuum sealed but that seemed like a small price to pay when it allowed me greater mobility for my biotic abilities. Temperature regulation and kinetic barriers were optimal although kinetic barriers were essentially useless when the enemy tended to stab you with giant metal claws or huge metal tails instead of firing mass-effect slugs at lethal velocities, but the habit kept my emotions in check and my mind focused on the task at hand.

"Find him, Cloud. Get that Data. Get to the Bridge. Together. Alive. No heroics," Percival ordered.

"Roger, Cloud signing off."

I checked the heat sink and the ammunition block on my Predator. I had enough for maybe three or four more reloads – approximately 40-odd shots. I still had the dual Talon turian combat knives strapped to my lower back, four more sticky grenades and an L7 amp that was in working order. I sighed and ran a dirty hand through my hair.

I turned to Sarah, who looked at me resolutely. I said nothing to her. Nothing needed to be said.

"Come on, we're headed to the back-up generators and getting that data. We've only got a couple of hours of air left."

I brushed past her and walked into the darkness of the corridor. She followed silently behind me, her breathing even and steady. I glanced above, somewhere above us I could hear faint moaning and rapid, frantic footsteps.

I couldn't save all of them.

"-and Cade better not have scratched my fucking Snakebite," I snarled.

January 23rd, 2211, 1807 hours – Aboard the SSV Hippocrates, Deck 1, Pedestrian Corridor 16B

1 hour, 7 minutes after the outbreak

With the life support disabled, the air had taken on a metallic, musky quality that filled the corridors like a grey, murky soup. We carefully made our way down the corridor, wary of making any sounds that could draw unwanted attention to our position. I didn't trust my armor to stand up to a direct hit even from one of those Corpsers and Sarah wore nothing more than civilian clothing.

Sarah glanced at me nervously, "Any idea how we're going to re-activate the back-up generators?" she whispered.

"Either they've turned 'em off, sabotaged them, or destroyed them," I silently answered. "I doubt they'd merely turn them off. If it's software sabotage there's little that I can do. Hardware sabotage –I might have more luck fixing that, I used to have my own ship."

"And if they're destroyed?" she ventured further.

"Then we'd be in a bit of a bind. We would need to make our way to the main engine room on the other side of the ship and check if those generators are intact or we would need to find an alternative power source for the Data Archives, both of which would involve us running around this god damn death trap of a ship and increasing our chances of getting killed or worse," I explained to her.

The state of the ship still didn't make full sense. Someone had cut off our communications and our life support with what I had initially assumed to be the intention of slowly killing everyone on board and preventing us from calling for help. However, if they intended to kill us, why not prematurely detonate the ship? Likely because their interests lie in some asshole-ish ulterior motive rather than in actually preventing the spread of this outbreak. Assholes.

"Actually, we might actually have another option," Sarah told me. "Both the main generators and the back-up generators in the Primary and Secondary engine rooms have adapters that allows them to draw power from the power-cells found and used throughout the ship. It was another function designed as a further failsafe in-case both the main and the back-up generators failed."

I looked at her incredulously even though I doubted that she could see my expression in the dark.

"So almost everything on this ship can run on remote power cells? Labs, engines, even equipment?" I queried.

"Yes. Aside from Project Prometheus, Alliance R and D is running almost a dozen other major projects amongst their various divisions. An absolute loss of power would be catastrophic." She explained.

I shuddered for a minute at the thought a dozen other projects blowing up in my face. "If we could get our hands on some power cells, would you know how to hook them up?"

"Yeah, I can," she assuredly stated. "Every scientist aboard the SSV Hippocrates received basic emergency tech training on how to utilize power cells to power our equipment. The last thing you want is to be stuck waiting for the engineering crew while your lab suffers a catastrophic meltdown due to a power failure."

I smiled in the dark. "Better not let you die, then," I joked.

"Yeah, you better," she shot back.

We continued padding softly down the darkened corridor, weary of making any noise. Far above us I could hear those footsteps again, though this time the footsteps were moving much more rapidly than before. I listened as they continued on for a few more seconds when suddenly a shrill, terror-filled scream emitted from above. The footsteps stopped after that.

"What was that?" Sarah whispered nervously.

"Nothing, don't worry about it." I assured her.

