Lazarus Rising

by KaiserKou

Like Lazarus of myth Commander Shepard is raised from the dead - only to find all his resources stripped from him and the galaxy on the brink of ultimate destruction. Can he trust those around him in the coming fight? Can he fight for the lost? They say it's a suicide mission. He intends to prove them wrong.

4. The Mercenary and the Professor

I actually tried to stop at 12000 words this time… but that went out the window, didn't it? So here's another massive chapter – and I'll try my hardest to make the next one at least a little shorter.

The theme song for this chapter is Stronger than All by Hammerfall… out of the sole reason that I couldn't make up my mind for anything else.

Also, thanks to my new Beta, neilin! Awesome dude, whose encouragement and insights are instrumental to this story. Cheers, mate!

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Chapter 4: The Mercenary and the Professor

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"Omega" Miranda muttered as she followed Shepard up the low stairs into the great club-fortress and centre of Aria's, queen of Omega, empire – the Afterlife club – leaving the dank and vile streets of the main district behind them as the bouncers let her and her entourage pass without protest. As far as they knew she was always allowed in there, and this was not the first time she had dealt with Aria. "What a pisshole. Every time I go here I feel I need to take a shower – in addition to the regular decontamination".

"At least it's not hard to find criminals here Garrus supplied from beside her, Shepard leading the team by walking first with the three of the squad members following after him, Jacob mostly silent while Miranda and the Turian talked. "All I had to do was point my shoot. Everyone's in a state of 'Proximus egomet mihi' on Omega, as we would say on Palaven. A breath of fresh air compared to the Citadel and the work I did there".

"At least here the criminals carry firearms" Miranda noted as they passed a group of Batarian troublemakers on their way out of the club, the armed thugs sneering at Shepard but not having the bravery to go up against a human in full armour who was also toting around an entire arsenal upon his body and the three highly trained combat experts he led. "Then again, so does everyone else too".

"Crime's a vague concept here, I've discovered" Garrus mentioned and they turned down the corridor and passed another line of security, this one headed by a lumbering Elcor, a great green-skinned brute who spoke ponderously and had to clarify his emotionless monotone speech by stating his intended tone before he spoke. "Citadel law doesn't apply in the Terminus systems, and on Omega there's only one rule".

"Don't fuck with Aria?" She had heard that many times when speaking to the Asari boss in question.

"Precisely" Garrus said as they entered the club proper, and Afterlife, Shepard discovered, was loud.

Really, really loud.

From all corners the music, electronic beats and alien sounds mixed together to form a thundering rhythm that burrowed into the ears, blasted from out of every angle of the vast club, and on the circular main level, edges lines with smaller booths and tables for those who wanted to make business or just sit down, the vast majority of the club consisted of a large dancefloor were humans and Turians and Batarians and Asari and even a few Salarians were dancing, all focused around a central circular bar that was the hub to the spokes and wheel that was the club. In the back of the room, past the crowd and the noise and the neon lights in pink and blue and venomous green, waited enforcers and bouncers with guns to guard the entrance to the VIP area. All around them, atop the bar and suspended in the air from rods attached to the high ceiling, danced Asari entertainers, blue alien women both slim and slender or otherwise, in skin-tight suits that put Miranda's to shame with their shameless sex appeal, though there was a great difference: they were strippers and whores, as far as she knew, and she was a warrior and an exemplar of humanity's genetic potential.

"I've had dealings with Aria before" Miranda noted to Shepard and the rest of the squad, who nodded as they made their way into the crowd that parted before them. "I'll go talk to her, smooth things over regarding the events in Kima district the other day and give her the datapad we recovered from Garm, the Blood Pack commander. Maybe she will give us the location of Dr Solus's clinic".

"You go do that" Shepard agreed over the mighty beat of the music blasting out around them, still completely ignoring all the Asari azure flesh on display while Jacob and Garrus couldn't seem to take their eyes off the strippers. Why wasn't he looking at them? He seemed to only have eyes for her, and not only was it disturbing, but… well, it was nothing more than disturbing. She certainly didn't think any higher of him for gazing only at her in that situation. She certainly didn't. "I'll go recruit our mercenary" he said, oblivious to Miranda lying to herself. "You're probably more diplomatic than me anyway".

"Of course" she nodded his way. "See you in half an hour, then" she said as she went towards the stairs in the back of the club that led up to the VIP section and Aria's throne, walking with some trepidation as she knew what was to come, while Shepard turned to find his target.

The target in question had been described in the Cerberus dossier as a consummate mercenary, having worked in the private sector ever since his retirement from the Alliance Marine Corps after the first contact war ended in 2157. His list of successful operations was three times the length of even Shepard's considerable record of achievement, though he had a tendency to be the only man in his squads to make it out of the missions alive, which made him… less than ideal for leadership positions. He was a scarred man, one eye blind and pale and the other one veiled in permanent mistrust where he was sitting alone in a both in the quietest reaches of Afterlife. Well, he wasn't quite alone where he was sitting with pistol at his hip and garbed in cobbled-together golden yellow armour that in places showed off his great and many tattoos. He was, with a lopsided grin, drinking slowly as he was softly conversing with the buxom Asari stripper dancing on the table before him when the three now Cerberus freelancers approached him.

"You Zaeed Massani?" Shepard asked as he took a seat opposite the scarred and armoured mercenary, the man narrowing one blind and one glaring eye at him.

"Depends on who's asking" came the rough reply in a British accent Shepard couldn't quite place but was fairly certain originated in lower London. "Who said you could sit at my table? Can't you see I'm fucking busy?" he jerked one gauntleted hand at the Asari stripper gyrating in front of him on the table. "Now piss off! I'm trying to drink myself to death in peace!"

"I'm Commander Shepard of the Normandy" he answered shortly, figuring this man was not one for frivolous ways and idle talk. "I'm… working with a certain organisation that have hired you for a very special kind of mission". Understanding flashed through Zaeed's good eye and his face became host to a gnarled and wicked grin.

"Well, why didn't you just fucking say so? Take a goddamn seat, all of you! Don't mind Serena – she doesn't mind, does she?" He looked up at the striper with a hopeful smirk as Garrus and Jacob each took a seat next to the old mercenary but made sure that their guns were within close range if they had to kill him. "Do you, love?"

"No freebies, human" she said in a coquettishly seductive voice, one that felt to the ear like the scales of a warm serpent did against the skin. "If they sit in, they got to pay their way". Zaeed cast a begging look at the other men, and Jacob acquiesced slowly and reluctantly while Garrus did so much eagerly, intent on some relaxation after the hell that had been the last few months of his life, leaving all four of them, soldiers and stripper both, looking to Shepard.

"Sorry" he said to the stripper that went with the name Serena on the clock. "I prefer my women to have actual skin and… well, you've got scalp crests. Not my cup of tea. Besides, I don't pay for this sort of thing, mostly". To wit the stripper shrugged and continued to dance to the other men, angled away from Shepard as he had not bought her services. "Is it alright if she listens in on this?" Shepard asked the old warhawk, who made a dismissive wave.

"Bah! She's working in Omega, Shepard – Shepard, was it? She's probably heard more assassination contracts being brokered and shady deals being shaken on this week than we would ever have chance to go through. So" he paused and sipped his Turian alien liquor, specially brewed to taste like Palaven rum but made from the amino-acid material that wouldn't make a human puke blood for a month "you're here for Cerberus, are you?"

"Yeah" Shepard nodded, uncertain about all of this. "I'm working with them for now. They needed my skills to take care of one troublesome little matter in which they have taken an interest. I've heard you've already got the mission briefing by the man in the high tower?" Even if you could mention Cerberus in public in a place like Afterlife it was best to never let it be known that you had been in direct contact with the Illusive Man. People who bespoke such things openly had a tendency to wind up tortured, mutilated and dead in a ditch on some backwater world. Cerberus had made a lot of enemies over the years, but the Illusive Man had made more.

"Aye, I sure have. Bloody piece of work it is, too. Normally I'd jog the fuck on and not look twice on a suicide job" the man took a deep gulp from his glass of Turian rum and paused, his look growing a little wistful beneath all the bloodlust "but I'm getting old".

"Is that the only reason?" Men like Zaeed… they didn't grow old. They burnt out rather than faded away, and there was no way that he would go gently into the good night, not a warrior who had been baptised in fire.

"Fuck no" the mercenary snorted, and Shepard was discovering that, despite for his angry ways, the old man was good company. "The money's good. Really damn good". He paused and downed the rest of his Turian drink, a glass that Garrus had been staring forlornly at, and then added with a cynical shrug. "And it beats buying a ship full of explosives and committing suicide by Omega – which I might still do anyway if I survive this job".

"There are worse ways to go" Garrus noted, and tipped the stripper, both actions that Zaeed seemed to approve of a great deal. "I can think of a few better ones, though… most of which involving the family mausoleum at Palaven and a nuclear bomb".

"Suicide mission?" Zaeed reflected dourly, his voice a long and wary drawl. "You know what, I'll say yes to this whole deal… provided you scratch my back before I scratch yours, Shepard". The commander narrowed his eyes at the mercenary, wondering what sort of drugs he was on that made him set demands for a mission's whose fee he had already taken. "Help me get sorted on one last contract later on – just your standard crash and smash affair – and beat me in a drinking contest here and now. After that I'll be your muscle".

Zaeed was a confident man when it came to his abilities with a rifle and blade and bomb, and even more so confident in his ability to drink any human under the table… but still he was a little shaken by the smile that came onto Shepard's face when that term was voiced, as was he by the terrified sigh uttered by the Turian who seemed to be his friend. "Sure" Shepard spoke, trying supress his glee. "What are we drinking?"

"How about some more Turian Vinium rum?" the old man suggested and made to summon a waitress, but Shepard shook his head and tutted disapprovingly. "What? You'd rather drink Earth microbrews, you pansy?"

"Let's take it up a notch – and then a few notches further, all the way to the top" he said then and looked to Garrus. "Save my seat, Vakarian, and don't spend all your money on the exotic dancer" he said as he rose and went for the bar, the Turian looking after him and then up at the stripper.

"You're very limber, hon" he noted in a drawl "but you're not very exotic, at least not to me. Humans, hmm?"

