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Title: Architects of Their Own Fortune
Author: Jewels (fanfic [at] bjewelled.co.uk)
Fandom: Mass Effect
Disclaimer: Mass Effect is Bioware's. And don't they do well with it?
Summary: Rumours abound: the Omega 4 relay has been used, and signs lead to Shepard being involved somehow. Someone has to investigate, and who better than one of Shepard's former crew? On top of all that, ship crews are disappearing, and it can't be the Collectors. So who's responsible, and why?

~*~

One: No Return Address Included

~*~

"Good morning, Citadel! It's a bright and sunny dawn here on the Presidium, and even if 'days' are a meaningless concept in space, it's time to get up and face a new one."

"That joke never gets old, huh, Mike?"

"No, Jamie, it never does. On the show today-"

Kaidan Alenko failed a hand somewhere in the direction of the VI interface near his bed, catching the 'off' switch more through blind luck than anything else. He'd only managed to get to sleep less than an hour earlier, and he was in no mood to be awoken by obnoxiously cheerful DJs, even if it was his own damned fault for not remembering to turn off the alarm before he went to bed. In his own defence, he'd been so exhausted when he'd finally arrived back that it was a wonder he'd managed to take his body armour off before keeling over.

He was, not for the first time, grateful that he'd invested in renting an apartment on the Citadel. Since it had become apparent that he was more or less permanently attached there it had seemed to be the sensible thing to do, and it was on mornings like this he was relieved he didn't have to deal with the hassle of the Alliance barracks. Normally, someone of his grade wouldn't have been able to afford anything within spitting distance of the Presidium, but Kaidan had been rather lucky in that regard.

If 'lucky' was really the right word for it.

When Commander Shepard, his CO, humanity's Spectre, survivor of Akuze and saviour of the Citadel, had died, she left behind a rather sizeable personal fortune. Kaidan had been aware of the fact that he and the rest of the team that had struggled to defeat Saren, Sovereign and the geth were getting the very best in the way of new and expensive technology, but he'd make the mistake of assuming that the Council paid its operatives handsomely for their efforts. He didn't discover until after her death that the Council paid nothing to the upkeep of the Spectres, expecting them to buy their own weapons and armour. It wasn't unusual, he learned, for Spectres to be involved in business ventures to fund their own activities. He had wondered at the time if it was an extra level of security for the Council; no one could trace the Spectres through payments from the Council if there were none to track. That or it was just genuinely miserly behaviour.

Shepard had apparently used her unique opportunity to explore parts of the Traverse where companies and governments would have to spend a fortune on financing exploratory expeditions to chart and acquire gas and metal mining rights on dozens of worlds. At the time, Kaidan had assumed that they were following orders from Alliance command to scout out new resources wherever possible. He hadn't seen any other justification for the constant diversions to place markers or conduct orbital scans. He had no idea the wealth this had brought Shepard until, a week after she was officially declared KIA, he received a call from a volus who'd represented her legal and financial interests (the best representative, it turned out, on the Citadel, and the most expensive to retain), politely informing him that he was the beneficiary of her estate, and what would he like to do with all the money he now owned?

When he had gotten over the shock of exactly how many digits made up Shepard's account total, he had used most of the money to anonymously invest the 'Shepard Scholarship', given slices of it to Tali and Liara (Wrex had disappeared off the radar right after Saren's death, and was long gone by the time Kaidan could have made the offer, and Garrus studiously turned anything down that might have seemed inappropriate to C-Sec), and what was left over was more than enough to pay for a modest apartment in an upscale part of the Wards, just off the Presidium junction.

It had made sense to rent the apartment, really. He had been quietly assigned to the Alliance's Citadel detachment after the Normandy's destruction, and had found himself being called upon fairly frequently by the newly appointed Councillor Anderson for missions. Officially, those missions were assigned by his immediate superiors, but it was only a formality. Routinely, his superiors didn't know the specifics of the missions that Anderson sent him out on. When he'd once drummed up the courage to ask why he had been given these assignments, of all people, Anderson had replied,

"You fought on Shepard's team. That's makes you better than ten Marines in my book."

He was away so often that he never seemed to get around to personalising the place. The furniture was basic and had come with the place, the walls unadorned with much in the way of pictures, though at least one of his female friends had made clucking noises of disapproval at the austerity of the place and given him a plastic orchid to brighten the place up a little.

It was a nice place. Shepard's finances had provided him that much comfort, at least, but he would have rather lived on a cot shoved in the corner of the barracks if it had meant that she was still-

He shoved the thought away, rolling on his back and rubbing at his eyes, trying to divert his mind from remembering her, recollecting the last time he'd seen her. It was hardest in these muggy semi-conscious moments just before he became fully awake. For two years, that last memory had been of her eyes through a slit in her helmet, her voice telling him to get into the escape pods, but these days it was of her on Horizon, glowing scars on her face, looking not a day older but every bit as ready to take on the galaxy as she had in the old days, flanked by unfamiliar faces, the shadow of Cerberus behind her. He wondered if it was worse to think she was dead, or to know her a traitor.

He shoved the covers off the bed. He was quite thoroughly awake. No chance of getting to sleep now his brain had started down this particular path. He had a scheduled free day today, liberty granted after the completion of a quick recon mission to the edges of the Attican Traverse. He could crash later in the afternoon, when he'd exhausted himself so thoroughly that he didn't have the chance to think about her.

He moved about the apartment, picking up the bits of armour he'd left scattered over the floor. He'd at least had the good sense to stow his weapons in the personal locker he'd received permission to keep in the apartment; another investment of his. Given that he often had to deploy at short notice, and the weapons weren't standard issue to the Alliance, it had seemed only sensible. He'd found that Shepard's habit of buying whatever weapons were the best, regardless of supplier, had served him well on several missions. The fact that he'd received permission to keep so many personal weapons seemed to him another indication of his rather odd status in the ranks of the Alliance here on the Citadel.

He'd tossed his omnitool on the desk near the kitchen, and he was just picking it up and moving to slide it onto his arm when he realised that the extranet terminal was flashing with a 'new message' icon. He pulled a face at it. He'd been away for two weeks. Messages tended to build up in that time, so, for the moment, he ignored it.

He stowed the armour, realised that he had nothing in his kitchen other than a sealed ration pack that he must have tossed in a drawer after a previous mission, and sighed, thinking that his mother would probably have been exasperatedly annoyed at his complete lack of domestic skills. The thing that annoyed him more than anything, though, was that he'd gone through the last of his genuine coffee before he'd left for the Traverse.

He stared, groggy and disgruntled, at the empty packet that he'd shoved back in the cupboard after the last time he'd made a mug, and slammed the door shut without bothering to throw it away. He went back into the bedroom, looking for some relatively clean civvies, and headed out of the apartment, going the rapid-transit station on the nineteenth floor and punching in the address of a strip of cafés and eateries not too far away, where he would be guaranteed to get a decent cup of coffee in spite of the obscenely early hour.

He picked a small café on the end of a row of shops that he knew from experience served decent coffee and was clean and tastefully decorated. He indulged in a sandwich as well, and the servitor, a diminutive human woman with a name-badge that indicated her name was "DORIS" smiled at him in recognition and offered to bring his coffee to the table. Now he thought about it, he was actually a fairly regular customer.

He relaxed on a stuffed chair in the corner of the café, opening up his omnitool and linking it back to his extranet terminal back in his apartment, accessing his messages. Some of them were advertising crap that had made it past the VI guard, and he scowled as he deleted them, unread, making a mental note to update the VI's algorithms. It would give him a few months grace until the next iteration of spam came up with new ways to circumvent the blocks.

There were a few messages from the Alliance, routine stuff mostly, which he set aside to review later, when he felt up to dealing with official nonsense. There were a couple from Anderson, which he skimmed to see that they weren't immediately urgent, then sent them to the 'deal with later' folder along with the Alliance messages.

Then he came across one which he nearly deleted as spam, but halted, fingers poised over the 'trash' macros, something odd catching his eye. The sender field was blank. Not masked, or spoofed, but utterly blank. That was unusual, to say the least. It was easier to just fake message header details than to strip them completely, so it was something he could never remember seeing before. He expanded the metadata, trying to pick out where it had come from, but it had been utterly scrubbed clean. There was no return data, no originator stamp. It could have come from a public terminal on the Citadel or from a buoy on the other side of the galaxy. It shouldn't have been possible to route messages without the header data, but he was staring at the clear exception to the rule.

Now unutterably curious, he opened the file, and when he read the contents, a single line, the bottom fell out of his stomach.

Tell Anderson: the Collectors are no longer a threat.

There was only one person who would send him a message like that.

His arm, omnitool still on and glowing, thudded to his lap, and he stared vacantly through the floor-to-ceiling glass windows that looked out onto the commercial concourse. His thoughts raced by so fast that he couldn't spend more than second on any of them. Eventually he gave up on trying to figure out what to feel, and just fell into a curious sort of stunned numbness that was easier to deal with that to think about the ramifications of that single, simple message.

"You okay?" Doris asked, as she set the mug of coffee in front of him, brow furrowed in polite curiosity, "You look pale."

He blinked, stared at her. He hadn't even noticed her approach. "I... uh. Just... something I didn't expect."

She glanced at his omnitool. "You didn't just get a Dear John, did you?"

"What?" He glanced at the omnitool, and quickly flicked it closed, before she could see the message content. She shouldn't be able to, but he wasn't going to take any choices. "No, no."

"Paternity suit?"

He laughed, in spite of himself. "No."

"Then it can't be that bad." She gave him a sunny smile, and returned to the counter to continue preparing coffees for the other customers that entered in dribs and drabs.

He should take the message to Anderson at once; that would have been the sensible thing to do. But the message was stamped as having been received by his system six days ago, while he was still in the Traverse, so it obviously wasn't urgent, or it would have been routed to Anderson's system rather than having been sent to his.

Why had she sent him the message, rather than telling Anderson directly?

He was tired, sore, with the beginnings of a migraine that was probably his own fault from pushing himself so far. He was in no condition to face Anderson and deal with this message rationally. He picked up his mug and took it back over to the counter.

"Can I get this to go?" he asked.

~*~

He was expecting to stare wide-eyed at the walls once he returned to his apartment, and surprised himself by lying down on the bed, still fully dressed, and falling asleep almost immediately. He awoke a good eighteen or so hours later, having slept the remainder of the day and most of the night, uncomfortably twisted in clothes and drooling onto his pillow.

Oh yes, very attractive, he thought to himself as he wiped at his cheek and went for a shower. By the time he'd dressed anew, and had thrown out the untouched coffee that sat stone cold on the table, he felt much more human.

He couldn't resist sitting down at his desk, opening up his messages, and staring at that anonymous message again. He couldn't just ignore it that was for sure. He transferred the message to his omnitool and erased the local copy, then headed for the shower. By the time normal 'start of business' on the Presidium, he had made himself presentable in a dress uniform with the pistol he was permitted to wear as a senior member of a Council race's garrison, and was heading for Anderson's office.

He heard the voices before he arrived at Anderson's office in the human embassy. The acoustics of the Citadel were oftentimes very peculiar. Sometimes sound echoed around corners and down hallways, in others, mostly in the Presidium, there seemed to be acoustic baffles in odd places, which could be a little disorientating until you got used to it. The Embassies were a prime example of this. It was hard to overhear anything that you weren't in the room for, which was exactly how the various diplomats liked it. They even used low-powered kinetic barriers to prevent someone from pointing a microphone across the Presidium to pick up sound waves, a slight tweak in them prevented anyone from seeing inside as well. Of course, it didn't stop various governments from trying to use technological methods to circumvent the sound-proofing. Anderson had to have his office swept for bugs twice a day, and more often than not it came up with something. He had once told Alenko that he was pretty sure the constant paranoia was giving him an ulcer.

It had given then Lieutenant-Commander Kaidan Alenko the chance to relate the anecdote of the volus merchant who'd tried to bug the Normandy back in the early days of Shepard's tenure as a Spectre, and detailed exactly what her response had been. It had been one of the few times during that awful two years where he could recall talking about her and laughing; the first time it hadn't hurt to say her name.

To hear voices, you had to be inside an embassy or, as in Kaidan's case, standing immediately on the threshold, the door open. He hesitated as he looked inside, seeing Anderson standing before three active holograms of the Citadel Council, arms held behind his back as he listened to the salarian councillor hold forth on some point. Kaidan glanced back. Anderson's secretary had waved him in, saying that the Councilman had been expecting him, but he wasn't sure it was intended for him to walk in on a private Council session. Then he saw Anderson's eyes flick in his direction, and the small motion made with his fingers, out of sight of the Councillors who would only be looking at the front of his hologram in their respective offices, gesturing for Kaidan to enter but remain outside of the holopickup. He wanted Kaidan to observe without being seen for some reason.

Kaidan stepped inside to let the door shut, and leaned back against the wall, arms folded and paying close attention to whatever was going on.

"Pure speculation," the salarian was saying, "Intelligence from inside the Terminus systems is sketchy at best."

"These rumours didn't come from nowhere," the turian said, "It seems that civilian news networks have better resources than we do. I believe that we must determine for certain whether the Omega 4 relay has indeed been used. It is an unknown quantity, if the so-called 'Collectors' truly exist, then its activation does not bode well."

"We cannot send a fleet, or even a task group into the Terminus systems to investigate," the asari said. "It would be seen as deliberate provocation. Even to assign a Spectre-"

The turian councillor interrupted brusquely, "We already have a Spectre in the Terminus systems, do we not, Councillor Anderson?"

Anderson quirked an eyebrow slightly, a gesture no doubt lost on a turian. "Have you forgotten already, Councillor? You were there when her privileges were reinstated, as I remember it, but perhaps it slipped your mind."

The turian councillor looked incensed that Anderson had turned a rhetorical turn of phrase into a subtle insult. The asari, however, looked like she was trying not to smile.

"Commander Shepard," Anderson continued, before the turian could puff up his pride and retaliate, "Has yet to respond to any messages or requests to report in. If it was her ship that passed through the relay, she may already be dead."

"What, again?" the turian asked.

Unseen, against the wall, Kaidan curled his fingers into loose fists.

"I wouldn't count her out just yet," Anderson said, ignoring the jibe. "If there's one thing that I'm certain of, it's that killing Shepard will only make her more determined."

"We don't know anything for certain yet," the asari councillor said, diplomatically, "We will continue to monitor the situation and proceed if further developments warrant it. Gentlemen, as we are in open session tomorrow, we will table discussions for now."

"Good day, Councillors," Anderson said, bowing slightly, the gesture and words echoed by the others before the holounits powered down.

