Alone II
Tali was starting to make out some details emerging out of the gloom she was walking through. Firstly, she could feel what seemed like a stone floor beneath her bare feet, then she started seeing the odd shape in the gloom, starting to give the impression of a large, rectangular space. A memory rose unbidden of her time on the Normandy SR1.
It was the night before Feros. The Normandy was just on the outskirts of the cluster, estimated to arrive at the besieged colony in about fifteen hours. Tali was exploring the Normandy while everyone else was asleep, getting to know her way around the new ship, when she heard a sound coming from Shepard's cabin. It sounded like muffled thuds, followed by a piercing scream that made her head ring as she rushed over to the cabin, bursting through the door to see Shepard sitting bolt upright in her bed, chest heaving as she hyperventilated, eyes wildly staring at her with an animal fire before her gaze softened and focused.
"Are you okay, Commander? I heard some thuds and then you screamed and I came in to see if you were alright and ..." Her voice trailed off as Shepard dropped her head into her hands. "I'm sorry, I'll leave ..."
"Please stay. At least for a while."
Uncertain, she hovered in the doorway for a second before coming to sit on the desk chair. Smiling, Shepard crossed her legs and patted the bed beside her, then again a little more forcefully. Reluctantly Tali came to sit on the very edge of the bed, so Shepard sighed and scooted over to sit next to her.
"Glad you're here, Tali. You know, you, Garrus and Joker are my best friends on the Normandy?"
"Really?"
"Yeah. I can't get friendly with any of the Alliance personnel, 'cept Joker who doesn't give a shit, Wrex ain't exactly a conversationalist and whenever I talk to Liara it feels like I'm drowning in awkward. So yeah."
"I'm glad I made the list, Commander."
"Not Commander. To you, Garrus and Joker it's just Kim."
"Okay ... Kim."
Tali smiled at the memory. The first time she met Kim, not Commander Shepard. It was funny how they were two different people really. And somehow she had to reacquaint Kim, trapped in here with her, with the part of her mind that was the Riser out there.
Thinking of the Riser made her sigh. What did Kim think she was doing, messing around with modified Geth? She had seen all too many times what happened when a young Quarian decides to try and take control of a Geth platform. It was usually an 80:20 split between getting turned into modern art by said Geth platform or getting exiled by the Admiralty Board. Huh. Modern art. She'd just used a Shepardism in an internal monologue.
Her attention was captured by the lapping of water against stone, just faintly audible in the echoing silence. Her curiosity piqued, she walked towards the sound. There was a gondola sitting on the ground, bobbing up and down despite being on a seemingly solid surface. Nothing else to do, then.
She stepped into the gondola.
Searching IV
Garrus woke up with a gasp. His last memory had been that goddamned Batarian bastard introducing his face to a missile. So he could be in one of two places. A Blue Suns interrogation facility or wherever those strange Geth-like synthetics came from.
"Hello son. How are you feeling?"
He looked around and saw a friendly looking Human sitting by his bed.
"Who ..."
"Dr. Marcus Chapelson. Medic for the Gethsemane, apparently."
"Where ..."
"Gethsemane Station. So, how are you feeling?"
He raises a hand to the side of his face and groaned.
"Like I just took a missile to the face."
The Human chuckled at that.
"Well, we had to take the entirety of your left mandible off, it was beyond saving. We used the tissue as a basis for a clone culture to make enough skin to cover up the rest of the damage. Also we had to remove your lower jaw - it had been completely shattered. Don't worry, we made you a new one and used what was left of your old one to patch up the rest of the skull. So to summarise, your lower jaw and left mandible are now synthetic and you have some sweet-looking scarring going on there. Krogan women just won't be able to get enough of you."
Suffice to say, the good doctor was not known for his bedside manner.
"Uh huh. Anything important going on?"
"Not really. You're cleared for field work by the way. Once Joker has prepped the Risatuu you'll be leading a squad against a Blue Suns prison ship."
"I think I'll pass out now, if that's okay with you."
"By all means."
Garrus passed out.