Shepard made his way to one of the many bars in Omega, elbowing his way through the crowd when he had to – which, considering he was fully armed and armoured from tip to toe and that humans had seemed to grow in respect after three unknown homo sapiens eradicated the entire Omega chapters of the Blue Suns, Eclipse and Blood Pack, was not very often – and in no time at all he approached the Turian bartender on the far left side of the main bar. He didn't try to approach the Batarian bartender that was giving him venomous looks from further down the bar, and he didn't even consider it. He'd been poisoned by Batarians back on Elysium, and he was not going through that again. "What can I get you, soldier?" the Turian bartender asked, her fringe tipped in blue paint to accentuate her features and make her seem more like the Asari kingpin she worked for.

"You see the guys over there, the ones I just went from?" Shepard indicated the far booth by the wall in which Jacob was being, against his will, made to "motorboat" the stripper on the table by the two rowdy and scarred veterans. "We're completing a business transaction and need to celebrate. You got a bottle of Ryncol or two on stock?"

"Ryncol?" she snorted in the way only amused Turians could and brought out four shot glasses and a bottle of the radioactive-looking liquor in question, a thick purple liquid spotted with green in places and more like a slurry than a drink, a picture of a charging, naked, laughing Krogan on the holographic label of the bottle. "Must be some business deal. Try not to shoot up the bar, okay? My boyfriend" she jerked her head at one of the Batarian enforcers standing guard for Aria near the stairs to the VIP section with rifle in hand "has a thing about throwing people out the airlock".

"Copy that" Shepard smiled, paid for the bottle and then went with it back to the table, where Zaeed was, in fiery terms and wide gestures, expounding on the virtues of the classic M-8 Avenger assault rifle over the more modern fare of weaponry in a debate with Garrus while Jacob seemed to be enthralled by Serena the stripper.

"You didn't go to the Batarian bartender, did you?" Garrus asked Shepard as the commander was back alongside his men. "He had a family back on Torfan – or so I heard. My contacts here on Omega says that he's been poisoning plenty of humans whenever he's got the chance".

"Bah!" Zaeed vocally disputed the severity of such things. "A little poison never hurt anyone! You could just walk it off-" Shepard, without little ceremony, demonstratively put the bottle on the table, and all eyes turned on him as even Serena stopped dancing. "Ha!" Zaeed whistled with a hideous grin coming onto his heavily scarred face. "Brilliant! Absolutely fucking brilliant!"

"I'm not getting paid enough for this shit" the Asari stripper grumbled and climbed off the table to Jacob's and Zaeed's protests. "Find me when you're not about to blow up the entire club, humans".

"Oh, come on, love! Don't go! We can snuggle!" Zaeed implored after her as she went before he turned back to Shepard with murder in his gaze. "You're going down, marine – mark my words".

"You've obviously never gone up against Shepard" Garrus quipped as Shepard placed a glass before each of them and filled it up with the syrupy Krogan liquor. "Careful, Shepard – shake a bottle of Ryncol too hard and you got yourself an incendiary grenade with a faulty timer".

"Aye" Zaeed agreed and took the glass the commander poured, sniffing the contents of it in eager apprehension. "Used a box of the damn things as Molotov Cocktails back on a mission in the Krogan DMZ in '75. Nearly took my bloody arm off, but it sure was fucking worth it to watch the bastards burn. Cheers!"

"Korbal!" Shepard echoed and thought of Wrex when he downed the shot alongside the others. Zaeed, when the liquor hit his system, twisted all the muscles in his face into a hideous grimace once in contact with the foul-tasting fluid, Jacob swallowing five more times than he needed to before he reached for his numb yet burning throat as he bashed his forehead against the surface of the table, and Garrus began shivering softly, his entire body shuddering as he made a series of strangled noises that were quite much like the songs of his biological forefathers in the silver jungles of ancient Palaven. Shepard, in the meanwhile, only made a face and shook his head a little, and barely so, causing the others to glare at him when he was barely affected. "I used to celebrate successful missions with a thousand years old Battlemaster" he quipped and then dropped his voice several octaves to make his best impression of a Krogan. "You squishy Pyjaks haven't got shit on me!"

"Fuck you, Shepard" Zaeed glared, his head already swimming from the liquor that had hit his system like it was ground glass mixed with sulphuric acid, which given the fact that he had no idea of what Ryncol was made from it might very well have actually been. "You set me up!"

"Hate the game, not the player" Shepard poured all of them another shot, grinning victoriously all the while. "I needed to only drink you under the table, did I? This shouldn't take too long".

"Bullshit, sir" Jacob noted in disbelief and wordlessly reached for his glass, confident in his own ability to handle anything of the recreational sort that came at him.

"Bring it on, Shepard" Garrus grunted almost playfully.

"Challenge accepted, dickhead" the old mercenary grumbled back at Shepard and downed another shot in tandem with the others. Five minutes later and after only one more shot things were… getting out of hand. "You know" Zaeed mused drunkenly as he gestured wildly with his hands "you knoow all of those Batarian pricks with their warbeasts? And those what-cha-ma-call-em… husks! Yeah, husks! Those dead things Saren used to run around with?"

"You fought husksss?" Garrus, whose avian metabolism greater subject to alcohol than the humans', wondered at the mercenary. "When did ya do that? And how can you tell the difference between them and normal humans? I mean, except for the glowy bits".

"Their skin's all different and stuff" Jacob noted from the reports he had read and made a face as he clutched his head, the ryncol hitting him like a truck full of Jägermeister all at once. And it tasted a hell of a lot worse…

"But you've got different skin from the other human's too" Garrus pointed out to Jacob, and then looked around the table as the mood grew tense. "What? Wasn't I supposed to notice that? I mean, is it some sort of illness or something-"

"Garrus!" Shepard snapped, eyes wide and voice harsh. "You can't say stuff like that!" He knew that he had alcohol tolerance that was out of this world given how he had been trained by Wrex and his liver fortified after that Batarian tech-expert bombed his lymphal system with neuro-toxin back on Elysium, but given how sober he was comparatively it was actually getting a little ridiculous.

"Racist prick" Zaeed muttered and looked to Jacob, taking another shot in tandem with the other humans as Garrus sat a little embarrassed to the side. "Humans come in all shapes and sizes and colours, Turian. We're to most genetically diverse lot in this entire fucking galaxy".

"How was I supposed to know that?" Garrus protested. "I don't know what skin colours humans are supposed to have! I've always assumed Shepard was the standard, and he's sort of pale and looks a lot like a husk! Do I look like a xenobiologist to you? The answer is no, no I don't – I'm a legionary from the 5th Stellar Legion and a C-Sec operative who dealt with Turians and Salarians and Asari and stuff… even a radical Hanar terrorist once. Oh, those big stupid jellyfishes-".

"You had a business venture to propose" Shepard went to Zaeed again, who nodded in recollection and set back on about explaining what he had earlier been saying, trying desperately to change the topic to something less culturally and racially insensitive.

"Alrright, alright. Here it is… to all of these buggers who think that breeding expendable shock troopers is the best fucking thing since white bread, I'd make a suggestion, mind you. I'd introduce the idiots to, and hold on to your knickers so you don't twist them around so hard that your head pops off… to the idea of a really big bomb. No more good-for-nothing grunts that you can instead put to work in the service sector or something. No more long forgotten races rising from the aether to rip your fucking face off. Just drop it and – boom! Arma-fucking-geddon! Your enemy's vaporised and their home's messed up beyond the efforts of any shampooing service, and you yourself got a shitload of dosh left… enough to give me my twenty-five percent and still have some left for a 'nobody died' party!"

"Whoa" Garrus seemed amazed at the idea.

"That's profound, sir" Jacob laid a brotherly hand in Zaeed's shoulder that was immediately slapped away.

"I hate drinking with you people" Shepard muttered and took another shot of ryncol, one that the others echoed. Fifteen minutes later, after finally dealing with Aria and receiving a lot of thinly veiled sexual innuendos from the Asari kingpin along with a few intimate propositions, all of which she rejected with extreme prejudice, Miranda made her way to their booth in the rear-most part of Afterlife to find Jacob passed out face-down in a plate of Asari calamari which he had ordered when he got the "munchies", Zaeed and Garrus trying to have some sort of discussion about revenge and the merits thereof and how much they loved each other, and she looked to Shepard who was sitting almost sullenly by the wayside, an entire half downed bottle of Ryncol before him. "Did you people install a new liver in me or something?" he wondered at the Cerberus agent as she approached. "Because getting drunk is proving… difficult".

"There's an implant in your liver that serves to filter away most kinds of impurities and poisons – an upgrade we thought it prudent for you to have" she looked to Jacob and cocked her head to the side. "Is he dead?"

"No… he just said that he thought me matching a Krogan shot-for-shot was impossible. He tried to go toe to toe with the Shepard, and look where it got him". He stood, a little gingerly from his aching muscles and his inebriation that was nowhere near as severe as that of the other three males, and slung Jacob up onto his back, having started to regain much of his earlier strength only a week after his resurrection at Miranda's hand. He had been training, training as hard as he only had before during his twenty hour training sessions during the first two months at ICT back on Earth, and even when he did sleep he had placed the electrical muscle stimulant pads given to him by Chakwas over his major muscle groups to regain muscle even when he slept. He ate three times as much as he usually did and took what felt like way too many drugs to make sure he didn't suffer from over-training or muscle degradation, and it was tiring… but as he dragged Jacob out from Afterlife with Miranda shepherding Garrus and Zaeed in front of her he was glad that it was already paying off.

"Shepard" Miranda spoke as he handed Jacob over to Garrus and Zaeed, making their way through the darkened and gloomy tunnels the led from the main mercantile area of Omega to the old repurposed wharfs where the Normandy was docked. "A word".

"Yeah" he nodded and fell in beside her as Garrus and Zaeed conversed loudly about entirely inappropriate matters. "You make any progress with Aria?" He would have thought that the dank filth of Omega would have rendered Miranda less beautiful to his eyes by proxy, but such was not the case. In fact it was more like she, a pristine pale and black and icy-blue flower, was all the more fair against the backdrop of the dung heap that was the station, and he had to make sure that he – no, she was not a flower but a person, a hell of a special person, and he was very much too drunk.

"I did" she spoke as severely as she had to him before the battle of Kima district, the tension between them rising once again as they weren't in close proximity to each other during the two days they had spent recuperating on the ship. "And that is what I wanted to talk about. Aria was very grateful for us taking out the conspiracy against her". At least her hands had been as she had been wanting to paw Miranda's posterior before the Cerberus agent had threatened to shoot her unless she started acting professionally again. "She owes us a favour, and Aria keeps her promises. We made a very powerful friend, Shepard. But there is a problem".

