Space Cow Rodeo

Notes and Notices: Apologies guys, rehashing an idea from a ME_Challenge Wednesday Insanity prompt. I really liked the "First Human Spectre Trampled by Space Cows" idea and have added it to Redundant canon. (With extra additives and preservatives.)

The original title idea came from a conversation way, way back with (I think?) Eliam Wordsmith. I believe the conversation was crack-tastic as we squeed over each other's Shepards, discussed the habits—both fun and frustrating—of the Mako and 90-degree angles, and wanted to know why there were no Tremors references when dealing with the Thresher Maws. But FF Dot Net didn't let me keep it when the site redid the way PMs are sent and received a few years ago. :(

(See? Wa-a-a-ay back.)

Also, I apologize for going so long in between updates. Move from Hell to the country was move from Hell to the country, and I don't currently have an internet connection at home. D: (The bad news about moving to the country.) The good news: This chapter is thirteen pages long and over 7000 words. Because I love. (And I couldn't find a stopping point. But still.)

Enjoy. xD

Shepard sat back in her chair, a tight lump forming in her throat as she stared helplessly at the holographic display of the Fifth Fleet Commandant. Admiral Steven Hackett only stared back impassively, blue eyes cool and assessing.

Four dead scientists with connections to a top secret project on Akuze.

Akuze.

Losing her entire unit. Nearly losing her life on colony that had previously been full of life. That one deep, dark, black mark on her record. The blemish that had nearly ruined not only her Alliance career, nearly killed her, but had taken everything she had, everything she was, and everything she would be and turned it on its ass then trampled gleefully on it. It was that one reoccurring nightmare she tried so desperately to forget. To ignore the pain and fear. Life went on. It had to. But the implications…

Holy shit.

She took a deep breath through her nose and let it out through her paper-dry mouth. She felt raw and empty. She had to stop herself from pushing her fingers through her hair in front of Admiral Hackett.

"You're saying our scientists were involved?" she asked the Admiral after she'd found the ability to speak again. He was calling from his office on Arcturus. The plaques on the wall behind him were grainy on the display. An aide handed him a datapad.

"I can't get any information on what they were working on," he told her. There was underlying tension in his otherwise calm demeanor. He glanced at the datapad then nodded to his aide, giving it back to the man. "The project records were sealed."

She shook her head — denial. A coincidence. There was no way… "This can't have anything to do with what happened to me on Akuze."

"There might be more to it than Akuze, Commander." He paused, looking to the side and giving a dismissal gesture to his aide — or someone else— before speaking again. "I'm sending you a burst of classified data."

"Well, this just keeps getting better and better," she muttered. She rubbed the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger as the Normandy intercepted the data and decrypted it. She knew the Normandy's communication system would wipe the data packet information from the comm buoy, as per standard protocol.

"Dr. Wayne, the fifth scientist involved in the project worked with Armistan Banes on a different project. Also classified and records sealed. What I was able to dig up is in the file I just sent."

"Kahoku," Shepard whispered. There was very little in the file. A few names, the location of a base, the deaths of another recon team. One survivor. Another piece of a puzzle.

All of it meaningless until she found the missing pieces, made the connections.

"It's a long shot, Shepard. You said yourself the beacon on Edolus was placed directly on the thresher maw's nest. Between Edolus and Akuze, we've got sixty-five soldiers dead. If Akuze was more than an accident, we need to know."

"Admiral, have you been able to find out anything about the Cerberus group?"

Hackett shook his head, blew out a puff of air in frustration. "No, I've still got my people combing through the encrypted data you sent last week from your mission on Binthu. IA is chomping at the bit to take a look at the data. And a friend gave me a thinly disguised warning to back off. She knows something, but…" He shook his head and leaned away from the camera. "I've pushed as much as I'm able to on this end. For now."

She nodded. "What can I do, Admiral?"

"I'm transmitting Dr. Wayne's last known coordinates. If he's still alive, I'm authorizing you to offer him immunity for his information. To hurt Cerberus."

"Immunity? Sir, that's—"

"I can't tell you how to handle this, Shepard," the Admiral interrupted. "Only what we're willing to do to get his cooperation. If he's alive," he added. The look that he sent Shepard chilled her blood. He was giving her the opportunity to kill this Dr. Wayne if she wanted. Did she want revenge on this man? Or could she use this man to take out the real evil? Cerberus.

The rogue group was not only responsible for a rear admirals' death but for turning one of her crewmates against her. Their deaths were on Cerberus and its commanders.

God.

"I'd like to voice my opinion against immunity," she told him. "I'd like justice for my unit, sir. Hell, for both of them. Justice for Admiral Kahoku. If he played a part in their deaths, immunity won't give them that justice. I'll bring him in for questioning. If he's still alive."