My nerves stood on end. Icy tendrils of fear and nervousness seemed to snake around my neck, choking me. I gripped my Predator tighter. We passed a few locked storage closets but had yet to encounter another living soul, hostile or otherwise. Actually, I couldn't say for sure if those things still had souls. I sincerely hoped that whoever the person inside those abominations had been before being turned, that that person wasn't still conscious and trapped inside those murdering monsters. Becoming one of those things was bad enough. To be trapped inside and conscious as it used your body to kill and turn others? Well, I would rather die before letting that happen.

I heard footsteps again coming from the intersection maybe ten meters ahead. I strained my ears and held an arm out to halt Sarah who silently stopped without question. The footsteps were plodding and heavy and most definitely not human.

I quietly dropped into a prone position which Sarah quickly mimicked, trusting the darkness and the distance to keep us out of the peripheral vision of whatever was about to walk through the intersection. I prayed that they were going to pass by us instead of coming down our corridor. I didn't fancy another close-quarters encounter with a Corpser.

I saw the eerie red and blue lights that seemed to emanate from their bodies before I saw the actual Corpser itself. A massive Krogan Corpser maybe two meters tall shambled through the intersection, the lights from its body illuminating wicked metal spikes nearly two and a half feet in length jutting from its arm. I heard a slight gasp behind me and wrapped a hand around Sarah's mouth. She clutched my hand in a deathly-tight grip.

I few more seconds later another Corpser followed, this one a salarian. It was slim and almost emaciated compared to the Krogan Corpser. Behind it trailed four more human Corpsers with soft blue lights coming from their stomachs. I could see their stomachs stretching and ballooning as the Crawlers housed inside shifted and turned.

We waited on our own stomachs for a few more minutes to allow the Corpser pack to put as much distance between us and them before we continued on. I halted before the intersection and peeked my head to look down the corridor they went. They must have turned a corner or something, because I couldn't see them anymore.

Sarah and I cautiously cleared the intersection. We traversed about another twenty meters when suddenly my comm. set cracked to life.

"H-h-hello? I-Is a-anyone o-on this channel?" someone whispered.

I immediately responded. "This is Spectre Operative Cloud, who am I talking to?" I whispered back, inwardly cursing furiously at my lack of a sealed helmet. Without it I'd have to watch my volume or else risk attracting unwanted, homicidal attention.

"B-B-arbra, Barbra Peterson, maintenance technician," she answered.

"Barbra, this is an extreme short-range channel, can I ask you where you are?" I queried further.

"I'm in an employee lounge. I've locked the door, but I can hear those things outside. Are you the rescue team?" Barbra pleaded.

"I'm not the rescue team, but I'm nearby. I'm going to come get you, okay?" I confidently assured her. "I want you to stay away from the door, stay away from the vents, and get underneath something. Can you do that for me Barbra?"

"Yes," she whispered.

Sarah stepped towards me and grabbed my bicep. "I know where that lounge is, it's slightly out of our way towards the secondary engine room," she whispered. "There should be another intersection about 25 meters ahead, we need to make a left there and detour down about 40 meters to a second intersection, and it should be on our right."

I nodded. "Barbra, hey, it's me. Do you have a weapon?" I asked her.

"No. Please hurry, I can hear those things trying to get in."

Her tone was getting increasingly desperate. I could hear the moans in question through my comm. set.

"Were on our way, okay? Sit tight, I'm not going to let anything happen to you," I assured her.

We began increasing our pace as much as we could. I checked the ammunition on my M-3 Predator and the activation triggers on my sticky grenades. Sarah checked her heatsink and ammunition block as well, staying roughly two feet behind me and making period checks of our six.

"Cloud? They're almost through. Oh god, I should have let them in, I should have let them in, I should have let them in—," she began repeating frantically.

"What? No, don't let them in. Whatever you do, do not open that door!" I ordered loudly, the urgency of her situation causing me to throw caution to the wind. Our hastened steps echoed frustratingly loudly in the darkness of the corridor, loud enough that I felt for certain the every shambling freak on this deck would hear us and begin converging on our location.

"No, not the monsters. My friends. I should have let them in but I got scared. I ran inside when the monsters came and locked the door and they were banging on it and they were begging me to open it but the monsters were outside and then they would be inside and I should have let them in, I should have let them in.."

