"I forgot how much I hate this place." Jack was fidgeting next to him. Three times she'd started to stand before sitting back down.
Garrus sat across from them, occasionally giving Michael an odd look. He'd left good cop and bad cop on the Normandy, not entirely sure he trusted either for this. Part of him had wanted to bring them along, wanted to rub their noses in what Cerberus really was. But they were here for Jack, and she was pretty close to the edge already. Thane sat next to Garrus, a calm, quiet presence. Having someone on deck who wasn't a hot head seemed wise, and frankly, Samara scared him just a lot.
"See the landing pad?" Jack pointed, nearly whacking him in the face. "Has to be on the roof, or the vegetation would overgrow it in a few hours."
"Shepard, I am picking up thermal signatures everywhere, except at your landing zone." EDI's voice came over his suit radio.
"Something's distorting the sensors." Could the facility still be active? If it was, there was going to be more than a little hell to pay.
"This was a secret Cerberus facility." Garrus shrugged.
"Yeah, they build their equipment to last. Assholes." Jack folded her arms.
"That actually works out to their net disadvantage." Michael frowned.
"How so?" Thane glanced up at him.
"I don't have enough data to figure out the exact equation, but it seems like once The Imprudent Moron puts in a certain amount of funds, we divide by the proximity to Alliance space, add the manpower involved, then multiply by the coefficient of fucked up, everything he does goes to hell and ends up getting his people killed." He tilted his head. "I mean, how many labs did we investigate where Cerberus experiments got loose and ate everyone?"
"Well, to be fair, twice the experiments got loose because we shot the shield generators." Garrus clicked his mandibles.
"And I do not believe Jack has eaten anyone." Thane gave a small frown. "Yet."
They flew in silence for a couple minutes before Jack started fidgeting again. "It was a mistake coming back here, Shepard."
"When we start a mission, we finish it." He met her eyes, and nodded to her.
"Yeah. Okay." She returned the nod. "Let's get on the ground."
#
"It's raining."
"Of course it's raining." Michael shook his head at Garrus. "We never get to go anywhere nice."
"The Citadel is nice."
"And at least half the time we visit, we get shot at."
"No, that's..." Garrus clicked his mandibles, then called up his omnitool. He clicked his mandibles again. "No, we only get shot at two-fifths of the times we visit."
"Going back to the Normandy doesn't count as a separate visit if the Normandy doesn't leave the docks." Michael shook his head.
"Then..." Garrus looked at his omnitool again and touched a few buttons. "You're still wrong. We get shot at two-thirds of the times we visit."
"Have you ever considered subtlety?" Thane shook his head as he followed them across the landing pad.
"I can be subtle."
"Going invisible and planting a large quantity of explosives does not qualify as subtle." Thane shrugged.
"Oh, well, then..." Michael frowned. "Guess I am going to have to look that word up."
Jack followed them quietly, an angry expression on her face. Michael kept watch on her out of the corner of his eye even as he bantered with Garrus and Thane. She was definitely on edge, but thus far was keeping it together. "Let's just get in there and plant the bomb in my cell. I want to watch this place burn."
#
"I never saw this room." Jack was looking around. "I think they brought new kids in these containers. They were messed up and starving, but alive. Usually."
"This is..." Garrus checked his ammo block. "Unbelievable."
Michael found himself wondering if he'd known any of them. Street kids vanished sometimes. Occasionally a body turned up somewhere. Other times, it was as if they'd never existed in the first place. There were some who made a profit off of such kids. He'd encountered one such the first day he'd left home, and gotten lucky on the fact he could reach the lock from the inside. And even those in the system, the ones who were supposed to 'help' them, dabbled their fingers into the darker trades.
For a moment, he found himself thinking about Officer Montgomery. If that man hadn't been one of the good ones... Michael shook his head, and kept walking.
#
"The Illusive Man requested operation logs again. He's getting suspicious."
"When we get results, he won't care what we did. But if he knew..."
"He won't find out."
Garrus stared at the recording as Michael switched it off. "Sounds like this facility went rogue."
"He didn't say what they were hiding from the Illusive Man." Jack glared.
"She's right." Michael headed for the door. "Could have easily been TIM not liking the color they painted the walls." All the facilities he'd been in had bright colors. Forced cheer, vomited up on the walls. The paint on the walls of this facility had faded, but he could see some of that here. Psychologists who had all somehow forgotten what it was like to actually be children themselves. Or who were just sadistic assholes.
