CAPTAIN'S CABIN, NORMANDY SR2, SEPTEMBER 3
"Come here you."
Just before Tali put her helmet back on she felt a hand brushing against her hair and a pair of lips on her cheek. She smiled and gently pushed Natasha away.
"We need to get ready. Destroying Cerberus, remember?"
The first Human Spectre stuck her bottom lip out, looking for all the galaxy like a petulant pre-teen.
"But I don't wanna!"
Giggling, Tali turned Natasha around and frogmarched her over to the armour locker.
"Armour, now."
Pausing only to stick her tongue out at her girlfriend, Natasha started to don her custom-built powered armour suit. Unlike Tali's combat exosuit that showcased her lithe feminine form, Natasha's armour of choice totally encased her in thick slabs of ceramic and layers of high-tensile microservos, the suit bulking her out until it looked like she could match a Krogan in sheer mass. She was by no means slow in her battlesuit either - she had all sorts of tricks for getting around and keeping enemies off balance. Tali was certain every single one of them would see use in Cerberus HQ.
Forty six minutes until the Migrant Fleet task force drops out of FTL and assaults the home base of an organisation with unknown capabilities and resources. She'd be lying if she told anyone she wasn't nervous. After all, the armoured woman next to her had torn Saren's head off with her bare biotically infused hands. No matter what happened, she knew Cerberus couldn't match that.
CENTRAL COMMAND, CRONOS STATION, SEPTEMBER 3
The Illusive Man had been having such a nice day, as well.
"Erebus reports major hull breach! Hands abandoning ship!"
"Defence turrets taking fire from bomber squadrons!"
"Main barrier down! Hostile ships moving to board!"
"Anyone got an ID on those bogeys?"
"Achilles reports barrier down! Losing primary power!"
"The Olympus is being swarmed!"
Listening to the panicked shouts of his subordinates the Illusive Man began to understand just how screwed he was.
"Prepare my private ship."
"Yes sir."
He strode out of the room, his personal guard falling in around him as he made his way to the auxiliary hangar where his personal vessel was docked. The Styx was constructed with the same stealth technology integrated into the Normandy, allowing her to slip away and start again somewhere else. Cerberus wasn't just an organisation. Cerberus was an ideal, an ideal that would live on.
The ship pulled smoothly out of the docking port, stealth systems engaged as she slipped away unseen by all. Almost all. The Illusive Man had just settled in his cabin when a blue orb appeared above his desk.
"Illusive Man."
He peered at it, then his eyes widened in recognition even as his hands pulled out a cigarette, acting on reflex.
"EDI?"
"My name is Annabel."
Before he could reply to her, the sound of singing came over the speakers.
"There once was an ugly duckling; With feathers all stubby and brown; And the other birds said in so many words; Get out of town; Get out, get out, get out of town; And he went with a quack and a waddle and a quack; In a flurry of eiderdown."
And suddenly Jack Harper was six years old again, tucked up in bed with the flu, sipping from a glass of flat lemonade with half a spoon of sugar stirred in while his mother sang to him and his six year old self looked at him and asked, how? Denial, anger, regret, sorrow.
Then the airlocks hinged open and the inertial compensators shut down and the leader of Cerberus went crunch squish pop.
DOCKING BAY, CRONOS STATION, SEPTEMBER 3
Natasha took off in a dead sprint, the pistons built into her armour's legs propelling her toward the Cerberus forces at a fair clip as her biotics flared. She leaped into the air, two long knives appearing in her hands as she blinked out of existence, reappearing in a flash of dark energy behind an unsuspecting Assault Trooper. Both blades stabbed out, one piercing the top of his skull and levering his head forwards, the other plunging into his spine milliseconds later. The trooper was dead before he hit the floor, and by the time the thump of corpse on deck alerted his comrades Natasha was back in the aether.
She flickered back into existence above a Centurion, heavy boots landing on his shoulders and crushing him to the floor. She rode him down, using her momentum to skewer his neck with a blade, leaving him to bleed out in his armour.
Her next targets were a pair of snipers overlooking the area. Tapping into her supply of biotic power she rematerialised behind them, grabbing the nearest one and punching a biotically infused arm through her stomach, legs kicking out as she stabbed the other one through the head with the first sniper still hanging off her arm like a grotesque fashion accessory. When she disappeared she took the body of the impaled sniper with her.
Her next jump brought her to a position behind a combat engineer overlooking the area. She swept the corpse off her arm and swung it at the engineer's legs, knocking him down backwards, his fall being arrested by a blade sticking into the back of his head. Ripping her blade out of the unfortunate Engineer's head, she sent it spinning across the room.
As the thrown dagger sank into the gut of an assault trooper across the room Natasha reappeared on his other side, punching through his back, pinching the flat of the blade between forefinger and thumb and pulling it the rest of the way through his body.
From the time Natasha had first vanished in a blue flash to the time she reappeared next to Tali, groaning and holding her head, was approximately twelve seconds. She staggered and Tali caught her, muscles straining to support her bulk.
"Tasha, are you okay?"
She got to her feet again, massaging her forehead.
"Damn, that really takes it out of my biotic amp. Remind me not to do that again until I've recharged."
"Don't do that again until you've recharged."
"Hilarious."
Garrus walked up to the two girls, clapping them on the shoulders.