Kaidan straightened up, tugging his uniform jacket back into place and walking over towards Anderson. He resisted the urge to salute out of habit, though it had been a difficult thing to teach himself not to do. He had a feeling that he'd always see Anderson as his CO deep down, though, given the way that Anderson always looked tired these days, perhaps he would have preferred to remain in the military.

"I hadn't heard," Kaidan said, "About the Omega 4 relay, that is."

"You must not have seen the news lately then," Anderson said wryly. "It's been the talk of the gossip columns the last few days, ever since news made its way out of the Terminus systems."

"I've been busy," Kaidan said, wryly.

"Ah yes, your mission to the Traverse. How did it go?"

"Productively," Kaidan said, "I've filed the report with Admiral Epworth. That's not why I'm here, though."

Anderson frowned, opening his mouth to ask when Kaidan held up a hand.

"Is the room secure?" he asked.

Anderson nodded slowly. "Had it swept just before the conference call. Electronic jammers still running as standard, of course."

Kaidan nodded, reassured. He had no desire to let this information get out unnecessarily. He had no idea if anyone could use the information for their own advantage, but he didn't want to experiment and find out. He opened his omnitool and linked it to the holounits. When they weren't generating real-time comm images, they could produce a fairly high resolution floating 2D image these days. "I found this message in my system when I returned from the Traverse."

A flick of his fingers, and the message appeared in the air. Anderson stared at it, eyes slightly wide. "Can you confirm it's from her?"

Kaidan might have, at some other point in time, found it funny that they both leapt to the same immediate conclusion as to the identity of the sender. "No," he said, "The metadata was thoroughly scrubbed. The only thing in the message was what you see before you."

"Well, we know who activated the Omega 4 relay," Anderson mused, "Was this sent before or after she passed through it, I wonder."

Kaidan frowned. "You think she would have sent it before going to face them?"

"Possibly, if she thought there was a chance she wasn't going to come back. Shepard wouldn't leave whatever was on the other side unless her task was completed, but I think she'd want us to know what was going on. Just in case."

"So..." He stared at the white-on-orange text in trepidation. "She might have died fighting them?"

Anderson frowned at the message for a long moment. "We can't send a scouting mission or fleet into the Traverse. That's a declaration of war. We can't send a Spectre in because it's halfway to a declaration of war." He stepped forward, tapping the control panel for the holounits. The computer chirruped and the screen cleared and the message 'Memory Cache Purged' flashed up briefly. "But one more mercenary in the Terminus systems, who's going to notice that?"

Kaidan scowled as he caught onto what Anderson was saying. He folded his arms. "One of these days I'm going to ask for a serious pay rise."

"One of these days I might give it to you," Anderson said, with a small smile. "You have the rest of the week off, don't you?"

"Yes, sir."

Anderson nodded his head thoughtfully. "I'll have a word with Admirals Epworth and Yang, see what we can come up with in the way of transport that just so happens to be passing close to the Terminus systems."

"I guess I should start making a few preparations then." Kaidan straightened, unfolded his arms and snapped of a salute before he even realised what he was doing. Anderson didn't even bother to call him on the unnecessary nature of it. Kaidan was halfway to the door when Anderson spoke up again.

"Odd that she sent you and only you the message," he said. When Kaidan hesitated and turned back, Anderson was studiously looking out over the Presidium, his expression invisible.

"Sir," he said, neutrally.

"One would think," Anderson continued, "That she trusted you above anyone else. More than Alliance Command, more than me."

Kaidan swallowed. Anderson had never given sign that he knew what had happened between Kaidan and Shepard while they served together on the Normandy. As far as he knew, they had been discrete enough that no one knew. While, after her death, pursuing him for any breach of protocol would have been pointless, now that she was alive and with Cerberus it meant that if anyone chose to make a point of it publically and claim he was compromised from a previous relationship with a woman with suspected terrorist ties, he was seriously at risk of getting stood down from active duty, moved away from the Presidium, perhaps 'encouraged' to resign if they couldn't find any evidence against him.

Kaidan opened his mouth to make some excuse about technical skills or their service together on the Normandy, but realised that Anderson had turned around was giving him a solid, knowing look. He swallowed the words, knowing they'd be picked up for the weak rationalisations that they were.

He didn't know how, but Anderson knew.

"Is that a problem?" he asked.

"Not in my book," Anderson said, after a long moment's silence in which Kaidan's heart sat firmly in his stomach. "I trust Shepard. More relevantly, I trust you, and I trust your judgment. Don't make me regret that decision."

"Of course not, sir," Kaidan said, hastily.

"Dismissed, Commander."

Kaidan had never been so relieved to hear those words in his life.

~*~

Two: Reunion

~*~

The Alliance had naming conventions for its ships. Frigates were named after battles, cruisers after cities, and dreadnoughts after mountains. Civilian craft had no such rules imposed on them, and tended to be whatever their owners preferred. Corporately owned ships tended to vaguely grandiose names such as ancient gods or some superlative concept like Adventure or Enterprise or Endeavour, borrowing notable names from humanity's pre-eezo space program. Privately owned ships tended to have more whimsical names, reflecting their Captain's personality.

The freighter that Kaidan had been forced to use as transport was called the PSV Kiss Me Marianne. Who Marianne was, Kaidan hadn't asked.

The man who had named her was a big bear of a man with a thick bushy beard and a Scottish accent. Incongruously, he had a fairly high pitched voice. Kaidan couldn't figure out if that was genuinely his voice or whether he was just putting it on for effect. He was a dementedly cheerful soul, and Kaidan had spent most of the outbound trip from the Citadel hiding belowdecks with the rest of the five-man crew who were relatively sane by comparison.

Captain Mike Blair was officially a private citizen, a freight-runner who spent most of his time moving luxury goods from the Citadel systems to the edges of the Traverse, close to the Terminus systems. His travels took him all over known space. More importantly, he was a man of discretion and who, after a word from Alliance Special Forces, would quietly drop people off where needed. In this case, that was Ilium, and since they were on approach, Kaidan had come up to the bridge out of curiosity, to watch their landing.

"Ever been to an asari world before?" The navigator, Mai Lee, was speaking to the helmsman, a kid called Fin who looked barely old enough to shave. Kaidan had no idea why they called him Fin when, according to his shipsuit patch, his name was Jimmy.

Fin had his eyes mainly focused on the helm readouts, but he was still able to shake his head. "Nope," he said, "First time."

"Here's a tip," Mai said, grinning, as she reclined in her seat and looked at him. "Don't let all the blue asses getting shaken in your face distract you, or you'll end up signed to some indentured servitude contract before you can sneeze. The asari are pretty, but they ain't stupid."

"Speaking from experience, Mai?" Kaidan asked, struggling not to grin at the sudden paleness that had overcome Fin's face.

She winked at him coyly. "Wouldn't you like to know?"

"Pay no attention to our Mai," Captain Blair said to Fin, who was starting to look a little wide-eyed, "And more to yer screens. I don't fancy becoming a wee smudge on the landing pad."

"Yes, Captain," Fin said hastily, bowing his head over the helm.

"And you, Mai," Blair wagged his finger in the navigator's direction. "Stop teasing the poor boy. You'll put him off pretty blue alien girls for life."

"Just means there's more for the rest of us," Mai smirked. She nudged Fin's chair with her elbow. "Oh cheer up and stop looking so miserable. I'll introduce you to Mirol. She's fascinated by humans."

Fin turned an interesting shade of purple and hunched further over his station.

Kaidan sat at an auxiliary monitoring station, the displays of which were dark, unneeded as they were during a landing. He was watching the descent on the forward monitors, and so almost missed it when Mai turned to look at him with a mischievous expression on her face.

"So what about you, Kaidan?" she asked, grinning cheekily, "Got anyone special waiting for you on Ilium?"

As far as most of the crew knew, he was just a passenger that their Captain was doing a favour for. If any of them had noticed the weaponry stowed in the hold, they were all smart enough not to mention it. He'd dug out an older set of armour, scuffed and a bit dented in places, but reliable and, more importantly, the sort of thing that would be expected of a mercenary who was reasonably successful. His hardsuit had been top of the line two years ago, and had been in storage on the Citadel when the Normandy had been destroyed, the only reason it hadn't burned up with the rest of his gear. Now it was just the top end of mid-range equipment. He'd had it recoloured and visibly scuffed before leaving to present a more convincing picture.

"Apparently no one as special as you have, Mai," he said, putting a lascivious twist on the word 'special', which earned a suppressed chuckle from Blair.

"Mirol's just a fun loving girl who's blue," Mai said. She gave him a shrewd look. "So if there's no one on Ilium, there's someone elsewhere, right?"

"Mai..." Blair said warningly, "Yer prying..."

"What?" She protested, the picture of innocence, "I'm just curious."

"No," he said, quickly, hoping to cut her off early, "There's no one special. There hasn't been for a couple of years."

At least, I don't think there's anyone special anymore...

He stared at the pictures of Nos Astra becoming easier to see as they descended through the atmosphere, and wondered who exactly he was trying to kid.

~*~

Kaidan hadn't come to Ilium because it was the gateway to the Terminus systems, or, at least, that wasn't the whole reason. It would certainly be easier to catch transportation from Nos Astra than it would be to take a direct ship from the Citadel, and it would be a lot less suspicious.

He was also there because Liara T'Soni was there, and he needed to speak to her. He was sure that she would have information that he needed to make his attempts to find Shepard much more fruitful. He could have gone to any information broker for aid, but the others would have charged, and word would have gotten out that someone was looking for the rumoured-to-be-alive Spectre. Liara would at least be discreet, and hopefully she wouldn't charge him.

It wasn't hard to figure out where to find her. An hour or two hanging out in the largest bar near the trading floor, drinking slowly and listening to the conversations ebb and flow around him supplied him with the information that Liara T'Soni was a local businesswoman of some repute, and her office held prime position directly overlooking the trading floor.

No one paid any attention to him, save for the asari bartender, who gave him a scrutinising look and just served him without a word. He had one drink, nursing it for the better part of an hour, before he tossed a fixed-denomination credit chit on the counter; the cost of the drink plus a rather hefty tip for the bartender. She gave him a warmer look after that, and the chit disappeared with a sweep of a cloth across the bar.

Kaidan made his way to Liara's office, outside of which was a desk. Sitting at it was a quarian female, her suit a colour that looked almost black in the pervasive blue light of Ilium. He guessed that it was actually red, if looked at under a yellow sun. He wondered if the suits had patterns on them that could only be seen using an enviro-suit's heads-up display.

He only realised he was staring when the quarian made a huffed sound of annoyance.

"Do I have something on my faceplate?" she asked, peevishly.

"Sorry," he said, with a rueful smile, "You don't see a lot of quarians in admin positions. Not many folks around here seem inclined to hire your people."

"My name is Erin'Zorah nar Hedron," the quarian said, icily, unable to break the social habit of her people to introduce themselves whenever they met someone new, in spite of her irritation, "And my people are perfectly capable workers."

"No! I didn't mean-" Kaidan cleared his throat. "I would never think that quarians weren't good workers. I know better. My name's Kaidan Alenko. I was shipmates with a quarian called Tali'Zorah. Is she a relation of yours by any chance?"

The tension seemed to abruptly leave Erin's shoulders; they sagged visibly. Even the irritation cleared from her voice. "Oh, you are a friend of Tali's? Yes, we are of the same clan. Not close family, by any means, but I suppose you would call us distant cousins. You were one of her shipmates aboard the Normandy?"

"I was," Kaidan answered slowly, not sure where she was going with the statement.

"I'm so sorry," Erin'Zorah said, and Kaidan was surprised at how genuinely sorrowful she sounded. "There's nothing worse than the loss of a homeship. Surface-huggers don't always understand, but I understand. All quarians do."

Kaidan was surprised at how his throat seemed suddenly tight. "I... thank you. Really. It means a lot." He cleared his throat, eager not to dwell on the subject. "So you're on your pilgrimage?"

"Yes," Erin said, leaning back in her chair slightly, "Though I did find myself running out of money fairly early on. Some... bad decisions about who I deal with for supplies and transportation. I had just enough money to make it to Ilium. I thought I'd wind up in some indentured contract until I tried Miss T'Soni's office. I'd heard she was... in the market... for a new assistant." Erin laughed wryly. "It turns out that she also knew Tali. She gave me a shot when I didn't have anywhere left to go. I owe her a lot for that."

"So, no idea what you're going to take back to the fleet yet?"

Erin sighed, and threw up her hands. "You know what Tali'Zorah brought back to the fleet? Information on geth evolution over the last three hundred years. How am I supposed to compete with that? I'm the first in our clan to go on Pilgrimage after Tali. You should have heard my mother." She thickened her accent, clearly mocking by impersonation, "'You know, your cousin Tali brought back data revolutionising our understanding of the geth. What are you going to bring back, darling?'"

Erin sighed heavily. "Keelah. Nothing's ever good enough for that woman."

"Mothers, huh?" he said, "Uh, listen, is Liara...?"

"Oh, of course. Let me check." Erin leaned forward, pressing her hand against the keypad. "Miss T'Soni, there's a human here to see you. Says his name is Kaidan Alenko. He doesn't have an appointment."

"Kaidan Alenko? Oh! Send him in."

Erin stood, coming around the desk and unsealing the door. "Please, go on in."

Inside the office, Liara T'Soni was standing looking out over the trading floor. When Kaidan entered, she turned, looking genuinely surprised. "Kaidan," she said, "I expected you'd come here eventually."

She held out her arms, and he willingly crossed the office to give her a heartfelt embrace. He'd not seen her in person since those awful days following the destruction of the Normandy, just before everyone went their separate ways, and he would have been lying if he'd claimed not to have missed her. They'd wound up leaning on each other a lot at that time, wallowing in a mutual sense of grief and loss. He didn't claim to entirely like the role she'd chosen to assume, an information broker with a serious reputation, someone not to be trifled with, but he still counted her as a friend.

He was relying on her friendship, in fact.

"Liara, you look well."

"And you look older," she told him, only semi-seriously.

He drew back, as if wounded. "Not that much older I hope."

"Humans all age too fast for my liking." Liara reached up, touched his cheek and smiled. "Have a seat. Do you want anything to drink?"

"No, thank you." He sat down in the chair reserved for visitors, while she sat down on the other side of the desk. It put a physical barrier in between them; he wondered if she felt more comfortable for that. "You expected me?"

"Shepard's alive," Liara said, simply, "And she's been on Ilium. Between your history with her, and the Council's undoubted interest in exactly what she's doing involved in Cerberus, I am surprised that you didn't come here sooner."

He leaned back in his chair, and smiled faintly at her. "The Council didn't send me," he said.

"Ah," Liara said, visibly filing that information away in the back of her mind. "So it was just Councillor Anderson then? From what I hear, he practically treats you like his own personal Spectre."

