Disclaimer: I don't own Star Wars or Mass Effect. They belong to their copyright owners and/or creators. I make no money from this story. It is written with no commercial purpose in mind.

Mad Science

Prologue: Fear the Combat Engineers

=T=

"Rise and Shine!"

I came back to the world of the living slowly, fighting my way through a wall made of sticky cotton. Well, at least that's how my addled brain interpreted whatever was happening at the time. There was that persisting, irritating repetitive sound too. Ah. Sirens.

The hell was happening?

"Congratulations, Delkatar, you won the jackpot again!" a woman laughed.

Her voice. I could almost recognize it. It was just like imagined that of certain ROB to sound.

"Nope. There is nothing random about me!" I could imagine her pouting.

"Urgh?" was my eloquent surprise.

My voice wasn't working right. With that though a switch was thrown and I could feel. My body ached all over. Every single muscle and bone. It was like someone had turned me into one giant bruise and stuck a bunch of needles in me just for the fun.

"We don't have a whole day here." she paused. "At least you don't."

"Shepard!" I could barely hear someone shouting.

"What?" I managed to gurgle. Nope, voice still far from all right.

"Oh, fine! I'll get to the point. Mass Effect 2, you know? The game you started to play again last night?"

I had a sneaking suspicion that was I fucked.

"Oh, don't be so cross. As I said you won the lottery. Literally. I have a gift for you." she giggled.

I could feel a feather light touch upon my forehead. Something touched my mind. A lance of cold, ruthless logic, information, knowledge. It burst within my head, making me scream myself hoarse.

Formulas. Concepts. Equations. More.

The pain intensified until it was the only thing I knew.

"That's for my Knight Veil. After all, you are the one to blame for all that has happened to him. Or at least will be."

I could feel her cold rage. The facade she had shown me crumbled away. Somehow knew that it was tightly controlled. As if the being wanted to tear me asunder if she only could. It was ridiculous dream born from my shattering mind. If she wanted to off me, it wasn't like she couldn't. All it would take was a thought after all. She was that powerful a being.

"Rise and shine!" another voice. Male, much darker if that was an attribute you could attribute to it. "Finally its time to begin."

"I'm a little lost here." I somehow managed to croak the words.

"Don't worry too much, little spark. Cause and reason often don't follow a linear path. You'll know when the time is right."

"This is the first step." whispered the woman. "Lets hope it will lead you to a different path."

I had the feeling that I was watching a train wreck going off in slow motion. With me being the train in question. Not a fun place to be.

=T=

"Shepard! Get the fuck up soldier! On the double!" shouted the same familiar voice.

My head pounded as if my brain was doing its best to escape from my skull. Can't really blame it after the blender its been through. I opened my eyes and groaned. It was half in pain from the light, half from getting confirmation on where I was. So it was Miranda on the speakers.

That wasn't good at all. Heh. Understatement of the year.

"Good, you are finally up. There is no time to chat, this station is under attack. There is a pistol and armor in the other side of the room. Hurry!" she shouted.

I got up from the medical bed and nearly fell to the ground. My legs were unsteady, not to mention the gut wrenching pain in my insides.

Bloody hell it hurt. I made my way to the locker in the corner, ignoring Miranda's insistence that I hurry up. I stared at the cylindrical object hiding my armor and weapon, wondering how the hell I was supposed to open it.

Then something clicked in my brain. Scanner in the upper right corner. I just needed to wave my hand there. Grudgingly I did so. A laser quickly scanned my palm and a moment later the locker opened with a quiet click. That done I glanced inside. Yeah, the same N7 armor I saw last night while playing the game and a futuristic looking gun. There was just the little problem that I had no idea how the hell I was supposed to get myself in that hardsuit and activate its system.

I looked at the different pieces and suddenly they started making sense. I knew which part should go where, what was the fastest way to don the armor, how I was supposed to activate it and synch its on board systems with my omni.

Knowledge I didn't have when I went to sleep last night. So some being which might have reasons to hate my guts messed up with my mind, possibly rewriting parts of it. Or she, it was simply messing up with me.

Joy.