"She took the news of the mercenary coalition poorly?" he wondered.

"You could say that easily. She threw the datapad into the face of one of her enforcers and in short terms declared war on the Blood Pack and the Eclipse, but most of all the Blue Suns. They're the most numerous in this sector and the most powerful" she curled her lips wryly and scoffed "though not for much longer, I suspect".

"Look, look, look mate, I'm being completely fucking serious" Zaeed could be overheard drawling drunkenly to Garrus whilst the two of them carried an unconscious Jacob along with them. "They say they're just dancers, but that's just to keep the worst of the rabble off them. You be nice, you play your cards right, and you tip generously, and they might not be consorts like Sha'ira but they'll do their best damn impression of her, you mark my words".

"Did you find out where the Salarian professor is hiding?" Shepard asked Miranda, ignoring Garrus and Zaeed, to which she nodded.

"Yes, and that is the problem. He isn't hiding, Shepard – he runs a clinic in Gozu district, one of the lower levels of Omega that's been hit by a virulent plague that's deadly to every single species but humans, Krogans and Vorcha – and even Krogans get hit, they just survive it".

"Crap" he cursed and pinched the bridge of his nose, scowling before he gave Miranda a look. "And there's more, isn't there?"

"Perceptive, Commander. Yes: Gozu was controlled by the Blue Suns, who used it as a base of power and recruited from the populous there. But the Blue Suns chapter here on Omega was eradicated by us and any that are left are comparatively toothless. With the plague claiming more and more victims by the minute and Vorcha militias and scavengers roaming unchecked without the control of the Blue Suns the district is a warzone. Riots rage in the streets as Gozu burns". She paused as they rounded a corner and the airlock to the Normandy, guarded by two Cerberus crewmembers with assault rifles, came into sight. "We have to get the doctor out of there, and soon".

"Dammit!" Shepard snapped, not at her but at fate itself. "And here I thought that getting those bumbling idiots" he gestured at the three former soldiers up ahead who were stumbling up towards the airlock and demanded to be let inside "drunk was a good idea!" He gave Miranda a burning look. "You realise what this means, Miranda?"

"Yes, I do" she nodded in confirmation. "We have to get him out ourselves, just the two of us".

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"Why the bloody hell did the Commander sent us out to fetch this merc's stash?" Kenneth "Ken" Donnelly, former Alliance engineer with a master's degree in interstellar construction and vacuum engineering, specialising in the electrical engineering of spaceships and space stations, had been reduced to a damn bellboy, and he didn't like it. He and Gabby, Gabriella Daniels, his best friend in the whole galaxy and his secret crush – though he had never admitted that out not wanting to ruin their friendship or being friendzoned to oblivion – and Kelly Chambers, queen bee in the Lazarus Cell after that frosty bitch Lawson, had been called away from their duties to run errands. Errands!

Well, technically it was the mission of fetching the arsenal of one Zaeed Massani, who had stumbled drunkenly through the Normandy's airlock arm in arm with the newly recruited Garrus Vakarian singing a very out of tune version of the Turian anthem "Die for the Cause", followed by a frigid yet terrifying operative Lawson. Ken and Gabby had been loitering around the CIC – because there was bugger all else to do on the Normandy after having spent nearly three days docked to Omega – and so had been treated to the spectacle of being ordered by Lawson to go fetch this Zaeed character's weapons and armour and clothes from his apartment as he himself was obviously too drunk to do. Granted, that was an expedition through a criminal station, a wretched hive of scum and villainy if there ever was one, with only the three of them and their pistols as defence, but such peril paled in comparison to what the fighting members of the crew would be asked to do while fighting the Collectors for Cerberus.

So yes, it was an errand. A bloody errand! But when Shepard himself had stormed aboard the ship after Miranda Lawson, looking like he had found out that someone had pissed on his nan's grave so furious he was, no one had wanted to argue. And he did have that voice which you mostly heard from video game commanders from your entertainment system these days, so saying no to him was hard enough as it was already.

"This is… charming" Gabby said as they came in under the shadow of the Chrysalis building, a great monolith of a building that had originally been one of the supports holding up a massive hollowed out area in the centre of Omega's main asteroid, the ore in it depleted to leave a city under the vast dome of the old main mine and the undercity reaching down into the wards below it. Habitats and houses climbed the interior of that great dome and the supports that held it up, keeping it from shattering under the weight of its own artificial gravity system, had been used as the core of great skyscraper-like buildings, buildings like the Chrysalis. It was black and loomed like a monolith, or would have loomed if not for all of the other similar buildings that dotted the skyline of that infernal city, and was all the more imposing as Ken and Kelly, with Gabby following after along with a mass effect field-suspended transportation plate in tow. It was with no small amount of fear that Ken entered that building, though he tried to tell himself otherwise.

First Tokyo under Anderson, and then Perugia during the battle of the Citadel and facing down hell in the form of an ancient evil, the Reaper, Sovereign, Ken and Gabby had gone through the shadow of death and come out the other side. He was convinced that nothing the interior of the building had to offer that could frighten him anymore.

His bravado lasted all of five minutes.

"Geez, Ken!" Gabby exclaimed after the Scotsman had shrieked and jumped three feet into the air all of the sudden as they went down a corridor on the 67th floor, having taken the rattling elevator up. "It was just a rat. Keep your socks on".

"'Just a rat'? Did you see the bloody thing? It was ginormous! Larger than a cat!" he protested as they followed the corridor until the end of it and the metal door there on, the floors clean but worn, every single inch of the building bespeaking a sort of decay and carelessness that Gabby, in her often quiet but incredibly keen and sensible intelligence, found more than a little sad. What stories these walls could tell if they could talk… well, the building was low income housing on Omega and primarily inhabited by travelling mercenaries and pirates on shore leave, so no, on second thought she didn't want to hear the stories of that place.

Through that door they went, using the key handed to Kelly by Zaeed after having, slurring all the while, introduced himself to her with a lecherous "Hello, love", and inside that apartment they saw… "Wow" Ken breathed as he looked around after the automatic lights were switched on. "That's a lot of guns".

"Someone's a little bit paranoid, I think" Kelly avoided the trap rigged in the doorway and turned off the live proximity mine placed by the door with laser tripwire aimed so that anyone stepping unwarily through the door would get their legs taken off. Filling the walls, stacked high around them, were guns and rifles and grenades – most of them were the standard modern energy-pulse fare, though some used high-powered pellets and some were from the early days of the first contact war and used bullets – and the parts of the walls that weren't were covered in maps and reports and old pictures, pictures of groups of fully armed mercenaries that all included Zaeed, and in those photopaper pictures the faces of those mercenaries been crossed over with red marker, indicating that Massani was the only one left alive of the bunch. "There is a lot of things" the Yeoman further observed.

"Oh, well. Let's just load this stuff up on the sodding cart and get going" Kenneth grumbled and hoisted up a crate of grenades taken from one of the stacks onto the lowly hovering carrier plate, looking wryly at the gathered explosive devices and handling them with care. He was usually a careless man, but around firearms and explosives it was a completely different story. Every member of the Alliance Engineering Corps was considered a marine per default, as they were stationed on ships but could be deployed planetside to build and maintain installations and military vehicles, and so every member of the AEC had to undergo rudimentary combat training, trained to shoot with both assault rifles and pistols. Ken had, however, been really bad at shooting and was by nature skittish around guns. Gabby, fortunately enough, did not have that problem.

"This man, Zaeed, seems to be an angry sort" she remarked as she carried another crate of explosives, plastic ones this time, past a picture on the wall of a dark man with near-black eyes and a callous cast to his features in a blue armour, an image that had seemed to be used as targeting board by the old mercenary for his practice with throwing daggers and darts. "Wouldn't want to get on his bad side".

"His psych-profile indicates that he is quite stable" Chambers protested as she began to lift guns and rifles off of the walls and sorting them according to type. "He is angry and bitter, quite certainly – but he's far from the most aggressive or unstable or even the potential recruit with the darkest past amongst all the ones we endeavour to bring in". Getting another box of explosives she struggled a bit under the weight of it, and Ken hurried over to her side, taking it from her hands. "Thank you, Kenneth".

"You can ask me to handle your box any time, Chambers" he grinned at her as he placed the crate on carrier tray, and the Yeoman didn't seem to be repulsed by his lecherous ways but instead was about to flirt back. Gabby narrowed her eyes at the other woman. No, she didn't trust her. Not one bit.

"Is the Commander going to be recruiting more crazy people?" she inquired loudly to keep the hag's claws out of her Kenny.

"We need several experts, human or otherwise, to fight the collectors" the Cerberus Yeoman said in a non-committal sort of way. "Speaking of the Commander" Kelly said from aside as she loaded another crate of grenades, the last one, onto their little ferry system. "Have you had any interaction with him since you were assigned to the crew of the Normandy?"

"Of course we have" Ken said before Gabby could tell him to shut up, as she was convinced that the Cerberus bitch would not have their idol and Commander's best interest at heart given her alliance to Cerberus. They were terrorists, in Gabby's mind at least, and the only reason she and Ken had joined them was because Cerberus had believed in Commander Shepard when no one else had, bringing him back to life and sending him to fight an enemy that no one else had the guts to face. Chambers had been with Cerberus since before Shepard and Lazarus. She was not to be trusted. "He made the rounds around the ship as soon as he was done with his first debriefing by the Illusive Man – though he did mention having been to the armoury and ordering some sweet weaponry from that sexy robot voice. He stopped by and talked to us for the longest while, so he did".

"Oh?" Chambers asked, seemingly only casually interested, but Gabby knew otherwise. "What did you talk about?"

"Well, about our service history and about how it was no longer being in the Alliance" Ken chatted amicably on and on. "And he asked where we trained and how we joined Cerberus and stuff. Nothing more than small talk – tough he liked that we saluted. Made him feel more at home, I think".

"I see" Chambers seemed to note that fact down for future reference. "How about you, Daniels? How did you perceive the Commander?"

"He seemed at home, glad to be back on a ship" she admitted in a non-committal, not wanting to reveal too much. "And surprisingly social. He said he was making the rounds and getting to know all of his crew. Not even Anderson was like that when we served under him".

"You don't mention that he asked you upgrade his Omni-tool?" Ugh, sometimes she just wanted to smack that man as he ran his mouth much more than he should've. "See, Kelly love, he was trying to sync his Omni-tool up with ours, so that he could communicate directly with the engineer deck if he needed to, but it wasn't working. So Gabby takes one look at it and low and behold, the thing's fried deeper than a battered sausage. He scratches his head and says 'Hold on a wee moment' and goes to fetch a new one from the armoury, and me and Gabby thinks he's not gonna come back. But then he does, and asks us to help him get it up and running and optimised. For a marine grunt he's pretty sharp, and quite nice actually".

