THE SHADOW BROKER liked her privacy. Even though her new residence on Ilmnos was in asari space, the asari were guarding their borders and Relays with a bureaucratically pedantic ferocity. There were innumerable checks and rechecks. Detours light-years out of the way. Bribes and cajoling and even a threat or two budged the queues not a kilometer. The morass added unnecessary hours and frustrations to the crew of the Phoenix, although some were less put out than others.
"We're not getting anywhere fast." Alieesh Himgi told her commander as the latter paced behind her. The pilot looked relaxed and a bit bored.
"What's the problem this time?" Ellie Crawford asked with arms crossed and foot tapping. They were already a day late for the damn rendezvous! She was watching Miranda pace, absently wondering why she wasn't wearing her uniform. The boss had opted for a more casual look today. She was wearing the rust-coloured scrubs the crew wore when off-duty.
"Refugee convoy. The asari have given first priority to them for the Relays."
Miranda nodded behind her. She could understand that reasoning.
"How long?"
"They're saying two hours processing per convoy. There are four convoys ahead of us." She adjusted a few controls. On the overhead monitors far in the distance a Relay glowed. "After them the BRIAR's get next priority, now that the fighting's stopped."
By now, they'd heard the news of the 'Miracle' but it hadn't made Miranda feel any better. Liara had mentioned it during their last communiqué but had cryptically told her not to get 'too excited'. Miranda was getting tired of 'cryptic'. Behind her Ellie stopped tapping her foot.
"What's a BRIAR and why are they more important than us?" The heavy weapons specialist asked with a faint disdain.
"Buoy Replacement, Installation, Alignment and Repair. Those are the only non-military or refugee crews being rushed."
"Fine, not arguing that," Miranda agreed, "but we do have the bloody credentials."
"Fake credentials." Himgi muttered. Miranda sighed a frustrated sigh then shook her head.
"Add it all up for me, Ali. How long are we going to be sitting here?"
"Tops? Eight to ten hours. Maybe longer, maybe a little less." Himgi waved a hand at her navigational board. "We could skip this one, use the Wil'emnosi Relay." She did a quick calculation. "It would add another eight hours to the trip though."
Miranda rubbed the bridge of her nose to attempt to head off the headache making plans to assert itself.
"No. Inform the Broker we'll be delayed again. Unavoidable." She turned to leave the cockpit and looked to Ellie. "I want this ship gone over from stem-to-stern and I want it perfect. Since we have the time, let's be productive with it. Check everything. I want a full inventory done, every weapon, ration, blanket and rivet counted and accounted for."
"Riley's gonna whine," Ellie told her as she passed.
"If he does, he'll end up doing it by himself. At 18:00 we'll meet to finalize everything and go over the new developments." Miranda told the air. Juneau acknowledged. Miranda entered the CIC as the ship's AI announced the new orders and meeting. Juneau, while adept did not have as complex a personality as EDI and the geth. They would remain the only AI anomalies for a long time to come. Asha'Rhaal was awaiting her as she stepped onto Command.
"I have a full materials manifest ready," the quarian told her, holding out a PAD. Miranda's bad mood dissipated somewhat.
"Of course you do," she said with a slight smile. She looked it over. Everything was satisfactory, though some of their stores had been depleted with the inclusion of both Black's and Flynn's ships in the hanger and the damages each had sustained. Normally it wouldn't have been a problem but they were far from a repair yard at the moment. "Who's down, who's working?"
'Rhaal activated her omnitool and called up a small screen.
"Ilola is off-duty but she was scheduled. Hoshiko is running simulations on the data Vas Raven's Fist brought us on that creature on Kahje. The quarian in question was asking to be made use of, so I sent her to Hoshiko to help there." Miranda nodded. "Riley is in the hanger. Saajila is in the armory doing her usual inventory. Illemna is writing code for sensor and targeting arrays. They were 'off', she said." She swapped screens. "Saajila and Illemna were scheduled to go off-duty soon, though."