"Then you misheard." Liara, he realised, had spent so much time in the shadowy world of brokerage, where information was more valuable a resource than eezo, that she couldn't help but search out anything secret, something that no one else would know. She'd changed, he realised with a faint sadness, from the heartbroken scientist he'd last seen on the Citadel, just before she'd gotten on a transport for Thessia. "I take my orders from the Alliance, just like any other soldier."

"Of course." Liara tilted her head. "Then, if I may ask, why are you here?"

"The Omega 4 relay," he said, "The Alliance is concerned about rumours that it's been activated. Given that many human colonies have disappeared under very suspicious circumstances that seem to point to Collector involvement. If that's the case, and more Collectors are coming through the relay, of course they're going to investigate."

"Of course," Liara sat forward, propping her elbows on the desk and lacing her fingers together. "It certainly would be a matter of great concern for the Alliance. I have no doubt however, that such concern is only part of the story."

"That's the extent of the Alliance's concern. I'm fact finding for them, officially."

"Kaidan," she chided, "Don't treat me like a fool. You and I know better. I must admit that I find it somewhat dismaying that you feel it necessary to treat me with such caution."

He regarded her for a long moment, trying to frame what he wanted to say in a way that wouldn't have her trying to throw him off the office balcony with her biotics. "Alright," he said, "But this stays between us. I don't find you selling this off to the highest bidder, or I will come back to discuss the matter seriously."

Liara smiled, but it was a sad shadow of a proper expression. "The fact that you even need to add such a proviso to a conversation..." She sighed. "Agreed. Now please, tell me. It's Shepard isn't it?"

He nodded. "We received information that indicated she'd passed through the relay to confront the Collectors, but nothing after that. We've heard nothing. There's been no sightings, no rumours, nothing at all. We have no idea if she returned, we don't know if a Collector fleet is going to come looking for revenge, or if they're taken care of forever. It's not something we can afford to 'wait and see' about."

Liara's hands dropped to her console, bringing up various holographic screens that appeared, scrolled data, and then vanished again to be replaced by a different window. Liara's eyes only skimmed the information, as if she'd already thoroughly memorised everything in the files. "The last reports of the Normandy that I have put the ship somewhere near geth space. Less than a day later there are reports of the relay opening. Since then, there's nothing."

"Sorry." He held up a hand, stopping her. "I just... the Normandy?"

"Not the original, for obvious reasons. That's on Alchera, if you were so inclined to visit. I think there's even a monument there these days." Liara pulled up one screen enlarging it so that Kaidan could easily see it, and displayed a picture clearly taken in the Nos Astra docks, of a ship that clearly following the unique design fusion of turian and human aesthetics that had defined the Normandy. There was no scale, but judging from the docking port, it was much larger than the Normandy that Kaidan had served on.

"How the hell did she-?" He felt strangely unsettled by the sight of the ship, part of him insisting that the ship had been destroyed and had no business sitting in a dock somewhere. It was rather the same sense he'd had when he'd seen Shepard standing in the middle of a Horizon cargo storage area.

Liara shrugged fluidly. "Cerberus is a powerful and well-funded ally."

He felt cold and hastily looked away from the sight. Cerberus had resurrected the ship and its commander, calling them back from the dead. It felt unnatural somehow. Liara seemed to take pity on him, and banished the image to the electronic ether.

"When I was in the Terminus systems," he said, "It was a straight line to and from Horizon. I didn't exactly get a chance to sight-see. Any suggestions as to where I start looking?"

Liara drummed her fingers on her desktop. "The Council ordered Shepard to keep to the Terminus systems, and anyone who travels the Terminus systems winds up on Omega. It's the centre of trade, an interstellar hub. Everyone goes to Omega, and some never come back."

Kaidan wasn't even going to ask how she knew about the Council's assignments.

She gave him a wry look. "I don't mean to sound overdramatic, but there really is no way to overplay the danger than Omega poses to the unwary."

"I can handle myself," he told her.

"I know," she said, "But, as I said, there's no way to overplay the danger."

She leaned over to the intercom. "Erin, could you put together some files on Omega for Commander Alenko?"

"Yes, Miss T'Soni."

"Shepard was here," he ventured, slowly, gesturing to where the image of the Normandy in dock had hung in the air, "To see you?"

"No," Liara shook her head, and smiled, though it was a smile that didn't entirely reach her eyes. "I don't think she even realised I was here until I paid her docking fees. She was recruiting an asari Justicar and a drell assassin for her mission."

"A Justicar?" Kaidan frowned, "I think I've heard of them. A sect of ascetics who believe in the law above all, right?"

"More or less," Liara said, "You don't try and recruit a Justicar for just any mission. She never explained what she was planning, only said it had something to do with the Collectors."

"And you haven't seen her since?"

"Once or twice she returned for supplies, but she hasn't been back for several weeks."

Kaidan nodded thoughtfully and stared at the floating holograms displaying stock prices and share indices. He didn't tell her about the message he'd received.

Liara bit her lip in an endearingly human gesture of anxiety and said, "If... if you do find information about Shepard, whether she is alive or... or dead, please tell me. I couldn't stand not knowing."

"Of course," he said.

"And if she is dead," Liara continued, in a darker tone, "Make sure you find her body and bring it back. Far too many people have use for her corpse."

~*~

Erin'Zorah was waiting for him when he finally left the office.

"The files Liara wanted me to give you," Erin said, holding out an OSD.

"Thanks." Kaidan tucked the OSD into a pocket and looked at her thoughtfully. "Listen," he said, "If you ever wind up on the Citadel and need help..." He opened up his omnitool and forwarded a brief data package to her; his contact details. "Let me know."

She looked down at her own omnitool as it beeped, examining the file she'd received. "I..." She sounded genuinely shaken. "I... thank you. That's more than I could ever... thank you."

"You're Tali's family," he told her, looking into her faceplate, where he could just make out her eyes, "And Tali was a crewmate. I owe her a lot. Helping out her cousin is the least I can do."

Erin looked away, fingers twisting in the hood of her environment suit in a way that Kaidan recognised as embarrassment and audibly cleared her throat. When she spoke again, she sounded firmer. "I've arranged transport to Omega for you. Liara has left instructions to pay the fees and mask traces of your travel."

"Generous of her," he said.

He wondered if quarians smiled the way humans did. Certainly it sounded like she was doing so. "She can afford it." Erin moved behind her desk and sat down. "I don't know what you're looking for on Omega," she said, "But I hope you find it."

"So do I," he said.

~*~

Three: The Rough and the Smooth

~*~

To most people in Citadel space, Omega was the stuff of rumour. Kaidan had received a full briefing on the place the first time he'd ventured near the Terminus systems, and now he had Liara's files that filled him in with more detail than Alliance intelligence could provide, but there was so much about the place that only being there in person could tell you.

For example, there was the smell.

The Citadel took great pains to keep everything clean and sterile and neat as a pin in the public docking areas. The Omega docks, by comparison, smelt of mechanical grease and engine fuel. There was the stench of a dozen species mingled together, the ventilation system clearly unable to filter any of it out. The noise was deafening. Omega had never been constructed with comfort in mind, and sound proofing the industrial areas had never been attempted. Sound leaked from other areas of the station, which was how Kaidan heard the Afterlife club before he saw its neon signage.

Afterlife was situated off one of the main docking areas, and there was a steady stream of patrons going inside, and a hefty crowd that waited to try and get in.

Afterlife, Liara had told him, is the domain of Aria, the self-styled ruler of Omega. People don't go to Afterlife for business. They go to get into trouble, or just to forget themselves a while. Mostly, it's that the music is too loud to hear yourself think, never mind negotiate.

He wouldn't find what he wanted in Afterlife, in spite of its prominent position. He had no desire to bring himself to the attention of Afterlife's patron by walking in there, brazenly.

He headed away from the docking areas, the commercial zones. He caught the communal transit trains to the end of their lines and started to walk around, listening, watching.

Kaidan wasn't overly concerned about walking the rougher areas of Omega. Even if someone had been stupid enough not to take the armour and weaponry he wore as a warning, biotics meant that he generally had an unfair advantage against any two-bit mugger or gang that might try and jump him. Like any major city on any major world, stations like the Citadel or Omega had their underclass, their dispossessed and poor. The Citadel was just better at hiding it from the tourists.

The fact was that the places that people did business, real business, was in those shadowy corners. The people who most people ignored, the underclass, also tended to far better informed of the comings and goings of others than anyone liked. If you were patient enough to listen, you could learn a lot.

Kaidan had spent quite some time learning how to do just that.

Liara's information had been useful, in so far as it had provided him with a few places to start looking. He spent most of his first day on Omega walking the backstreets, scoping out Liara's suggestions and eavesdropping on conversations.

He heard a lot of things as he wandered about. One dismayed businessman was lamenting the loss of a startup colony ship that had fallen off the grids, probably to pirates. An asari was unhappy about the recent batches of bad feed to herd animals on Iridon. But what he heard most of all as he walked around amongst the poorer areas of Omega was that there was a lot of talk about the Omega 4 relay activating. He quickly gathered that it was unusual but by no means unheard of for the relay to activate. It had been happening more frequently in recent months, though, leading to speculation that the paradise that lay beyond was soon going to cross over.

He passed some sort of church or temple, and could hear a preacher inside, talking about the "Gates of Paradise" and how they would soon open to admit the righteous. Kaidan shook his head as he paused a moment to listen, thinking that if the Collectors really did come from beyond the O4 relay, then the opening of the Gates of Paradise would generally be a bad thing. He shook his head, and kept walking.

He eventually settled on one bar to begin staking out. It wasn't too far from the docking areas, close enough to commercial zones to be easily accessible but far enough away that it didn't see a lot of customers who hadn't managed to get into Afterlife looking for somewhere to drown their sorrows.

The bar, which his translator informed him was called "Nora's Garage" in batarian, was dark, private, with a low murmur of voices and music that kept an acceptable level of background noise up, making conversation hard to overhear. There wasn't any door staff to keep troublemakers out. The owners clearly did not expect any sort of trouble there, and the staff were polite and discrete. The glasses were mostly clean. It was as likely a place as any for Kaidan to find what he was looking for. He had a few places tagged as likely, and would move between them.

He ordered something that wasn't liable to get him too drunk too quickly and settled in to wait.

Six days after he arrived on Omega, he found what he was looking for.

~*~

It was a flash of dark hair that attracted his attention first. He wasn't immune to an attractive human woman, especially when she walked by his booth in the corner of the bar, less than three feet away, giving him ample eye-level view of one of her assets. The second thing that attracted his attention was that when she turned slightly to sit down, he saw her face and realised that he recognised her. She'd been on Horizon with Shepard, rolling her eyes at his 'Alliance attitude'.

She wasn't alone. A drell sat down next to her, folding his hands neatly on the table while the woman reclined in a position of studious relaxation, almost slouching, as if she hadn't a care in the world. They were at a table not too far away from him, though the natural acoustics of the bar should have meant he couldn't overhear them, he wasn't above cheating. Under the pretence of checking his mail on his omnitool, he opened his communication implant options and set it to amplify external audio. It wasn't a standard software option, but he'd had some upgrades. It meant that every noise in the bar was suddenly brain-splittingly loud, and that he'd probably wind up back in the bare room he'd temporarily rented, doubled up in agony with a migraine, but it was worth the gains in information.

The pair weren't speaking, obviously waiting for someone. After several minutes, a batarian stepped up to their table, looking at them both silently for a long moment. Finally, he addressed the human woman.

"You Miranda?"

"And you're Char," she said, and gestured carelessly, flopping her hand towards the chair on the opposite side of the table.

Char sat down, and cast a look around to see if they were being watched. Kaidan was subtle enough not to be caught staring directly at them, though, so Char, satisfied, leant foward and started speaking. "Matterson tells me you're wanting to buy without drawing attention."

"Nothing illegal," Miranda said, distinctly bored, "Nothing that'll get you even a fine if a turian patrol were to search your ship. We just need to keep this entirely off all official records. No flight plans, no cargo manifests, no trails."

Char snorted. "You building an army on the quiet or something?"

Miranda's voice hardened. "And no questions."

"Fine, fine, I know how this works." Char sighed in faint exasperation. "What sort of things do you need?"

"Mainly spare parts." Miranda proceeded to rattle off a list of detailed requirements. Mostly they were spare parts that could be picked up at any major space-port or trading planet. She also listed several pieces of portable manufacturing technology. It was, as she said, nothing illegal. It was pretty common in fact. Why was she negotiating in a bar on Omega for commonplace spare parts?

Char seemed to be similarly confused. "And what are you offering for all of this?"

Miranda looked at her nails, seemingly uninterested. "One thousand units of eezo."

Char froze, and looked like he couldn't decide what to say. Kaidan could understand his shock. A thousand units of eezo was a massive overpayment for such mundane goods.

"The price," Miranda qualified, "Is for your silence. We need this as quickly as possible. Within 48 hours."

Char nodded slowly. There was no way, with such a potential payoff, that he wouldn't try to do whatever he could to satisfy his potential clients. "I'll see what I can do. I'll leave word with Matterson by tonight if it can be done."

"Good," Miranda said, and inclined her head slightly.

Char returned the nod, then stood and walked away.

It wasn't until Char had walked out of the bar and was long gone that Miranda abruptly sagged, grimacing and raising her hand to her forehead. The drell next to her, who had kept so still that Kaidan had almost forgotten that he was there, stirred, reaching out to rest a hand on her shoulder. "Are you alright?"

"I'm fine," she said, plainly lying. She fumbled in a pouch on the belt around her waist. She pulled something out and slipped it into her mouth in one smooth motion. Kaidan guessed it was a tablet of some sort of medication.

"You should be resting," the drell said. "Your surgery-"

"The Professor said I would recover."

"The Professor said you should rest."

Miranda shook her head sharply, and rolled her shoulders to dislodge the drell's hand. "I'm fine," she snapped, "I can do this mission. I have to do this mission."

The drell tilted his head at her. His expression, to Kaidan's human eyes, was unreadable. "You don't have to prove yourself."

Miranda sighed. The tightness around her eyes was lessening, and she rubbed her forehead. Whatever painkiller she'd taken was kicking in. "Of course I do," she said, "I've been loyal to Cerberus ever since I escaped. Shepard doesn't quite trust me to set that all aside. Why should she? I wouldn't trust someone who performed such an about face. And... well... she and I have never exactly been the best of friends."

"Shepard trusts you with her life."

"I'll prove where my loyalties lie," Miranda said fiercely, "The Normandy is the only place I have now, my only home."

The drell glanced around. Kaidan made sure to be staring into his drink, supposedly morose. "This is not the place for conversation," he said, "Let us return to the shuttle. We can wait for Matterson to contact us there."

