ALPHA CITADEL

SYSTEM INAPPLICABLE

OCTOBER 2188

History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme a lot.

- Mark Twain

JACK PUSHED HERSELF out of 'Murtock's' grip, staggered back.

"What the fuck is this? You can't be here. There is no way."

He was dressed in the last clothes she'd seen him in – those brown leather pants and black boots, the battered stolen repainted Eclipse and Blue Suns armor pieces. With a dull-crimson longcoat with the arms cut off over everything. He had an Avenger VIII on his back, a Brawler VII on his hip and a Katana VI at his back. He had a couple of krogan-made knives strapped to his chest.

At first glance, he looked the same. Smelled the same. Something was …off, though. Something she couldn't quite place – aside from the obvious.

"There's all kinds'a ways. One, I live here. Sorta. Two, so do you. Kinda."

"There's no way I can be here!"

"Whoa – you got some good 'Hallow' last night, huh? I knew I shoulda stayed." He went rummaging around the bed – more a mattress on the floor, really. "Where's the blanker agent? You don't have time to be high. We gotta go make some money."

'Hallow'? 'Hallow' was the street-name for Halladrexine 121 - an asari medi-grade biotic enhancer – it was also addictive as hell in large doses. It was pressured in, usually into a major artery – or "slid". Side effects included organ failure and blood leaking out of unpopular orifices. Jack hadn't touched the stuff in almost a decade.

Murtock found a pad as he rooted through the stuff on the floor.

"I am the black and scarlet dream

the last bloody eye, the last gasping scream… - the hell is this?"

Jack reflexively batted it out of his hand.

"Nothing! Leave shit alone!"

Murtock shrugged and kept rummaging. After another moment, he stopped, stood, hands on hips.

"All right – where is it? Are you Hallowed? Was it something else?"

Jack fought down a headache snaking under her skin looking to drop down behind her eyes.

"What – no! No drugs!" He shook his head, not believing her. She staggered to a dirty sink near the bed, leaned on it, breathed. "Just give me a damn minute!"

"You're acting like you're spun, Jackie." He crossed his arms. "This score will be big if we pull it off and I need your ass operational."

"Fuck off, asshole! Let me think for five goddamn minutes!" Was she on drugs? It felt like she was coming down off… something. Did she just imagine the last ten years of her life as some Hallow-induced hallucination? No. That was just stupid. She'd never been that bombed. She wouldn't hallucinate all the shit that happened to her like that. She sure as hell wouldn't have hallucinated Shepard. Reality and where she was now were two opposing things, she was fairly certain.

She looked up into the broken mirror over the sink. She looked as normal as she ever got. Shaved head, tattooed makeup, all other ink she could see correct.

Oh, and she was naked but for a pair of plain black thong underwear. Shepard likes these. I never wore these much, but Shepard likes 'em…

Murtock had looked cross for a moment, then waved the remark off, started to walk toward her, stopped, pointed, as if suddenly noticing.

"The fuck? When did you get all this new ink? I was only gone a day and a half!" He poked her right gluteus. "What the fuck's an 'N7' and why is it on your ass?"

So he didn't know about her ink. No, of course - she didn't have half the ink she had now as when she ran with Murtock. So, stuff could legitimately be crushed and exploded - or both - soon.

His hand slapped her ass, lingered, leaned around her with his familiar leer.

Jack suddenly felt …too exposed. Yeah, this might be Murtock, and yeah, every sense told her that this was Murtock, but her rational mind insisted it was impossible, and she was inclined to believe it. So she was 98 percent naked, and it was just… stupid… and yeah, she'd never cared before, but now she did. She was different now. To see it – to touch it - you had to… well, fuck it - you had to be Shepard, and that was that. She slapped his hand off her ass, pushed him back, wheeled around on him.

"None of your goddamned business!" She was suddenly wide awake. Blue flared around her. "You've got two seconds to explain how I got here and who you are!"

"Sweetheart," he told her with that sarcastic tone that had bought him that broken nose. "This is your fuckin' Hallow haze."