"Tell them to give me a few more hours. I'll make it up to them." Miranda handed the PAD back. "I want you to make certain we have every last scrap of information relevant to our current situation in order and ready to go."
'Rhaal nodded.
"I've been datamining everything I can get on this so-called 'Miracle'. Official news is rife with speculations but have no real answers, which is hardly a surprise. The military hard scans show that the creatures or beings who did it match the one on Kahje almost exactly. All covert sources are flinging orders for heightened readiness everywhere."
"Business as usual." Miranda looked thoughtful. "Ill winds and no sails."
"It gets worse." 'Rhaal told her, calling up another new screen. "Military channels are reporting vessels and troops of, and I quote, 'unknown quality and quantity with engagements not satisfactory for initial contact', unquote."
"Which means more ships like the ones we've encountered with those encounters going badly."
"That's about the size of it."
"Thank you, Asha. Add that to your analysis."
"As you wish. As to everything else, our guests seem to be behaving themselves at least."
'Rhaal excused herself and went to work. Miranda, satisfied all was in order, decided to go to her office. Yes. Their guests. A quick check on the interior cameras showed Duke in a corridor with Kassidi and Flynn sitting up in his bed in the medbay. Flynn appeared to be reading. He was healing with a remarkable vigour and she surmised that he'd probably be on his feet in no time. Another check of his latest mediscan confirmed her assumption. He looked relaxed as he read, tension gone, with years seeming to have dropped off that rugged face and he almost looked as she remembered. After a while, Miranda caught herself. Staring like some besotted teenager.
"Dammit, Miranda. Stop this foolishness." she muttered to herself. "It was only eight damn days."
"Excuse me, Commander."
A stylized female face appeared on the large monitor opposite her desk. The voice was pure English, straight from London and had a complete calm that Miranda sometimes envied.
"What is it, Juneau?"
"All crew at stations, all ship systems in order. There is a minor circuit fault in propulsion ferrofluid regulatory array 161. Specialist Riley has been tasked to its remediation."
"Thank you. I want regular reports." Miranda rose to seek an analgesic for the headache that finally bloomed behind her eyes.
"Medical telemetry indicates you are currently experiencing cephalalgia and are showing heightened fatigue proteins in your circulatory system. Were you not a woman of your unique physiology, this would indicate significant stress."
"It's just a headache."
Miranda found and held up a small pink pill before swallowing it.
"As you can see," she told the AI.
"Confirmed. I will log it in your medidex."
"That's not necessary." Miranda made her way back to her desk, sat and rubbed her temples.
"There is no need for concern, Commander. It is kept strictly confidential unless required under emergency conditions by the ship's medic, or by..."
There was a pause, then Juneau resumed. "Excuse me, Commander. Someone has just sought access into my files on Cerberus."
Miranda perked up at that.
"Whom?"
"Chip ident registers the user as Major Ryan Flynn, currently in the Medbay. I informed him as per protocol that those specific files were restricted to ship personnel only and then only on direct orders from you. He is currently detailing my alleged parentage between a rather byzantine sexual aid and a refuse-sorting computer."
Miranda stifled a smile.
"What was he trying to access?" Miranda had a sneaking suspicion she already knew.
"An index search on a Class D asteroid called 'Sjanus'." Miranda shook her head, suspicions confirmed. He was looking to see if he could find any reference to the first time they'd met. "I have again informed him there is no such data outside of standard cartographical surveys. He has now likened my cognitive functioning to an uncontrolled bowel condition."
Another pause.
"Major Flynn has ceased his inquiries."
"Juneau – pull up my personal files on my initial missions for Cerberus. Specifically anything that matched the search criteria used by Major Flynn."
"One moment…" Text began scrolling across a screen on Miranda's desk. "Displayed. Search criteria included yourself, himself, the asteroid Sjanus and the Illusive Man."
That might explain his rather snide attitude since New Chamberlain, she thought.
"Display all pertinent data on Sjanus." Again the screen switched and scrolled.
"Sjanus. Class D asteroid. Former listening post of Cerberus dubbed 'Arkady' only structure present during specified time parameters. I do not have mission specifics for the time period for which Major Flynn searched."