I opened my mouth, speechless. Beside me Sarah let out a faint sob. We were halfway down to the second intersection, I could hear low moans and growls coming nearby.

"Listen to me Barbra," I firmly responded. "Whatever you did can be forgiven, trust me on that. Your friends would forgive you. They would understand that you were scared," I lied.

"We're almost there. Whatever you do, don't open that door," I begged her. We were meters from the corridor. My biotics flared to life, purple-ish blue flames snaking up and down my arms. My comms. set crackled again.

"They're almost through. Please, please please please please please don't tell Nancy what I did. Tell Nancy that I was brave, tell Nancy that I tried to save my friends. Promise me, promise me that… OH GOD-,"

Sarah and I turned the corner. Four human Corpsers stood outside the lounge door. The fury inside me coiled and sprung, the biotic blue flames surrounding my arms sparking and crackling like lit roman candles as I forcefully waved my left hand forward, firing a blistering dark-purple orb of energy that flew among the Corpsers.

They were violently yanked off their feet by the Singularity, flailing helplessly and shrieking in rage at having their hunt interrupted. I threw my left fist forward again, this time firing a massive, blue Warp that slammed into the Corpsers trapped in my Singularity, detonating it in a bright, blue explosion that ripped large gouges in the surrounding bulkheads and utterly disintegrating the former humans and the Crawlers they housed.

A shambling salarian Corpser walked out of the room, moaning angrily at the death of his pack. Beside me Sarah fired a half-dozen rounds from her Predator into what used to be his chest and head, blowing it apart and dimming its lights. Crawlers began tearing out of its stomach but I threw another bright, blue Warp and destroyed them too. I sprinted into the room.

In the vibrant, cobalt light of my biotics, I could see broken furniture lay scattered around the lounge, the tiny diminutive body of a girl in a maintenance tech uniform lying bloody and broken beneath a steel coffee table. Towering over her was a monstrous, krogan Corpser with fresh, red blood coating its teeth-studded maw.

It slowly turned around at my entrance, lifted its arms and roared in an angry challenge. It moved to charge towards me but my left hand flew up in a fist, firing a Stasis and immobilizing him in place. I calmly walked towards it and emptied half of my Predator into its gaping jaw, blowing out its brain pan. I emptied the other half of my clip into its chest, cracking and weakening the giant headplate protecting its temples. I smoothly holstered my Predator, drew my dual Talon combat knives and drove them into the sides of its head, severing its secondary nervous system and killing it for good.

Sarah padded quietly into the room, one hand grasping her smoking Predator and the other clutching her mouth. I pulled the Talons out of the Corpser and wiped them on what was left of its face before sheathing them behind my back. My face a grim mask, I made my way to where Barbra lay and slowly knelt down at her side. Her eyes were open and staring, her last expression an expression of shock and fear. Sarah moved beside me, tears slowly streaming down her face. She had heard every word of our last exchange, had known what Barbra had done and the price that she had paid.

I swept my hands over her eyes to close them shut. I grabbed an old blanket lying atop one of the overturned couches and pulled them over her body, hiding the bleeding, jagged teeth marks and torn flesh around her neck and shoulders.

I took one last look at her face and then pulled her comm. piece from her ears and handed it to Sarah, who put it on with shaking hands.

I stood up rather quickly, and for a minute my vision darkened and my L7 amp sparked. I fumbled my way over to a water fountain and gripped its edge tightly for a second. I waited for the brief vertigo to pass before impatiently pressing the water dispenser. I scowled when nothing came out, cursing electronic water fountains and cursing the saboteurs who had disabled our power. I had come close to red-lining my amp that last fight with my unusually vicious biotic combination on the Corpser pack. Coupled with the stress of the fight at Containment Airlock 1 and the one-sided duel with the Krogan Corpser, I had pushed my amp a smidge too hard.

"Are you alright?" Sarah asked. Her tone was concerned as she gently padded around Barbra's body and made her way towards me.

"Fine," I flatly stated, "just a bit hungry and thirsty." My stomach growled as if to agree with me. Generating the dark energy fields necessary to utilize my biotics required calories that I had neglected to supply my body.