Some kids had been selected for 'extracurricular job skill training', and removed from the facilities. He racked his brain, trying to think if he'd ever seen any of those kids again. Could Jack have been...? No, she'd been taken very young. Then again, there had been girls who'd been pregnant. Smiling faced, blank-eyed workers with sweet voices, persuading them to give their children up for adoption. He may not have known Jack, but it was possible he'd run with her mother.
The thought made him want to shoot something.
#
"I remember escaping to this room. Fighting here. I saw sunlight through the cracks in the ceiling." Jack shook her head. "Only a half-dead guard between me and freedom. He was begging for his life."
They hadn't gone much further when the layout caught his eye. There were spots of old blood on the floor and... "This looks like an arena."
"That's right. They used to stage fights here." Jack's smile was unpleasant. "Pit me against the other kids." She looked around. "I loved it. Only time I was ever out of my cell."
"What were they studying?" He frowned.
"Hell if I know. Maybe that's how they got their kicks." She shrugged. "I never understood anything that happened here."
He felt the slow, calm rise of anger. "How often did they do this?"
"I was in a cell my whole life." Jack gave him a defensive look. "Sometimes they took me out and made me fight. Filled me with drugs. Other stuff." She shrugged again. "Time gets funny in a cell."
It did. Even when you knew it would eventually open. "Did other children die in these fights?"
"I was a kid, filled with drugs. I got shocked when I hesitated." A slow, bloodthirsty smile crossed her face. "Narcotics flooded my veins when I attacked."
"They actually rewarded you for attacking?" It was a good thing he hadn't brought bad cop along. She's probably say something in defense of Cerberus at this point, and then he'd have had to break her perfect face on the arena floor.
"I still get warm feelings during a fight." She nodded.
His voice was cold. "What the hell was wrong with those people?"
"I don't know." She looked around. "Doesn't matter now."
"Let's keep moving."
#
"Security Officer Zemkl, Teltin facility. The subjects are out of their cells. They're tearing the place up." The man on the recording looked frantic. "Subject Zero is going to get loose. I need permission to terminate - I repeat, permission to terminate."
"All subjects besides Zero are expendable. Keep Jack alive." Kids. They were talking about killing kids.
"Understood. I'll begin the -"
Jack walked forward and shut the console off. "That's not right. I broke out when my guards disappeared - I started that riot."
"It looks like there was a lot you didn't know." A lot many people didn't know. At least, he hoped that they didn't know. From what Kaidan had said, the Alliance hadn't done such a... Kaidan could have ended up in a place like this.
"The other kids attacked me. The guards attacked me. The automated systems attacked me." She glared at him. "That doesn't leave lots of room for interpretation."
#
"This place is supposed to be empty." Jack narrowed her eyes. "Who the fuck shot that varren? It's a fresh kill."
"Oh. Good." Michael checked his ammo. "I was starting to worried we weren't going to get to kill anyone."
Jack's smile was vicious.
#
"Why'd they need a morgue?" Jack looked around the dour room. "This was a small facility."
Garrus's voice sounded hot and angry. I"m saying some sick son of a bitch killed a lot of kids with these experiments. And then checked his work."
"Bullshit. I had the worst of it, and I made it out alive."
"Not..." Michael caught movement out of the corner of his eye, and put a round into a vorcha. "Watch your six."
#
"So strange to be back here." Jack was getting a little jumpy again. "I feel like..." She rolled her shoulders. "I'm pissed off. I'm a dangerous bitch. But then I'm a little girl again." She shook her head. "Shit, it's complicated. Let's just go plant that bomb."
"Twenty years." Michael's voice was soft. "Gingerbread still makes me want to puke." He nodded to her. "Come on."
#
Garrus made a growling sound as they walked down the hall. Little rooms filled both sides, some with three or four beds inside. "They kept children here?"
A couple of the holding facilities he'd been in hadn't been much of an improvement.
More varren and vorcha broke up the walk. Thane's biotics were more tightly controlled than Jack's, but the man was proving that experience counted for a great deal in a combat situation. He made a mental note that if he ever for some reason had to take Thane down to do it from a couple miles away. With a missile launcher.
#
"This..." Jack stopped and stared. "It's a two-way mirror? My cell is on the other side - I could see all the other kids out here. I screamed at them for hours, and they always ignored me."
Isolation. Watching the other kids have some attempt at play, have the benefit of having each other, while she was kept apart. Someone needed to answer for this.