"Really?" Chambers asked, sounding interested even over the sound of Gabby grinding her teeth together in frustration at the openness of her fellow engineer. "You said she upgraded it?"

"Aye, so she did. Installed the military edition software onto it, with all kinds of awesome plugins. Combat hacking, overload protocols, incendiary programs for when you have access to plastic explosives and cold-shot ones for when you got the same for liquid nitrogen canisters. Direct grenade interface, armour electrocution shots, Alliance military drone interface, even training simulations of all kinds and advanced hacking tutorials – I doubt he knows how to use half of all of those things, but we went all the way. It's an Omni-tool fit for a tech-expert".

"That seems quite handy" Kelly smiled at both of them, looking like she was nothing but appreciative of their efforts. "I'm sure the Commander was very happy with all the upgrades, Kenneth, Gabriella". You have to earn the right to call me that, bitch, Gabby growled mentally but forced herself to smile back at the woman. Who knew what might happen to the two of them if they showed hostility to Cerberus. That organisation had done worse than killing to its own people for less.

"Not the mad stars raving round me" Ken sang idly as he worked, using it to occupy his idle mind while his body toiled with taking rifles off the walls. "Cannon's flash or thunder's roll" it was a folk song often sung by his mother to him as they worked in the late nights over the by her designed cross-sections of warships together. "Not the Reaper's rage could wound me / While her image fill'd my soul!" He had, of course modified the lyrics somewhat to fit their situation.

Gabby liked his singing. The man had many faults: he was neurotic, complained all of the time, and was generally a sexist arse and quite a bit of a lecher. But by God could he sing, and sometimes when toiling by the ship's engines his eyes could grow so soft and tender as he sang, as if he would over a child of his very own. He was so smart in some ways, but so stupid in others, and despite that his behaviour often frustrated Gabby to no end she would always be there to take care of him. He had no one else know, and he wouldn't make it on his own.

And she, thought she tried to convince herself otherwise, would not make it through all the coming horror without him.

---

"You know, for a while back there while chasing Saren I used to wear white armour" Shepard commented when they had passed the security checkpoint and entered the elevator to take them down about half a mile through the old mining complex that was Omega to the Gozu district. "You know, the standard Alliance navy White and Blue, or black and blue for marines, or white and red if you're some sort of infantry jarhead. Trust me, it gets you nowhere the same effect as the red and black. People are terrified when you show up and loom when you're in black and crimson armour. Do you loom, Miranda?"

"I've found that many other things besides sheer size can be imposing, Shepard" she replied as the elevator down to the lower levels, one of many, began to move to the sound of softly grating metal and whirring machinery. "Intelligence, for one. One's intellect can tower over others as well as one's stature, and perhaps even more so in certain situations".

"Indeed" he had to agree that she certainly was… imposing. And beautiful… but she wasn't Ash.

Him and Ashley… he thought that they had something special together, with the way they just clicked together perfectly, like two pieces of a puzzle. He wasn't sure that it was love, perhaps not quite, but she was supportive, she was familiar, and she was good to have around – and in that situation, as they were heading towards certain doom on Ilos, she had been just what he needed. But… he had looked for her over the extra-net after Illusive Man said she had rejoined the main Alliance Military, trying to pull any strings he had left to get to know where she had gone, what she was doing, if she had moved on. The only thing his questing proved wat the Illusive Man's claim that her files and service seemed surprisingly well classified. And besides… he wasn't so sure about her anymore. After dying and coming back he wasn't sure about anything anymore.

"Do you have a plan, Shepard?" Miranda asked after some period spent in heavy silence between the two as they descended into the depths of the station and thus woke him from his dark thoughts. "According to Aria her men are trying to hold the perimeter and restore order, but they aren't soldiers. We are walking into a warzone, Commander. What is your plan of action?"

"It's best of we try to stay off the main streets and out of the carnage as much as we can" he pondered and scratched his chin, the plate of his black gauntlets cold against his stubbled skin. "I've never done riot-control or urban warfare of this kind. Elysium and Torfan were all out attacks, and the Citadel Presidium was mostly empty when Saren and Sovereign hit it. Your guess is probably as good as mine. You have any idea of where in the district the clinic is?"

"We're out of luck, Shepard" she said as she brought out her Omni-tool, scouring the data Aria had provided. "Dr Solus's clinic is in the middle of Gozu district, nearly a mile away. And if the information I've received is accurate-" the elevator hit the bottom trench and the doors slid open, revealing a look that seemed to be into hell itself. "Oh God".

Fires, in apartments and in the homes and in the streets and on the terraces, filed Gozu district. Chemical torches were held aloft in the gloom of a district quenched in darkness, the sounds of breaking glass and blaring sirens and the screams of the raging and the damned making the distant hum of the life support system's fans all but impossible to hear through the chaos, and lit by fire shadows of terrified aliens roamed the streets, hunched over and delirious and their mouths dripping with bloody bile as the plague ravaged their bodies. Immediately before them lay a security station where guards, a few Krogan backed by a large group of humans with rifles and guns, all of them under Aria's employ, and beyond the gates of that checkpoint a large crowd was trying to force their way out of Gozu, trapped and delirious and dying in their violence.

"Crap" Shepard muttered and looked over his shoulder at the weapons strapped to his back. "Well, sniper rifle's useless, I guess. I don't have any concussive rounds for the Typhoon… guess it's Crusader time" he went on as Miranda, having herself no compunctions about being brutal towards the civilian populous, pulled free her submachine gun, a custom gilded black M-9 Tempest SMG she had designed herself to preform precisely to her specifications. She used her Omni-tool to spec its shots to a slightly slower velocity but to go through a di-glycitine treatment on their way through the barrel, making them essentially burn upon contact with oxygen. She had magnesium bullets for just such occasions that were slightly more incendiary, but it was best to not waste such precious resources on crowd control.

Some persuasion from Shepard was all it took for the Krogan overseer to let her and Shepard through, which required him and his men to fire upon the crowd – which it seemed that the battle-hungry berserker had been itching to do for the longest time judging by the gusto with which he slung his shotgun around to use as a club and batter the closest civilian over the head with. However, this wasn't the best of ideas, as it turned out, as the crowd took issue with such callous cruelty and stormed the secrutiy checkpoint, Miranda and Shepard managing to slip through the chaos without firing a single shot of their own, sprinting for a rear alley as what seemed like thousands of enraged citizens stormed down the street with makeshift weapons held aloft.

"I told you" she panted as they stood in the shadows of that alleyway, waiting and hoping that the mob would pass them by. "I told you. When you first got aboard the Normandy, after I introduced you to EDI and the crew" she bent her head backwards to make air flow down her lungs faster. "I told you then that you should have gone for Solus first. But did you listen?" she shook her head in rhetorical frustration. "Of course you bloody well didn't".

"Yeah, well hindsight's twenty-twenty" he snapped back at her as he gazed carefully out of the mouth of that alley, eyes sharp and his every sense on full alert. "What's done is done. Your boss told me the same thing, so that's why I maybe didn't listen. I don't like terrorists telling me what to do". She opened her mouth to argue only to find a metal-plated finger upon her lips, Shepard silencing her even as he kept gazing out of that alleyway. "Save it, princess. We don't have time to banter right now. We're not getting back out that way – we need to find another route to the clinic". He snapped his gaze to hers, steely and determined. "Can you find us one?"

"Ass" she muttered his way as she brought up her Omni-tool and pulled up a layout of the district from off of the extranet, scowling at it like she would have at a tear in her favourite Cerberus uniform. "We can circumvent most of the riots if we go the long way around the eastern part of the district" she pondered their options. "But that will take us dangerously close to Vorcha territory, according to Aria's information. When she isn't trying to get into my pants she's quite resourceful".

"Keep your snide remarks to yourself, Lawson" the Commander barked as he regained his breath before he even registered Miranda's actual words, hearing little but the tone in her speech. "What's the quickest way to the clinic? Vorcha ain't got nothing on me and my ballistic barrage".

"If you think that you're going to be fighting through legions of alien rodents to get to the Professor then you can do so on your own" she muttered sourly, regarding the map even as she hoped that what she had stepped in back there had been just water, not… ugh. His glare her way caused her to sigh and focus on the matter at hand, and so she sketched out a vague path for them to follow, upon which they subsequently embarked on.

Gozu lay near the bottom of Omega, the home of the permanent residents who had nowhere else to go or who made a living off feeding from the dreg that seeped through the cracks from the city above. Humans, Batarians, exiles from the Turian colonies who had no place in the Hierarchy: one could find all sorts in Gozu district, and in their extreme poverty all of them were equal. The plague had changed that and stripped the thin veneer off of the underground society, and so it was that Miranda and Shepard, walking carefully and pacing slowly as not to arise any suspicion from the few people that still roamed the streets, they went.

On the edge of the city slum block that housed the Salarian professor's clinic they found a Batarian sloughed against a wall, remarkable over the fact that he was in armour rather than in civilian clothing, a rifle lying discarded beside him. "Human" he coughed, the bile running down his cheeks coloured red with the blood pouring into his lungs. "Should've guessed". His fingers reached for the barrel of his sniper rifle as Shepard and Miranda approached the corner where he sat but his hands lacked the strength to grip it, and so his hand sloughed to the ground in deathly hopelessness. "Bad enough that you inflict us with the plague. Now you lack the decency to even wait until I die before you come to steal my possessions".

Shepard stopped, to Miranda's great ire, and chose to stay by the Batarian male, kindness and mercy the only things upon his face as he beheld that fallen warrior. "Is there anything I can do for you?" he wondered, and got naught but bile in return.

"Get away from me, human! Your kind has done too much already!" the Batarian snapped, one of his four eyes bleeding around the edges from the sickness that ravaged his body. "Your plague did this to me. Your feigned pity is the final insult". He coughed raggedly, blood spilling from his lips as his chest arched in struggled cramps. "Damn you- damn it… I can't even… I can't"

"Hey!" Shepard barked and crouched down before the batarian, slapping him gently over the face to keep him alert even as he reached for the canister of medi-gel by his lower hip. "Khas'kou-tah! Stay with me!" he spoke as he pooped off the Batarian's breastplate and ripped through the thin cloth beneath, smearing a large portion of Medi-gel onto the male's aching muscles. "This won't cure the plague, but it might relax your chest muscles, help your breathing". Shepard looked up at his XO as he took one of the Batarian's arms over his shoulder and stood gingerly. "Miranda, we've got to get him to the clinic. He doesn't have much time".