Hackett nodded. "Commander." He paused, leaned forward, and addressed her off the record. "Shepard. What you do with this is up to you. I just thought you would want to know."

And she read between the lines – if Shepard chose to take Dr. Wayne out, Hackett would cover for her. If she needed that particular brand of closure, she had the authority, without having to use her Spectre status. A lump formed in her throat as she listened to Hackett. She forced herself to pay attention, to keep her face as neutral as his. Business as usual.

"Dr. Wayne is part of ExoGeni Corp's catalog team on Ontarom."

"Catalog team?" Why did Ontarom sound so familiar?

"The orbit of Ontarom's moon, Thonal, has been slowly decaying since the formation of the Newton system. ExoGeni Corp is one of the corporations representing the Alliance to help catalog and preserve Ontarom's genetic diversity along with Heyuan Genomics. Dr. Wayne is there representing the Alliance as one of ExoGeni's lead scientists. He heads the toxicology department."

Shepard snapped her fingers, remembering how she knew of Ontarom. "Space cows."

"Yes. I believe Ontarom is the space cow's home planet. But ExoGeni Corp breeds them on every planet they have an interest in. The company advocates the space cow has more nutritional value than vat grown beef or earth cattle beef." He rolled his blue eyes — clearly a non-believer.

"I'll check out the coordinates, Admiral," she told him. "Maybe we can save this scientist from whoever is doing this and find out what he knows about the two projects. Without offering him immunity," she added decisively.

"Good luck," Admiral Hackett said with a nod. Shepard thought she saw a thread of approval in his visage. "Fifth Fleet out."

God.

Akuze.

After the briefing with her crew, she relived the ordeal in her sleep that night.

The gas giant Juncro loomed, a golden-green marble against the backdrop of stars. Joker adjusted the external cams to get a closer look while Serviceman Silas Crosby, the ship's Photographer's Mate, sitting to Joker's right, grunted in consternation that the hi-res digitals were suddenly out of focus.

"Suck it up, man," Joker told him.

Dirty clouds of hydrocarbons, sulfur and chlorine streaked and marred what could otherwise pass for an oblate Golden Delicious apple that rolled on its side around the distant orange star. The jovian was "tipped on its side" like Uranus; what was considered the planet's "north pole" faced the star Newton. But there the similarities to Uranus stopped. Uranus's "south pole" faced Sol. And Juncro was just shy of Jupiter's diameter and mass; it wasn't icy. Soon it would be all Joker could see out the window as they used the planet's massive gravity well to "sling shot" them into the inner system to the terrestrial planet Ontarom.

Glancing back out Normandy's window, Joker saw an H II region, a shiny blob of red on Normandy's horizon, just beyond the ringless planet. The region where hot stars were ionizing the hydrogen in the interstellar matter was nearly six hundred light years away from their current location. Even with mass effect drive cores as advanced as they were, the voyage could take years just to get to there. Probably why the area the Kepler Verge had gone mostly unmapped by the CitSpace species, Joker thought. It was a big expanse, all things considered.

Sometimes just staring into that great expanse scared the shit out of him. Like it could swallow him whole, and no one would give a damn.

"Approach vector Bravo-Seven-Niner-Yankee," Hendricks reported, drawing Joker's attention back to the helm. She gave the countdown to Juncro's magnetosphere breach as Joker's spectrometry holo-panel lit up, sent to him by Nav, giving him a spectrograph of the planet and its satellites. He inspected it for abnormalities and fluctuations before pushing it aside. Three of the moons were little more than S-type NEOs with radii of about twenty kilometers each that had managed to get snagged by the planet's massive gravity-well. Those were the ones they had to watch out for on approach. The asteroid-like satellites sped around Juncro in a tight but irregular and elliptical orbit, circling the world in one to two Earth days. Joker didn't even want to think about what would happen if the Normandy crashed into one. Or if one crashed into the Normandy. Nightmare scenarios had been drilled into his head at flight school; he didn't need a refresher course. Collisions happened all the time —and the media fed on the tragedies like carnivores fed on wounded prey. I'll be damned if it's going to happen to us.

Several systems blinked as Normandy roared towards Juncro, typical of electrical systems — even on a state-of-the-art frigate like the Normandy—when entering such a powerful magnetosphere. Backups immediately kicked into place, power loss was less than a second.

The jovian hadn't been completely scanned and mapped, but according to the Normandy's findings, it had a healthy abundance of metallic hydrogen in its lower atmosphere over a mostly metallic core. They would be able to discharge the drive core on their way around the planet.

Joker waited for the "all clear" confirmations to light the window to his right and sent the magnetosphere and other planetary data to Engineering, XO and several other stations in the CIC. When the board was "green," he dragged and dropped the proper commands into the window to his left. Now all they had to do was ride the gravity around the planet and allow it to propel them further into the system.