"You can drop the act." she said dangerously. 'Murtock' crossed his arms and pursed his lips. Even his ink was authentic. As he had always been in the face of her rages, he said fearlessly,

"You gotta cut this shit out. We got a long day ahead of us – and I'm not goin' broke because you broke your damn promise. Winch your ass into some clothes and let's go."

He was good, but she was already nearing the dangerous edge of her patience.

"You tell me what's going on and I'll crush your sorry ass to the size of a B-ball."

Murtock put his hands up defensively, like he always did when he'd realized he'd really pissed her off – granted that had been relatively easy to do. He even had that stupid eye tattooed on his left palm. Whatever this was, it was thorough.

"Okay... look - " He gestured behind her. "There's your gear, right there. Put it on, you'll be less touchy, yeah?"

Jack glanced back to see a large crate containing black Ariake Tech VIII-level Merc armor. It certainly looked like the gear she'd stolen five lifetimes ago – it wasn't new by a long shot, but it was clean, scaled down and tailored for her, with the exact touches she'd have put on it if she'd ever forced herself to wear that much armor in the first place. She eyed it and him with suspicion, vaguely remembering there had been a time long ago that she'd worn heavier gear than usual because Murtock's many and varied always-failed-get-rich-quick schemes required it. They'd stolen that gear at one point, and she'd tried it for a while. She'd stopped wearing it after his death, trying to disassociate herself from all the things she'd felt then. Now, though, since the War, she'd worn the custom Serrice stuff Shepard had bought her, fitted with shunts and backup e-nodes and integrated auxiliary amps, the perfect suit for a Vanguard-class biotic. It looked sharp as hell and was comfortable, if more than she'd been used to wearing. Still, she was kind of invested in living now, and every edge mattered. This old suit – a knock-off 'Sentinel' variant pulled off some long-dead Eclipse bitch - was surprisingly comfortable, as she pulled on the bodysuit on first, then fit the pieces over it. She saw the familiar shape of a shotgun at the bottom of the crate, pulled it out – an Executioner VII, liberated from a batarian – it even had her name scratched in it. Under that, a Kessler VIII. The weapons were period-specific, pre-t-clips. She felt her biotics even out as the suit's built-in controller nodes synced to her amps. Directional channels and extra e-packs she'd installed in the armor also synced.

Yeah – so… this Murtock.

"Better yet?" He crossed his arms again. "You're rigged and armed, now, yeah? Shit together yet? All nice and calm?"

Jack had started to get a look at her surroundings by now. Out a dingy window, she saw the backside of a block on some Citadel ward.

How in the blue end of fuck did she get on the Citadel? Some kind of holo-projection? A drug after all? Some kind of psychological trick or trap? That was another fuckup by whoever it was – she'd never lived on the Citadel. It still explained precisely squat, so she skipped the futile path to an actual explanation and just addressed the foremost concern on her mind.

"Where's Shepard?"

"Who?" He looked genuinely confused, then suspicious. "Did he sell you the Hallow?"

Jack, patience leaping over that edge in an elegant swan dive straight to anger, pinned him to the wall with a biotic 'clamp'. He squirmed briefly, then relaxed, knew struggling was futile. Her Kessler pushed his nose flat.

"Who the fuck are you? Last chance." She 'squeezed' the 'clamp' for emphasis. Murtock coughed as she did it.

"Jack – I'm your ol' Benny Murtock, yeah?" He smiled at her insolently. She knew that face. But – more details were not meshing with her memories. She remembered well because the damn scheme he was talking about was the one on the batarian weapon frigate that had gotten him killed. The Murtock she had known had his busted nose bent to the left, this guy to the right. Her Murtock had broken his orbital bone over his right eye so badly that he'd been left with a slight squint in that eye, and this one had no such thing. He'd had a broken canine that gave him lopsided fangs – and this one's teeth were perfect. To top it all off, he hadn't aged a single day from the looks of him. Small details, but big enough.

"C'mon – you were probably just dreaming about me a minute ago."