"Certainly, Commander" she narrowed her eyes at him, showing her disproval but voicing it not as she followed after Shepard, shouldering the Batarian and holding him upright, as they made their way towards the central clinic. He was doing nothing but wasting their time, wasn't he? And hadn't he fought Batarians for most of his career? Weren't they the enemy, even if some things he had said previously indicated that he respected them to some small degree?

"You… you helped me" came the wheezing words from the male's cramped throat made dry and ragged by pain and misery, his tone bewildered still and all but lost. "You spoke our language… it wasn't the translator that did that… why?"

"S'traakha… it's what I do" Shepard replied as they rounded another corner, hiding from another raging mob in the shadows of an alley before they snuck out again, moving to see the clinic stand before them, more a fortress than a hospital. "I don't know if I can find a cure for this plague, but I'm going to try. Khar'ten kai – a warrior's promise". Bodies dangled from the jutting balconies of that clinic by nooses, Blue Suns mercenaries' corpses rotting still in their armour as to ward off any who sought to enter the low concrete building's double glass doors with ill intent. "What's your name, warrior?"

"Gahak" came the rugged answer as they went to stand in the shadow of that door, Miranda and Shepard assuring the automated defence mechs at the gates that they meant to do no hostility within the clinic despite their weapons and armour. "Your words… they sound sincere". He seemed surprised, Miranda reflected as they came into a large waiting room lined with Batarians and Turians deep in the grips of the plague, human aides tending to them wearing armlets in white and red to designate that they were clinic aides. "Maybe it's the fever, but… you have honour" Gahak coughed, letting out another large lump of bloody slime upon the already grimy metal floor. "Rare… in a human". Four wary eyes looked at Shepard without hatred, having in them only the resignation of the tortured and a longing for death. "Have you killed many of my kind, warrior?"

"I have" Shepard answered slowly, as if reluctantly, as they moved deeper into the clinic, down a corridor to another waiting room "but always in battle, and never wastefully. Your kin's eyes were whole when they died, I assure you". His words were interrupted by the Batarian suddenly jerking under his own weight, foaming at the mouth and collapsing to the floor of the crowded hallway. "Get him some help, now!" Shepard roared at the nearest aide, who hurried over as she did not want to dispute a man carrying with him so much firepower upon his body. "He's seizing up! I can't-" he spoke almost helplessly as that aide and a few of her co-workers took Gahak the Batarian away for treatment, and as he stood in the hallway looking lost Miranda lay a hand upon the shoulder of his armour.

"Shepard, you can't save them all" she said, just like she had before and would do again, though her words were more pitiful this time, more understanding and caring for his needs. "Just… you did what you could. You can do a lot of things, but you're not a god". She pulled him with her as they headed deeper into the clinic, speaking to the now quiet warrior in black armour to reassure him and maintain his convictions. "Stay on target: find the Professor. Then we can find a cure, and maybe save those that can be saved".

Slowly Shepard nodded, brightening a little at her rarely seen caring side – though it was a role she had adopted for the sake of keeping him focused and not something she had any actuall proficiency in doing – and together they searched through the clinic. In the end they found who they were looking for, standing over a workbench in the same room as two medical assistants and a now dead Turian upon an operating table, working efficiently and outwardly completely calm despite the emotional wrecks that were his two aides who had just lost another patient to the plague. "Professor Mordin Solus?"

"Hmm". The Salarian was old for his species, meaning that he was somewhere in the mid-thirties, and his large and bug-like black eyes displayed an intelligence that was both dizzying in scope and nauseating in speed as he examined the two approaching humans. "Don't recognize you from area. Too well-armed to be refugees. No mercenary uniform. Quarantine still in effect". Miranda, who was regarding him in return, saw that he carried his red and white doctor's robe on top of a set of Salarian military fatigues, betraying a commando background. "Here for something else. Vorcha? Crew to clean them out? Unlikely. Vorcha a symptom, not a cause". He cocked his head to the side even as he worked, narrowing black eyes just a hint. "The plague? Investigating possible use as bio-weapon? No. Too many guns, not enough data equipment. Soldiers, not scientists". He moved to another bench, holding a vial of extracted viscera upon which he had run tests and applying a protein stimulant and dialyctic acid to speed up the gestation process of the virus he was examining. "Hired guns, maybe? Looking for someone? Yes!" the Salarian nodded both at them, his own deduction and the results he saw on the slab before him. "But who? Someone important. Valuable. Someone with secrets. Someone like me".

"Relax, Mordin" Shepard told him in his deep voice and stepped around to come face to face with the doctor, urging calm by his tone. "I'm Commander Shepard, and I came here to find you. I'm on a critical mission, and I need your help".

"Mission?" the Salarian wondered but then shook his head. "What mission? No. Too busy. Clinic understaffed. Plague spreading too fast. Who sent you?" Miranda hoped that Shepard wasn't overly blunt about explaining things as he usually was when that question was posed.

"Ever heard of an organisation called Cerberus?" But unfortunately she was still dealing with Shepard, who had about as much subtlety as a brick in a dishwasher.

"Crossed paths on occasion. Thought they only worked with humans". Mordin narrowed his eyes, his spider-like fingers going up to his head to touch the fleshy horns upon the crest of his head, one of them broken off and scarred over, his armoured fingerpads trailing over it in what seemed to be a nervous tick. "Why request Salarian aid?"

"I'm on a mission to shut down the Collectors, and I need your help". Well, Miranda noted, it seemed that the Doctor was responding well to the direct approach, and that maybe he and Shepard could work together with little issue.

"Collectors? Interesting" the Salarian noted, pondering the matter rapidly. "Plague hitting the slums is engineered. Collectors one of few groups with technology to design it". Nodding the Salarian turned fully towards Shepard and Miranda- "Our goals may be similar". He retrieved a heavy vial, the results of his earlier experiments, from its metal cradle upon his desk, a desk already littered with medical paraphernalia, all glittering contemptuously in the gloomy light of that clinic basement. "But most stop plague first. Already have a cure. Need to distribute it at environmental control centre. Vorcha guarding it. Need to kill them".

Shepard, frustrated with his inability to fight a sickness and the terrors they had seen around them, sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose at that. "Why can't anyone ever just say 'Sure! Let's go right now! No strings attached'?" he grumbled venomously.

"Shepard, that is childish and spiteful". Miranda's voice hit him like a barbed whip across the back, the Cerberus operative moving to stand beside him. "Pardon him, doctor. He has a tendency to get… emotional". The Salarian was about to indicate his head in a dismissal of both apology and perceived wrong when suddenly a low siren began to whirr in the clinic, and the low hum that had been so constant all throughout Shepard's and Miranda's treck through the chaotic district was silenced, it's absence deafening and terrifying both. "What the hell was that?"

"Vorcha have shut down environmental systems. Trying to kill everyone. Need to get power back before district suffocates". Mordin seemed, however, to be in no greater hurry than before as he took the vial from its cradle and made as if to hand it to Shepard. "Here, take plague cure. Four conditions for joining Cerberus". Shepard, taking he cure warily, nodded and agreed to listen. "One: reactivate environmental systems. Two: help distribute cure".

"And the other two?" he wondered, scowling darkly.

"Works for Cerberus, soldiers, privately funded. Therefore resources. Considerable resources. Likely has ship, crew. Since Cerberus: all likely human. Highly trained. Immune to plague". Shepard and Miranda both nodded, to which the Salarian noted as if obvious, his deductive reasoning superb. "Conditions three and four: help secure clinic. Restore order in district with highly trained crew. Then will join you".

"Is that all?" Miranda wondered, thinking that it was the Commander's own descision to make… but in knowing him he would jump at the chance to help the helpless of Gozu district.

"One more thing. Daniel. One of my assistants. Went into Vorcha territory. Looking for victims. Hasn't come back". There was a hint of a plea in the Salarian's voice, and Shepard, being the big softy that he actually was, took to it hook, line and sinker.

"If I see him, I'll do what I can to help" the Commander rapidly agreed.

"Thank you. Told him not to go. But he's smart. Bright future". His eyes darkened for the fraction of a second. "I hope".

"I found a Batarian victim near the entrance to the district. His name is Gahak. I brought him in upstairs". Shepard spoke carefully, making sure that it verbally came across that this was the counter-proposal for the previous secondary requirement. "Could you make sure he gets his treatment?"

"Gahak? Batarian fighter, former pirate. Vorcha hunter, good with sniper rifle. Has reputation" Mordin noted rapidly as if knowing about the plague-stricken victim in question, showing extensive knowledge of the district in which he worked. "Will see what I can do".

"Then we best get going" Shepard said and moved towards the door, heading for Environmental Control and the salvation of Gozu district therein.

However, getting to the place they needed to go was a project more easily undertaken than completed.

The district through which the nearest sizeable service hatch to Environmental Control was, as Aria had informed Miranda, under Vorcha control, and though people still lived there sparsely they were often the poorest of the poor, looters besetting them when the Vorcha did not now that the Blue Suns no longer were there to maintain control. Shepard and Miranda had to fight tooth and nail through most of the neighbourhood, but once they came across a sizeable Vorcha patrol there seemed to be no more immediate enemies after Miranda had downed the last fleeing Vorcha with a single well-aimed shot to the back of the head.

"Where did you learn to shoot?" Shepard whistled, impressed, as they stood from out of cover and kept making their way through the Vorcha-infested reaches of the slums. He was in a better mood then, for Vorcha were an enemy he could fight, something he could beat, something that wasn't as invisible or insidious as a sickness. As they went, in no small hurry but needing to pass the time through the silence somehow, he tried to reach out to her.

"Private tutors" she answered defensively, rejecting his attempts at any sort of cordial proximity. "Why? Why do you ask?"

"Just trying to get to know my XO" he jabbed, concerned by the suddenly so cold shoulder she was giving him. "Tell me more about yourself, Miranda".

"Is this really the right time for this?" she sighed and put her hand to her forehead. Dammit, this inconsolable idiot was going to give her wrinkles, wasn't he? "I guess that's fair" she admitted when he gave her a questioning look that said that they might very well be dead by dawn the next day. "I've spent the last two years spent learning everything there is to know about you".