"It's slingshot time, ladies and gentlemen," he announced. "Systems are green. Optimal thrust achieved. Compensating for satellite gravitational fluctuations. Engineering, calculate time of drive core discharge and report."

"Aye, aye," Adams' voice confirmed. Less than a minute later he had the calculations he needed and sent the report to Nav to confirm trajectory. They were on course.

The bells sounded and boots stomped on the deck behind him. It was a hazardous time for shift change of the techs, but everything went smoothly. Joker still had five more hours on his shift and Hendricks had more than that on hers. Every once and again, Pressly got a burr up his ass to switch the shift-change schedules around. Joker didn't know if it was to keep everything from getting boring on such a long cruise or if the XO just liked to piss off the people who happened to like schedules and order. When Shepard had been XO, she hadn't deviated from her original shift-change schedule once. But she liked schedules and order. Joker liked schedules and order.

Pressly just didn't like anyone. That had to be it.

Definitely no fun.

"Welcome back, Chief Williams, Lieutenant Alenko," Hendricks said pleasantly drawing Joker's attention away from his inner thoughts. Williams and Alenko replied just as pleasantly, and Joker wanted to get off the bridge as quickly and quietly as possible. Maybe hide in a hole somewhere for a very long time.

Actually, no —Joker wanted to install mirrors onto Normandy's helm and the sides of his chair. At least then when Ashley— No. He stopped that train of thought right there. Her name is Williams. That was the whole fucking problem. He'd gotten too close. Too damn close. And yeah. He needed mirrors on the sides of his chair. Big-ass mirrors that came with neon signs in candy-apple red that read, "Go Away" and "Silence! Pilot Working" and "Get Lost." With multiple translations. Because it was just like some idiot to claim a misunderstanding and not leave him the hell alone.

Especially when he asked so nicely.

At least then when Williams came onto the bridge he could at least be ready for a fight—read the sign, Williams—or, god forbid, be ready to talk to the woman if she came onto the bridge with a directive from a superior. Damn MaRINEs.

He hadn't even noticed Williams' name on the schedule chit for bridge duty. But he hadn't been looking for it either. She hadn't had bridge duty in a while; scuttlebutt was that she'd volunteered for salvage team duty. Which had to be some kind of cosmic joke because that usually required heavy use of a good omni-tool and its fabber. Last he knew, her omni-tool was a piece of shit she never bothered to keep up to date and the fabber was too small to squeeze a dick into.

Avoiding him. Just as Joker was avoiding her. Damn her.

Damn her.

Damn her to Hell and back.

There was good reason they were avoiding each other though. She could have told him to go to hell the other night. But she didn't. And she should have. He would have. From what he remembered and the bruises in weird places he'd noticed the next morning, he could barely stand, could barely get around. …At least he didn't think she told him to fuck off. Oh, wait. She did. So he did. He probably wouldn't have woken up at all if she'd told him to go to hell and he didn't take no for an answer. (And didn't that just sit oh-so-well in his already churning belly?) He would have known, damn it. He prided himself on control. Always. And besides, he'd watched her run drills with the rest of the marines in the cargo bay; Joker knew she could pack a punch if she had to. She had a mean left hook. She especially loved using it on Gun Dog Fredericks. The corporal never seemed to be able to block her or learn when she was going in for his chin.

And here he was thinking about her. Again. That curvy body, the lithe form. The look in her eyes. No one had ever looked at him like that.

Drunk. She'd been drunk. He'd been drunk. But. Still, no one had ever looked at him like she had.

He'd pushed regs before, but he'd never actually broken them. All he needed now was to get a court martial for…for this bullshit. Then what the hell would he do? Go live a "normal" life as a civilian after his dishonorable discharge for fraternizing with a noncommissioned officer? Go live with his mom on Arcturus and put up with her chaotic life? Go live with Dad and Hilary and —? The thought of his dad brought him up short. He studied a read-out without really seeing it. At least Dad was recovering from the Arcturus bomb. Joker had received the email from his stepmother that Dad was finally home and walking fine now. Mom the Second was working on a lawsuit to get the money to pay for cloned tissue so Dad could have his flesh and blood leg back. The physical therapy and the leg prosthetic were working for now and Dad could work the fields, but Dad was still traumatized by the fact he no longer had his leg below the knee.

Maybe Joker could be a fucking farmer on Tiptree like his dad. Two gimpy farmers. Come and buy our fucking produce. Creaky-Leg Farms. Just give us a little bit longer to go and get it for you. We're a bit slow.

Joker mentally shuddered. Surgeries and designer drugs were one thing; amputation… No. Just no.

Fucking terrorists. If it had been terrorists. No one's claimed the blame.