He sent her a pitying look, still as fearless.

"You wanna get fried, do it after a job, right?"

With a disgusted hiss she backed away, dropped him to the floor. Fine. She probably wasn't going to get any actual answers here. She channeled some biotic energy through her glove's sync into the shotgun to charge her ammo.

"You're not Murtock." She cocked her head at him, growled, tried a different tack. "Whatever the fuck this is, you're not the Murtock I knew. He's dead – and I was not dreaming about you."

He just looked at her, not fazed, his attitude still one of being sure she was coming down off something.

"It's them dosages, Jackie. You gotta watch how much you slide." He smiled up at her. "You're here, now, where you was yesterday, right?"

That irritating tone he'd used to talk her down way back when. Damn - they had seriously done their homework.

"We got a raid planned on some squints. We'll find you a pipe cleaner, get you flushed. This is your reality, babe. It's one of them things even drugs can't make you deny."

"I can deny anything I like," Jack said, sucking in a deep breath. All her senses said this was as real as it got, except it couldn't be. There was no such thing as time travel, it couldn't be '78, she wasn't 18, and she'd not been anywhere near the Citadel. She still had her N7 ink, still had her memories of Shepard, Collectors, Reapers, her students and all the time from then until yesterday. No matter who stood before her – the Benjamin Murtock she knew was long dead – and she was done playing this stupid game.

"Whatever. Look, you can stay and play …whatever the hell this is, but I'm leaving." She turned a dark eye on him. "I suggest you refrain from trying to stop me."

Murtock just laughed.

"Shit – listen to you! 'Refrain from'. Ain't we sophisticated alla sudden?"

"Yeah. Follow me and I'll blow you away. Not negotiable." Murtock just snorted, waved her away, his attitude of "you'll be back", plain. Jack stepped through the door, and the first thing she noticed was the silence. A very deep silence. Stretching over her head she could see the other arms of the Citadel, but they were mostly dark, spotted only here and there with lights. No endless stream of vehicles, no glitter of apartment blocks and residences. No nebula. Just the Deep Dark and a small cluster of stars. Not the real Citadel then. Just fucking great.

"Hey, Murtock," she called back into the grungy apartment. "You miss this on your way in?"

She heard a sigh through the still-open door, then a stomping approaching.

"Thought you were leav… the fuck?" He shot past her, looking all around, at last looking up. He stood as if transfixed for long moments, until Jack shook her head and shoved him back into awareness with a rap from her shotgun.

"Well?"

"No…" Murtock muttered after another moment. He did a 360, looked back at his apartment. "No." His gaze went back to the sky and he pointed at various things up there, the dark, the lack of stars, traffic and lights, each finger point punctuated with a "No". The finger came down finally as he slowly pivoted around to look at her, finger following. "No?" She shook her head.

"No."

He looked lost and bewildered for a moment.

"Then what the fu…?" She shrugged.

"Don't look at me! Not gonna find out standing here yapping about it, though."

"What'd ya suggest we do then?"

Jack rubbed a thumb over her bottom lip, contemplated. What, she wondered, would Shepard do in this kind of situation? She chuckled out loud at that. Yeah, I'm head over for Big Hero Boy all right.

"What's funny?"

"Nothing. We got two choices: Presidium or the Docks." He'd go to either one, probably the Docks first, look for a ship.

Murtock crossed his arms and slapped a skeptical look across his face.

"Right. Notice any transport anywheres? This place is at the outer edge of the arm. How long do you think it's gonna take for us to walk anywhere here?"

Jack scowled at him.

"I don't remember you being this much of a whiny bitch." He scowled in return. "The Docks are closer, and have travel tubes and elevators. This place may not be inhabited, but it does have power, dumbass."

Without waiting for him, she started off.

"Just wait a damned minute, wouldja?!" Jack slowed, but didn't stop. With a curse, he ducked back into his apartment, scrambled around for a few moments to emerge with a backpack and more weapons. He jogged after her. "Provisions."

Jack just shrugged and kept walking.