A/N: Those of you following this story, thank you so much for your patience! Here's a new chapter, enjoy!

Chapter Thirteen

Shepard was breathing hard as she crouched down next to the doorway leading into a vast, open warehouse. They had been moving quickly, but they were a group of five where Jack was a lone woman – and a one-woman demolition team, to boot. They hadn't caught her yet, and privately Shepard was beginning to worry that they weren't going to. Jack was going to make it to the Normandy before they could intercept her, she would take it, and to hell with anyone stuck on board.

Shepard clenched her teeth, easing an eye around the side of the doorway and trying to keep that kernel of growing anxiety buried. Jack was far more unstable than Cerberus had led her to believe, and Shepard hadn't been prepared to deal with her. She had trusted Cerberus' intel again, despite knowing the Illusive Man was capable of manipulating it as he saw fit. Now, as they doggedly fought their way through waves of the warden's mercenaries, they were paying the price for her lapse.

The mercs hadn't let up after Shepard had freed the prisoners, and that had allowed Jack to get further and further ahead. She could only assume the warden was still hell-bent on salvaging what was a disastrous situation for him, too. If he could capture and sell her, no doubt he could recoup some of his losses.

She jerked back as a hail of bullets slammed into the wall right above her head. Revan, who was just across the hall from her, raised an eyebrow as though telling her to be more careful. There was no humour in it, and nor could Shepard muster any for the half-hearted glare she tossed back. She was far too tense to joke around with Revan right now.

What must she be thinking, having agreed to put herself and her squad under Shepard's command, only to have Shepard… cock it up like this?

Nothing like that was evident on the Jedi's face, though. She simply cocked her head toward the doorway, raising both her eyebrows in a question.

Shepard understood. Revan was right: she was the best choice to take point here. "Go," Shepard ordered shortly. "I've got Matt."

The engineer, who was hugging the wall at Revan's side, wasn't quick enough to hide his grimace. Shepard didn't draw attention to it. She was fairly sure she understood how he must be feeling, and that was her fault too. The man was a civilian engineer, yes, but he had been a marine only a few short years ago, and judging by the way he had been handling himself he hadn't forgotten much. Having someone assigned to babysit him despite his background must have felt like one hell of an insult. She should have taken the time to talk to him before the mission, to find out his capabilities, rather than just making an assumption.

It was too late now, though. Revan took a couple of steps forward and ignited her sabers, ducking through the door. The barrage of gunfire immediately intensified, but the Jedi's sabers flashed, deflecting everything they shot at her. Bullets began pinging on the deck below rather than the walls around them.

"Shit," Matt muttered, eyes wide as he watched her. "So that's why she told me to stay behind her."

Shepard nodded mutely, jaw tightening. And that was another failure on her part. She should have briefed Matt on squad capabilities, particularly Revan's – what she knew of them, anyway, which wasn't as much as it should have been – before they even set foot on the station.

Inwardly she shook herself as some small part of her finally rebelled at that kind of defeatist thinking. It helped no one, least of all her. She could almost hear Garrus' voice in her ear. Stop it, Shepard. You have a job to do.

She took a deep breath. "Let's go," she said, and ducked around the doorframe, crouching and sliding quickly into the cover of an empty cargo pallet within Revan's scope of protection. She waved Matt along behind her, and Kasumi followed quickly after.

HK-47 was next, stalking along in a slight crouch, as though he relished the fact that bullets simply pinged off his heavy armour. He probably did, she thought. Revan's droid had one hell of a personality, for a mech. She thought the rogue AI they had chased down on the Citadel while on the hunt for Saren would have been similar, had it possessed a body of its own.

He was slow, though, and she was starting to grow tired of his antics. "Move it, HK," she snapped, resting her rifle on the crate before her and returning fire.

The droid sped up just a little. "Explanation: I am moving as fast as my servomotors allow, temporary Master."