Or fly aircars on the colony. Transport shit. That sort of thing. Yeah. Sure. Great. A fucking taxi driver. Just what he wanted to do after flying a state-of-the-art frigate for the Alliance. The blacklisted creaky-legged ex-Alliance pilot would be such a productive member of society.

"Joker," Williams greeted. She sounded neutral. As she had for the last week and a half. Ever since Liberty on the Citadel. Ever since he'd…she'd…they'd —

She had a nice body.

Damn, it'd been nice.

She was a lot softer than she looked. Her hands—

Fuck. "Williams," he answered, mind swirling with irritation at the situation. He brought up the spectrograph of the planet again, pretended to study it. If he didn't say anything, Alenko, who sat beside him relieving Crosby of bridge duty, would get suspicious. The biotic Boy Scout. Sure, Alenko and the Commander flirted on the battlefield and sometimes on Liberty —and Joker had ragged on Alenko about it—but Joker sure as shit knew they weren't fucking. No way would Alenko be able to keep that sort of thing to himself. No way. Not with the way the biotic had been so uncomfortable when Joker had ragged on—well, hell, maybe they were.

Shit.

Joker had been kicking himself for the last week and a half. All for a piece of ass he thought was someone else. How the fuck had he screwed up so royally? Yeah, alcohol could sometimes affect his prescriptions. But he didn't think he had had enough to impair his judgment that much. He'd conveniently forgotten to take the ones he knew would be a problem. He thought he had everything under control. He thought the asari maiden behind the bar had been willing. Then he'd awoken naked next to Williams remembering very little of what happened the night before.

What he did remember made him ache.

Made him want her all the more.

God.

Her hands…

Ah. Hell no.

Why the hell hadn't she said no? Was "no" such a bad word? He shoved the memories forcibly aside and called up another screen. No. No. No. See? Easy. No. No.

Thinking like that — thinking about her — would get him in trouble. Had gotten him into trouble.

Holy shit, oh, god, was he in trouble if anyone found out. Shit. Shepard was going to neuter him. The Alliance was going to kick his ass out. Then Beck was going to neuter him again for leaving her in when he was out. Because he'd fucked up. She'd never really wanted to join the Alliance to begin with. And then she'd probably bitch about Feelings and shit. What was it about women and Feelings, anyway? Hell. Forget gender. What was it about people that made him wish he had the bone density to punch them out?

And Ash was no help. She'd just been… cold after he'd claimed he'd thought he'd been with an asari. Because he had thought exactly that. And was honest with her. And it'd been a whim too. Something fun and a stupid to do while on Liberty. Because why not? He was the best damn pilot in the fleet. Fuck creaky bones.

It wasn't until he'd blurted it out that the memories slowly started oozing to the surface. Remembering her under him, over him. With him. And then he'd had to watch Ash's face go from that, that look to confused, then from confused to surprised to… to something like disappointed, maybe even hurt.

Well, fuck her.

And Beck? She was his best friend. In his book, he was allowed to fraternize with his best friend. They'd known each other all their lives. And they were currently the same rank. And she didn't mind him banging asari. …That much.

Sort of.

Probably.

…Hopefully.

And, anyway, Ash wouldn't understand. She was the outsider to him and Beck. Besides, Beck wasn't—they weren't dating. He didn't date shipmates.

He didn't fuck shipmates either. He'd told Beck that. Then he remembered the last time he and Beck had been alone together. Blow jobs didn't count, damn it. Those were benefits. Side effects to a twenty year friendship.

Shit.

It was all Joker could do to keep from squirming in his seat. He could feel eyes on him, beady eyes, hairy eyes, laser eyes, dagger eyes. Squinting and accusing eyes. How the hell had he fucked up so badly? How the hell had he let Williams fuck him up so badly? It wasn't—

Joker noticed a grav anomaly and, thanking the gods of disruptions, compensated, announcing over the MC in the most normal and official voice he could manage when he did it. The techs adjusted their screens and readings as necessary and within seconds he had more information from them. At least the ship was behaving the way it should.

"Are you two still fighting?" Beck asked when all had returned to normal and the Normandy continued along its sweeping trajectory. She eyed Williams in the way Joker noticed most women he'd seen assess potential threats to relationships—the beady eye. Beck's beady eye was enough to sear the upper layer of skin from anything she zoned in on. Wondering how Williams wasn't melting into a puddle of sticky, but sexy, goo, he gave a thoughtful frown. Beck had never done that before.

Oh, god. Panic blossomed in his gut. Was she going to have the Feelings talk with him again?

"What are you talking about?" Williams wanted to know.

Beck looked from Joker, who was trying to glare and not seemed like a herd animal in head lamps, to Williams, who was watching at the weapons systems' readouts but not really seeing them, and then back to Joker. "My mistake," she said, but her expression told Joker he owed her an explanation. Like hell. "Read your tone of voice and body language wrong."