My last meal had been back on the SSV Excalibur, and the ration bars and electrolyte fluids that I usually kept on hand were somewhere with Cade alongside my armor and my weapons. I briefly looked around in the dark, trying to locate a fridge but failing to spot one. I breathed a heavy sigh and began exiting the lounge, not sparing the dead girl another glance.

"That's not what I meant." she stated sadly, but otherwise wisely decided not to press it. She quietly followed me and together we resumed our way to the secondary engine room.

We backtracked our way back to the first intersection. Thankfully nothing jumped out to try to disembowel us. I could sense Sarah biting back words of consolation, probably shit about how we tried our best or how we couldn't have saved her.

Except I could have saved her. I could see it play out in my head like a bad, shitty movie. Had I chosen to engage the Corpsers at that first intersection, she would have lived. Had my conversation with Percival back outside Containment Airlock 1 been half a minute shorter, she would have lived. Had I chosen to run a little faster instead of maintaining a cautious pace, she would have lived.

As a Spectre, they don't teach you how to fight or shoot. They don't teach you how to negotiate with terrorists, how to disarm a bomb, and they most certainly don't teach you how to cope with the death of innocents. "Spectres are not trained, but chosen. Individuals forged in the fire of service and battle – those whose actions elevate them above the rank and file."

Those were the words some uptight Asari councilor had imperiously stated at my induction into the Spectre Corps. Not trained, but chosen. Chosen not because they can kill and shoot and watch innocents die, but because they can kill and shoot and watch innocents die and keep on going.

Becoming a Spectre is incredibly easy, a bunch of suits come in, they wave their hands, and the next thing you know you can go anywhere, do anything in the name of galactic safety. But staying a Spectre? Sure you might already know how to shoot, how to lie, how to infiltrate and steal and murder, but you also had to be immune to all the stone-cold fuckery that you saw on the job or else you'd blow your brains out.

Cade, Percival and I, we had seen some shit and we had always kept going. We had seen half-crazed, doped-up Vorcha tear apart civilians, Krogan extortionists set hostages on fire when their families were unable to pay their ransoms, seen quarian rape victims die of infections. On my shit-meter, those lost innocents didn't register. The fireteam that had bought me the time I needed to escape the Prometheus Labs didn't register, Barbra shouldn't, didn't, even register. So if Sarah wanted to play shrink with me she was going to have a less than stellar time.

I held my breath, expecting her to chime in with some well-intentioned, useless remark or psychoanalytic crap, but she didn't say anything. If her gaze held any sympathy it was too dark to see.

A common misconception was that Spectres didn't feel. That was wrong, at least in most cases. There were the odd few who were complete, utter sociopaths, but the majority of us were just people who knew that if we weren't the ones who had to make the hard choices, then it'd be some other poor sap, someone who might not be capable of making or even surviving those choices. Spectres felt, but they didn't feel immediately, they bottled it all up and saved it for the next guy dumb enough to try to screw with the galaxy.

"Wait," Sarah sharply, "there's a storage room nearby that I know for a fact houses a couple of spare power cells. I accidentally walked in there a few months ago looking for spare lab equipment and found a locker full of them there. We should check it out."

"Good, might save us some time. Lead the way."

Sarah nodded and took point, keeping her Predator raised. I fell back and began covering our rear, making periodic sweeps to ensure nothing would sneak up on us.

After a while Sarah decided to break the silence. "So," she began, "what were you before you became a Spectre? I think you mentioned that you weren't military?"

She waited patiently as I paused to consider my answer. "I was a delivery boy," I finally responded.

"A delivery boy?" she said incredulously. "What, like pizza?"

"Something like that," I said dismissively.

She shook her head disbelievingly. "So how do you get from a delivery boy to Spectre? You're also a biotic too."

"You can be a biotic and still be a delivery boy," I said defensively.

"Yeah, but I find it hard to believe that you can go from a delivery boy to a badass Spectre without you being part of some super-secret special operations group or something."

"You think I'm a badass?" I laughed.

"5 out of 10. Not quite bonafide." She joked back.

"Ouch."

"Still, you must have learned to fight and use your biotics somewhere, and you look young, maybe a couple years younger than me."

"I'm turning 29 this year."

Her head snapped back. "You're only 29?" she asked disbelievingly.

"Yeah, born in '82, why?"

"Nothing, just that you look much younger. I'm jealous," she shrugged.