Irritation flared. She was certain she wasn't imagining the condescension in his tone. Before she could say anything, however, Revan beat her to it. "Cut the attitude, HK," she ordered, raising her voice over the thrumming of her lightsabers. "Shepard, I can get up there." She nodded in the direction of the two Blue Suns mercs who were safely ensconced behind a solid half-wall on a two metre-high platform about ten metres away. "I can boost Kasumi, too."

"I can get up there myself, thank you very much," Kasumi interjected cheerfully. The thief was shaping up to be almost as useful as Revan herself on the ground team. She was efficient – if theatric – and competent, and seemed to be enjoying herself almost as much as HK, judging by the slightly less bloodthirsty trash talk.

"Both of you, go," Shepard ordered, letting loose a barrage of gunfire on the platform that HK was quick to emulate. Irritating as he was, at least he was competent.

The thief seemed to flicker out of existence as she engaged her tactical cloak. Revan, meanwhile, was less subtle. She took a few steps and leaped the full ten metres, sabers flashing as she somersaulted above a hail of bullets. She landed lightly right beside the two guards, who scrambled to both get out of the way and fire on her, momentarily forgetting the rest of the ground team.

Neither of them expected Kasumi's appearance. The thief materialised behind them and with a single, neat slash of her monomolecular blade, removed one guard's head clean from his body. Revan didn't give the other guard time to be surprised. With a gesture, she jerked him bodily up out of cover and tossed him to the ground below, where HK-47 finished him off.

"It's not like biotics at all, is it?" Matt murmured, and she could practically see his engineer's brain working as it latched onto the enigma of Revan's powers.

In two teams they advanced through the warehouse, taking out mercenaries as they went. Revan and Kasumi remained on the walkway, with Shepard, Matt and HK beneath and beside it. They had managed to gain the upper hand and were just reaching the point where the gantry met the main floor again when a door at the end of the room slid open with a crash.

"Cover!" Shepard yelled instinctively, and dropped down behind a cargo loader. Matt was a hairs' breadth behind her, white-knuckled hands clutching his pistol. Carefully she eased an eye around the control cab to see what was on the other side of that door.

Not one, but two YMIRs came lumbering through, cannons at the ready, ocular receptors scanning for targets.

"Fuck," Matt muttered.

Shepard's heart sank. The YMIRs towered above the ground team, taller than the overhead catwalk even, and this time there was no Jack around to demolish them. One of them would have been difficult – though doable – to deal with, but two? Two could be a problem, especially because her HUD was telling her they were both heavily armoured and shielded.

Luckily, they had a trump card.

"Revan," she called up to the catwalk. "Go! We'll back you up."

Revan nodded curtly, but instead of leaping straight in as she had on Omega, she paused, taking a moment to study the YMIRs below. Shepard frowned to herself, and a sudden pang of uncertainty crept up on her. Was the indomitable Jedi unsure if she could take them?

Before she could say anything, though, Revan took a couple of steps and flipped down from the catwalk to land directly in front of the two giant mechs. They ponderously began trying to reorient themselves to face her, but she rolled neatly between them and side-stepped so she was behind one and shielded from the other. She stabbed a lightsaber into the mech's rear, aiming for its thinner mid-section, clearly trying to cut the thing in half in one quick blow.

But the saber was stopped, hard and jarringly fast, by the mech's shields. The blade sparked and with a sharp crack of electrical feedback that echoed through the warehouse, died.

Shepard saw Revan's eyes widen in surprise right before the YMIR spun far more quickly than it looked capable of and swung a huge metal arm at her head. Shepard sucked in a breath but Revan managed to somehow turn at the last second, just enough to take the blow on her shoulder instead of her head. She was knocked off her feet and thrown, skidding, across the metal deck plating.

The anxiety from before began to bloom into something approaching actual fear. Shit shit shit. That was not good.

Shepard hauled her rifle to the ready and opened fire on the mech, knowing that a biotic charge would do little damage and having precious few alternatives. "Kasumi, overload it! Grab its attention!" she shouted. "Matt, with me. HK, on the other one!"