"Hurry up! Mechs are converging on your position."

I glanced at one of the cameras in the room and shook my head. For a moment I wondered why I wasn't freaking out then I remembered that Shepard wasn't supposed to be up and running yet. So there probably were sedatives in my system that were keeping me calm. Possibly messing up with my mind too, but that could wait until there weren't killer robots coming for me.

I frowned. There were ideas, schematics in my head not my own. Avenues of research, ways to ensure that my hardsuit should be able to purge unwanted chemicals from my system. That led me thinking on how to upgrade the armor system itself... Oh, that's neat! I needed to build it in too!

"Shepard!" Miranda screeched, loosing her composure.

I shook my head. That girl got nice set of lungs in her chest. Ah, what a chest too...

Shaking my head I returned my attention to the locker. Armor right.

Phase 1: First steps

=MS=

Part 1

Time Unknown

Location: Cerberus facility, project Lazarus HQ

For some reason, having a fully functional armor on me made me feel much better. The part of my mind pouting that it was very basic and needed upgrades, NOW DAMN IT!, notwithstanding. I apparently had an omni tool, too. One quite basic, loaded with little better than commercially available overload protocols, a basic incinerate protocol and a combat drone which would be good only as a brief distraction. I winced as my mind was about to overload with ideas on how to improve them all.

Bloody hell what did this woman do to me?!

Meanwhile, Miranda was droning something about danger. A flash of red and I found myself on the ground. Ouch. That hurt. My HUD was flashing madly indicating that my shields were depleted and rebuilding. I glanced around and found that most of the door was gone, leaving behind a twisted ruin of smoking scrap.

Better shields, integration of kinetic dampeners in the armor… I groaned and got myself up. I needed to concentrate in order to get out of this mess in one piece. It wasn't as if I had the time to start building anything.

My mind started supplying possible avenues of research that might lead to time dilation.

Well, fuck. Time wasn't something I ever wanted to mess up with. Equation started flashing in through my mind trying to convince me with math that it is indeed possible to screw with time. It also increased my headache by a factor of two.

'Concentrate!' I screamed in my mind, the torrent of information receding to the background.

I made my way to the door, flash forging a spherical drone. It took me seconds to tweak its programing so I could use it as a scout too, up-linking what it saw with its main camera to my HUD. It was a bit disturbing how easy I tweaked my omni's programing to do so. Making such changes on the fly… I shook my head. It was a very far cry from the last time I programmed anything – more than a decade ago in high school.

Hopefully, the drone would help me keep my head on my shoulders. I sent it forward and followed seeing no hostiles in sight. Only the corpse of a man wearing the white and black Cerberus uniform. Then another. Both were slumped on the ground, fresh blood spilling from woulds in their chest.

I know that I should feel something at the sight. Perhaps feel nauseous too. But there was nothing. Just dispassionate note that I should avoid going around without decent armor unless I wanted to end like them. My mind tried to spew details about the way they died, conclusions the extent of their injuries. It wanted me to dissect them and find exactly how much damage the bullets had caused. Because it would help me find the best way to both improve the ammunition and the ways to defend against mass effect weaponry.

It was eery. Creepy. I should feel disturbed by those thoughts. Yet, I simply filled them for later consideration, while looting the corpses. Ah. Thermal clips. Inefficient as far as the knowledge in my head was concerned. And a credit chip. Useful. I needed a ton of resources considering what some of the ideas bouncing in my skull would require.

I massaged my head as the pain increased. Is this how it feels to be slowly going insane?

My drone send chimed, announcing that it had detected a hostile. I did my best to concentrate and ignore the bubbling mass of ideas in my head. I reloaded my gun and vaulted over the makeshift barricade in front of the med bay. The mech, which was the detected hostile was shambling my way. I sent my drone to distract it, and once it had his attention firmly on the floating sphere, I shoot it in the head.

Huh. I actually managed a head shot. Further its been ages since I shot a gun, but the recoil didn't surprise me. It was actually light. Beginner's luck perhaps something was left from Shepard's skills. Besides his disjointed memories which were slowly taking shape. I was starting to recognize things I have never seen before, outside a computer screen, yet I knew what they were. Besides a props to make the setting of the game look more science fiction like. I just knew that those were pieces of Shepard's memories, his knowledge and not whatever other crap that being forced in my skull.