How the hell did he wind up here? When he was finally out of the medbay he made to get the hell out of whatever mess he'd gotten himself into and somehow wound up on Purgatory looking for a psychotic prisoner called Jack. He needed a hobby.
His squad's Adept looked around at the setup of the prison ship, seeming impressed.
"Considering how delightful your inmates are, some of them must try to escape." Now that all the Gethsemane units were getting fitted with voice pitch controls, the Adept was turning out to have a rather pleasant voice, sporting a cut-glass British accent. The Turian warden, Kuril, replied a tad testily.
"We're in space. They have nowhere to go and they know it. But even so we keep a tight control over the populace. These are dangerous individuals, after all."
The Engineer watched a portable force field generator envelop two arguing inmates in kinetic barriers, the slight brightening of her optical input indicating her interest as she spoke up in the Texas accent all the Engineers seemed to have.
"Impressive force field generators."
"Yes, those are very versatile. They can be used to contain prisoners or to protect our guards against a riot, should that occur. It's a unique system. Out processing is down that hall, past the interrogation facilities and the supermax wing. I'll catch up with you later."
The walk through to Outprocessing was relatively uneventful but when the door opened there wasn't a prisoner waiting for them. There was a cell. And in the cell was a bomb.
"Ah shit."
When the bomb exploded it didn't produce a bloom of fire or a cloud of shrapnel, instead making all the electrics in the room short out quite dramatically. The only sources of illumination left in the room were the six optical processors of the Gethsemane unit Garrus had brought in with him.
"An EMP?" The Infiltrator shook his head in bemusement. "Amateur."
Garrus checked over his unit. The EMP seemed to have not affected their core systems and the handful of weapons that had been affected were quickly recovering.
"Everyone lie down like the EMP knocked you out."
"Huh?"
"We can spring our own ambush."
"Nice thinking, boss man."
The six Gethsemane lay down on the ground as the door slid open to reveal ten Blue Suns troopers pointing their rifles into the room, flashlights picking out the dead shapes of the Gethsemane and Garrus kneeling behind cover, sniper rifle already stabbing out, catching one in the skull.
"Quick! Rush him before he reloads!"
The Suns sprinted towards Garrus, paying the Gethsemane no mind ... Until four plasma beams scythed out, cutting two troopers into slices as two more ran right into a blitz of machine gun fire. The Vanguard's shotgun roared out, blowing a messy hole through a Turian trooper as the Infiltrator leaped into the air, two clean headshots ringing out while the Adept biotically slammed the last two onto the ground before the Engineer finished them off with her pistol arm. Garrus stood up and dusted himself off.
"That was efficient."
The Sentinel twitched her arms in an approximation of a shrug.
"I aim to misbehave."
Shepard turned around, brushed some ash from the exploding fuel tanks off her shoulder and shrugged before a cheeky grin spread across her face.
"I aim to misbehave."
Garrus shook his head, clearing the memory. The shrug, the phrase, even the delivery was so ... Shepard. He sighed and motioned with his rifle.
"Alright. Let's go find Jack."
Of course, it wasn't ever that simple. Releasing Jack from cryo necessitated releasing every other prisoner on the ship as well. That complicated their job quite significantly. Blowing through the prisoners and the Suns was relatively simple, with the two of them fighting it out and then Garrus sniping the survivors, leaving the Gethsemane trailing behind him feeling rather impotent until they came to a room that contained a YMIR mech. He hated YMIR mechs.
"Alright! Engineer, prep your Overload! When I say, we both overload that thing. Then everyone rip it to shreds. Ready?"
"Ready."
"GO!"
Garrus and the Engineer both leaned out of cover, hitting the heavy mech with two simultaneous overloads as weapons fire stabbed out from the rest of the Gethsemane. The mech's weakened shields were down in seconds and the Soldier neatly severed its rocket arm with an armour penetrating railgun shell as the Adept threw a Flare, knocking it backwards and leaving it wide open for the Infiltrator to hurl a sticky grenade at its chest, cracking armour plate and staggering it even further to allow Garrus to finish up with a sniper round through the chest that tore through circuitry with impunity, destroying the mech in a spectacular explosion.