"Those were my early days in Cerberus." Miranda paused at the recollection. She hadn't really thought on that particular period of her life in a very long time. "We'd received word from an 'inside source' – one Jolly Finn – that an independent mercenary band had attacked it and had begun to loot the base for intel to sell."
"Logged. Thank you."
Miranda laughed softly to herself.
"As a test the Illusive Man had given me command of a group of ex-Alliance soldiers. Told me to 'encompass the situation.' I think it was more to see if I could handle the soldiers. I had assured him the base would return to Cerberus control without delay." Miranda muttered, not happy with the next memory. "What an annoying battle that had been."
"I beg your pardon?" Juneau inquired politely. Miranda gestured at the screen.
"The battle to take back Arkady Base. The fight seesawed back and forth for most of a day. The mercenaries were poorly positioned. Whoever had been in charge made some rather amateur mistakes. After my team went through two rather senseless guards and a rather ferocious first few hours, I managed to trap them in a decon annex then used the scrubbers to finish them off." She smiled grimly to herself. "I kept my promise."
Miranda shook her head with just a touch of self-reproach.
"I'd dispersed the remainder of my squad through the base to make sure it was empty, to take inventory and to find what intelligence I could as to who had attacked and why. That was just standard procedure." She rose to make herself a cup of tea in her small kitchenette. She laughed ruefully to herself. "Until one-by-one my squad began to vanish."
Miranda glanced back at the face on the monitor, then realized that'd she'd been talking to the computer. She shook her head and put her mind back to the tea.
"And then what happened?" Juneau asked after a minute of silence. Miranda turned and regarded the AI's 'face'. Then what happened? No small question there…
"Major Flynn happened." Miranda poured her tea, sipped it appreciatively and leaned against the counter. It was a story she'd told to no one. In a way, she was still telling it to no one, so she saw no harm in continuing. It felt odd to tell it out loud, but also …liberating, in a way. "We missed him in our sweep. I had no idea I was now facing an N7 soldier and a survivor of Torfan." She sprinkled a few fingerfuls of salarian meetii sweetener into her mug then sipped again. Perfect. "The last attack involved Flynn shorting out an entire corridor's power line, breaching the wall and venting it to space. I barely made it out of that corridor. After that, I was the only one of my team left."
"Major Flynn's experiences on Torfan must have prepared him quite handily for combat in such close quarters."
"That was a fact I'd wished I'd known at the time." Miranda paced around the kitchenette as she spoke. "I was in the command centre of the base trying to get an emergency message off when he dropped from the ceiling behind me. For such an unwieldy slab, he could move rather quietly when he wished. We stood there gun-to-gun."
"It is obvious neither of you fired." Miranda blinked, coming back to the present.
"The Blood Pack showed up. Thanks to Flynn I had no team left to fight them off. Regardless, I refused to give up the base. He had other ideas. He left." Miranda continued, refreshing her tea. "He holstered Brigid and walked away." A small smile played over her lips at his eternal audacity.
"You let him leave, Commander?"
"Well, no. I was trying to get automated defence systems back online. I caught him up to him just before he got to his ship and managed to convince him that it was in his best interests to stay and help me."
"Very advantageous given your situation at the time."
"That's one way of looking at it, yes."
She put the mug down with the tea unfinished then wandered the room. She stopped in front of a small simple silver box on a tall set of drawers in a corner. On an impulse she opened it. Inside, a couple of medals for her actions in the War, a few old-fashioned paper letters from her sister, small keepsakes. At the bottom something wrapped in a sheet of pale green tissue paper next to a small emerald-shaped bottle, as green as the gem. Her fingers hesitated as they touched it but she made herself extract it then unfold the delicate paper.
In the centre of the bundle sat a small silver four-leaf clover. It had once been attached to the bottle, but the ribbon that had held it had long since been lost.
Corny damn cliché, anyway.
Carrying it, she returned to her desk and lay the charm carefully down and contemplated it.