"Everything…?" he wondered, swallowing hard at the thought. Did she know about the…? And the…? Even about the…? Oh, no, this was the worst breach of privacy in the history of the galaxy.

"Everything, Commander" she verified as they slowly made their way down the carnage-littered street, eyes trained on the Vorcha infested gloom before them. "Well, about me… you should probably know that I've had extensive genetic modification. It wasn't my decision, but I make the most of it. It's one of the reasons the Illusive Man handpicked me for this mission: I'm very good at just about anything I choose to do".

"I see". Ah ha! He had an inkling for the longest time that those gratuitous gravity defying breasts of hers hadn't been all natural, and he had been right all along. Score one for Shepard, he noted internally before he actually took in the gravity of what she was saying. "You certainly don't lack for confidence".

"It's just a fact, Shepard" she said then, icy blue eyes narrowing as she gazed down into the darkness of Omega's deepest levels. "My reflexes, my strength, even my looks: they were all designed to give me an edge. There is no point in hiding from it". She seemed… not very enthusiastic about it all the same, he remarked internally as he watched her facial expression carefully – though her face hardly gave anything at all away. "It's the reason I'm trusted to oversee the most dangerous, risky, and technically demanding operations Cerberus undertakes". She cast a look his way to inform him that she very well knew that he was staring at her. "And it's why I was assigned to you. It's my job to make sure you succeed".

"So" he said as they made their way towards the residential district detailed on their maps by the Salarian professor, his eyes now locked again on the darkness ahead, wondering where all the damn Vorcha had gone. "What level of genetic modification are we talking here? I myself got some stuff put in by MarsGene, but only against genetic diseases or hereditary disorders and the bad crap… and the ones against muscle and bone-matter degradation during space travel".

"It's very thorough" she assured him as she aimed her gun at something in the distance, but it scurried away before she could determine what it was. "Physically I'm superior in many ways. I heal quickly and I'll likely live half again as long as the average human. My biotic abilities are quite advanced as well… for a human" she demonstrated by picking up a turned over hoverbike that were laying in their way and sending it crashing into the distant darkness in a biotic blue haze. "Add to that some of the best training and education credits can buy and it's all rather impressive, really".

He regarded her back as she moved ahead into the right residential district, the one where the largest emergency vent to the EC ducts lay past the balcony of one of the larger habitats. "Sounds like you were made to be perfect" he said to that white shape in the gloom, and he had to admit that even her back was sexy, slim and supple yet muscular, her every shape defined through her suit.

"Maybe, but I'm not" she spoke in a darker tone. "I'm still human, Shepard. I make mistakes just like everyone else – and when I do the consequences can be severe. Everyone expects a lot from someone with my… abilities". In the distance, from the place in which the vents and service tunnels they were heading for lay, they heard a rattling, and immediately the pair of them fell silent, approaching the ruckus that came out of a humble but well-built residence in a slow stalk.

"Please… I'm telling you the truth!" came the voice from within as Shepard crouched down and peered in through a window at the front of the residence, seeing five humans, unarmed all, crouching down on the floor as four Batarian looters with guns stood looming over them, snarling and ready to kill. "I work for Mordin at the clinic. I came to help you!" The speaker was a skinny young man, idealistic and frail, a large duffle-bag of medical supplied by his side as he tried to remain brave in the face of certain death.

"Silence, vermin!" The leader of the looters, having no desire to indulge in the weeping of one pitiful human, slammed the butt of his gun over the young man's face and, in breaking his nose with a wet crunch, send him down to the floor, speaking up to the other looters. "Saret! Dishak! Kishock! Hurry up! We need to get out of here before the Vorcha smell these humans and come back!"

"Ever had a human woman?" one of the other looters asked their leader, looming over the two women, a daughter and her mother even as the last two, an old man beaten to a pulp and his cowering son, lay cowering to the side in the shattered remains of their home. "Their flesh is supple, soft. They taste so good". Miranda at first thought he was referring to some sort of sexual deviation, but as she saw that the Batarian pulled heavy and blood-stained cleaver from his hip she realised that the looter meant something entirely different but certainly no less disturbing. "When you eat their skin you need no spice. The fear adds enough of it when you bite into their flesh-"

Shepard, growling all the while, had enough of listening idly by, and in a stark silence he gathered his biotics around his limbs and all but poured forth through that broken window, slamming into the two rear-most looters with terrifying speed, avoiding to use his firearms in close quarters as he didn't want to accidentally hit the innocent civilians the looters were extorting and intending on cannibalising. The first one died when he lashed out with an arm and punched straight through her unarmoured body, the second when his neck snapped under the weight of Shepard's iron grip. The third, the leader, had all but no time to raise his voice in a shout before Miranda, striking like a viper, rose from cover and shot him through the head even as Shepard charged the last looter. Him he attacked viciously – he struck its throat to crush its unprotected voice-box with his armoured fist before he wrenched the cleaver from its hand and slammed it twice into the looter's face, slicing all four of its eyes in half in a clearly ritualistic manner, before he ended it all with a single slice to the neck, Batarian blood splattering over his face in a red so dark it was almost black.

"Even most Batarians think the eating of other sentient beings nothing but barbarism" he spoke aloud to the room as he panted, the family before him stunned by the sudden burst of violence, the young doctor especially staring wide of eye at the corpses. "Are you alright?"

"You- you killed them!" the young doctor gasped even as the family, unrelated to him and all of them simply victims of circumstance, rose from their places on the floor, the mother helping her son and daughter to stand.

"Of course he did" the older man shot back at the doctor before he turned to their saviour. "I… thank you, good man! Without you… I hate to think what those disgusting aliens would have done to us!" Shepard held back a snarl at that, but the man went on regardless. "I… I need to pay you for this. A man's got to make his way… don't you see?" He was an old man, tired and wan and in threadbare clothes, but he was stubborn as well as prematurely white of hair, and Shepard could tell that this was the kind of man he least of all approved off.

"I'm not doing this for money, Mr" Shepard spoke back, but he was interrupted.

"Lawrence. Bill Lawrence – and I insist. My family" they came up behind him as if to lend him support, their seventeen years old son helping the medical aide, clearly the Daniel to which Mordin had been referring to before, to his feet. Miranda and Shepard both noted the young man's Omni-tool, active around his arm – it was scarlet red instead of the common orange, which was a rare thing in the civilian sector. It must have been a prised possession indeed. "We can't just let you save our lives without getting anything in return".

"Well, Mister Lawrence, I think you're being insane and an ass wanting to pay for what's freely given, but" Shepard shrugged while sighing "what the hoo-ha". He looked them over, not wanting to take anything that was of any real value, but if they insisted… "Hey, you" he said to the young man who was now crouching down with his scarlet Omni-tool by the side trying to get into connection with his friends. "What's your name?"

"J-Joshua, sir" the lad stammered out as the man in the dark armour towered over him, terrified by his mere presence and blood-splattered appearance.

"Your friends and family call you Josh, don't they?" Shepard wondered, to which the boy rapidly nodded. "Well, Josh, I'm Commander Shepard, and I'm your friend too. I'm gonna be helping your family and you out of here, and I would have done it for free if not for your father being an asshole. But I'm not going to take any money. You know why?" the young man quickly shook his head, to which Shepard smiled. "Because I can take all the money I need for my ship and crew off the bodies of dead mercs and looters. I do that because I'm not just friends with you and the Doctor – I'm friends with Archangel too. You've heard about Archangel, haven't you?"

"Yeah" he nodded back at the Commander, much more at ease at the mention to the hero of Omega's name. "I-I heard he was d-dead, sir. Is he-?"

"Very much alive, Josh" Shepard confirmed, sending a wave of relief washing over the young man's psyche. "He's an old friend of mine, actually. We go way back. Used to hunt Geth together. Thing is, he and I have sort of a style competition going on – and with him being a Turian and all his sense of fashion is nothing short of devastating. So let's make a deal, just you and me, Josh: I trade my boring orange military-grade Omni-tool for your snazzy red one so I can upstage Archangel just a little, and in return I take you and your family out of here. Got it? That sound like a fair deal to you, Josh?"

"S-sure, sir" he nodded through his dry throat, and the thought that occurred to the clever young man as he, in a sort of efficient rapidity he hadn't thought himself capable of, switched Omni-tools with the bulky Commander. "Sir" he asked slowly as they moved towards the door of their apartment, doctor Daniel and his family and that awesomely hot woman in tow. "Are you going to be taking Archangel away from Omega – to fight wars and stuff?"

And now he was feeling bad. Great. Here he was, storming through Omega and upsetting the balance of power so much that he might just as well have upended the figurative table the scales of power had been standing on and flung said scales into a wall. What right had he – no, thinking like that would take him nowhere. And the boy needed to believe in tomorrow just as much as anyone else, even if the hope was at best a hollow lie intended to soothe. "Archangel is leaving, Josh – but that doesn't mean he's gone. As long as people stand up and fight for what's right and what's dear to them were will always be angels, even in Omega". It was nothing but platitudes, of course, though the young man seemed to take what he said to heart.

"I hope you didn't have anything dangerous installed on that thing" Miranda commented later after they had left the family and the doctor's assistant back at the clinic and as they made their way back towards the environmental control section of the service ducts above the large habitation area they had just fought through.

"Uhm…" Oh, dammit, he had forgotten about all the things Daniels and Donnelly had said that they had installed on the thing for him. He could hardly remember all of the things they said they had put into his Omni-tool, and now he had just handed it onto some random Omega kid. "No. Nope. Not at all, nothing of the sort". That kid would probably find something he wasn't supposed to and accidentally set fire to his sister. Dammit.

"Shepard…" she gave him a hard look as he, trying not to blush as he felt like an idiot, brought up the interface of his own new scarlet Omni-tool and checked through it as they made their way back to the apartments.

"Alright, I've accessed the settings. Just changing the username from to" he tapped into the machine as they made their way over the broken streets littered with Vorcha corpses and still burning debris "ShepardTFHS. Oh!" he noted as they passed into the Lawrence apartment and stepped over the dead Batarian looters they had come across before. "This thing's got an extranet uplink! Miranda, what's your username? I can set it to connect to your Omni-tool so that we can rely on extranet communication if something takes out our coms like the Blue Suns did back in Kima".

It was the same as she had it on most extranet accounts and even the rare dating site she had frequented during her time at Cerberus – she was working herself more or less to death and needed to let of steam, as it were – just to keep it simple. No need to make up several different accounts for unimportant and baseless things, though she had changed it a little when they began constructing the Normandy SR-2. "LawBringerSR2" she replied – and realised too late with whom she was dealing.