Later. I needed to go away from this station.

=MS=

Thank god for cheap mechs with rudimentary combat protocols. I don't think that I could have fought my way through few groups of crappy merks in my condition. Luckily I didn't have to. Using my drone as distraction, few well placed overloads and voila. The murder bots were so much scrap metal.

More hallways, scattered corpses and the odd mech, until I found myself on top of a platform overlooking a corridor wide enough for six men to march abreast. There were hydrogen tanks on the left side. Oh, what I could do with that much fuel… I shook my head and looked away only to see another dead operative. This one was clutching a grenade launcher! Ohh, shinny!

I unceremoniously tore it from his cold dead fingers, paying no attention to the bones I had to break to do so. I caressed the weapon, deciding what mods it needed. And the ammo… proximity mines, acid warheads, the good old white phosphorous… Oh the list went on and on…

If it wasn't for Miranda screaming at me I would have stood there until the mech shot me.

Speaking about the inferior murder bots, I glared at the quartet that was marching my way. One grenade and they were gone.

All color drained from my face. The explosion breached one of the fuel tanks, luckily only letting a jet of burning high pressurized gas to block the way. Instead of evaporating me in a chain reaction of exploding hydrogen tanks. I had to pay attention to what I was doing or I won't be able to build anything.

I stiffened at that thought. Such a state of affairs simply couldn't be allowed to stand! The jumble of ideas retreated a bit, allowing me to thing clearly.

Relatively speaking.

I took the elevator down and went to the jet of burning fuel. I didn't want to run through that crap without a helmet. Oh, my new found knowledge and intelligence were telling me that I should be all right… But fire… Urgh… I couldn't see any way to extinguish the fire from here. Not with what little I had.

Taking a deep breath, I sprinted through, before my nerve failed me.

Damn, even with the shields holding, it was damn hot!

Note to self, always keep a helmet handy.

I moved on, founding that there was only one path forward I could use. At least no more enemies for the time being. Until I reached the next corridor. The door to the left was dark, obviously no energy was reaching it. There was a way to the right and another door in front of me. This one was glowing green. Not only powered, but unlocked too.

I couldn't help it. The need to check if there was some useful tech or at least parts was overwhelming. The door opened, revealing a small office, a bureay with working computer on it, a row with documents, paper ones even! There were holographic screens along the walls showing scans of someones body. One pretty messed up at that. Oh, yeah, a pair of crippled mech scrambling my way. I shot them and looked around. A wall safe, another terminal... Ah. The corpse of a woman who had a terrified expression on her face. I glanced at the body and seeing nothing useful disregarded her. It took me few minutes to download the data from the terminals and I went to the safe. My mind supplied a lot of ways to deal with it, though all but a few required tech I didn't have access to. And no, I wasn't searching for parts to build a plasma cutter or a laser drill!

It was some old fashioned bypassing. Or safe-cracking as they used to say. I flash forged some simple tools and removed the protective covering of the electronic lock. If I had a better omni with the relevant programs, I could have hacked it, but what little was loaded on mine, couldn't deal with something of that caliber.

It took me twenty odd seconds and the safe surrendered its contents. Huh. So the source of my persistent headache could be useful in the field. Good to know.

Though I was a bit disappointed from the contents. Couple of thousand credits, few data drives, which I took too and few pictures of the dead woman and what I supposed was her family. Not important.

Once my curiosity was satisfied, I managed to get away from the office and continued to make my way to safety.

On the bright side, there weren't any other shiny toys to distract me, so I made a good progress until I reached an open area and found the first alive person ever since I awoke here. That must be Jacob.

He was taking cover behind a waist height parapet, made by some kind of rather tough plexiglass or metal you could actually see through. Because the stuff was good enough to absorb a lot of pistol bullets, as a bunch of mechs were busy demonstrating. The machines were on the other side of a deep shaft, which was probably used to transport bulky materials through the station.