"It turned out we worked surprisingly well together. We had our differences in personalities, naturally." She said the next more to herself. "I have to admit, I had not initially liked him at all. He probably did it on purpose."
Miranda rotated the clover and studied its sheen.
"Fortunately, the Blood Pack was only a scouting party, mostly vorcha with only three krogan handlers. Flynn killed one. It was rather impressive, admittedly. I'd never seen a human and a krogan fight hand-to-hand like that before. We set a trap for the other two, put them down and secured the base."
She couldn't, she thought suddenly with a guilty start, recall if she'd actually thanked him or not. She rubbed her left temple, urging the analgesic on. She probably hadn't and cursed herself mildly for the lapse. The next she said with remembered incredulity.
"Then he announced we were 'done' and congratulated himself on 'saving me'! If his sheer bravado had been weaponized, he could have beaten the Reapers by himself!"
"Such misplaced confidence can be detrimental." Juneau stated in preprogrammed solidarity.
"You would think so, but he had an endless supply! Naturally I was affronted by such arrogance and told him in no uncertain terms. He was a real piece of work." One finger absently turned the clover. "Tried to take the credit. He even…" she tried to laugh it off, make it sound ridiculous. "…asked me on a date."
"That was rather brazen given the circumstances, Commander. You were technically still enemies."
Miranda nodded. She was starting to wonder if they still were.
"'Brazen' should be that man's middle name."
"May I inquire as to your response to such an inquiry?"
"I was angry. I told him in no uncertain terms how utterly and completely insanely ludicrous I thought the entire idea." She scoffed. "'That's nae a no.' he said." She imitated him with just a touch of sarcasm. "Unbelievable."
"As I calculated, based on your personality profile."
Miranda looked up, fixed Juneau's 'face' with an direct stare.
"I went anyway."
Juneau was silent for several seconds.
"That was …unexpected."
Miranda could only agree.
"May I inquire as to your reasoning for going?"
Miranda opened her mouth to answer then closed it, realizing her initial response would have been wrong.
Why did I go?
"Frankly… I don't know. Maybe I… damn. I don't know."
"I see. May I inquire as to its resolution then?"
"It was…" Miranda began, reliving it in her head. "It was… like absolutely nothing I'd ever experienced before. Or since, to be completely honest." Some dam seemed to break in her. She laughed at the memories, perhaps allowing herself to enjoy them for the first time in a long time. "Somehow the lout seduced me on the way to Illium. I don't know how, but he did. I let him. I must have, it's the only explanation. I mean, in the hotel it took him almost no effort at all to talk me into bed. Of course I let him." She slapped a hand down onto the desk, causing the clover to jump. "I just didn't care about the consequences! Everything had gone wrong and gone …right in ways I wouldn't have expected. I felt sophisticated and seasoned, which shows you how much I wasn't either of those things. Intelligence isn't much without experience. I also admit I was rather naïve in a few too many ways. Still… I was entitled to be that once, don't you think?" she asked the AI, not expecting nor wanting an actual answer. "Where was the harm? Afterwards, all I had to do was explain it to him. End it and walk away. It should have been easy. I had a little fun against my better judgement and that was that. I should have ended it there and then. I was so furious though. I left the room early and just wandered the grounds. I thought he'd drugged me, it was so pathetic. I just didn't know how to handle it. I was halfway to a clinic to have tests run."
"Perhaps that would have been prudent."
"No. No, no, never Flynn. He's a lot of things, but never that."
She dropped her head into her hands, spoke between her fingers.
"I marched back to that room. It was over and I was going to tell him so. Flynn, damn him, was a perfect gentleman. Charming, gallant, warm and sincere. He'd ordered room service." She peered through her fingers at the little charm. It was so polished she could see her reflection in it. The Miranda down there looked back up at her. "This was on the tray, around the neck of a bottle of perfume. I can't imagine where he'd found it. It was called 'BhFabhar Na Dána'. 'Favour The Bold'. I still have the bottle. I never opened it, it was rare and obscenely expensive. There was a note with it, but I lost it. I can't really remember what it said. He had this tidy, slanted handwriting. You don't see that much now. I'd wondered where he'd found an actual pen. The note was probably something maudlin and silly, anyway. But somehow it translated into me staying for seven more days."