The YMIR turned to face the new threat, aiming its two heavy machine guns directly at Shepard, and thankfully away from Revan, who was nowhere near cover and just beginning to pick herself up. Shepard threw herself to the deck below the truck bed of the cargo loader just as the mech opened fire, hoping it would hold up against those guns. Matt hit the deck beside her, his breathing coming hard and fast but barely audible over the frenetic hammering sound of machine gun slugs slamming into metal.

Shepard kept her head down. Peering underneath the bed of the loader, she spotted Revan. She was on her feet now and shaking herself off, looking just as surprised by what had happened as Shepard, but thankfully uninjured.

"Warning: temporary master, my armour cannot hold up for long against this calibre of blaster." Shepard dragged her attention from Revan to HK, who was firing on the second YMIR and ducking in and out of cover as best as he was able – which wasn't particularly nimbly, meaning he was taking a lot of fire. He had a point. His armour had proven thick and durable, but it wouldn't last forever, and his personal shield wasn't rechargeable like theirs were.

She opened her mouth to reassure him that he wouldn't need to hold out for long, but as bullets hammered into the loader just over her head, as Matt ducked and reflexively covered his head, as Revan fought to shake herself off and as Kasumi finally fired off only her second overload, the words stuck in her throat and she found herself momentarily paralysed as her growing fear bloomed into panic.

Had she made a terrible mistake?

She had been so excited by Revan's performance on Omega that she had assumed the Jedi's abilities could overcome all kinds of opposition…. but they hadn't run into too many shielded opponents, had they? And when they had, Garrus and Miranda had taken care of them easily. Revan had never had to test herself against them. Shepard had just… assumed that Revan was capable of dealing with anything.

Obviously, she had been wrong.

But while Shepard was momentarily paralysed by self-doubt, Revan had been recovering. Shepard saw her shake her head a final time before turning to the loader and tapping her in-ear comm. "Shepard… these things hit hard. I can't take both of them by myself. Not while they're shielded."

The implication that she could have taken both of them on her own if they hadn't been shielded helped snap Shepard out of her paralysis. She took a careful breath. Pull your damn self together, Shepard. She had made a mistake, but she hadn't been that far from the truth. She started looking around the warehouse for inspiration. "You're not supposed to let yourself get hit by them, you know." It didn't come out sounding as flippant as she would have liked.

"Thanks for the tip." The amusement in her voice meant Revan had taken it as a quip, which was probably a good thing. "Look, I can't get through their shields, but I can keep one distracted while you take the other one."

Shepard nodded slowly. HK couldn't handle the full attention of an YMIR by himself, but Revan probably could. "Do it," she agreed tersely. "Everyone else, on the other mech. Kasumi, keep those overloads coming."

"On it, Shep," the thief replied. Even she sounded a little tense, but the overload she threw was just as accurate as ever. Shepard grimaced as her HUD showed the mech's shields dropping by just under ten percent. At the rate they were going, the mechs would chew through all of their cover before they could take even one of them out.

Revan ignited her lightsabers again and ran lightly back into range of the first YMIR. She launched a flurry of blows at it, slashing its shields ineffectually. Nevertheless, she caught its attention. This time when it spun around, she was ready, nimbly rolling away from its swipes.

Finally free to move, Shepard and Matt kneeled up behind the cover of the loader and opened fire on the second YMIR, joining HK and Kasumi in trying to bring its shields down by brute force. Kasumi was safely ensconced behind cover up on the catwalk, but HK still stood half in the open, rifle hammering the mech with blaster bolts as he was hammered with metal bullets in return. His warning had been accurate; she could see he was taking damage. He wouldn't be able to keep that up for much longer—

She narrowed her eyes and peered at the mech. Something was off…

Her eyes widened. HK-47's blaster bolts were passing straight through its shields. How the hell were they doing that, when Revan's lightsaber had been stopped so thoroughly? Were blaster bolts and lightsabers made of completely different things?

But Shepard pushed the question aside. It would be a good idea to find out, she was certain, but not right now. Right now, they needed to take that YMIR out before it overwhelmed them.