Only the fact that the sound of voices was boring into his skull stopped him from completely blanking on the conversation. The moment he'd heard Shepard's name, heard her spoken of in the present tense by members of her crew, such an overwhelming sense of relief had come over him that he'd struggled not to gasp and draw attention to himself. Instead he forced himself to continue listening until they left the bar and Kaidan turned down the input on his comm implant.

Shepard was alive and up to something. That made the decision as to what to do next much easier. He downed his drink, and left the bar to scout out the docking bays.

~*~

The Citadel was badly damaged, but, oddly enough, the Alliance Headquarters just off Presidium Junction were still standing. No doubt Udina was doing a private dance of victory at the fact that the Alliance had come through the fight not only as Great Big Heroes but as one of the few races with anything approaching a sizeable military force. The Citadel, and the races there, would be reliant upon Alliance support for some time, until they were able to build their own fleets back up. Most of the Arcturus fleet had already jumped back to their staging area, but there were a lot of human boots on the ground to help with the clearup.

Kaidan could see them from the vantage point of the briefing room's balcony, which gave a clear view all the way to the main concourse of the Presidium. Human soldiers helping C-Sec restore some sort of peace, human engineers engaged in cleaning up the station, a Human soon to be on the Council...

"The volus are gonna hate us even more than before."

Kaidan turned, surprised at Shepard's approach. He had figured she'd be kept locked up with the brass for debriefing for a few days yet. He'd been in this conference room himself for the past two days, his meals brought to him, getting escorted to and from the bathroom or his 'guest' quarters, ostensibly for security reasons. He wondered who they were trying to keep him away from.

He didn't ask, though. The conference rooms were undoubtedly monitored, and if she'd wanted to be candid, she would have approached him with a less neutral opening sentence.

"I've never understood the logic behind denying them a Council seat," Kaidan admitted, "I would have thought that giving the race that runs all interstellar commerce a voice in the governance would make sense, but then I'm not a politician."

Shepard gave a small smile, eyes sliding to the side. He thought he recognised the look by now. She had her own ideas of the reasoning behind that particular decision, but she wasn't going to voice them here. "Feeling like your brain's been scooped out enough?"

Kaidan coughed slightly. "The brass are certainly... thorough... with their debriefings, ma'am."

"Well, you're done for now." Shepard folded her arms, shifting her weight to one foot. "We've received new orders. We're shipping out."

"Ma'am?" He couldn't help his surprise. Two days of debriefing was nothing, not after an attack on this scale. He'd anticipated being stuck there for at least a couple of weeks, expected that they'd want to go every shred of data in the Normandy's core about the Reapers, would want to question every member of the crew. There was no way they'd managed that in two days.

"It is the joint decision of Alliance and the Council," Shepard said, her eyes flicking to the corner of the room for only a moment, brief enough to ignore, but an indication that she knew exactly where the cameras were, "That the Normandy should be dispatched asap to track down the geth who escaped the clean-up operation in the aftermath of the battle."

He was desperate to quiz her about the decision, but he wasn't going to get that chance here. He'd have to wait until they were aboard the Normandy, away from prying eyes. "So," he ventured, "I guess the crew don't get that shore leave we were all hoping for."

"I guess you'll just have to do without," Shepard said, her tone fondly amused, "You guys don't work hard enough anyway."

He saw it because he was looking closely for it. Her mouth flattened briefly, the corner twisted, before her mouth smoothed out. She'd rather been looking forward to that shore leave. They both had.

"It's always a pleasure to serve under you, ma'am."

That time, she blushed.

"Deceleration detected."

Kaidan blinked, trying to clear the gunk from his eyes. He reached up to wipe his eyelids, only to have his fingers mash into his suit's faceplate. That brought him all the way awake, though the recollection of exactly why he was sleeping in his hardsuit was a bit longer in coming.

Trying to ignore the unpleasant itchy feeling of dried sleep in his eyes, he looked at his suit's indicators. His oxygen was still at an acceptable level, although heading into the lower third of remaining stored air. These suits only had a day or so worth of air stored, and that was if the person in the suit made an effort to reduce all their activity. He'd brought along a backup unit just in case, but that only had a few more hours of liquid oxy stored inside.

It wasn't exactly how he would have chosen to travel, but it was the only way to get aboard the batarian freighter without being noticed.

He had stowed away in the freighter's cargo hold, tracking Char to his ship after he had agreed to make delivery with Miranda. She and the drell had boarded their own shuttle and left a day before the freighter departed Omega. He'd toyed with placing a tracker on their shuttle, but had decided, in the end, that he was much more likely to get caught messing with a state of the art personnel transport than he was a rickety freighter that had seen better days. The problem was that freighters often expected to have stowaways.

It was fairly common, Kaidan had learnt, for people to try and escape Omega to get to colonies by hitching rides in freighters. The easiest way to deal with this was to keep the cargo bays in vacuum after loading. It was unusual for the average stowaway to possess a hardsuit that would let them survive that. But even if they did have a suit, travel times would mean that they ran out of air long before the ship reached its destination. That was what Kaidan was risking, but he was gambling on the fact that Miranda had been willing to pay a lot for expediency, and hope that they would be making their meeting before his air ran out.

If it did, he'd be forced to head for the crew decks. At that point, all attempts at subterfuge would be flying out of airlock.

His suit's VI had a nice little suite of software infiltration tools, and it had spent most of the trip so far inserting its binary tendrils into the code. The suit had managed to set itself up so that it could surreptitiously spy on the routine goings on of the ship, so low down in the code that it was virtually unsecured. He couldn't see as much as he could if he were standing on the bridge staring at a console, but he could pick up when the ship went in and out of FTL. He could also tell if the sensors picked up any other ships, and pick up the ID string if the freighter scanned their IFF. If it wasn't the Normandy, then hopefully the tracers he'd littered amongst the cargo containers would eventually take him to the ship's current position, but if it was the Normandy...

There was no better way of finding out what was going on than getting on board.

Possibly it wasn't what Anderson had in mind, but that was what the man got for not asking questions.

"Proximity alert," the suit's VI reported, and brought up the relevant information on his omnitool's display.

He raised his omnitool. In the pitch black of the cargo-bay, the sudden light hurt his eyes, and threw an orange glow about like a beacon. He glanced about guiltily but, of course, there was no one there. The freighter's VI was reporting that another ship was approaching, although it didn't report a confirmed identification. The VI reported, however, based on its silhouette, that it was likely an asari ship.

Kaidan frowned, wondering what an asari ship was doing rendezvousing with this freighter in particular, when he was distracted by an alert flagging up on the omnitool. The VI was reporting that something had been launched from the asari ship. It didn't appear to be a weapon but-

White light flashed through the cargo bay, and Kaidan squeezed his eyes shut as the light became painfully bright. His hardsuit's visor abruptly became opaque to prevent his eyes from damage, but by then he was beyond caring.

Pain lanced through every cell in his body, and a metallic taste flooded his mouth as he bit his tongue. He fumbled at his omnitool, trying to access the menus, but he couldn't force his fingers to cooperate. His vision blurred, and he lost consciousness before he even had a chance to wonder what was going on.

~*~

The next time he opened his eyes, Commander Shepard was standing over him, a grim look of determination on her face, holding a pistol that was unwaveringly aimed at his forehead.

~*~

Four: Two Weeks Earlier

~*~

Commander Shepard stood over her personal console on the CIC deck of the Normandy and glowered at the screens. One of these days, she was going to go down to the AI core and threaten to pull EDI's chips one by one if she didn't update her junk mail definitions once in a while. She was the scourge of the Reapers, Spectre, saviour of the Citadel and generally a bad ass space marine; she shouldn't have to put up with offers to expand her breast size using "perfectly legal" turian medication.

She pinched the bridge of her nose, and reminded herself that she ought to be grateful she was still alive enough to bitch about junk mail.

"Commander Shepard?"

She dropped her hand and smiled politely at the crewman who had approached her. "Crewman Hadley. How can I help you?"

A lot of the crew had been having difficulty in sleeping lately, but Hadley looked like he'd finally had a good night's sleep. There was a brightness to his eyes, that Shepard hadn't seen in the days since they'd returned through the relay, the days since they'd been lingering just out of FTL comm. range, hoping to pull all the trackers and spytech that riddled the ship's systems before Cerberus could draw a bead on them.

"I just wanted to say," Hadley said, running a hand through his air, "I really appreciated getting to serve under you. You're a real hero in my book, and I know you did everything you could to save as many people as possible."

She was rather thrown for a moment, unsure of how to respond. "Well, ah... thank you, Hadley."

He held out his hand. "Really, it's been an honour."

She smiled, slightly befuddled by the sudden thanks, but shook his hand regardless. He saluted and turned to go without being dismissed, heading forward of the galaxy map, towards the cockpit. He looked like he was heading for his station, and Shepard was about to turn back to sorting through her mail and reports when the thought occurred to her that, last time she'd seen the ship's roster, Hadley wasn't meant to be on duty at that moment. Possibly he could have switched with one of the other crewmen, but...

She looked up, in time to see Hadley walk straight past his station and keep going.

A cold feeling of dread spread out from her stomach, panic seizing her. "Hadley," she tried to call, though her voice came out pitifully low.

Hadley didn't stop. Shepard pushed away from her terminal, rounding the edge of the map and starting to run. "Hadley!" He'd already turned, just before the cockpit, entering the airlock. "Stop him!"

Her voice grabbed the attention of a couple of other crewmen, but before they could react, just as she passed Hadley's station, there was a tremendous bang, and Shepard was yanked off her feet, flung forward as the air started to rush out of the deck through the now open airlock. There might have been screams and yelling, but Shepard could only hear the rushing of air. She had just enough time to think 'not again´ before she slammed into the kinetic barrier that had appeared in place of the now open airlock door. She bounced off it, dropping to the floor with a painful thud as the inner airlock doors made an odd grinding sound and finally slammed shut.

"Joker! All stop!" Shepard couldn't hear anything other than the thudding over her own heart. She was still off-balance as she pulled herself up and stumbled towards the cockpit.

As she regained her equilibrium, she could hear alarms ringing and EDI's voice. "Man overboard. Emergency crew to forward airlock. Man overboard."

Joker had obeyed her order through sheer reflex. As Shepard leaned over the consoles, peering out into space, struggling to catch a glimpse of Hadley against the starscape, he swore and said, "What the hell...?"

Shepard didn't answer him for a moment. She stabbed a finger against the glasses. "There! Move us closer!" Hadley had been blown a fair distance from the ship with the force of the decompression.

Joker followed where she was pointing and swore again, fingers dancing across the console. The Normandy banked sharply, and there was the sound of running booted feet coming up the walkway. Two crewman were shoving themselves into hardsuits, doing up the seals as they ran. There were always supposed to be two crewmen on any deck with an airlock who could respond quickly to someone 'falling overboard' (a bit of naval parlance that had never found a better alternative in the space age). Shepard had never been aboard a ship where they'd had to be used outside of drills.

The inner door of the airlock opened, kinetic barriers still in place. The outer door, Shepard could see, was jammed open to space, showing nothing but spinning stars as the ship moved closer to where Hadley was drifting.

"Let 'em through, EDI," Shepard said.

"Reconfiguring kinetic barriers."

The barrier shimmered and, instead of the hard screen that had arrested Shepard's tumble towards hard vacuum, it became permeable to objects of a certain size. The two crewmen passed through the barrier and the door shut behind them.

"Clear the deck! Make a hole!"

Crewmen flattened themselves against the consoles as Doctor Chakwas, accompanied by two Corpsmen, ran the length of the CIC dragging emergency medical kits and an AG-sled behind them. Shepard gripped the back of Joker's chair tightly as she watched them get ready to receive a casualty, listening with half an ear as Joker murmured, "Easy, girl, easy," and EDI delivered a rapid fire stream of positional data and micro-adjustments in an even tone, supplemented by scrolling information on the screen.

Shepard couldn't see what was going on. The vantage point of the cockpit didn't give her the right angle to see what was going on. She was forced to watched the external feeds on the monitor, waiting what felt like an eternity as the two emergency rescue crewmen pushed off from the open airlock, attached to the ship by tethers, the moment they got within reach of Crewman Hadley, who had long since stopped moving. They grabbed him, then reeled themselves in. Time crawled by painfully slow until finally the airlock doors opened and they dragged Hadley back into the ship, where he was set upon by Chakwas and her Corpsmen. Shepard watched silently as Chakwas barked orders and they hurried back through the ship, heading for the medical bay. She guessed that was a good sign. If he was beyond hope, then they wouldn't be making such an effort to recover him.

Shepard drew breath for the first time in what seemed to be a lifetime and nodded to the two rescuers. "Good work," she said, and nodded sharply to their salutes.

"Jesus," Joker muttered, staring up at her, "What the fuck just happened?"

Shepard felt like she needed a stiff drink. "I'll let you know when I find out," she said.

She didn't realise until she took her hand away that her fingers had left an imprint in the metal back of Joker's chair.

~*~

"How is he?"

Doctor Chakwas had finally felt that she could leave Hadley in the hands of her Corpsmen, and had appeared in the conference room looking drawn. "He'll be fine," she said, "We got to him in less than sixty seconds. He'll make a full recovery physically. Psychological recovery is another matter, and something I'm not equipped to deal with here."

"Exposed to hard vacuum for nearly a minute?" Miranda shook her head. She was leaning against the conference table, arms folded. "Hard to believe anyone can survive that."

"It's takes about ninety seconds to die after getting spaced," Shepard said. She had her hands laid flat on the table's surface, studying the skin on the back of her hands, imagined it webbed with burst capillaries, though she was certain that two years ago, by the time Cerberus got to her, skirting the edge of Alchera's atmosphere had done more to her skin than simple vacuum exposure would have. "You lose consciousness after about ten or fifteen seconds, but you don't die straight away."

Miranda frowned. "How do you-?"

Shepard raised her head, and gave Miranda a look. Miranda cleared her throat awkwardly and tried to pretend she hadn't asked such an obviously ridiculous question. Jacob, who had just been quietly observing up to that point, rolled his eyes.

"How did he manage it?" Shepard asked, quietly, turning her head towards the fifth member of the group, Tali.

Tali shifted, wringing her hands unhappily. "He used the manual override to open the outer airlock doors and circumvent the AI's control. Damage from the Collector base's explosion caused a system short and opened both inner and outer doors at once, decompressing the CIC."

"If that's all, Commander, I really should be getting back to my patient," Doctor Chakwas arched an eyebrow expectantly, and Shepard wasted no time in nodding.

"Of course, Doctor. Keep me informed, please?"

"As always," Chakwas said drolly, throwing the statement over her shoulder as she left the room

"As tragic as Hadley's... current state is, there are other matters we need to discuss," Shepard said, shifting from foot to foot and wondering why they'd never bothered to install chairs in the comms room. They could have decamped to Miranda's office, as that was the only place that was really set up to handle a long discussion about logistics, but Shepard wasn't going to cede control of the discussion that easily.