"LawBringer?" he snickered, and she gave him an icy glare that would have reduced most other people in the galaxy to a quivering jelly of fear quietly shitting itself on the floor. "Hah! That's so going to be your call sign once we get this show on the road!"

"You ass!" she cursed his way before she sighed in resignation as he all but cackled with glee. "Call sign?" she wondered with an arched eyebrow as they came in under the hatch up into the service tunnels. "We don't need military call signs. This isn't a military operation, Shepard-"

"The hell it isn't" he said as he jumped up and pulled himself up into the vents through that hatch, leading the way at least until they came up into the environmental support air cisterns and could stop crawling. "I'm military, and I'm running this crew, so yes, yes it is. I've already thought up ones for the others" he added to fill the silence as they made their way through the air ducts made unnaturally quiet by the turned off life-support. "Jacob can be 'Gunsmith', Zaeed can be 'Eclipse' or 'Blue Sun', Garrus can be 'Archangel', you'll be 'Lawbringer'… and Dr Solus can be 'Caffeine Hamster' or something".

"You've given this a lot of thought, haven't you?" Miranda wondered, to which Shepard chuckled.

"I can't be bothering the crew all the time, right? And working out by running around the ship and lifting weights with Taylor isn't the most stimulating thing in the world, is it? You get a lot more time than you'd like to think when you haven't got your library set up yet. We need a sparring ring, I say. And a shooting range!"

"I don't know about a shooting range, Shepard" Miranda thought on the matter and felt a little apprehensive as they crawled around a corner in the ducts, her view forwards obscured by a massive hunk of moving black armour… in more sense than one, she thought and immediately gave herself a mental slap. "But we have room in the cargo bay if needed for a sparring mat and some punching bags. We could otherwise clear out the bar on the portside observation deck-"

"Ah!" Shepard wordlessly groaned as his jerked his head upwards in surprise and accidentally slammed his head into the top of the vents with a mighty metallic thud. "What?! We have a bar on the Normandy?! Why wasn't I told about this?!"

"Well, because you didn't ask" Miranda quipped back and shook her head at the man, who, grumbling all the while, kept on going ahead after turning his head and shooting her a dirty look. "Also, didn't you tour the ship? How come you didn't notice the bar? It's just down the hall from my office".

"I couldn't get into all of the rooms" he noted dourly. "Life Support, the observation decks, the cargo holds on the engineering deck, the AI core, the Science Lab on the main deck… there wasn't a lock-interface on any of those doors. I'm quite offended by that, actually. I could only get into the forward battery after Garrus reset the door from the inside. And you have an office?"

"It's not my fault that you haven't visited me there yet, Shepard" she sighed and shook her head as they finally came out of the ducts and rose under the blade of a great fan now still to take in the sights of the dark EC cistern. Why did she have to keep playing 'mother' and taking care of this man? "And perhaps it's just something faulty with EDI's programming. I'll see what I can do once we get back on the Normandy-" she took a single step forwards and slipped on a puddle of condensed moisture, falling uncontrollably towards the floor.

Moving with a quickness that belied his size and the weight of his armour Shepard dashed to her side and caught her, and instead of banging her head against the metal plates beneath them she looked up to find his deep and strangely green eyes staring back down at her. "Be careful, Miranda" he said in a low tone that was far from dark and menacing, instead almost warm and… more as his armoured arms held her so gently. "That's what happens when you wear high heels on a combat op. You might slip and fall".

"Some of us fall quicker than others" she told him, and she had little to no idea of what she meant by it. Was she rambling? Was this ass of a man making her ramble like some schoolgirl? What the hell, Lawson? Pull yourself together! "Could you please let me stand, Shepard?"

"Oh! Yeah" he straightened her stance and stood back, giving her a curt nod in his suddenly flustered state. "We should, em, probably take care of that cure and Vorcha stuff. So" he looked around the cistern before he gave her a sheepish smile "which way is it?" With a sigh, moment utterly ruined, she pointed down one of the service tunnels after bringing up the radar map on her Omni-tool.

They walked in silence down that tunnel, Miranda wondering what the hell was going on between the two of them while Shepard internally cursed over the fact that being around Miranda was a lot more infuriating than it was being around Ashley had been. But by the end of that tunnel, as they came out into a great gallery beyond which lay central environmental control for the district, they mood changed to apprehension. The gallery beyond, open and vast as the tunnels of the undercroft intersected there in a great dome where the central fanning controls lay, was filled with Vorcha. Packed to the brim they milled, larvae and females as well as males, all but a few unarmed and moving about their lives until a singular shape in robes, backed by a guard of vicious looking thugs in blue and green rags, took his stance upon the centre ridge of the central control platform just before the environmental control consoles.

"We shut down machines!" he spoke with quite the booming voice for a Vorcha, and all in the great chamber turned their eyes to him in reverent jubilation. "Break fans!" He seemed to be what the Vorcha passed as a religious authority of some kind, and Shepard wondered as to the culture of these creatures before the Krogan had uplifted them so cruelly to serve as canon-fodder for the Blood Pack. "Everyone choke and die! Then Collectors make us strong!" Had these creatures been noble once, savages with honour until a cold and uncaring galaxy had stripped that honour away, leaving only bloodlust and primal rage?

"Alright" Shepard muttered after surveying the situation and shaking the idle sophistry from his mind, turning to Miranda with worry in his eyes. "There's a tonne of them… but most seem to be non-combatants. I say we go in hot, guns blazing, grenades and biotic explosions. That should scatter the most of them, leaving only the fighters for us to deal with. Then I go in with the Typhoon and Crusader and crack some skulls. Can you provide some suppressive fire from up here?" Thinking about it he unslung the sniper rifle, unused so far for this mission, from his back and made as if to hand it to Miranda. "Take this-"

"Shepard, please" she shook her head and turned away from him, looking out over the great gallery before them and lifting her pistol to aim it at the distant Vorcha prophet. "How far away do you think that leader of theirs is? A hundred and fifty yards? Two hundred?"

"At the very least" Shepard remarked hesitantly as he slung back his sniper rifle onto his back where it stuck with a faint click, pulling out the two grenades he had brought for this mission and manually setting them to explode on impact as his new Omni-tool lacked the military plug-in program to do it. "Two hundred and fifty yards, more like. A shot like that from a pistol is impossible to pull off-"

Miranda, coolly and coldly, sighted down the ridge of her own custom M-77 Paladin and gently pulled the trigger. A resounding bang shattered the stillness around them, and with a hole through the centre of his slotted brow the Vorcha prophet fell down dead, slumping dead to the floor like a marionette that had its strings cut. "Impossible, you say?" she wondered at him as chaos erupted down beneath them, smirking ever so slightly at a Commander Shepard who was momentarily stunned with awe.

"Damn, what a woman" he breathed far too low for her to hear before he forced his mind to attune to battle, making all other thoughts and worries fade away to leave on the objective before him. With no further words spoken he lobbed the two grenades in quick succession into the massed of the confused Vorcha crowd, hoping that he didn't hit any of them that could feasibly be viewed as civilians as the explosions shook the great gallery. Miranda kept laying in stray shots and biotic lifts and throws upon the more troublesome enemies down below, most of the Vorcha scurrying away into the pipes and tunnels like panicked rats, even as Shepard unslung his heavy assault rifle and leapt out of that service hatch they had been standing in a biotic blue haze.

The Biotic airdrop was a technique developed by Asari commandoes nearly two thousand years earlier, where the soldier wielding the biotic power would hurl themselves off of great heights and use their biotics to generate a pulling field around themselves upwards when they were nearing their destination, thus slowing their crashing descent into a gracious landing. Shepard, however, was of a different school of thought thanks mostly to Urdnot Wrex. Instead of slowing down his landing he speeded it up by gathering his barriers around him as much as he could, slamming into the ground with great force and letting the outermost layer of said barriers break and crash out and away from him, and as he did just that as he dropped from the service hatch, sending Vorcha flying and staggering away from his the site of his drop.

He did not shout anything akin to "Say hello to my little friend!" as he lifted his heavy rifle and began spewing death and machine-gun fire into the horde before him, the Vorcha quickly growing wise and falling back to hide behind what little cover that could be had. He did not, in fact, say anything. That would just have been tacky and more than a little disrespectful, he considered as he slowly advanced, relying on his armour and his barriers to deflect most of the shots sent his way by the unorganised Vorcha with the very poor firearms. Miranda cursed from above as she saw another large group of Vorcha, enraged at the sudden appearance of the human in black armour, attacking him from behind as he obliviously kept on his forward assault and didn't notice. If they reached him and got within melee range…

She dropped down out of the hatch and used the standard lifting technique to keep her descent from breaking her bones, lowering herself onto the battlefield and the unsuspecting Vorcha like an avenging angel. She managed to get off three shots before they were upon her, and used her biotics to slam away another five before the last got the better of her, leaping at her and slashing at her barriers with its claws. She tried to hold it off with one arm while brining to bear her other and her gun, but it was little use as the sinewy creature had in speed and ferocity many times what humans had over it in strength. Its claws raked at her arm and cut deep and bloody furrows in her skin through then shredded arm of her uniform, but if she just could –

A resounding bang blew that last Vorcha into the air, and suddenly a hand was upon her unharmed arm, helping her stand easily, shotgun smoking in the other hand as Shepard helped her up. "Thanks" he muttered back, completely sincere for her taking care of the ambushers from the rear for him, before she and he were forced to go back to keep killing Vorcha.

In the end they managed to do it, Miranda bleeding profusely and Shepard's armour dented and scratched by claw and gun, up onto the terrace where the control console lay, Shepard holding off the advancing tide of fang and claw with assault rifle fire even as Miranda laboured at the console with one arm, administering the cure into the vent air-borne nutrient injection system even as she booted up life-support systems for the district again. Shepard held them off until she could help him with barrier powers and throws, and then, as if all of the sudden and all the more shocking for the sudden shift in the world around them, the lights came back on from above to illuminate the red-tinged gloom, sending the last of the Vorcha scurrying away from them.

Panting the two sank down to the gore and grime-splattered floor, Shepard idly administering Omni-gel to Miranda's arm as they realised that they had come out of that crucible alive and together and that the district now beneath them would survive.

"I suppose we should get back to the doctor" Shepard spoke after perhaps twenty minutes spent in restful silence, looking over at Miranda with a sweated and bloody brow.