That Joker was even thinking in terms of a relationship with Beck made him ill. They were friends. There were benefits, but at the end of the day, he trusted Beck. Friends.

Williams was different. Not really a friend. A pretty face that was fun to play cards with. Who didn't appear to judge his disability. And seemed to listen to him when he talked, even if he was just blowing smoke out his ass most of the time. Like Beck.

Well, maybe they were friends. Shit. Well, fuck it. Not anymore.

He had trusted Ash—Williams too. And she had been too drunk to say no. Or maybe he had been too drunk to say no.

Shit, he hated people. Complicated, messy. Idiots. He just wanted to fly and forget everything else existed. So that's exactly what he was going to do. He wasn't going to deal with this now. Not on shift. Not now. Not till he was good and ready and both Beck and Williams could go to hell until he was good and ready. He was not thinking about Ash or the way she'd all but purred in his arms. Yeah.

"We are not fighting," Joker asserted, mostly because Alenko was looking at him now—giving his version of the beady eye—and all Joker needed was for the damn Boy Scout to go running to the Commander with his suspicions. "Just not talking." Before Beck could open her mouth he added, "Leave it alone, Beck. It doesn't affect our jobs."

Alenko looked back over his seat at Williams—softened a bit—then glanced at Joker. "So, what, now we have to put up with your awkward silent treatment of each other?" he asked.

Damn him.

Beck added, "Again?" She crossed her arms, thin lips pouting.

Damn her.

The bridge was silent a moment before Williams spoke up. "Yep."

Damn her most of all.

Space cows were inelegant creatures. Part fox-dog, part raccoon, part dinosaur, part something else — all alien. They walked in a trotting, clownish gait, bumping into one another, bleating in a sing-song, mourning warble that was just as hard on the ears as their bodies were on the eyes. They had a red coat of soft-looking, downy fur with a mixture of white and black spots in various patterns, but Ashley didn't know how they survived in the hot climate of Ontarom. The balmy afternoon heat of the canyon cliff the squad sat on was playing havoc with Ash's ability to breath. She checked her armor's readouts again on the new Nexus omni-tool Adams had requisitioned for her. It was an uncomfortable 60 degrees Celsius even at their present altitude overlooking the lush valley and raging river four kilometers below. The omni-tool itself made her smile – it had a decent sized fabber and the processing power of God. She could melt down anything. For the first time since joining the Alliance, she was having fun doing salvage duty.

Hear me roar, salvaged goods. In her mind she gave a wicked chuckle and twirled her Evil Mustache of Doom.

She turned her attention back to Shepard, a lopsided grin on her face. Because: What. The. Fuck. Ash had yet to put the scope of the rifle to her eye to give Shepard a status report of the bunker nestled in an alcove on the other side of the canyon nearly six hundred meters away. She simply watched her commanding officer interact with the space cow like Shepard did it for a living. It had surprised the hell out of Ashley when Shepard got out of Precious and fed one of the damn things while they were supposed to be doing reconnaissance. The alien creature looked like it wore a black mask over its silver, deep-set eyes, a pattern Ash had only seen on earth raccoons. With its almost human-like fingers, it plucked the proffered rice cake out of Shepard's outstretched hand and greedily nibbled, unafraid of the strange human with treats. It blinked its alien eyes—the damn things had three pupils, like a mutated goat or something—one eye, then the other.

"Careful, Shepard," Garrus said. His reverberating voice sounded apprehensive, like he was giving the thing the turian version of the laser eyeball. "That one looks a little shifty." Ash knew he was an urbanite, but damn. How could a space cow—something you ate—look... shifty? It wasn't like space cows were all going to hold a herd meeting, or whatever, and decide to take over the galaxy.

They had to have a shuttle for that.

The turian laid prone on his belly, like Ash, eye at the scope of his sniper rifle. Ontarom's moon hung just over the horizon beyond him. In a few hundred years, it would collide with the planet. Because it was so close to the horizon, about to set for the day, the optical illusion made the moon appear larger in the sky than it really was. Ash had been on some alien worlds before, but she'd never witnessed a "moonset". As Thonal continued its rapid descent, this would be a first for her.

"The mask only occurs in one and three thousand," Shepard said absently as the space cow pawed at her hand, looking for more treats. "It's not a sign of a bandit. They're harmless."

It grabbed her thumb like an impatient child and bent it back to open her hand, gave her palm a snorting sniff then touched its wide tongue to the same spot. "Sorry. That's all I've got, pal." She extracted her hands from its searching paws before it began to snatch at the latches of her armor.

"Do I want to know how you know that, Commander?" Alenko asked. He crawled on his belly up next to Ashley and put binoculars up to his eyes, looking out over the canyon. Ash took the hint and put her sniper rifle scope up to her eye. The first thing she saw was the body of dead security guard lying at the bunker's door. She gave a grunt of surprise. They were probably too late to save the scientist. She'd been hoping that maybe they weren't too late to do some good. Disappointed, she let out a puff of breath.