"The first is repairs," she said, "Tali?"

Tali shook her head. "We've only made a brief sweep for damage. I've a partial report, but I'd like to wait until tomorrow when Daniels and I have finished going over the optical datanet. We weren't aware there was a problem with the airlock, so now we can't trust the diagnostics. I have her and Donnelly going over the low-level deecee routines as we speak."

"How about a preliminary assessment?" Miranda asked, pointedly.

Tali turned her head to look at her, and Shepard tried not to smile as she imagined the faintly annoyed look her quarian friend no doubt wore. "We've got holes all over the hull," she said, "And while we've managed to reuse some scrap metal from the cargo bay to restore pressure integrity, the fact is that we don't have the raw materials or the spare parts to make repairs in the middle of deep space. We need to dock at a station to make proper repairs."

"Unfortunately, Cerberus stations are no longer an option," Jacob said, wryly.

Shepard rolled her eyes. "Oh I'm pretty sure if I asked the Illusive Man nicely to work for him again he'd let us use the resources no problem. Of course, the rather comprehensive 'go to hell' I gave him might just mean that option's closed to us now."

Miranda looked uncomfortable, but said nothing.

"What about the trackers?" She asked.

"We've pulled most of them as we've been making repairs," Tali said, "Since it's made some of the harder-to-reach areas of the ship accessible. We're still working on it though."

"What was the second thing?" Jacob asked, curious.

"The crew." Shepard folded her arms. "They didn't sign on to be fugitives from Cerberus, and I won't have them suffer for my decisions. There are two things I want to do." She paced as she spoke. "We'll head for Omega and the Citadel. Some of our specialists want off, and I'm hardly going to keep them here against their will. Anyone from the crew will be able to disembark at that time. But I don't want anyone who decides to remain separate from Cerberus to suffer for it."

She stopped, drew herself up to her full height. She wasn't the tallest of women, but the act of doing so granted her even more of a physical presence than she normally presented. "So, the crew's implants are going to need to be removed."

Jacob stood upright, startled. "Sorry, what implants?"

Shepard gave Miranda a pointed look.

Miranda grit her teeth, then shook her head, resigning herself. "The crew are fitted with... certain implants that Cerberus uses to ensure operational security."

"Optical flashbangs and poison capsules in teeth being amongst some of the nicer," Shepard said.

Jacob turned an angry look on Miranda. "And we all have these? I don't recall agreeing to that."

"They're not for control," Miranda said, sharply, defensively. "If a cell is captured, and there's no hope of rescue, the information a crew like this holds about Cerberus cannot be allowed to be let out."

Jacob shook his head in disgust. "You know, I'm really not surprised," he said, "Though I am disappointed you decided not to tell anyone."

"Even I have the implants," Miranda said, "Everyone Cerberus recruits does. Well, except for Shepard." She turned towards her commanding officer. "We hadn't reached that stage in your reconstruction when you were revived."

Tali had been watching the conversation, her head moving back and forth as she followed the conversation. If she was shocked, she gave no sign. "It may be possible," she said, interrupting the brewing argument, "To set up some sort of electronic screen to prevent remote activation of the implants. But it would only be a temporary solution, and the crew would have to remain aboard the Normandy to be protected."

"I was hoping you'd say something like that," Shepard said, with a faint smile. "How quickly can you do it?"

"Not quickly at all, I'm afraid," Tali said, apologetically, "There's too much damage to the ship. We just don't have the resources."

That wiped Shepard's smile away. "Well, Mordin's been kind enough to agree to continue to research the removal of the implants. Hopefully we'll come up with some sort of solution before the situation becomes critical. If nothing else, the crew needs space, time to recover. Hadley was under more stress even before the Collector's base. Now...?"

Shepard reached up and rubbed the back of her neck. A headache was brewing at the base of her skull. She'd never suffered the headaches early biotic implants could cause, and with the experimental tech that Cerberus had outfitted her with, she barely got a twinge even when overexerting herself. But simple stress was something technology couldn't account for.

"We'll stay off the FTL buoys until we're sure we can screen ship and crew from remote detection or attack," she ordered. "Dismissed."

Tali nodded, and Jacob saluted, but Miranda made no move to leave. So eventually it was just her and Shepard, alone in the room.

"You know," Miranda said, casting Shepard a sidelong look. "It's almost certain that the Illusive Man planned for the possibility of your leaving Cerberus' aegis."

"The thought had occurred to me." Shepard said. "Especially when I noticed that most of the crew claimed to have been assigned here out of loyalty to me, rather than Cerberus."

"It's not a claim," Miranda said, "It's the truth. They weren't drawn from the usual pool of talent Cerberus tends to use. There's a lot of ex-Alliance officers here, people who publicly defended you, like Donnelly."

"What are you getting at, Miranda?"

Miranda shrugged ever-so-slightly. "The goal of Cerberus, and the Illusive Man, in bringing you back was to defeat the Reapers, and save humanity. With this ship, and this crew, your implants and your skills, you have a better chance than maybe anyone else has in the galaxy. He may not be directly guiding your hands anymore, Shepard, but I wouldn't bank on him not having planned for this eventuality, anticipating it. If he had needed you to be part of Cerberus to accomplish his goals, he would have implanted a control chip. You're a force for humanity's good, Commander, whether you talk to him or not."

Shepard gave her second in command a regarding look, scrutinising her expression. She considered the 2iC role a privileged position, one that should be given to someone that had earned the trust of their CO. Miranda had placed herself in that position, the official 'leader' of their cell, always watching, always reporting.

Yes, she'd given the Illusive Man her resignation in no uncertain terms, but could that instant of good judgement turn around most of a lifetime spent working for Cerberus? Shepard honestly didn't know. She was willing to give Miranda a chance, though.

She had to be willing. She couldn't believe that mere association with Cerberus made one irredeemable. If that was true, then there really was no hope for her.

"This particular force for humanity's good has had a very long day," Shepard said. It had only been early afternoon by the ship's clock when Hadley had walked off the deck, and the rest of the afternoon had passed so quickly that it was the nightshift had just started work an hour earlier. "So if there's nothing else...?"

"I'll start looking at our options for repair materials," Miranda said, and sashayed from the room.

The door had barely closed behind her when EDI's holographic avatar sprung into life, displacing the diagram of the Normandy that had been floating in the centre of the table.

"Commander Shepard?"

Shepard tried not to sigh. She'd wanted just a brief moment of numb contemplation, but that was not to be, it seemed. "Yes, EDI?"

"I feel I must admit to a certain amount of culpability," EDI said, without preamble. "My circuits are still damaged from the attack on the Collector base. I was unable to prevent the use of the airlock manual override. My inability to respond quickly led to Crewman Hadley's suicide attempt. I did not predict his intentions upon entering the airlock. I should have."

Shepard wondered if it was too late to resign and go wait for the end of life on a tropical moon somewhere. "EDI, I'm going to say this once and only once," she said, "So I want to make sure you're paying attention."

"I am always paying attention," EDI said, "Even when I am not projecting myself physically."

And that wasn't a creepy thought at all. "Good. It's not your fault. It's not anyone's fault. Or, if someone has to be blamed, blame the Collectors. I have a trained psychologist on staff who didn't notice anything." But then Kelly was barely holding herself together these days. She could hardly be expected to take on the burden of the entire crew's mental health when she was so fragile herself. "Hadley's brother had already been taken by the Collectors. Knowing what happened to him, and having to go through it himself? I don't blame him for a moment of weakness, nor do I blame anyone else. I'm not assigning fault and as far as I'm concerned that's the end of the matter."

"Yes, Shepard," EDI said, in what she could have sworn was a meek tone of voice.

"Now, is there anything else?"

"No, Shepard."

Shepard heaved a sigh. "Then please continue to monitor the ship's systems and forward me the latest damage control estimates when they're updated. If anyone wants me, I'll be unavailable for the next few hours. I'm going to my cabin."

"Yes, Shepard," EDI said, and vanished from sight.

A couple of weeks shore leave, that was all she wanted. Somewhere with a beach, those drinks in coconuts, and servitors wearing very tiny shorts. That would be nice. Shepard rubbed the bridge of her nose, banishing the thought to the land of fantasy. It wasn't an image that would be occupying her dreams. She knew that she was going up to her cabin to lie on her back, stare at the ceiling, and see Hadley's bloated body floating behind her eyes.

She walked to the elevator mostly on automatic, fingers finding the deck menu out of habit. The doors opened outside her cabin, and Shepard was halfway to the door when she came to a halt. "Kelly?"

Yeoman Kelly Edwards, looked pale and nervous, took one look at her commanding officer, and burst into tears. Shepard's heart went out to her, even if some part of her wanted to howl in anguish at the continued demands on her. She silenced that rebellious part of her for the moment, though, and put her arms around Kelly in a loose hug.

"Come on in," she said, kindly.

~*~

Five: Sleep Is For The Weak

~*~

It was a very long night. Kelly flitted between tearfulness, self-recrimination, anger, apologies, and eventually came right back around to tearfulness. Shepard sat next to her the whole time, a sympathetic ear and occasionally literal shoulder to cry on. By the time Kelly was finally able to leave, to return to her bunk and sleep, she looked shocked and exhausted, but a little stronger than before.

It was the small hours of the morning by the time she was finally alone, but Shepard couldn't sleep. So she pulled off her sodden uniform tunic and lay on her back, staring up at the ceiling.

Some days she wondered if she hadn't missed her calling as a counsellor. Clearly Alliance officer training had skimped on that particular requirement of captaincy. She'd solved Jacob's problems with his father, Samara's problems with her daughter, and Miranda's problems with her sister. Perhaps she should have business cards printed up: Shepard's family counselling services. No problem too big for a trusty shotgun.

She was being uncharitable, she knew. Irreverent where it really wasn't deserved, but Shepard couldn't help but feel resentful at the fact that she was expected to save the galaxy, and solve everyone's problems for them. It wasn't the easiest thing to wake up one day and find out that you were dead until about five minutes ago. All she'd received in the way of help was to be handed expensive weaponry and be pointed in the direction of things needing killing. She felt like she hadn't stopped moving since she'd woken up on Lazarus station, and now she had the first chance to catch her breath in months, leaving her thoughts turning in unpleasant directions.

She was Commander Shepard. She didn't get any of that nonsense hand-holding. Get up and get on with the job and try not to get yourself killed a second time because resurrections are costly.

It just would have been nice to have someone to talk to, someone who didn't hold her up as a paragon of humanity. Maybe she could have talked to Tali or Garrus, but they had their own problems, and they'd changed just enough from the people she'd remembered that it still felt somewhat odd to talk to them. Garrus was nowhere near as outgoing as he once had been, and Tali had been struck with an odd reverence since Shepard had defended her on the flotilla. The crew in general weren't an option. She had to be their Captain, with the unshakeable nerve. Hadley was, no doubt, just the most visible sign of the trauma the crew had undergone. They didn't need to see her cracking on top of that.

Thane would have listened, and he was always welcoming to her presence. But she just didn't know if he'd choose to leave at the Citadel to be with his son. Could she really bring herself to pour out her problems to a friend if they were just going to leave?

She tried to clear her mind. She might not be able to sleep, but the least she could do was try to get some rest.

~*~

Shepard wasn't the only one having difficulty sleeping. Miranda Lawson, in her office, was equally awake, hunched over her desk and looking somewhat less than her usual pristine self. She'd been unaware that Shepard knew about the crew's implants, and it had been a decidedly unpleasant experience to be ambushed with it, leaving Jacob staring at her like she was personally responsible. His employment by Cerberus had always been conditionally that they'd played fair, and Miranda had respected that agreement. He doubtless thought she'd been lying the whole time.

She had, of course, but it had been for a good reason. At least, that was what she told herself.

She rubbed her eyes as she stared at the list of estimated materials that Tali and her crew had provided for the repairs. They couldn't just throw a few automated drones at a planet and harvest the needed metals themselves. Even if that had been an option, their on-board manufacturing had been too badly damaged to make use of the raw materials. The spare parts to repair the bare minimum to get them running again were easily available, but not if they stuck with Shepard's orders of remaining out of communications range.

The only option was, therefore, to go and retrieve the materials needed. The shuttle couldn't carry that much cargo, though, so that meant hiring a freighter to come out into deep space. That meant someone had to go to a planet or trading station and barter for what they needed.

Miranda knew it had to be her.

She hadn't been ignorant of the stand-offish way that Shepard had been treating her since she'd rather abruptly broken off ties with the Illusive Man. Miranda could hardly blame her. She was the most visible and most loyal member of Cerberus on board the ship. Why would Shepard believe that long-held loyalties could just shift overnight?

Shepard had a way of gathering people to her, of inspiring intense loyalty. Miranda was willing to admit that she'd fallen under Shepard's sway. There were even moments when, if Miranda hadn't been so sure of her preferences, she might have been distinctly inclined to approach Shepard on the subject of becoming more than friends. It had been a frighteningly easy decision to send a reply to the blistering message the Illusive Man had sent in the aftermath of the Collector base's destruction that simply said, "Consider this my resignation. Sir."

She still believed in Cerberus, but she knew that she couldn't serve both Shepard and Cerberus at the same time. She had made her decision, and now she had to live with it. Now all she had to do was convince Shepard of her sincerity.

She drummed her fingers on the desktop, pondering, then got to her feet and headed for the tech lab. It was the early hours of the ship's 'morning', but Mordin Solus was already there, or maybe he'd never gone to bed. Sometimes Miranda got the impression that Mordin would only stop moving and talking when he was dead.

She was very glad that he'd survived.

"Have you got a minute, Professor?" she asked, as he looked up from his work in askance.

"A minute. Or two. Or a lifetime, since we aren't dead. Acceptable conclusion to suicide mission, wouldn't you say?"

"We survived, saved the crew, and defeated the Collectors," Miranda said, wryly, "I feel like someone should be writing epic poetry about us."

Mordin smiled, distinctly amused. "Will settle for continued survival. Epic poetry tends to be very dull. What can I do for you, Miranda?"

Miranda rubbed her palms together in an unconsciously nervous gesture. "Shepard mentioned you'd been researching the crew's implants. The flashbangs and poison capsules."

The amusement had left Mordin's face. He now regarded her with narrow-eyed suspicion. "Have been researching. Methods of removal, of disablement." He had taken on a slightly more confrontational stance, perhaps expecting her to take issue with his work. "Implants of crewmembers without knowledge or consent unethical. Rather like Reapers and Protheans, wouldn't you say?"

Miranda felt slightly ill at the comparison.

"Will not stop work, if that is what you're here about."