"I suppose we should" she answered him slowly in agreement, but still didn't rise. "You know, Commander" she said then, a slight and dazed smile coming onto her lips as the Medi-gel sapped the pain from her scratched arm. "We make a pretty good team".

"Yeah, I guess we do" he agreed in a tired drawl and raised his fist her way, palm pointing downwards and level with the floor. "Bro-fist?"

"No" she glared back at him.

---

The following seven days were hectic, and Shepard and Miranda barely had time to talk with each other at all. Mostly she and Jacob stayed at the Clinic while Shepard, Garrus and Zaeed swept the streets of Gozu district with a small squad of Aria's enforcers behind them backing them up, clearing out the remaining Vorcha and looter hideouts and eradicating the Blue Suns stronghold – as after the information that had come to light after the events at Kima district the Blue Suns had found their way onto Aria's shitlist; a very uncomfortable place to be, to say the least.

Meanwhile at the clinic Miranda and Jacob had to do little but stand and look intimidating to ward off any troublesome elements as Mordin fixed the mechs that had guarded the clinic and made sure that his impromptu apprentice, Dr Daniel Abrams whom Shepard had saved from certain death at Batarian hands, was ready to take up the flag he dropped when he left the clinic. They also worked on enhancing the clinic's defences – until Mordin figured that it was a lost cause and moved them to another location that situated on higher ground and thus more easily defended against attack. She had to admit that Dr Solus was brilliant scientist, though a little callous, just like her – they seemed to have a lot in common, but she preferred not the socialise too much with him. He was very erratic, on the precipice of unstable in her eyes, and she preferred the slower and more methodical approach. Salarians, the few she had come across, were always… twitchy.

Still, as she worked over the days, stories came back to her from the people coming in for treatments or from the Normandy crew that helped her and Jacob at the clinic about the deeds of the assault team. Shepard seemed to be as a saint by people who, among other things, claimed that he had used money forcefully taken from the Blue Suns' old headquarter to give a small group of Quarian mechanics and merchants their tickets off of Omega, or that he had punched a crazed Batarian prophet in the jaw after which he had proceeded to tear the mad preacher's teachings apart one by one by revealing the circular logic and contradictions within his reasoning to the crowd to which he had been preaching, forcing him to scurry away into the shadows. Others seemed to view him as a dangerous renegade element, citing his lack of affiliation to any mercenary group or gang and his unwillingness to compromise the safety of the civilian population in Omega by moving slower and more methodically than he otherwise could have. He denied any attempts by the gangs to recruit him, and always sent Miranda a message about each mercenary approach, instructing her to inform Aria. The blue big boss was, understandably, not happy.

All in all: they might have feared him or loved him, but all of them respected him. It was almost Machiavellian, Miranda thought after the week was finally over and she had washed the grime of Omega out of her hair and off her body as she sat down on the bed of her cabin. It would have been callous and an attempt to garner political power – had he had any drive at all to take the station over and rule it for himself, or if he had any intent at all to go against Aria. But no, he had wanted nothing but to get the Professor on his side and re-join the fight against the Collectors, who had been strangely inactive for the last two weeks after striking Freedom's Progress, and resigned to see his secondary mission through he wanted nothing more than to help. He seemed to have some empathy for the poor of Omega, and when Jacob or Garrus, both from affluent backgrounds, presumed to comment on the poverty of the people they were trying to help Shepard told them off in sharp terms.

Miranda sighed as she looked towards her computer terminal, thinking of how all of this would look in the report to the Illusive Man. The resources of the Lazarus Cell, the most expensive operation of the entire organisation, the most vital of all the initiatives they had ever undertaken, wasted on helping the downtrodden of Omega in what amounted to charity work. Well, to be fair, Aria had mentioned during her last talk with Miranda that she might be willing to pay Shepard and his crew handsomely if they so happened to "bomb the Fuck out of any Blue Suns' base he could find", but good will and good work were not one and the same – and definitely not one and the same in the robotic eyes of the Illusive Man. Still… this opened up a lot of opportunities and garnered some good will with Cerberus in the Terminus systems, and she could work with that.

It was later, when Miranda had dressed in her spare white cat suit, the other one discarded when she couldn't get the stink of Omega out of it, sitting at her terminal in the middle of writing her report to the Illusive Man, that Shepard walked into her office for the first time. He was looking down at his Omni-tool from time to time, narrowing green eyes at its scarlet data as he walked in through the door and stood before her desk, newly showered and clad in a pair of fatigue trousers, t-shirt and zipper-up hooded jacket that was practically ancient style and more than a lot out of fashion. "Something I can do for you, Commander?" she looked up from her report, expecting a quick answer but got none. "Shepard?"

"Yeah, you can uninstall whatever gunk Donnelly put on this thing" he grumbled and shook his Omni-tool-carrying arm, an expression of stark annoyance on his face as he looked up at her. "Seriously, it keeps asking me if I'm sure that I want to 'incinerate the target', and I've no idea how to shut it off".

"If it's just technical assistance you need-" she frowned, a little disappointed to her own great disgust for herself and her emotions.

"Oh, yeah, and me and the boys getting our drink on at the bar" he added and shook his head, his peeved expression replaced with a slightly more at-ease one and a boyish grin. "Donnelly and Daniels came too, as did Joker now that we're on course for the Hourglass Nebula and our crazy biotic sidekick. You in, Miranda?"

"I've got some reports-" she began to say before it struck her: she had never done anything like that before. She had never just taken a drink with the team to celebrate a work well done, and that one time years ago when she had champagne with Jacob it was just a part of her ploy to recruit him for Cerberus. But… she had work to do. Her allegiance lay with the Illusive Man, not with this paragon of warrior virtue, and she believed in what Cerberus stood for… didn't she? "I'm sorry, Shepard" she said, and as his face fell a little she felt a strange pang in the depths of her chest "I can't. Maybe some other time?"

"Hold that thought" he said then as he held up a single finger before stomping out of the room, returning mere minutes later with a bottle of honeyed Bekenstein whiskey in one hand and his private datapad in the other, slouching down in a chair he pulled up before her desk opposite to her and throwing his legs up onto another one. "Sweet office, by the way… though it could use a fish tank or a hamster or something".

"Shepard" she wondered, a little amused and much more baffled as he began to look through the extranet and synced his Omni-tool to his datapad, using it as a readier interface for the computer upon his arm. "What are you doing?"

"If you can't bring Mohammed to the mountain" he shrugged and took a sip of the sweet fiery liquor, his attention zipping from menu to menu as he toured the extranet. "You don't mind if I keep you company, do you? I hate drinking with those lightweights anyway, and I need to download some books up in this thing – to have something to do besides hazing Garrus and upstaging Jacob at weightlifting".

"No, I don't mind" she shook her head softly, knowing that he couldn't see her writing her report from the far side of the desk and so content to work alongside him in a peaceful setting for the first time, actually, to her own surprise, a little glad for his company. "What sort of books are you getting?" She usually wasn't the most… social of people, but somehow a distant part of her mind wasn't overly bothered by his presence.

"The Art of War, Commentaries on the Gallic War, the Arthashastra, The Art of War – the Machiavelli one, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, The Book of Five Rings, the Epitoma Rei Militaris, the Thirty-Six Stratagems…" he looked up at her after droning out the titles of the books he had downloaded so far to find her staring back at him with a calculating gaze. "What? You think I just pull these advanced tactics out of my ass? A good commander respects the victories of those who came before him and labours to avoid their mistakes".

"That was precisely what I thought that you did with your tactics – pulling them out of your arse" she quipped back as she hammered away at her keyboard without even looking at the monitor before her, knowing every single stroke of the keys by memory and instinct. "Given how much your tactics stink, that is".

"Ouch!" he flinched theatrically. "I'd best get myself over to the med-bay – because I just got burnt!" Despite his outraged words he chuckled and looked to her. "You know, it's good to hear you joke. Nice to know that there's a person underneath that Cerberus swimsuit". Before she could reprimand him with an icy glare he changed the subject. "So how does Cerberus really work, exactly? You always go around resurrecting dead people, or do you steal babies from cradles to become suicide bombers in the downtime?" With a sigh she set about correcting his misconceptions, hoping to perhaps get this done quickly so that she could finish her report.

They ended up talking for hours, long into the ship-side night. And somehow she didn't mind.

---

And Scene!

A/N: What I'm striving for in this little piece of Fiction, among other things, is to expound on the gameplay aspects of Shepard's character and integrate them more into the dialogue and the actual story of Mass Effect. For example, if we look only at Vanguard M!Shep's abilities, skill-set and gear through the Mass Effect games, what can we tell about his character?

First and foremost: Shepard (who for the sake of simplicity in this argument is a He in this little expose, even though Fem!Shep is in many ways more awesome) is the only one in his squad with medical abilities in ME and ME 3. He is also the only one that tots around heavy weapons in ME 2 and ME 3, and the only one that uses more than two firearms in his squad – indicating that he has had training in many types of weaponry, at least on a rudimentary level. Also, Shepard is the only one in all of the games with access to Advanced Training, where he can learn the signature moves of his squad mates. Shepard is also the only one with directly socially-affected skills in ME, ME 2 and ME 3, represented in gameplay as the Charm or Intimidate skills and the Paragon and Renegade interrupts. More specifically for Vanguard Shepard he is the only one in the entirety of the galaxy in ME 2 with the Biotic Charge ability.

What does all of this say about the character? How does gameplay inform his character? Let's set aside gameplay tweaks and the practical ideas of Bioware and talk about applied gameplay narrative and active storytelling.

Shepard is not just a highly trained and versatile soldier, with training in all manner of standard weaponry as well as heavy ordinance, but also intelligent and shrewd enough to be a combat-medic of sorts, indicating that he is highly intelligent as well as physically fit and powerful. Shepard is also very social, given his tendency to speak and move within his crew and squad on equal terms with them, and charismatic, given how he earns their loyalty and strives to learn from the people around him. A Paragon Shepard, who romanced Ashley in ME, is also quite possibly well-read as he quotes fairly obscure poetry, indicating a highly literate mind. Also, Vanguard Shepard is very much an aggressive fighter in ME 2 and ME 3, differing from ME where he didn't possess the Biotic Charge ability, indicating that he must have invented or learnt the technique in the intervening time – most likely from a member of his squad (my money's on Wrex rather than Kaidan or Liara).

That's my thoughts, anyway. Can you come up with anything better? Let me know in the comments and the reviews!

Until then: Read and Review, and DFTBA!