"Well, I did come from a farming colony. They're tough to wrangle, but once they're down—"

"Wait. Wait. You were… you're a space cowgirl?" Alenko sputtered, he sat up a bit from his prone position and gaped at the commander. A grin teased the corners of Ash's mouth at the LT's dumb-struck response as she watched a man in heavy armor but no helmet light a cigarette with his omni-tool. Alenko's reaction had pretty much been hers too when Shepard had told her that tidbit of information when they'd laughed together over drinks at the Citadel. Before Ashley had managed to wake up naked in a hotel with Joker next to her with very little memory of the night before.

That thought brought on a frown. She didn't want to think about the stupid jerk or the stupid things they did in their stupid, drunken stupor on stupid Armistice Day. Stupidly.

Or that said stupid jerk had stupidly thought she was a stupid asari.

Ash continued to watch the heavily armored man across the ravine as he blew out smoke from his nose then took another puff.

An asari? Really?

Stupid, idiotic, moronic asshole.

She wasn't going to think about it. Forget it. It was over. It was done. And the asshole was just stupid. And she wasn't going to cry about it. It didn't hurt. She was just pissed. Yeah. She was just pissed and hurt and, and pissed that she'd been too drunk to realize— Fuck.

An asari?

Really?

"I'm Commander Shepard." Shepard's voice was imperious, almost as if she were insulted to be called anything else. Her next sentence confirmed it. "'Space cowgirl' is just… well, it's just wrong. I'm a Marine. I'm not… I haven't—oomph." Ash looked back just in time as the space cow nudged Shepard, nearly knocking her over. The Commander thumped it on the nose, and the weird-looking cow took the hint, giving a bleating warble before walking away towards the rest of the herd. "Ah. Damn it. Give that back."

Shepard tried to keep pace with the space cow which had begun to trot. It had something in its paw. Is that Shepard's credit chit? Ash blinked. Well, maybe Garrus was on to something after all. She imagined the herd holding a town hall meeting with the shifty-looking one holding a gavel and calling the meeting to order.

Still, they needed a shuttle if they were going to go for galactic domination.

Before Ashley's eyes, Shifty broke out into a dead run, its four muscular legs allowing it to quickly distance itself from its pursuer. Its reddish speckled fur rippled as it darted. Shepard ran after it dropping all semblance of dignity and yelled, and her crew dropped all semblances of dutiful soldiers and laughed. "Get back here. That's not edible!" T'Soni followed at a distance, telling Shepard she should have listened to the turian.

"Told you it was shifty," Garrus muttered as Shepard and the space cow disappeared over a ridge and Ashley, still chuckling at her commanding officer and the idea the shifty-looking cows of the galaxy were going to use Shepard's creds to fund their takeover, put her eye back to the scope. "Williams, you see what I see?"

"Only if you're seeing the two dead bodies and five not-dead bodies across the canyon," Ash responded, watching the five heavily-armed guards as they patrolled the bunker's parameter. Two were smoking cigarettes now. One, a woman with what looked like a white handprint painted across her charcoal-gray helmet, walked with a limp. She appeared to sneer at one of the others, another woman also with the same headdress paint across the charcoal-gray helmet, as she passed her.

"Eight not-dead bodies," Garrus corrected. "There are three on the other side of that shuttle. Mercs by the look of it. Not sure of the company though. I've never seen the logo."

Ash looked again, spotting the three mercs easily now that she knew where to look. One of them was taking a leak—he was armored, but it wasn't a hardsuit. The white handprint was across his padded shoulder. His shoulder-length hair was dark and matted to his head by liquid, probably sweat. It was hard to tell at this distance. If it was some kind of hair product—Ash shuddered. Gross. The other two appeared to just be standing around gabbing and smoking. Then one took a bite of what appeared to be a sandwich.

"Leave it to a mercenary group to have bathroom and lunch breaks while a serial killer does his murdering thing inside." She shook her head while the LT choked back a laugh.

"Easy pickins," he commented.

Ash heard Garrus shift, his armor rubbing on the blue-green moss that covered the granite of the precipice making the moss crackle. It sounded like someone stepping on dead leaves. "The dead bodies are wearing what looks like the same make and model of armor. I can make out the ExoGeni Corp logo on the one by the door. Company's private security, maybe."

Ash lifted a shoulder. "Armor's different than the Zhu's Hope colony security."

"Heyuan Genomics supposedly shares the bunker," Alenko said. "They may have supplied some of the security. Either way, I doubt they stood a chance against the mercs. Professional hit squad, maybe?"

Garrus's voice was quiet. "That'd be my guess. Whatever's going down with this Dr. Wayne is going down now. We'll never get over there in time to save him, question him."