Miranda held up her hands. "No, no, you don't understand. I'm not here to stop you, I'm-" She broke off, turning away from Mordin to pace a few steps one way, then the other. "What would you need to do? To remove the implants that is?"

Mordin still looked suspicious, but he took her question seriously. "Surgical intervention, possibly nanotechnological assistance required. Lack perfect scans of implants. Interference countermeasures in place, uncertain if they would self-destruct under detailed surveillance. Very difficult to model virtually."

"So, basically, any surgery you did would be experimental."

Mordin looked shocked. "Could not ask any of the crew to take such a risk!"

Miranda took a deep breath. "You don't have to."

~*~

If she'd given it a moment's thought, she would have considered that hammering on Shepard's door in the middle of the night was a bad idea, but Miranda rather thought that if she stopped for a moment to think about what she was doing, she might panic and change her mind.

Shepard might have been fully dressed in trousers and black undershirt, only her tunic discarded, but she looked tired and slightly grey. Her hair was mussed and her eyes were dull. "The ship better be under fire," she groused, as she let Miranda in.

"Commander, I apologise for the intrusion at such an hour," Miranda said.

"Always got time for my crew," Shepard said, though she sounded so exhausted that the phrase rang hollowly. Miranda felt a smidgeon of guilt, but didn't let it stop her. She followed Shepard to the low couch and took the seat offered to her. "What's on your mind, Miranda?"

"The implants," Miranda said, without preamble, "The crew's implants. Mordin's been researching ways to remove them. I'm volunteering to be his first patient."

Shepard frowned, absently combing her fingers through her hair to flatten it out. "Mordin hasn't finished his research yet," she said, "Last he reported, he'd yet to iron out certain issues, like how to remove the tech without it self-destructing."

Miranda laced her fingers together in her lap to stop her hands from treacherously giving away her emotions. "I know," she said, "He's unsure that he'll ever be able to get information from scans. He needs a test subject, a volunteer. Shepard, I'm volunteering to be that person."

Shepard suddenly seemed a lot more awake. "Tell me why," she instructed, softly.

Miranda had prepared for this question, had rehearsed her answer over and over in her head on the elevator ride. "We're going to have to send someone to Omega to purchase the material we need to repair the ship. I'm more familiar with the ship's construction that anyone else except maybe Tali, and she's needed here. I can't go while I still have these implants, they might let a Cerberus team track me to the ship. They have to be removed, and it's something we need doing sooner rather than later. So I volunteer."

Shepard nodded. "Thank you," she said, "Now the real reason."

Miranda drew back slightly, biting back the reflexively sharp response. "What makes you think that wasn't it?" she asked.

"I know you, Miranda," Shepard said, looking at her in the eye intently. It was distinctly uncomfortable, but Miranda couldn't bring herself to be the one to break the gaze. "I've worked with you these last few months, worked closely with you. I've seen you fight, and more to the point, I've seen you desperate. That's a perfectly rational reason, and though you might like to pretend you're a perfectly rational woman, you're just as human as the rest of us. So tell me: what's the real reason you're volunteering?"

Miranda curled her fingers tightly. It turned the skin of her hands white where they clenched together. "That is the real reason," she insisted.

Shepard shook her head, sighed, and stood. "Then your request is denied. There'll be no surgery, and I'll send Garrus and Thane off to Omega to do some negotiating for us."

"No! I-" Miranda shook her head, and said, firmly, "I have to."

"Why?" Shepard demanded.

Miranda felt cornered, and it was an unpleasant feeling. "You don't trust me," she said, and was surprised at the bitterness edging the words.

Shepard stared at her for a long, hard minute. "Don't be ridiculous," she said, finally, sounding exasperated.

"Hear me out," Miranda said, "You don't trust that I've completely ceded my loyalty to Cerberus."

Shepard pursed her lips faintly. "I'll grant that you're as much of a dyed-in-the-wool Cerberus operative as I'm sure you'd find. Cerberus has done a lot for you. That sort of attachment doesn't just go away."

"No," Miranda agreed, "It doesn't. I still believe in what Cerberus is doing."

"Then what the hell are you still doing on my ship?" Shepard barked the words, sounding almost angry.

Miranda felt a hot flush come over her face and she leapt to her feet. "Because I believe in you more!"

"Come on, Miranda," Shepard shook her head, and her smile was twisted, slightly mocking, "You're honestly telling me that you, Cerberus agent, insider and apologist, has completely let go of her old ties?"

Miranda bit back a fierce 'fuck you', to be backed up by a biotic punch. Shepard was baiting her, she realised, trying to get her emotions to loosen, to force her into an unthinking statement. She was looking for honesty, not calculating answers. And suddenly it was a lot easier to deal with.

Miranda took a deep breath, forcing herself to take a step back and closed her eyes for a moment to regain her equilibrium. She could have sworn that Shepard looked almost approving when she reopened them, but only for a moment. She reached inside herself for the words she needed, and tried not to balk at saying them.

"You've done more for me than I can ever thank you for. You had no reason to help me with Oriana, but you did that anyway. We brought you back as a tool... I... brought you back as a tool, but you transcended that without even trying. I was created for a purpose. I've always been useful, for my father, for the Illusive Man. I have to believe that I can transcend that myself, or else..." Miranda spread her fingers, a gesture of helplessness. "Or else, what else is there for me? I've thrown my lot in with you, Shepard. You're going to save us from the Reapers. Let me help you the best way I can."

Shepard rubbed the back of her neck. "Miranda," she said, sincerely, "You don't have to prove yourself to me."

"Yes, I do," Miranda replied. There was more, she was sure, to her reasoning, deep down inside where Miranda wasn't even willing to admit the emotions existed. Damned if she was actually going to say anything though.

Shepard thought about it, and then finally nodded. "Alright. If Doctor Chakwas and the Professor agree, you can have the surgery, and go to Omega."

"Thank you, Shepard," Miranda said, feeling like some huge weight had suddenly been lifted from her shoulders. She headed for the door.

"Miranda," Shepard called after her.

Miranda turned, curious.

"I don't hold being a Cerberus operative against you," Shepard told her, "But if I ever found out you had anything to do with what happened on Akuze, crew or not, subordinate, tool or friend, I would kill you."

Miranda sucked in a breath sharply. Shepard was deadly serious. Miranda had seen that same look in her eyes many a time, usually just before she snapped someone's neck without hesitation. "I understand," she said. She started to turn away, then paused and glanced back. "Out of curiosity, would you ever consider being more than friends?"

Shepard scowled. "Go away, Miranda."

"Just thought I'd ask," Miranda said mildly, and left.

~*~

Six: All For Others

~*~

Miranda Lawson, in her colourful career as a member of Cerberus, had been shot, punched, tossed around by biotics and, on one memorable occasion, electrocuted. She and pain were old familiar friends. But she had a high tolerance threshold, a "gift" from her father, and so physical discomfort had never bothered her that much.

This pain was new. This pain clawed at her brain, demanding she give it every nanometre of her attention. She felt pinned down, too heavy too move and though she would later realise that she hadn't completely shaken off the anaesthesia, the loss of movement was suddenly frightening.

But she could hear voices, low and smooth, talking over her, and could feel the warm weight of what felt like fingers on her wrist. She could make out words, but when she tried to concentrate on what was being said enough to understand it, meaning slipped away from her. She settled on struggling to open her eyes. She managed to crack her eyelids open a sliver, and immediately made a pained sound as light stabbed in to add to the cacophony of pain in her head.

She made a pathetic noise that she couldn't recall hearing before.

The voices stopped, and the warmth went away. Miranda tried to reach out for that contact again, but her fingers barely twitched.

"Miranda," Doctor Chakwas's voice came to her clearly. She'd leaned closer to speak to her patient. "We've dimmed the lights, but your eyes are going to be sensitive for a while. Just try to stay calm and breathe normally."

Easy for her to say.

It seemed to take far too long, but eventually the dim light was only eye-watering, and Miranda managed to open her eyes fully and look around. Things were a little blurred, her eyes taking longer than usual to focus, it seemed, but when she finally looked at her surroundings, she realised that the only people in the medical bay were herself, Chakwas, and Hadley, asleep on one of the other beds.

"Was there someone else in here?" she asked, hoarsely.

Chakwas nodded, pulling away from Miranda's bedside for a moment to retrieve a datapad. "Mister Taylor was here. He wanted to make sure you were recovering from your surgery well enough."

Although he hadn't stuck around when she'd started to wake up properly, Miranda noted, though she couldn't summon up the appropriate bitterness at that moment. She wondered if it had been his fingers on her hand. "Am I recovering?" she asked, "My head..."

Chakwas looked at her seriously. "I won't lie to you. There were complications during your surgery. One of the optical implants self-destructed as we removed it, causing some damage to your tissues. But we got it out before it did any permanent damage. You have a remarkably tough system, Miranda. You'll need a few neural-regrowth treatments, but you'll make a full recovery. You might have some terrible headaches for a while though."

"So I'll be fine," Miranda said, looking for simple clarification.

Chakwas nodded. "Yes," she said, "And you'll be happy to know that the Professor is sure that, with the information gained during your surgery with your implants in his lab, he can simplify the removal procedure for the rest of the crew."

"Well... good..." Miranda felt vague, spacey. Her head still hurt, but it seemed unimportant. It took her a moment to realise that Chakwas had been working on the drug line into her arm while they had been speaking, no doubt introducing some kind of sedative. "That feels nice," she commented.

"Only the best for my crew," Chakwas said, amused, turning her head as the door slid open. "Ah, Commander Shepard. Come to check up on our guinea pig?"

Shepard approached the side of the bed, eyes searching out Miranda's. Her shoulders relaxed ever so slightly, apparently reassured by what she saw there. "Yes, I'd heard she was awake. How are you feeling, Miranda?"

Miranda blinked. "Your eyes are glowing," she told her commander.

Shepard drew back slightly, a hand coming up to rub the back of her neck the way it always did when she felt awkward. Miranda abruptly felt bad. "Yeah," Shepard said, a rueful expression on her face, "They do that in low light. Not nearly as bad as it used to be, I'm told."

"They'll stop doing it completely by the time you're totally healed," Chakwas said.

Shepard's facial scars were gone, though, Miranda thought. Why wouldn't she be completely...? Oh yes. "You'll be alright eventually," Miranda told her, trying to be reassuring, "You're perfect. I made sure you were still perfect. I do good work."

Shepard smiled, lips twitching, and glanced at Chakwas.

"I think you have a fan," Chakwas said, her hand reaching up to cover her lips briefly.

"She's more tolerable than Conrad," Shepard said. "I'll be back to check up on you later, alright, Miranda?"

"Ok," Miranda agreed, readily. Something occurred to her, and she spoke up as Shepard made to leave. "Oh, if you see Jacob, tell him I don't mind if he's here?"

Shepard tilted her head, looking at her drugged 2iC thoughtfully. "I'll do that," she said. "Get some rest."

"Sure," Miranda agreed fuzzily, "Rest sounds nice."

~*~

Commander Shepard sat at her desk in her quarters, arms folded, bestowing a truly impressive glower upon her personal terminal. The terminal, unimpressed, continued to display the same message that it had done for the last several minutes. It wasn't very long, only a few lines of plain text. The message itself didn't bother Shepard so much as the sender, and the intent behind it.

They were well off the communication buoys that routed network traffic around the extranet. This message hadn't come through traditional routes. It had come via the quantum communication system that connected the Normandy to the Illusive Man, and cross any distance. EDI had assured Shepard repeatedly that the system was thoroughly firewalled, and there would be no successful attempts to take over the ship that way, and it was too low a bitrate even if an attempt was made. But it was perfectly adequate for sending a plain text message. It was certainly easier than sending holograms.

They had received it some time ago, but between Hadley's suicide attempt, and Miranda's unexpected volunteering for experimental surgery, Shepard had managed to put it out of her mind. After seeing Miranda, lying there in the medical bay, what she'd said about the Illusive Man had come back to her, and she'd found herself back in front of her terminal, staring at the message.

It wasn't the only message that she'd been ignoring. There'd been a few from the Council, picked up from the last buoy they passed after returning through the Omega 4 relay, before they'd run off to lick their wounds in private. Shepard had been trying to think of a way to turn them from abstract data into physical substance, so that she could take them down to the cargo bay and use them for target practice.

The Council had restored her Spectre status, admittedly, but Shepard was under no illusions as to why. It was a symbolic gesture. If she turned out to be right, if there was something to her warnings about the Collector, then the Council had been right on the ball, and had a Spectre in place to investigate and terminate the threat. If she was wrong, the Council had never reinstated her, as Shepard was known throughout the galaxy for being dead. Rumours of her resurrection were the product of terrorist organisations seeking to destabilise the Council's authority. So they had refused to listen to her, and Shepard had walked away from Anderson's office nearly shaking with anger. The only thing that had prevented it being visible was the fact that her armour had prevented such minor muscle spasms from being seen.

She hadn't expected much, but she had hoped. After her unproductive meeting, she'd gone back to the Normandy and asked EDI to set up a crawler to trawl the extranet in order to mine all the old stories about her after her death from news and more private sources.

What she'd read hadn't been pleasant.

Her reputation had been thoroughly trashed after her death. At first, she was feted as a hero, humanity's Spectre and saviour, then rumours started about her being 'unstable'. The slightly more sympathetic ones called her 'post-traumatic' following a 'difficult childhood' and 'trying times' on Akuze.

A few had spoken out against the bad press. Shepard had discovered exactly what Donnelly had meant by his 'very public' opposition to what had been said about her. She had watched the interview that Emily Wong had gotten after ambushing him during shore leave, and felt a lot of gratitude towards her engineer for the absolute trust he'd seemed to have for her, even though they'd never previously met. The only other person who seemed to object to the Council's revision of recent events was Defense Minister Lesh T'Vann, an asari matron, who had gone on record several times about needing to build up their forces, to prepare for worse to come. It sounded exactly like how Shepard herself would have proposed building up their forces to combat the Reapers. Six months after Shepard's death, however, T'Vann resigned under undisclosed circumstances and all talk of Shepard was quietly dropped from the news nets.

Shepard was willing to bet that T'Vann had been a victim of the Council cleaning up the history books. The whole sordid saga had disgusted her, and she'd decided that the Council could generally go screw itself. So when time had come to tell someone, anyone, of what had happened, she'd arrange for EDI to quietly and anonymously deliver a message to Kaidan.

He may not have trusted her, but she still trusted him implicitly.

None of that was important right at that moment, though. Shepard was more focused on the message from the Illusive Man.

Shepard, it started, unobtrusively, I don't agree with your decision regarding the Collector base, but I have no choice to abide by it. The important thing now is not to lose sight of the real threat: the Reapers. You and I may have had a parting of ways, but we still share the same goals. The survival of humanity and the defeat of the Reapers occupies as much of your attention as it does mine.