I also shrugged, but otherwise kept silent. "Fine," she finally conceded, "be an ass." I could see her flash a quick smile before turning back around.

We hooked a right and found ourselves standing in-front of a pair of doors. I quickly flipped on the flashlight on my Predator and panned it above them, the words "Storage Room 1F" were labelled across the top.

Sarah placed her Pistol on the ground, retrieved a security card from her back pocket and tapped it on the electronic lock installed into the door. It didn't budge.

"It's locked," she said sheepishly, "guess we wasted our time, sorry".

I gestured for her to step aside. She grabbed her Predator off the ground and moved back a few feet, checking the corridors for hostiles as I moved up in-front of the door.

My amp sparked to life and wrapped my body in a shimmering, blue corona of biotic energy. I lifted one leg and drove a booted foot into one of the doors as hard as I could, my biotics increasing and enhancing the force behind my blow. The door nearly crumpled in half, creating an opening large enough for both Sarah and I to squeeze inside.

I signaled for her to stay put, then maneuvered inside the storage room. Predator out, I made a quick sweep, checking behind every corner and machine for anything that could try and kill us.

Satisfied that the room was reasonably secured, I waved at Sarah to come inside. She gingerly ducked into the room and began looking around for spare power cells while I kept an eye on the door and on the vents. I had watched Cade play too many sci-fi horror games for me to not expect something to burst through the vents and pull us into the walls. Also because I was intimately familiar with the finer points of Murphy's law.

Sarah made a small exclamation of triumph. I turned and saw her pull a stack of metallic cylinders the approximate length and diameter of a thermos from a storage locker. Her hands brushed over a switch located on the side of each power cell and they immediately began pulsing a soft blue light, not unlike the light that Corpsers emitted. A charge meter on the side of each power cell began lit up and an indicator began displaying the level of power remaining in each cell.

I saw Sarah turn on each power cell stored in the locker, her brow furrowed and lips silently moving as she made calculations in her head. Eventually, she pulled out a duffel bag and filled it with eight fuel cells. She gave me a thumbs-up and silently prepared to leave.

Finally, something had finally gone right for the first time since this mess started. I followed her back out into the corridor and, power cells in tow, we resumed our progress to the back-up generators.

"Four of these should be enough to run the back-up generators on low power for the next 6 hours. It'll be enough to restore some measure of life support and the emergency lighting, and the lights in all the major rooms should now be in power saving mode, meaning they'll be off but will turn on when we trip their motion sensors," she explained excitedly.

I gestured for her to hand me the bag, but she shook her head in refusal. "You need to be mobile enough to fight in-case we run into more of those things. All I can do is stand there and look pretty."

"Fair enough," I conceded. Sarah was turning into more and more of an asset. She had had the sense to grab back-ups just in-case we needed them. She had acquitted herself well during our rescue attempt and despite having lost her husband mere hours before had not suffered an extreme emotional breakdown that made her a security liability.

It could have been worse. I remember one time during a mission on Zorya, Cade was bit by some purple centipede-analogue during a raiding operation on a Blue Suns weapons depot and rendered feverishly incoherent. Not only did Percival and I have to outrun a platoon of angry mercenaries without long-range sniper support, we had to sidetrack to Cade's observation post was and haul his spiky ass back to our shuttle. I remember being fed up with the situation and simply killing the mercenaries when they stupidly decided that the best way to take down two Spectre operatives was to split up into smaller teams.

This was marginally better.

January 23rd, 2211, 1839 hours – Aboard the SSV Hippocrates, Deck 1, Secondary Engine Room

1 hour, 39 minutes after the outbreak

Ahead were the doors to the Secondary Engine Room. Nothing else had attacked us since we had departed the storage room we had found the power cells in, but nonetheless I loosened up my Talons in their sheaths and kept my Predator trained in-front of me. I had been a Spectre for a little over five years. I had a pretty good idea what was waiting for me in the room.

I stacked up behind the door, gesturing for Sarah to stay behind me. I cursed the lack of a tactical cloak on my shitty armor then palmed the door activation button and slid smoothly inside, Predator raised.

I hated when I was right. I saw a couple of engine technicians strewn around the back-up generators, a reservoir of blood pooling around their heads. My eyes swept around the room, making note of every single alcove, nook and cranny.