Despite going straight through its shields, HK's blaster bolts were still only doing about as much damage to its armour as Shepard and Kasumi's bullets were doing to its shields. The YMIR lumbered forward a couple of steps and Shepard slapped in another thermal clip. They needed more overloads, or heavier artillery.

"Matt, can you configure your omnitool to produce an overload?" she asked quickly, fairly certain she knew the answer.

"No," he replied, and she could hear the frustration in his voice. "My 'tool is configured for practical work, not combat. It doesn't have the power."

She grunted. No more overloads, then. Heavier artillery? She had her missile launcher, which might do the job, but only for one of them and Revan was too close. The Jedi had said she could remove herself from melee range very quickly, though…

As Shepard was thinking, Kasumi fired off another overload, which dropped their YMIR's shields another ten percent. "What was that?" Revan asked, and Shepard noticed she was finally in a position that gave her a good view of the other mech as it was overloaded.

"It's an overload," she explained distractedly. "Kasumi is using targeted electrical energy to fry its shields." In the corner of her eye, she spotted HK being rocked back a step by the onslaught of bullets. It was time to call him back, even if that gave their YMIR the chance to move even closer to them. "HK, cover," she ordered.

The droid stalked quickly behind a stack of cargo crates, and the YMIR took another couple of steps forward, as she had expected, shifting to target Shepard and Matt instead. She tensed, ready to throw herself to the floor again, but there was another crate partially impeding its line of sight. Ponderously it began to move to the side to fix that, stepping away from its counterpart… and further away from Revan. Shepard smiled. Finally, something was going right. Soon it would be in a position where she could safely use her missile launcher without worrying about catching Revan in any resulting explosion.

"Electrical energy?" Revan's voice had a strange tone to it that Shepard couldn't quite place. "Well, thank the Force for that omnitool. These things are tough."

"Yep, it shouldn't take more than, oh, an hour for us to take both of them down," Kasumi said wryly.

In the corner of her eye, Shepard could see Revan dancing around her YMIR, narrowly avoiding its machine guns. She ran to one side, then darted back in the opposite direction, skidding beneath its targeting zone. Somehow she was keeping those guns turned away from the rest of the team. "An hour?" she repeated, sounding confused.

"I'm exaggerating," Kasumi admitted breezily. "But I can only queue up an overload once every thirty seconds or so." She ducked out of cover to spray the YMIR with bullets from her SMG. "Any quicker and I'll fry my omnitool."

"Sithspit," Revan muttered over the comm, diving to one side as her YMIR slammed a fist down right where she had been standing only a moment before. "I can't sense these things, I don't know if I can—"

"You won't have to hold out for much longer," Shepard interrupted. The second YMIR was just clearing the crate that stood between it and Shepard, and had managed to move well out of range of Revan and the other YMIR in the process. Shepard slid her rifle back into place on her backplate and pulled her missile launcher free. "Stay on that side of the warehouse," she warned Revan. "Missiles out!"

One by one she fired all eight of her missiles at the YMIR. The first three dropped its shields, while the next four chewed chunks out of its armour, keeping it constantly rocked back, off-balance and unable to return fire. The eighth missile drilled straight into its ocular sensor and exploded, destroying the mech's central processing unit and sending it crashing to the ground. "Down!" Shepard yelled, dropping to the floor behind the loader with Matt right beside her.

The mech detonated in a shower of fire and metallic debris, sending the crate it had skirted to get line of sight on them flying into the cargo loader, knocking it back towards them. Matt swore, and the two of them scrambled backwards to avoid being crushed by the heavy vehicle. Shepard's boot caught on a piece of debris and she hit the ground awkwardly, landing elbow-first, but Matt reached a hand out and pulled her up and out of the way.

She nodded in thanks, but now the loader had slid to a stop his attention had shifted away from her. "What is she doing?" he murmured.

Clambering to her feet, Shepard followed his gaze. Revan was facing off against the second YMIR, seemingly unaffected by the shockwave. She was crouching as though coiled to strike, lightsabers at the ready, but she wasn't moving.

Shepard frowned. It was difficult to see from this distance, but there was a very strange look in Revan's eyes. It wasn't fear, or rage, but it certainly wasn't calm either. Shepard didn't like it at all.