Shepard had snorted on reading that line. Humanity wasn't her only concern, but she wasn't about to send a message back to him reminding him of that fact.

I hope that the gifts Cerberus has given you, your ship, your crew, and your life, help in the pursuit of that goal. Know that I am always willing to provide whatever assistance you require in the days ahead.

Apparently the Illusive Man was incapable of taking 'fuck off' as a hint.

Shepard had absolutely no intention of returning to Cerberus. She'd needed him at the time, and now the Collectors were destroyed, that need was gone. Unfortunately, Shepard was pragmatic enough to realise that there might come a time where she didn't have a choice but to ask for his help. That knowledge was more annoying and irritating than anything.

"Commander," EDI said, her holographic avatar springing into life with her customary lack of respect for privacy, "Thane Krios is requesting admittance to your personal quarters."

"Thank you, EDI. Let him in."

She closed the message with a stab of her finger against the keypad, and turned in time to see Thane slip through the doors with his customary inherent grace.

"You asked to see me," he said, politely, folding his hands behind his back.

"Yes, thanks for coming so quickly." She stood from her desk and gestured to the more comfortable couch seating. "Please."

Thane had never been in her quarters before, and she noted that he quickly scoped out her personal space with quick flicks of the eyes. His gaze lingered on the empty fish tank as he sat down, and Shepard offered, before he could ask,

"It's a fish tank. They're supposed to be scenic and relaxing. I couldn't keep the fish alive, though. The hamster fairs better."

Thane hesitated, blinking rapidly in what Shepard had come to realise was the equivalent of frowning. "Do all humans keep animals in their personal space?"

"Not on ships, or stations," Shepard said, with a small shrug, "It's hard to get the permits for them. Too much space and resources are required for anything bigger than fish or hamsters. You couldn't get a dog on the ship."

"Do they serve a purpose?"

Shepard thought about it and shrugged. "Not unless you count companionship."

Thane had acquired the look that Shepard periodically saw on alien faces, the one that said 'humans are strange, but I'm used to that by now'. She decided it was a good time to change the subject. "Anyway, I wanted to ask a favour of you."

"Of course. I am, as ever, at your service."

Shepard smiled faintly. "You're not, Thane. The mission to defeat the Collectors is finished and a damned good job we all did of it too. Some of our specialists have expressed a desire to get on with their lives as soon as possible. Samara and Zaeed will be getting off at Omega. Kasumi at the Citadel. I don't know what your plans are, but whatever they may be, I'd like to ask you a favour. I'm aware that you may want to hurry back to the Citadel and your son, but we have a job that needs doing first."

"Siha," Thane interrupted gently, "You are a friend to me. I am more than willing to do any favour you ask of me."

Shepard tilted her head. "You said you were going to tell me what that means one day."

"And I will," Thane said, "One day. Now, what is this favour you ask?"

"Miranda's going to be taking the shuttle to Omega to negotiate for some needed supplies," Shepard said. As she spoke, she sat slightly straighter, unconsciously donning the 'official' stance of command. She didn't even realise when she was doing it, these days. "This is against the advice of Doctor Chakwas and the Professor, of course, but she's bound and determined to go. Garrus will be going as well. He has knowledge of some of the people on Omega we need to deal with. Since he's going to be too busy to do it, I'd like you to go along to keep an eye on Miranda."

Thane was silent for a moment. "Do you not trust her?"

Shepard drummed her fingers on her thigh for a moment, turning the question over in her head and thinking of how best to phrase it. "She's been Cerberus a long time," she said, after a moment. "I don't think she's completely forsaken those beliefs, but I believe she's sincere about her willingness to serve under my command. So I'm willing to put my faith in her. But I do believe she'll put her health in jeopardy. I would rather delay the mission, since she's so intent on going, but unfortunately we need those supplies."

"So," Thane said, "You want me to make sure she doesn't do anything... stupid?"

"Just so."

"I can do that." Thane said, "And, so that you're aware, I haven't yet made my decision about what to do now. I find that I am not as... complacent... about my coming end as I was before this mission. I have found a dear friend, and my son. These are things I did not have before. And so, I find deciding what to do next to be difficult."

Shepard leaned forward, and resting her hand on his arm. She couldn't feel his body warmth through his sleeve, as she might be able to with a human. "Whatever you decide," she said, sincerely, "If I can give you any help at all, you have it."

"You are willing to give a great deal of yourself for your crew," Thane said, looking down at her hand contemplatively, "Kasumi used the word 'nakama'. Family who are not blood."

"Well," Shepard sat back, awkwardly, "Not... deliberately. I value my crew, their moral, their wellbeing, is essential to the running of the ship, to keeping us all alive. I'm their commander. It's my duty to do what I can."

"I didn't mean to make you feel uncomfortable," Thane told her, "But one cannot give of one's self infinitely. Eventually an end point must be reached." He looked at her seriously. "When did you last sleep?"

Shepard waved a hand vaguely. "With all the cybernetics Cerberus put inside me, my need for sleep has seriously decreased these days."

"Which means you cannot remember, which means that it has been too long."

Shepard frowned and opened her mouth to object, but Thane held up his hand, silencing her.

"Your devotion to your crew does you credit, but I would not see you suffer for it."

Shepard shook her head, and looked away. Her clock was a convenient thing to look at, to draw the eye, and so she stared intently at it as she said, "Thank you for coming to see me. We'll be despatching the shuttle within the next two days, whenever Chakwas gives Miranda the green light."

A light touch landed on her shoulder, and she glanced back to see Thane standing next to her, hand outstretched. She hadn't even heard him move. "Think about what I have said, siha," he said, not deterred by her sudden coolness. "I will prepare myself for the mission ahead."

Then he bowed, and departed.

Shepard glanced at the bed, contemplating the conflicting desires to lie down and sleep with the knowledge that she would only be haunted by Miranda, Hadley, and the Illusive Man's attempts to drive her to distraction, not to mention that she had to deal with the damage reports that Tali had just forwarded to her terminal, and the cataloguing of their resources and what they might be worth on the open market, which would provide the funding that kept them in the sky...

Shepard sighed, and returned to her terminal, opening it up and getting back to work.

~*~

Seven: Convergence

~*~

Shepard stood over the tactical hologram, staring down at it and periodically sniffing the steam that arose from her coffee mug. Sometimes, the almost tactical sensation of inhaling the biting fragrance was better than drinking it.

"Commander," Joker's voice filtered through to her from the cockpit by way of the comm system. "We've arrived at the rendezvous point. Stealth systems are engaged and running within normal parameters."

"Thank you, Joker."

Normally, the holograph in the middle of CIC displayed either the ship's status or the navigational map, but now it was displaying a tactical readout of the local space. The Normandy's position was a small blue dot, labelled appropriately, the rest of the system depicted as orange-tinted spheres with names and classification data attached as labels that Shepard could expand if she so chose, but for now she left them closed. She was more interested in looking at an overview of the situation.

A day had passed since Miranda, Thane and Garrus had returned from Omega with details of a rendezvous with a batarian trading ship. Shepard had the Normandy head to the Ophan system early so as to lie in wait, just in case anyone untoward had gotten word of their situation (perhaps through a scan of the Omega 4 relay, and the damaged ship that had returned through it before limping off the grid). Shepard was fairly certain that her paranoia was just that, paranoia, but she didn't survive the Collectors just to be taken out by a trigger-happy Cerberus cell.

"I am detecting an anomaly," EDI reported, and the hologram shifted, showing a section of the star system on the far side of the third planet.

"I need something a little more specific than 'there's something odd', EDI," Shepard said, frowning at the new hologram.

It wasn't EDI's fault, really. She was only able to say what her sensors were telling her. Unlike a VI, she was able to make intuitive leaps regarding the conclusions she drew from that data, but Shepard was slowly learning that although EDI was highly intelligent, possessing a wealth of knowledge greater than any human could hope to accumulate in a single lifetime, her conclusions were occasionally simplistic, a mark of her inexperience. She had no doubt that, in time, EDI would eclipse them all, but for now, human instinct occasionally trumped EDI's understanding of a situation.

"Interference from the nearby Mutara nebula is obscuring accurate readings," EDI said, disapprovingly, as if Shepard had forgotten exactly why they'd picked this particular system for the rendezvous point. "I am detecting a large metallic object. I would speculate that it is a ship, but it is not broadcasting any transponder."

Jacob had left the armoury, and was standing at one of the stations ranged at the teardrop shaped console set around the galaxy map. He looked up as EDI spoke and frowned. "The freighter we were scheduled to rendezvous with?"

Shepard frowned at the map. "Joker, bring us around the planet and into visual range. Keep us stealthed. EDI, gather as much data as possible without being detected."

Jacob scowled at the holodisplay, absently stroking his chin. "What are you thinking?" he asked.

"If it's a ship, why aren't they broadcasting an identifier?" Shepard said, watching as the blue symbol representing the Normandy started to move.

"We're not," Jacob pointed out.

Shepard grinned at him, the expression a little wolfish and rendered eerie by the translucent hologram that hung between them. "We have something to hide. Question is, what are they hiding?"

She said nothing further, simply sipping silently at her coffee as the ship changed position, coming closer to the "anomaly" so that EDI could scan it more thoroughly. For a long pause, there was nothing but the hum of machinery and the gentle background murmur of crew conversation.

"According to my scans," EDI reported, eventually, "The object is in fact two ships, docked. Neither is ship is broadcasting an IFF signal, but from their silhouettes, one is an asari vessel, the other a freighter of indeterminate origin. I would assume it to be the freighter we were due to meet."

Jacob pulled a face. "I'm guessing the asari are pirates," he said, frowning at the console in front of him, "No IFF, no ident string. Lucked on the freighter, apparently alone, and thought they'd score some easy money."

Shepard leaned forward, staring at the hologram, mind going through possibilities. What might be possible? What might be probable? What outcomes could arise from each course of action? It only took a moment, then, her mind made up, she straightened and barked, "Action stations!"

EDI's voice rang out across all decks, accompanied by an alarm. "Action stations! Action stations! All hands report to action stations. Assume condition bravo. Action stations! Action stations!"

"Joker," Shepard said, knowing that her voice was being piped to the entire CIC from her position at the galaxy map, "Take us into weapons range."

"Aye-aye, Commander."

Personnel were running to their stations. The elevator opened to disgorge damage-control personnel and dock sentries, who moved forward armoured and armed, to guard the airlock. Miranda was right behind all of them, heels clicking loudly as she hurried onto the deck.

"What the hell is going on?" she demanded, staring around the deck in confusion.

"Someone's decided to help themselves to our cargo," Jacob said dryly, when Shepard didn't answer.

Miranda settled herself at the opposite station to Jacob, to Shepard's right. "Now that's just rude."

Shepard handed her coffee over to Yeoman Edwards, who hurried to get rid of it, and leaned forward, resting her hands on the railing separating her from the galaxy map.

"In weapon's range, Commander."

Shepard's mouth twisted slightly in amused contemplation of what the reaction of asari ship's crew might be. "Light us up, let them know we're here."

"Dropping stealth," EDI reported. "Weapons hot."

"A ship appearing out of nowhere, breathing down their neck," Miranda said, eyeing her console. "That'll give them a good scare."

"That's the idea," Shepard said, staring intently at the hologram, waiting for a reaction from the other ships.

"Not that we're in any condition for a fight," Miranda said, her fingers curling around the console's edge. Her words were tart. "We might give them a good laugh before they finish the job the Collectors started on our hull ruptures."

She was clearly irritated by Shepard's refusal to show any concern for the situation. Shepard gave her second in command a patient look. "If they were spoiling for a fight, they'd be on more populated trade routes."

"The asari ship has decoupled from the freighter." EDI manipulated the hologram, updating it to depict the new information.

"They've blown the airlock seal," Jacob reported, staring at his console. "The freighter's venting atmosphere."

"No kinetic barriers?" Shepard asked.

"The freighter has lost all power," Jacob said, shaking his head.

EDI said, "The asari ship is coming about. Its FTL drive output is increasing."

"They're going to run for it," Miranda said, and looked up at Shepard. "Do we follow them?"

Shepard thought about it for a moment, then shook her head. "No, there's no point. Besides, we need to see if anyone survived the attack on the freighter. Track their course as far as possible."

"Of course, they could be turning to attack," Jacob pointed out.

Shepard said nothing, only smiling faintly and folding her arms, her eyes fixed intently on the tactical hologram. Miranda grit her teeth, reminding herself that Shepard was a skilled commander and an experienced tactician, and that there was no reason to doubt her, but hadn't Shepard herself said that they needed to complete repairs before they got into a firefight-

The asari ship spun on its thrusters, changing course to a new vector. Then the blue dot vanished, leaving only a holographic line to show where it was heading. The asari ship had jumped to FTL.

Miranda let out a breath she didn't even realise she'd been holding.

Shepard just nodded, as if everything had proceeded exactly as foreseen. Miranda felt a miniscule amount of doubt; Shepard wouldn't have called for action stations if she'd been totally convinced that the asari ship would flee. The outcome was not, however, unappreciated.

"Stand down action stations," Shepard said, and, as EDI repeated the order via shipwide, "EDI, have Garrus, Grunt and Legion meet me at the forward airlock, geared up and ready."

"Aye, Commander."

~*~

Power had comprehensively failed throughout the freighter. If Shepard were to guess, she would have said that someone, probably the pirates when they boarded, had tripped the emergency drive shutdown. Most people didn't do that unless there was no other option; if you weren't within communications range of help when you hit the switch, you could be in trouble, as forcing a rapid shutdown could completely fry the engines and prevent them restarting.

Most of the main deck's air had vented when the pirates pulled away, but even without computer control to throw up kinetic barriers to keep the air in, the unpowered mechanical systems had reacted to the vacuum by dropping the pressure doors. It took a few judiciously placed portable barrier generators and Legion's skills to force the doors to open, letting them inside the ship properly. Grunt took the lead, shotgun cradled in his hands, just in case any of the pirates had been left behind. When they weren't ambushed after reaching the bridge, he seemed almost disappointed.

"Legion," Shepard said, "See if you can reconnect the ship's auxiliary batteries, get these consoles up and running. Grunt, Garrus, check out the rest of the ship. See if anything's out of the ordinary."

Garrus nodded, and Grunt made a sound of acknowledgement, the two of them making their way into the darkened corridors illuminated only by the light from Garrus' omnitool. By the time that Shepard turned around, Legion had already prised off a panel underneath the navigation console, and had folded himself into an improbably shape to access the hardware inside. Shepard looked around the bridge while he worked.

She would have expected a ship set upon by pirates to show signs of combat; pitting on walls where ricochet and missed rounds had hit, discarded heat sinks on the ground. She'd seen the aftermath of such attacks several times during her tenure in the Alliance.