"The eezo trail from the relay was still fresh when we arrived," Alenko reminded them. "Whoever this is, he's a sadist. The other two doctors were tortured. That last one..." He made a gagging noise.

"Yeah." Ash remembered the digitals Hackett had sent along with the coordinates and suppressed a shudder. "The first one was a clean kill. The killer got more aggressive as he went along."

"Angrier," Garrus asserted.

"You see that sort of thing a lot during your work with C-Sec?" Ash wanted to know.

"Some. The psychopaths on some of the cases I handled couldn't find the peace they were looking for or the thrill of killing took them further over the edge as they gained confidence in what they were doing. A few of them had been torturing and killing things since childhood. Real sick bastards."

There was a thunderous, alien roar off in the distance. It was deep and throaty and ended with three whining, bird-like calls. The alien sound gave everyone pause.

"Where's the Commander and Liara?" Alenko asked, lowering his binoculars and looking around. The Mako sat some distance away from the edge of the cliff to keep the vehicle from sight of the bunker — it was a good walk to it, about a hundred meters, but the Commander and T'Soni were nowhere in sight. Neither was the ambling herd of space cows. There was another roar with same three bird-like calls.

"Shit!" Shepard's panicked voice bit out. Ash tensed, senses on alert. "Shit! Shit! Shit! Liara!"

Liara sounded frantic. "I see it!" She was panting. Were they running? What was it?

The three crawled back from the edge of the cliff and stood as one, each calling out to the Commander and T'Soni in their own way. Shepard's helmet appeared over the rise she and T'Soni had last been seen on. T'Soni's appeared soon afterward. They were running—sprinting, more like. Ashley thought she heard a dull roar, not like the alien roar from before. Different. It sounded like the rush of water. Ashley looked around. They were on flat, open land. It was alien land, mind, but gravity still appeared to work the way it was supposed it. Water wasn't falling up. At least she hoped to God not. She didn't want to imagine what kind of alien creatures lived in the water here. Too many teeth and not enough elbows.

"Get inside the vehicle, people!" Shepard ordered. She gestured with her hand. "Move!" The rush-of-water roaring grew louder as Shepard and Liara sprinted towards Precious. It began to sound like those rotary bladed vehicles from the very old army vids Granddad used to watch— helicopters? Then the animal-like roar echoed once again. "Shit! Run! Run!"

Ashley swallowed and broke into a run, quickly forgetting about army vids and helicopters, collapsing her weapon as she did so, attached it to its slot on the back of her armor. She focused on moving her legs as she began a hundred meter sprint.

"I can see it now," Shepard said.

"What's that Commander?" Alenko asked. He was faster than Ashley, his longer legs propelled him further. Ashley wanted to know what Shepard could see too, but at the same time dreaded what was chasing them. Commander Shepard didn't scare easily.

Shepard panted. "The headlines when this gets out."

"First Human Spectre Trampled by Space Cows?" Liara asked.

What? Ashley picked up speed. A stampede? Here? Seriously?

"Story of my life," the commander said depreciatively. "Liara, how many do you think we can pick off before they overrun us?"

"Not enough!" Liara shouted. She, too, sounded winded.

"Joker!"

"You want me to take out space cows?" Joker asked. He sounded surprised.

They were nearing the Mako. Ashley looked over her shoulder as she ran. Shepard was steadily closing the gap. Unfortunately, a sea of red and pounding hooves closed the gap to Shepard. "Not necessary. Just be ready to pull our asses out of the fire. Things are about to get ugly. Keep monitoring transmissions on that base."

Alenko and Garrus made it to the Mako and opened the hatch. "Close the door!" Shepard ordered, now keeping pace with Ash. Twenty meters left. The Commander reached back and grabbed T'Soni by the wrist, pulling her along. "Williams, round the other side. Move it, T'Soni! Move! Move! Move!"

The herd was almost upon them. The sound of hundreds of hooves roared in Ashley's ears. She hurdled a rock that jutted out of the ground. Then the animal-like roar echoed, closer.

Much closer.

Oh. God.

She didn't dare look back.

They rounded Precious just the first of the herd slammed into the vehicle. Shepard let out a surprised curse as she swung the door open then was forced to duck away from flying space cow hooves when the Mako wasn't enough to stop the herd from bounding over it like alien kangaroos. Liara pushed her and the three jumped in, slammed the door behind them.

"They're not stopping," Ash said in wonder.

Shepard shook her head. If they didn't get out soon, the creatures could damage the vehicle. Blood already streaked the window on Alenko's side as creature after creature rammed the rover. "I'm more worried about what startled them," she said.

"Big?" Alenko asked, his fingers flying over the haptic adaptive interface.

"Huge," Shepard confirmed. "Big enough to swallow the herd and us. Inside Precious."