"I mean no offence, but that does not seem to be something you would do."
"It was only a week." She said lamely, as if trying to justify something she couldn't articulate. She didn't like not knowing why. The silver clover winked light at her as she turned it on its paper. "Not very long at all."
Miranda got up then sat back down, but rose again almost immediately to stalk across the room, fists clenching at her sides, obviously agitated. Juneau watched her and let her walk. Miranda stopped then whirled back to face Juneau's simulated features.
"It had to end! It was too much, too soon. I couldn't allow it. I wanted it. I just couldn't …have it."
"You do not sound convinced, Commander."
Miranda planted her hands on her hips, setting her stance as if readying herself for some action.
"I was different then. I was younger. There was too much at stake. I couldn't allow myself those kinds of indulgences. I had to keep my father away and keep my sister safe. So… that meant no Flynn."
Miranda ran a frustrated hand through her short dark hair.
"He just wasn't… possible."
Miranda crossed to the small window that looked out into the Deep Dark. The bright white-blue of the Relay in the distance reflected off the ships ahead of the Phoenix. She leaned her head against the transparent metal, watched the stars burn.
"It was so unlike me. The Illusive Man sent agents to find me because I of all people forgot to check in!" She pushed herself away from the window, went calmly back to her desk. "That's when I realized that Flynn was very, very wrong for me. Wrong in the best possible way."
"I do not understand this seeming dichotomy, Commander. Major Flynn being 'wrong' for you would imply a negative experience."
"Juneau, the point of any experience is learning from it as that's the actual point to living. I'd made a mistake. I'd learn from it. He'd shown me a road I couldn't walk. Things became clear. So I left." She frowned. It sounded wrong when she said it out loud.
"The Major must have been disappointed when you informed him of your intentions."
Miranda had been contemplating the clover trinket and looked up sharply when Juneau spoke. She opened her mouth to say something but stopped and looked back down. The reflected Miranda looked discomfited.
"I didn't tell him. I just left." She laughed a short laugh laced with bitterness. "I …ran."
"I see. Do you regret your actions?" Juneau scanned the Commander. Her stress levels had been steadily climbing throughout their conversation, but seemed to suddenly peak then drop. The woman was clearly agitated, but Juneau was not sophisticated enough to say by which emotion. The AI calculated that it was time to be sympathetic and overlaid her simulated face with an appropriate empathetic cast.
Miranda gave the AI a hard eye as it did so.
"I wouldn't change the life I've had since even if I could. I've done important things. Necessary things." She covered the clover with her hand. "I have some regrets. Who wouldn't?" She looked away. "But I've done important necessary things."
"As my historical databases confirm. Your actions were undeniably essential."
"It just hadn't been the time. There's never any damned time." She uncovered the clover, glared at it. "Is it irony that I found the one man in the universe I could have…" Could have what, Miranda? "…and found him at precisely the wrong bloody time?"
On the vid-feed from the medbay, she saw that man slowly rise, disappear for a few moments then return. Never the right time, she thought, watching him hesitate by the bed. He turned from it to go to the locker with his personal effects therein.
Now she was in charge, things were different and she had all the time she wanted, if she wanted. It only needed a yes or no.
"Juneau – not only will you forget everything you've just heard, you will purge this entire conversation from your memory. Permanently. That's an order."
"As you command."
"Engage privacy mode."
Juneau acknowledged and closed off her monitoring of Miranda's quarters. Miranda looked down at her hands to see them trembling. She huffed in a breath and did her best to calm herself. She looked back to the monitor showing the medbay. Flynn was in the process of dressing himself, doubtless disobeying Hoshiko. Miranda jabbed the control with some pique and shut off the feed then glared at the blank screen. Her hand clenched around the clover charm, crumpling the paper. She squeezed so hard its edge cut into her palm. Her headache returned with a vengeance.
Miranda so desperately wished she could hate him.