I darted forward, wincing as bullets impacted my shields and took position next to Jacob.

"Shepard?! The hell are you doing here?!" he exclaimed after almost shooting me.

Note to self. Don't surprise people in the middle of a firefight.

"I want to know that, too!" I shouted and send an overload at the killer bots suppressing us.

"Well, it's a long story..." Jacob trailed off, stood up so he could shoot a couple of tangoes, before returning to cover so his shields could rebuild.

"I'm Jacob. Jacob Taylor..." he trailed off. "The head of security around here." he muttered.

"Ah. Good job." I deadpanned. "Why there are killer robots using us as a target practice?"

"It should be impossible! You'd first need an access to the mainframe to reprogram them!"

It was scary how many ways around that my brain immediately supplied.

"It doesn't matter right now. I haven't shot me yet, so you are getting the benefit of the doubt."

"We need to get out of there before they overrun us."

"You know this place better than me. No offense, but you aren't going out of my sight before we are out of here."

"Fair enough."

It was a nice, calm conversation, interrupted every few words by one of us getting up and taking out a mech or two. By the time we agreed to work together, the volume of incoming fire had noticeably decreased.

"Move!" I shouted and pushed him towards the exit behind him. Luckily we made it out with our hides intact.

"Now that no one is shooting at us care to answer some questions?"

"Fair enough. Shoot."

"So you are the Chief of security… What do you know about this attack?"

"Besides that it has to be an inside job? Not much. I was preparing for some shut eye, after checking up if everything was all right. There was nothing out of the ordinary. Then bam. A series of explosions and the next thing I know the droids were trying to kill us all." He glanced at two bodies we passe by. "And succeeding."

"Who are you exactly? The name doesn't ring a bell."

He shrugged. "I spent five years in the Alliance before getting this job. Technically I'm Miranda's top lieutenant, but I've been in charge of security while she's been putting you back together. It's usually much more dull than this." He waved at the devastation around us.

"Uhuh. What about Miranda? To me she's just a voice right now."

"That's Miranda Lawson. She is in charge of this station. As the head of Lazarus team, it was her job to bring you back to life. By the look of it she succeeded."

I kept to myself that she actually didn't. After all I wasn't Shepard. Though I didn't think that it would be a good idea to claim otherwise. I didn't want to end up as Cerberus lab rat. I had such plans to fulfill. So much things to build…

"What about you?" Jacob asked. "Miranda told me you lost contact for a bit. That was shortly before she went off the air."

"Just some interference and a lot of mech." I shrugged. I didn't feel like telling him that I couldn't get myself out of that office before looting it for useful tech.

"She's a big girl. Miranda can take care of herself."

"Let's hope so. Where are we going anyway?"

"Shuttle bay."

"Check, check! Is someone still on this frequency?!"

"Yeah, it's me Jacob. Wilson, are you all right? Where are you?"

"Network room B. You?"

"Near D wing. Shepard and me just dealt with a wave of mechs and are making our way to the shuttles."

"Shepard?! How the hell is he still alive? Never mind that. Can you come and pick me up? I don't think I can fight my way out..."

"Hang on, Wilson. We are on our way." Jacob promised.

Wilson… Ah, wasn't he the traitor? I should try keeping him alive this time around. It will be interesting what he has to say. It will be good to build a truth detector, and some way to make him talk…

"Shepard, you all right?"

I shook my head in attempt to clear it.

"Headache. According to Miranda I wasn't good to go yet."

"Ah. That sucks. We need to go. The server room is back that way." he pointed towards an intersection we passed moments ago.

"Who's Winson, anyway?"

"The Chief medical tech. He answers directly to Miranda."

"So he's one of the people that put me back together..."

"Yeah."

=MS=

Reaching the server room proved to be relatively easy. With two of us taking mechs distracted by my drone, we made a short work of the opposition.

We found Winston on the ground, clutching his leg. He's been shot after taking out three mechs, whose smoking remains were near the door we passed through. Two of the machines were fried by an overload with the last shot to pieces. Nice work for a medic.

"Thanks god you are here! They shot me!" Winston moaned, clutching his leg.