The YMIR was reorienting itself and bringing its machine guns to bear on Revan, but she didn't move. Instead, she straightened quickly, clipping her lightsabers back to her belt.

Shepard felt her eyes widen. "Revan, move!" she yelled in warning, pulling her rifle off her back and sprinting in that direction. Matt was hot on her heels.

Before she had made it more than a few steps, though, Revan raised her hands, and with a crackling boom, brillant white lightning shot from her fingers and leaped across to the YMIR. Shepard skidded to a stop, staring in disbelief as lightning crawled along Revan's arms, setting what few shadows there were in the warehouse dancing like macabre marionettes. Her eyes were stony, flashing with the reflection of the lightning pouring from her fingers.

The YMIR jerked, spasming under the sustained onslaught. Shepard's HUD showed its shields steadily dropping, draining away faster than even the strongest overload could manage.

Matt had stopped beside her. "What the fuck," he whispered, "is that?"

Shepard just shook her head and watched as the lightning crawled along the YMIR's limbs, finally overloading its shields and leaving it vulnerable to gunfire – and lightsabers. Revan pulled both sabers from her belt once more and ignited them, stepping into range and unceremoniously thrusting them into the mech's armoured carapace. Staying too close for it to reach her, she dragged the sabers through and around its body, leaving smoking, melted gashes in her wake. When she reached its back, she stepped away and pulled the sabers free. The YMIR toppled to the ground, landing with a crash and laying still. Smoke rose lazily from the smouldering metal, spiralling up towards the air exchangers high above.

Revan was breathing hard, lightsabers still alight and clutched back-handed, knuckles white, staring at the downed mech.

She did not look good.

Shepard mentally shook herself, holstering her weapon and hurrying over to Revan, trying to suppress the tiny flutter of nerves that settled in her throat. "Revan, that was…" Amazing, unsettling, surprising… Shepard trailed off, unable to find the right words. "Are you all right?" she asked instead.

Revan turned her gaze on Shepard, eyes full of a mixture of despair, anxiety, and cold fear. "No, I'm not all right," she all but snarled. "I can't… I can't do that again. Don't ask me to."

A cold chill ran its icy fingers down Shepard's spine. "Why not?" she asked carefully.

Revan took a deep, shaky breath, and closed her eyes, fists still tightly clenched around the hilts of her lightsabers. "Because that… what I just did… that was the dark side."

"Oh." Shepard stared at her as she stood still, taking one deep breath after another. She felt the hair on the back of her neck rise, just a little. She opened her mouth, then closed it again and waited as the smaller woman continued to breathe.

Finally, Revan continued. "I made a decision, back in my own galaxy, that I would draw on the power of the dark side when it was absolutely necessary. This is what that looks like. For a while I thought that maybe, now I had the time, I could find the power I need to defeat Malak in the light…" She shook her head. "Maybe I was wrong."

Shepard wasn't entirely sure she understood what had happened, but it was clear Revan was even more disheartened than she seemed. She had to say something. "Revan, that was one thing. You did one thing that was, uh, a dark side thing," she said awkwardly, struggling with the terminology. "And you saved us from the danger of a long, drawn out fight against a powerful opponent. You protected your squad. That doesn't make you evil."

"It's a slippery slope, Shepard," Revan snapped.

"Maybe so, but right now you're catching yourself from sliding down that slope," Shepard fired back.

Revan stared at her for a moment, then seemed to deflate a little. Finally she deactivated her sabers and reattached them to her belt. "I suppose."

Shepard let out a breath she hadn't realised she had been holding. She wasn't sure Revan was convinced, but it would do for now. And as for her own feelings on the matter… well, the jury was still out on those. "I won't ask you to do that again," she promised.

Revan nodded again. "We should keep moving."

Shepard had to admit that she had completely forgotten about Jack, after seeing that lightning, but Revan was right. "Come on," Shepard said to the others, reluctantly forcing her mind back to the mission. She began jogging for the exit. "Jack can't be too far ahead now."