#
"I must have come through here when I broke out, but I don't remember it." Jack said the words a little too fast. "This is a bad place."
Michael's eyes went to the medical chair in the room, with the sturdy restraints. It might have been for the best to let her keep not remembering. He touched the security console. "Entry 1054, Teltin facility. The latest iteration of PergNim went poorly. Subjects One, Four, and Six died. No biotic change among the survivors. We lowered core temperatures of surviving subjects, but no biotically beneficial reactions occurred. As a side effect, all subjects died. So we'll not try that on Zero. I hope our supply of biotic-potential subjects holds up. We are going through them fast."
"This is bullshit. They weren't experimenting on the other children for my safety." Jack shook her head as she stalked back and forth across the room.
"You can't help what they did to others."
She turned. "You don't get it, Shepard. I survived this place because I was tougher than the rest. That's who I am."
"You move on, harder and tougher." He nodded to her.
#
"It's all fallen to pieces. The subjects are rampaging, and Zero is loose. We're shutting Teltin down. What a disaster. We'll infiltrate and piggyback onto the Alliance's Ascension program. Hopefully that will - who are...?" The man in the recording suddenly took on a horrified expression. "Zero, wait!"
"Shepard." She actually grabbed his arm. "They started up somewhere else."
"Ascension is an Alliance program. It's a school for biotic kids." Kaidan had told him just a little about it, about how it was an improvement on what he'd gone through. "They don't torture children there."
"A lot of this..." She took a step back. "Isn't the way I remember it."
She'd just been a kid. "You couldn't have known."
"Maybe." She shook her head, the motion a little uncertain. "We're getting close to my cell. The place I came from. Let's keep going."
#
Krogan. Vorcha. And oh look, someone had given vorcha flamethrowers again. Why did people keep doing that? The krogan was on the radio with someone. "Hey Aresh, it's Kureck. Yeah, the intruders are here. You want them dead, we have to talk creds."
Michael exchanged a look with Garrus. Garrus clicked his mandibles. He couldn't help but be curious just how many credits they guy was about to charge to have his ass kicked.
"You promised us lots of salvage, but this place is a waste." Whoever was on the other end of the radio said something. "Fine - we'll put 'em down. Then I'm coming in there, and we're going to talk salvage."
"Over confidence is always so sad to see." Michael shook his head at Garrus.
Garrus nodded. "Glad we never have that problem."
Thane gave them a look. Michael shrugged, then raised his voice as he looked at the krogan. "You're in my way."
"Get them." The krogan went for his guns.
#
"Only room left is my old cell." Jack tossed Michael a heat sink. "Whoever Aresh is, he's in there." She shook her head. "I want to plant the bomb there, anyway. Might as well do it on his corpse."
"Alright." He checked the new heat sink. "Let's go welcome him to the neighborhood."
#
"Come out. We know you're here." He looked around the seemingly empty room.
A man, somewhat worn in appearance, came out of his hiding place. Jack frowned at him. "Who are you?"
"My name is Aresh, and you're breaking into my home." He gave Jack a second look. "I know you, Subject Zero." He shook his head. "So many years have passed, and I thought I was the only survivor."
Jack pointed her sidearm at him. "My name is Jack. How the hell do you know me?"
"We all knew your face, Jack. They inflicted horrors on us so their experiments wouldn't kill you." He waved a hand at her. "You were the question, and I'm still looking for the answer."
"Why did you come back here?" Michael narrowed his eyes.
"I hired these mercs and came back almost a solar year ago. We're rebuilding it, piece by piece." A strange gleam came into Aresh's eyes. "I'm going to find out what they knew - how to unlock true biotic potential in humans. I'm restarting the Teltin facility." He turned around. "It will be beautiful."
Well, hello crazy. Jack turned toward Michael. "I wanted a hole in the ground - he's trying to justify what happened by using it."
"You'd do the same thing to new kids?" Michael had to stop himself from breaking the man's jaw. Jack had first dibs. "Wasn't this forced on you?"
"Some were bought from poor families on Earth or kidnapped from colonies. Most ended up here the way I did: batarian pirates." His cousins could have been among the dead here. "They did such horrible things to us. They must have had good reasons."
"There's no reason good enough. Are you nuts?" Jack glared. "You lived it."
Aresh glared back. "Everything we went through must have been worth something."
"We can blow up the place, but that still leaves him." Michael shook his head at the pathetic wreck standing there. He didn't want that kind of shit on his ship. "What do we do with him?"