The Secondary Engine Room was maybe three decks tall and circular. It was big, like every other space in this bloody ship. The offline back-up generator sat in the center—a large, spherical machine with a multitude of conduits linking it to ports situated into the ceiling and the floor. I could see a number of slots that looked like they could hold the power cells that Sarah was currently toting and a cracked, damaged drive core sitting inside the translucent casing.

I signaled for her to step inside. She flinched at the sight of the technicians but didn't break stride on her way to the back-up generator.

She began inspecting the generator. "The back-up generator seems to be intact", she reported. "It looks like the saboteurs decoupled and destroyed the drive core, thankfully they didn't destroy the power cell adapter ports. I should have no problem coupling them to the generator."

She started to pull the power cells out of her duffel bag, but I held out a hand to stop her.

"Wait," I ordered.

She looked at me with her eyes wide. She didn't understand but obeyed me nonetheless.

I spun around and began firing my Predator at positions that I had made a mental note of. My first three shots hit nothing, but my fourth sparked off a kinetic barrier. Gunshots instantly erupted from the spot I had shot at. A tall male dressed in form-fitting black armor of make and manufacture that I did not recognize materialized as his tactical cloak fizzled out.

I erected a Barrier around Sarah and I, deflecting the saboteurs' gunshots. Three more figures de-cloaked around the room, all of them holding what I recognized to be silenced M-8 Avengers and clad in the same slim, form-fitting armor suit that the first saboteur had worn. Judging from their physical profiles, three of them were male while one was female, likely all human.

Together, they walked slowly towards Sarah and I, their fancy M-8 Avengers trained on us. Behind me, Sarah had aimed her Predator at the closest saboteur.

I holstered my pistol and used both hands to strengthen my Barrier. The saboteurs closed in around us, casually stepping over the technicians that the moment I had entered the room I knew they had killed. I exercised every ounce of my considerable will not to roll my eyes.

They must have thought they were fucking geniuses, leaving behind a group to ensure that no one else would power on the back-up generators – because no one would ever expect that, right? They must have thought that they were the Da Vinci's of espionage. They must have thought that they were already living in 2212, a group of big-brained, big-dicked assholes in fancy black armor with fancy black guns.

Except I got to see first-hand that they didn't have big brains and that they most certainly weren't going to be living in 2212. I heard three loud coughs erupt from somewhere above me and suddenly three of the saboteurs had perforated helmets, their kinetic barriers doing nothing to slow down the kinetic energy of an armor-piercing round fired from an M-98b Black Widow. The last saboteur began frantically scanning the room for the ghost who had murdered his comrades, firing indiscriminately into the shadows.

His rifle overheated clicked empty, which was pretty much the last thing that you wanted to hear when you were stuck in a room with two angry enemy Spectres. I dropped my Barrier and crossed the distance between us in four quick strides, immediately bringing me within close-quarters range with the increasingly desperate saboteur.

He pulled out a black M-3 Predator but my Predator was already in my hand. I fired a round into his gun, knocking it out of his grasp, before placing my gun beneath his chin and firing two more shots that shorted out his kinetic barrier and stunned him. I sent an arm into his chest, forcefully pushing him back a few feet. My fourth round went through the gap right between his armored boot and his shin greaves and my fifth went into the gap between his thigh armor and his knee-guard as he knelt down in pain. I kept my pistol trained at his head.

He ripped off his helmet, revealing a vaguely familiar face smiling at me. For a moment I hesitated, trying to place where I had seen him before.

In that moment's distraction I failed to see the saboteurs' hands disappear behind his back only to reappear with a grenade. His smile stretched wolfishly as he thumbed the activation trigger and lobbed it at me. Years of reflexes kicked in as my mind finally registered the grenade leaving his hand. I swiftly threw up my hands, erecting a spherical Barrier that encapsulated him entirely. The grenade Bounced off of my barrier and hit the deck with an innocent little clang, rolling nondescriptly back towards him.

The grin never left his face, not even as the grenade detonated and his body was torn to absolute shreds.

I lowered my pistol and let out a dispirited sigh, slightly disappointed that I wasn't going to get my 'dramatically-realize-who-the-saboteurs-were' moment and even more disappointed that I wasn't going to get to personally get to kick some saboteur ass.