The last room was even tougher. The barefaced Warden Kuril was hiding behind a force field produced by three shield generators, blitzing their position with a Revenant LMG as his Blue Sun elite unit swarmed through the room, bullets flying through the air. The Engineer ducked behind a low barricade and deployed her combat drones, the three drones rising from their ports on her left shoulder and splitting off, each one firing a blitz of incendiary rockets at one of the shield generators. With the shield down it was relatively simple to take out the Warden, with the Soldier keeping him suppressed while Garrus got in position for a headshot. The Warden's kinetic barriers turned away the first bullet, but depleted themselves in doing so, leaving him open to a barrage from the Infiltrator's rifles, silenced shots like puff sounds as they kicked up shards of titanium from the barricades. The Warden ducked behind his barricade again and his men redoubled their efforts, taking the Sentinel, the Adept, the Engineer, the Soldier and Garrus to keep them back. As soon as the Warden popped up again it was the Vanguard's turn.
The Gethsemane Vanguards are built with two biotic emitters, one in each arm. This means they are capable of putting two pull fields on the same object at once. In opposite directions. The top half of Warden Kuril went up. The bottom half of Warden Kuril followed the top half for about two seconds then went down. Rapidly. The Vanguard, having calculated the most probable splitting pattern, was pleasantly surprised when the Warden's digestive system was strung out between the two pieces of Turian, the gouts of blue blood spraying over the room not quite concealing the sickly yellow tint of his intestines. The display definitely served to demoralise the other Blue Suns and the cowardly mercenaries broke and fled.
Garrus walked over and nudged the top half of Warden Kuril with his toe as the Adept came up behind him.
"I'll probably have a witty one-liner five minutes from now."
He nodded absent-mindedly as he bent down and prised the Warden's fingers off his Revenant.
"I'll take that."
The weapon was coated in the Warden's blood, something he could rectify later. He collapsed the rifle and slung it on his back in place of his Vindicator battle rifle which he kept on hand as he led the Gethsemane squad through the covered corridors of the prison, following Jack, catching up just in time to witness her deal some damage to a couple of errant Blue Sun mercs. Garrus put the last one down with a burst from his Vindicator and Jack span around, fists clenched, biotics flaring. Garrus did a double take. Based on his observations of Shepard and Ashley he was fairly certain Human women were a little shy about their chests so to his admittedly limited knowledge it was a little odd that she seemed to disdain clothing on the upper half of her body. The Engineer waved a dismissive hand.
"Wonderful. Super biotic, psychotic convict and now we can add exhibitionist to the list."
The Soldier spoke up in his rumbling Russian accented voice.
"Nice rack though."
The Sentinel cuffed him on the back of the head.
"You are such a pig."
Shepard walked up behind Kaidan and smacked the back of his head, breaking his focus from the Asari dancer.
"You are such a pig."
Dammit! Why the hell did these weird Geth things remind him so much of her? He refocused his attention on the increasingly confused Jack.
"Who the fuck are you?"
"Name's Garrus. We're here to extract you."
She scowled at the Gethsemane standing behind him.
"Bullshit. I'm not going anywhere with Geth."
The Adept cuts in.
"Geth, Geth, why does everybody confuse us with Geth? We are Gethsemane, servants of the Riser."
"Whatever. You think I'm stupid or something?"
"Okay, why don't you remove your head from your ass and think about this for a sec, kay? This ship is going down. We've got the only way out. We're offering to take you with us. And you're bitching about it. Genius."
Jack fixes the Engineer with a truly evil glance as the Infiltrator speaks up again.
"Let's just put a bullet in her leg and Marcus can glue her back together."
Jack looks right at the Infiltrator.
"Go ahead and try."
Garrus holds up a hand.
"There will be no shooting. Thank you. Now then. Jack. We're leaving. If you want you can come with us, or you can stay here. Fair warning though - I fully intend on getting my pilot to blow this ship in half. So what'll it be, hmm?"
She snarls at him.
"Doesn't look like I got much choice."