"That's easy." Jack walked past Aresh to look out the window.
"Just leave me here. This is where I belong."
"Fuck that." Jack whirled, and hit him with a biotic blast that knocked him to his knees.
He'd done a lot of things he wasn't proud of, but there were limits. Hard fucking lines in titanium. Hurting kids was one of those things. For just a moment, it was his father on the ground. No, this one was Jack's. "You're here to erase your past. He's part of that."
"I..." Jack looked up at him. "Shit, is this right? Will killing him fix my head?"
"You don't want the shot, I'll take it." Michael shrugged.
She looked down the sight. "Mine." And pulled the trigger. "That felt..." A small smile came to her face. "Good."
"A bullet in the head can solve a hell of a lot of things." Michael shrugged. "And so can a big fucking bomb."
"I like the way you think, Shepard." She looked around, and a strange look came over her face. "This room was my whole childhood. Give me a minute to look around."
He nodded, and stepped back. Garrus was looking around, but Thane was giving him a somewhat disapproving look. Seriously? The man was a damn assassin. Michael leaned on the wall, and watched Jack.
"Nothing's changed..." She walked around the room. "But it's all different." She walked toward the window, and he walked up beside her. "I thought that room out there was the rest of the world. I'd pound and yell. Never did any good."
She turned and looked at the bed. There was a thin coat of mold on the sheets. "Sometimes I dream that I'm back in this bed being tortured. I used to tie the sheets around my wrists and try to rip them off." How many nights had he hidden beneath his own bed? He hadn't thought about that boy in a long time. Most days, he just tried to pretend that life had never actually existed. That Montana was just some empty spot on the map. "I want to stop coming back here."
Her hand trailed across the table. "I used this table for everything. It was like my best friend. I'd crawl under it to cry." She looked down at her hand. "I was pathetic."
As they walked out of the room, she stopped. She gestured at some dark stains on the wall. "See the scarring on the wall here? That's where I killed my first man. One of the guards tried to stop me." She stood, her face proud. "Instead, I stopped him." She turned toward Michael. "Okay, no more wallowing. Let's blow this place to hell."
#
Setting the bomb only took a few minutes. He gave Jack the detonator. They were still in atmosphere when it occurred to him that might have been a mistake. She kept fiddling with it. She caught him looking, met his eyes, and pressed the button.
Michael nodded, then banged on the wall to tell the pilot to go faster.
The ride got just a little bumpy.
#
"Cutting through red tape is not a fucking excuse." He glared.
"You don't know that it was a sanctioned operation." Jacob shook his head.
"I know whose logos were all over that place. Seriously, if you people want to pretend your hands are clean, stop fucking signing your work." Michael folded his arms.
"You're right." Jacob looked down. He took a couple deep breaths. "You're right. That..." He sighed. "That should never have been allowed to happen."
"And just as importantly..." Michael took a step toward him. "It shouldn't be allowed to happen again."
#
"Done yelling?" Tali met him in the corridor.
"It's therapeutic. You should try it sometime."
"I wanted to ask you about a new part in engin -"
"Get it." Michael nodded to her.
Tali rocked back on her heels a little. "You don't even know what it is."
"Do you think it will improve the ship?"
"Yes."
"Then do it. Far as I'm concerned, you're chief engineer. If you can't buy it, then let Kasumi and I know where we can steal it." He shrugged. "You proved yourself to me a long time ago, Tali."
She bounced a little. "That means a lot to me, Shepard."
"Try not to blow up anything I'm going to miss."
#
Kaidan blinked, and then saluted. "At ease, Alenko." Hackett nodded.
"Admiral Hackett. I wasn't expecting to..." Kaidan shifted his bag to his shoulder.
"You're not on duty for another seventeen hours." Hackett shrugged. "Thought you could use a drink. And I know I could." He gestured at a mech. "That'll take your stuff to your bunk."
He dumped the bag in the cart, then followed Hackett. Hackett led him to an out of the way section of the bar, and indicated for the waitress to bring them a couple beers. He was trying to decide what to say when Hackett spoke again. "How'd he look?"
"He's got some new scars. Some cybernetics but..." Kaidan swallowed. "It's him."
Hackett leaned back in his chair, then looked Kaidan over. "You alright, son?"
"I, uh..." Kaidan shook his head. "Don't know."
"Work on getting that way." Hackett took a drink from his beer. "I'll work on getting Michael the good swift kick in the ass he needs."