"Shi-it." Pressly's voice over the comm sounded. "Commander, we're in position to pick you up."

"Negative. Hold in orbit, Pressly." She let loose a volley of automatic weapons fire, and the herd changed direction enough for the Mako to move. Shepard threw it in reverse, managed a full donut, but they otherwise stayed in about the same place. The herd didn't relent. They were everywhere.

Ash saw the thing that was chasing them. Her blood turned to ice.

Mother of God.

Like a gigantic open-mouthed shark on two powerful legs. It wasn't running, merely walking after its meal, sweeping up the tail end of its intended prey—the space cow herd. And closing fast. It must have been the size of the Normandy's cargo bay. There were at least six rows of ridged, triangular teeth that lined all the way around the beast's mouth.

Oh. My. God.

The creature raked across the ground, snatching up cows and the blue-green moss, chewing as it went, its great jaws gnashing, its lips peeling back to reveal how large the teeth really were. The one visible all-black eye at the very top of its head shut as it chewed with the ferocity Ash had only seen of earth's Great White sharks. The teeth gleamed white against the fleshy color of its triangular-shaped head and backdrop of the black clouds and electrical storm on the far horizon. Even the geth on Eden Prime hadn't been as frightening as that thing. Ashley bit back bile. Fear bubbling up even as she remembered the Thresher Maw all those months back on Edolus. It'd been ugly and slithered, and there had been acid, but there hadn't been so many damned teeth.

Ashley wanted out of the vehicle. She wanted to run. How come they weren't moving? Why weren't they running?

Oh. My. God.

"Shepard!" T'Soni cried from beside Ashley when she saw the advancing maw of triangle teeth on legs. And suddenly Ashley had a lap full of frightened asari. Ash was reminded of her sister Lynne when they'd first discovered the junjun in their home after moving to Amaterasu. Reflexively, she reached out and held Liara. Then she remembered Joker's words and nearly pushed Liara out of the Mako.

An asari? Really? It was an asinine thought in the middle of being scared out of her mind, but it was there. She shook her head to clear it. Okay, why weren't they running?

"Commander?"

"We're going!" Shepard assured her, but the Mako wasn't going. In fact, it was like Casbin all over again. This time instead of getting stuck in primordial muck, they were crunching and crushing space cows stuck in the axles and under the chassis. Shepard tried to bounce them to safety with no luck. The space cows, though they were thinning out, were still ramming the vehicle — a roadblock of bodies on three sides.

"Scramble orders from the bunker, Commander," Joker reported. "They know someone's there."

"We're about to die, Joker. An alien dinosaur with a mouth three times the size of a T-Rex is about to eat us. I don't particularly care what the fuck is going on in that bunker right now." The Commander smacked the dash with her palm. "Fuck!

"Kaidan, adjust the eezo core. Lighten our mass. Joker, if they leave the planet blow them the fuck up. Garrus, arm the canon. We are not going to be food today."

"Tomorrow then?" Ash asked. It was stupid, but her mind was on overload. A giant land shark. A goddamn alien land shark. She couldn't force herself to look back out the window at all those teeth. It would haunt her nightmares for days, weeks to come. Oh. My. God.

Shepard ignored her. "Why the fuck didn't someone tell me this planet was in its fucking mega fauna stage? We're preserving that thing? Why?" she wanted to know. "Why would anyone want to do that? What's wrong with people?"

"Eezo core adjusted, Shepard," Alenko said, tone light but clipped. "We're as light as we're going to get."

Shepard fired the thrusters. The maw of teeth was almost upon them. They shot straight up in the air just as the beast bore down upon the Mako. "Increase mass all the way!"

Precious plummeted and the ground reached up to grab them. Ashley's gut went to her mouth, instant nausea. The rover landed with a thud on the top of the monstrous creature's huge, triangular head.

"We can't beat this one to death by jumping on it," Garrus told them. He was anything but calm.

It took Ashley a few seconds to realize what they were now looking at was a giant black eye about the size of the Mako that sprouted out of the top of creature's head. The eyelid rose up and moistened the eye, the second, filmy inner eyelid caught and didn't retract all the way. Ash felt she was looking at a liquid black hole.

"Blind it," Shepard ordered. Garrus fired the port-side automatics. The moist eye popped like a blister, spurting orange liquid onto the rover. Then the alien dinosaur roared in pain, rearing back and shook its head. The Mako was tossed off like a dust particle. They tumbled ass over gun turret without a means to hold on. No one had the time or inclination to strap themselves in before Shepard had thrust them onto the creature. Precious leveled out, the five occupants landing in a heap of arms and legs at the back of the rover, pushed back by the initial g-forces of the fall.

Ash looked out and only saw the valley's basin four kilometers down and rising fast. She joined Liara in screaming as they plummeted.

xD