"There is medigel dispenser over there, Shepard. Go get some." Jacob pointed at the far wall. He knelt near Winston and started examining his wound.

I went to replenish my medical reserves, but still kept an eye on them. The drone hovering behind Jacob helped in that respect.

The dispenser had six doses of gel, which I loaded in my armor. The fist was used automatically on me. I was apparently worse than I felt. Lucky me.

Next, I went to Winston and used my omni tool to administer the medicine on him. It actually acted as fast as the game suggested, his wound sealing in seconds. The med gel was amazing, yet there were plans to improve it too. Too bad that there weren't for something that get rid of my headache.

My mind was still for a moment then I was imagining some compound with complicated molecular structure. The pain in my skull spiked again.

"God damn it", I muttered, clutching my head.

"Shepard, you all right?" Winston asked.

"My head is killing me but it can wait until we are safely away."

"Heh, thanks Shepard. I guess we are even now."

"Winston, what the hell were you doing here anyway?" Jacob asked.

"I tried to shut down the mechs! I already told you that. But the system is completely fried. No way around that."

"You should have been in the bio wing! How do you have access to the mechs anyway?"

"Weren't you listening..."

"Enough. It's not like I trust any of you right now." I muttered. My attention was focused on the security control station. It was fried all right… But useless? It was far from that.

I kelt and removed a panel. I scanned the circuitry with my omni and grinned. Yeah, it was partially fried. Now if I could only… I stood up and looked around the room.

There were few terminals that were still working. Splendid.

"Shepard, what are you doing?"

"I don't fancy the idea of fighting our way out if I can help it." I muttered. It took me few minute to scavenge the necessary parts, a bit of improvisation for the two devices that didn't really do what I needed them to and voila! The security station came back to life. I didn't really need to hack it, because Jacob had the necessary codes. That was the good news. The bad was that the sensor and wireless links were down across most of the station, so I couldn't just shut down everything. Including whatever security systems were in the last stretch of our way. As far as the terminal was aware, the docks were dark area.

"That should make our lives easier."

"Heh. Great work, Shepard. I forgot that you were combat engineer." Jacob slapped my shoulder.

"Lead the way. I'm sick of this place."

=MS=

Cerberus Shuttle

In transit

Getting to the docks proved to be child's play. We had to face only half a dozen mechs, which couldn't really slow us down. Then things became tricky. When the door leading to the shuttle bay opened, it revealed Miranda Lawson in her full, skintight suited glory. If my brain wasn't ready to explode due to too may ideas bouncing around, I would have just stood there, starring at her.

Let me tell you a secret. The game didn't make her justice. Miranda was the most beautiful woman I've ever seen.

Ah, right. She, with Aria Talok, was one of the top contestants for the title Queen Bitch of the Universe too. But that's another story.

"Hi, Wilson." She smiled and raised her pistol without telegraphing her movement in any way shape or form I could detect. That broke my spell and I pushed him away just in time. Just in time too. Instead of splattering his brains on the deck, her bullet only grazed him, tearing out his left ear.

Wilson screamed and scrambled for his own gun. I shook my head and struck him with an Overload. While it was much more effective against synthetics, the emp shock was perfectly able to stun human sized targets too.

"Miranda! Damn it! Shepard what the hell are you two doing?!" he had raised his pistol but apparently was unsure who of us maniacs was more dangerous right now.

I had to push my way between myself and Wilson to prevent Miranda from finishing her job, something that pissed her off if her expression was anything to go by.

"Shepard, move!" she ordered me.

"I'm not under your command, missy. Besides I want him alive for questioning."

"It's too dangerous. I can't let him spoil two years of work for..."

"Can it. He is going with us."

"Or what?"

I grinned. It was a good thing that Shepard had quite the reputation.

"Or I'll have to drag three knocked out idiots to the shuttle. I'm not wasting a potential intelligence asset to make you feel more comfortable. Besides, its not like I trust any of you."

Miranda lowered her gun and transferred her glare at Jacob who winced.

"Ah. Jacob. I should have guessed that you wouldn't be able to keep your mouth shut."