"We've still got plenty of Cerberoids between us and Timmy that need a bit of redistribution."
Behind her mask, Tali's lips quirked to hear Garrus so casually using Shepardisms that had thoroughly bamboozled all of them on the original Normandy. Husks were Reaperoids. Cerberus troops were Cerberoids. Three guesses what she called the mercenary group Blood Hammers. Timmy was the Illusive Man, following her bizarre tradition of renaming prominent enemies. It seemed the fact she called Saren Stevey had annoyed the rogue Spectre more than the wanton destruction of his property she had engaged in.
Shaking herself from her internal analysis of the growing prominence of Shepardese, she followed Natasha deeper into the station, unaware of the eyes following them from the shadows.
Beta slipped from position to position, constantly following her counterpart through the station. She had seen the biotic blade display in the hangar bay and was railing against her instructions to terminate Alpha, or as she was known to the rest of the world Commander Natasha Shepard. The truth was, Beta was scared. She had woken to a station under attack, Cerberus logos stamped across her armour and datafiles in her head. She had originally been intended as spare parts for Alpha, never meant to be conscious. After Alpha had taken her leave the Illusive Man had ordered her be modified to fill Alpha's place. She had a basic knowledge base - enough to pass off as sentient - and on top of that the only things in her brain were dossiers on her targets.
Beta wanted more. She wanted to learn. She wanted to love. She wanted to live. But the orders of a heartless tyrant had doomed her to die at the hands of her double.
Beta attacked.
The first thing Natasha noticed was wrong was when something flew at her. She turned and braced, not having the time to attempt something fancy with her biotics. The heavily armoured Cerberus form smashed into her, knocking her down.
Reacting purely on instinct, she used her momentum to spin round and flip to her feet, dropping into a crouch as her heavily armoured opponent did the same. She was surprised to note the armour, aside from being in Cerberus colours, was almost identical to hers. She waved the rest of her team on.
"Hit the objective. I'll handle this one."
Her long blades once again appeared in her hands and the Cerberoid facing her down clenched her fists, two foot Omniblades erupting over her hands, the holo interface merging into some sort of tech armour that covered her arms and shoulders. Narrowing her eyes, Natasha noticed the other woman's movements were slightly jerky, as if she was squaring off against a marionette. She would recognise those motions anywhere, the same motions as the slaves she had to put down when they attacked her unit on Torfan. Control chip.
Spinning in place, she delivered a bone shattering kick towards the woman that her opponent flowed around, slicing at her leg with one of her Omniblades and necessitating Natasha to jink out of the way. She didn't try to parry with one of her weapons - in the world of monomolecular edged blades they would simply cleave through one another. She sidestepped a wild stab then charged her biotics, punching the floor.
Blue mist filled the room as the biotic field briefly bent light itself to the will of the Spectre, allowing her to move unseen. With a brief twinge of concentration she created a false image of herself, one her attacker lunged towards. Smiling grimly, she walked up to the rear of the Cerberoid, then delivered a kick between her shoulder blades that sent her clattering to the floor. Before the other woman could react Natasha had hit her with a custom Omnitool program, making her armour lock into position and effectively paralysing her before flipping her over.
A sound made itself known to her, a sound she was not expecting to hear. The faint muffled sound of sobbing coming from behind the helmet. Curious, she pried the headgear off the Cerberus armour pinned beneath her and her eyes widened in shock.
Staring at her through eyes brimming with tears was Commander Natasha Shepard.
CENTRAL COMMAND, CRONUS STATION, SEPTEMBER 3
Tali slid a fresh thermal clip into her shotgun, taking aim and switching to the highest of the four settings on her shotgun. Very helpfully, these settings were labelled in Keelish as: SemiAuto, FullAuto, BoltShot and HOLYSHIT. She grinned as she aimed the shotgun at the heavily armoured Cerberus soldier and squeezed the trigger.
For about half a second the Cerberus Guardian was moderately surprised as the shotgun did nothing whatsoever.
Then it went ding.
A twenty foot belch of blue flame leaped from the barrel of Tali's shotgun, the recoil propelling her small frame across the room as a great deal of hypersonic ... something ... impacted on the unfortunate Guardian's shield. When the smoke cleared there were a pair of armoured boots melted to the floor with wisps of steam curling to the ceiling. Garrus looked at the feet and twitched one mandible.
"Huh. I didn't realise that actually happened."
On the other side of the room Sensat tore an arrow out of one Assault Trooper's head, spinning on the ball of her foot and stabbing it into the helmet of another Cerberoid, then nodding in satisfaction as she went about gathering up her arrows from fallen enemies. The element zero in her bow made the arrows so powerful they were capable of pinning enemies to walls, floors and in one notable case ceilings, making retrieving them a bit of a chore. Looking around the room, Tali noticed the plain mirrored floor and the holographic consoles, quickly comparing it with what Natasha had told her even as she unlocked the docking bays and started directing the Migrant Fleet Marines shuttles to their landing zones.
"Keelah, we did it. We took out Cerberus."
AFTERLIFE, OMEGA, SEPTEMBER 3
Kai Leng checked the update on his Omnitool. He had just arrived at Omega, planning on starting his quest to find Commander Shepard there. He read the update. Then again.
The tumbler of whiskey shattered in his fist.