That was something she was still getting used to, thinking of the Alliance, her only life since escaping Earth, as a time of her life that was over. Sometimes she tried not to think about it too hard.

There was a click, and dim emergency lighting came on, providing only just enough light to see by. Shepard's suit's VI was helpfully increasing the contrast projected onto her faceplate, letting her see better than she could have with the naked eye.

Legion had extracted itself and was working at the navigation console proper. "Power restored."

Shepard nodded, although Legion would neither notice nor care about the engines. "What hit the ship? I didn't see any hull-scoring on approach. Nothing that looked like there'd been an exchange of fire. Batarians wouldn't go quietly."

Legion said nothing, hands moving over the consoles. Finally, it turned its head towards her. "We have retrieved external hull visual data. A damage control assessment camera was pointing at the asari ship when the freighter was attacked."

"Show me."

It was a low resolution image. Hull cameras were only designed to give engineers inside the ships an idea of the sort of punishment their hulls might have taken after running into an asteroid or getting into a battle. They had a limited field of view, and their magnification was awful, but fortune had meant that this particular camera had a clear shot of the asari ship as it approached, running lights dark, and fired... something... at the freighter. Seconds later, the camera went dead.

"What was that?" Shepard asked. She'd never seen anything like it before. It had appeared as little more than an elongated white dart that had vanished out of shot quickly, moments before the footage ended.

"Unknown. Further analysis of visual data will be required."

"Shepard. We're at the cargo hold entryway, deck three. Looks like the pirates were trying to burn through when we interrupted them. We've detected a weak but active signal inside. Might want to get down here." Garrus' words were clipped, his voice brusque and business-like.

"On my way," Shepard said, into her suit's com. "You good here, Legion?"

"We will continue working on extracting recent log entries and sensor data, Shepard-Commander," Legion said, inclining its head slightly in acknowledgement.

Shepard followed data uploaded to her HUD by EDI: a map of the ship's decks and a line showing the shortest path to get to Garrus and Grunt's location. She saw no weapons fire scarring the walls at any point along the way. The asari had clearly managed to disable the crew, without a struggle.

Shepard didn't know of any weapon that could disable a ship and its crew in one hit. On the other hand, she'd been out of the loop for two years, and while she had been playing catch-up in her spare time, it was possible she might have missed technological developments in her reading.

Garrus and Grunt were waiting for her at the entrance to the cargo level. Or rather, Grunt was waiting, looking bored, flicking the safety on and off on his shotgun. Garrus was kneeling next to an open access panel, his omnitool lit.

"Well?" Shepard prompted.

"The cargo areas went into complete lockdown when the power died, some kind of emergency security mechanism, I'm guessing." Garrus' expression couldn't be seen behind his helmet, but Shepard could hear the scowling in his voice. "I'm trying to re-pressurise the bay and override the locks."

"I can get Legion down to help."

Garrus sniffed. "I can do it, Commander."

Shepard stifled a smile, even though it was as invisible as Garrus' frown. She had clearly insulted him a little. She was sure that he wouldn't hold it against her.

"We could just blow it up," Grunt said, impatiently.

"And risk damaging whatever was inside? The pirates certainly weren't keen to do so. They were the ones who pulled this panel off." Garrus tilted his head to indicate the bulkhead panel on the floor. Now Shepard looked closely, it had clearly been burned off the wall. There was a solid thunk as Garrus spoke that reverberated through the air. Shepard could feel the vibration through the deck under her feet.

The door unsealed, opening a few inches. The lockdown had clearly disabled the automatic doors, leaving an awful lot of mass between them and the cargo bay.

Grunt just nodded and holstered his shotgun, stepping forward and bracing himself to push. Shepard went forward as well, standing facing the krogan, fingers tightly wrapped around the edge of the door. Between Grunt's raw physical power, and her cybernetic augmentations, the door didn't stand a chance. With a squeal of metal-against-metal the door slid back, opening up into an unlit, dark space.

"I got the air back in here," Garrus said, "But the lighting's a no go."

"Figures," Shepard muttered, and flicked her omnitool open, setting it to provide illumination. Light flared out in front of her wherever she moved her arm.

The cargo hold was densely packed with crates and Shepard could at least take solace in the fact that all the cargo they'd bartered for was apparently present and still accounted for. It wasn't worth the freighter crew's lives though, and she swallowed anger down into the pit of her stomach. Pursuing pirates wasn't her job, and this was the Terminus Systems. Piracy was rampant, as was slave trading. No matter how much she might hate it, the freighter crew was either dead or being prepared for sale even as they investigated what had happened to them.

She wanted to follow them, though. Slavery wasn't right, and neither was attacking an unsuspecting ship on a trading run.

"At least we got what we paid for," Garrus said, unknowingly echoing her thoughts.

"We hadn't made payment yet," Shepard said, quietly.

Grunt snorted. "Free stuff. Nice."

Shepard shot him a dark look, but said nothing. Apparently krogan couldn't read human expressions that well, as he said nothing. "You said you detected a signal in here," she said to Garrus.

Garrus raised his omnitool, examining the readouts. "This way," he said, pointing across the cargo bay, in between the stacks of crates. "Looks like a hardsuit. Maybe a survivor?"

"Lead the way," Shepard said, holding up her omnitool to serve as a searchlight.

The cargo bay wasn't large, but as a result, the containers were fairly tightly packed, with just enough space for the average humanoid to walk between the stacks, which went most of the way to the ceiling. It was more awkward than anything for Garrus to lead the way, and Grunt was quite vocal about his dislike for the cramped conditions. More than once she heard the scrape of his armour against crate as he was forced to shoulder them out of the way where they were packed slightly too tightly. When Garrus stopped, she nearly tripped over him.

"Commander!" Garrus crouched down next to what Shepard realised was a slumped and suited body lying on the cargo hold floor. Shepard went down to one knee next to the body, examining it as carefully as she could in the low light.

"Is he dead?" asked Grunt, sounding only mildly curious.

The suit's helmet was all encompassing, hiding any hint of identity. All that Shepard could gather was that, presuming that whoever was inside conformed to the standard Humanoid model, the occupant was male. She raised her omnitool, hooking it up to the suit's VI. It was sluggish and unresponsive, but it reported a lifesign inside, weak but there. The air in the cargo bay was still thin, and Shepard didn't want to risk him by pulling off his helmet and suffocating him.

"Get him to Chakwas," she ordered, "We're not going to find out what happened here if he dies."

Grunt bobbed his head in acknowledgement, picking up the body and slinging it over his shoulder. Garrus looked at her, his suit lit eerily by her omnitool. "He's the only survivor," he said. "We didn't find any sign of anyone else."

Shepard nodded. "We'll get a crew over to remove the cargo." She sighed, looking around the room and shaking her head. "Damn. They shouldn't have gotten set on by pirates, not this far off the main trade routes."

"Space is unforgiving," Garrus pointed out. "We're just lucky it wasn't us."

~*~

Shepard was rather keen to learn the identity of their guest. After they returned to the ship, and most of the crew was dispatched to transfer cargo from the freighter to the Normandy, Shepard spent only a few minutes in her quarters before she returned to the crew level in her captain's uniform, her black and white tunic thrown over her arm as she smoothed out her undershirt. Garrus and Thane were in the mess hall when she arrived, both casting glances over towards the medical bay. The windows had been greyed out for privacy, offering no clues as to what lay inside.

"Damndest thing," Garrus was musing to Thane as she approached, "Not a single sign of a fight anywhere, apart from the fact that the ship was disabled and the pirates were trying to burn through sealed doors."

Thane considered that for a moment. "Gas, perhaps? It would have killed or disabled the crew."

"Fast enough that none of them could get to their emergency gear? And shutting down the ship would have shut down the life support, stopped the spread of gas."

Shepard came up to the pair of them, Garrus glanced at her as he spoke, including her in their discussion.

"If they took the crew instead of killing them, it points to slavers." Thane rolled his drink around in his mug. It was thick and slightly gelatinous, and smelled metallic and revolting. "Pirate activity is nothing new in this region. We were undoubtedly fortunate that they chose not to attack when we came across them."

"We were an unknown force running weapons hot that appeared on their scanners apparently out of nowhere. They weren't going to attack us." Shepard spoke with utter confidence as she shook out her tunic and pulled it on.

"Glad to know you were so assured of our success," Garrus said, dryly.

Shepard looked at him, closing one eye. "Better than just assured. I was right."

"Medical to Commander Shepard."

Shepard glanced to the side, a habit most people with implants managed to acquire. She was so used to the sound of voices coming from her right hand side that she tilted her head in that direction even when the voice came over the shipwide system. "Yes, Doctor?"

"Commander, you should probably come down here." Chakwas never sounded anything less than professional and unruffled, but the hesitation was still audible.

"Is our guest awake?" Shepard turned her head towards the medical bay, but the windows were still opaque. Chakwas probably didn't know she was directly outside.

"No..." This time Chakwas paused, as if she didn't know quite what to say. "I believe it best for you to come to medical as soon as possible."

Shepard frowned, but smoothed her fingers over the seals of her tunic, finishing making herself presentable. "On my way, Doctor."

She murmured a quick, "Excuse me," at the pair of them. Garrus watched her as she went, somewhat curious about what had so perturbed Chakwas.

Shepard froze on the threshold of the medical bay. From across the mess hall, Garrus could see her entire body stiffen. As he watched, her skin pigmentation changed, becoming a shade greyer. He was wondering what exactly that fascinating change signified when she spun on her heel and strode across the room to Crewman Venn, who was armed and wearing full armour, one of the two on deck who had guard duty that shift. They weren't officially 'guarding' anything, but Shepard had instituted guard shifts after one-too-many arguments between specialists that had run the risk of escalating.

"Sidearm!" Shepard snapped, standing in front of him and holding her hand out.

Crewman Venn blinked, nonplussed, but didn't hesitate to take the pistol from his waist and hand it over to his Commander. Shepard nodded sharply, spun on her heel, and strode in the direction of the infirmary.
"Should we follow her?" Garrus asked.

Thane watched her go, and shook his head. "I would not wish to stand between her and her destination."

"Right," Garrus drawled, "That would be bad."

~*~

Doctor Chakwas barely glanced at Shepard as the Commander, with a fierce expression on her face that might as well have been carved out of duratanium, strode into the medical bay, pistol in hand. She had realised that this was going to happen the moment she'd removed her patient's helmet. The Cerberus corpsman hadn't known the reason why Chakwas had hurriedly dismissed her, only confused as to her superior's sudden discomfort. It had taken several moments of going through the familiar motions of treatment for her to calm down enough that she knew her voice wouldn't give anything away when she called Shepard. By the time her superior arrived, she had even regained some of her humour.

"I suppose if you're going to shoot someone, this is as good a place as any to do it," she said, dryly.

Shepard didn't respond to the joke, but then Chakwas really hadn't expected her to.

"Have you pulled his amp?"

Chakwas looked down at the small dish in her hands, which she'd just been sealing shut as Shepard walked in. Inside was a thin piece of what looked like simple metal, to the naked eye. It was needle-thin, barely a millimetre in diameter, and an inch in length. Biotic amps were very unassuming to look at. They weren't easy to remove or insert, the device too fiddly, the port usually hidden under the hair at the base of the skull, and the risk of the amp not being correctly seated meant that it was left to medical professionals to fit. It wasn't difficult, by any means. It was a job any qualified nurse could do, but the need to maintain a sterile field prevented casual removal. As such, most biotics lived with amps permanently connected, their brains becoming accustomed to the heightened buzz provided by the amp.

Kaidan had once told Chakwas, during an amp upgrade, that the brief period where an amp was gone was like suddenly loosing functionality in all his senses at once. Everything felt duller, he'd told her, without colour or texture.

She wondered what it would feel like to him to have it gone now, combined with the after-effects of being electrocuted. He lay quiet and slightly ashen on the bed, ignorant of the words being exchanged over his head.
"Yes," she said, neutrally. "Would you like to know how he's doing otherwise?"

Shepard scowled, and looked like she was about to tell Chakwas not to bother, so the Doctor plunged ahead, not giving her commander a chance to speak.

"He was suffering from an extended period on low oxygen," she said, carefully setting the dish aside and folding her arms as she approached Shepard. "No permanent damage due to that. He was rendered unconscious, however, by what his suit recorded as a powerful electrical charge of unknown origin. I've passed the logs onto Legion and Tali to see what they can make of it."

Shepard frowned. "Electrical?"

"Some sort of highly energetic waveform," Chakwas amended. "Or at least, that's what Tali muttered as she wandered out of the door, nose buried in her omnitool. I'm afraid it's a little out of my area of expertise."

She looked at the pistol that Shepard was still holding tightly and frowned. "Commander, you're aware that I cannot allow any harm to come to a patient in my care."

Shepard's expression wasn't angry, or sad, or flinty. It was merely flat, and utterly blank. Chakwas reminded herself that she'd faced ground combat, treating men who screamed and were bleeding out under her hands even as their comrades fought on around them, and that this woman decades her junior had no business trying to intimidate her. She reminded herself of that several times.

"Going to try and stop me, Doctor?" Shepard finally said.

"You'd just shoot me, if you were serious." Doctor Chakwas unfolded her arms and tilted her head. "But I know you, I know him, and more importantly, I know what it means when two officers known for spending a lot of time together talking suddenly come to my door within twenty four hours of each other asking to have their contraceptive implants checked."

Shepard licked her lips briefly, and couldn't meet Chakwas' gaze for a moment. "That obvious, huh?"

"Not really," Chakwas said, "Unless you're the Chief Medical Officer."

Shepard looked at Kaidan Alenko, unconscious and silent on the bed. "Can you wake him?"

"Yes. Any time."

"Do it. Then take a walk."

Chakwas pursed her lips, taking the vial of mild stimulant she'd prepared the moment she'd realised what would inevitably happen and injecting it into Alenko's veins. "Call me if he appears to be in pain," she said, before setting the injector down and heading for the doorway.

She couldn't help herself, and glanced back towards the Commander and her former lover just before the door slid shut behind her. She caught a brief glimpse of Commander Shepard raising the pistol to point at Alenko's forehead, an expression of grim determination on her face, and sincerely hoped that she was right about Shepard not wanting to kill him.

~*~

Eight: Layers

~*~

Kaidan Alenko looked from the barrel of the pistol, to Commander Shepard's face, and back again. He tried to wet his lips, only to find that his mouth was utterly dry. It was an unpleasant sensation, like his tongue was made of sandpaper. So when he spoke, his voice was hoarse, cracking.

"I got your email," he said, because the other options for an opening statement that ran through his head ("hello to you too", "whatever it was, I didn't do it", "was it something I said?") all seemed glib and an invitation to getting shot.

For a moment, the pistol wavered, lowering a fraction. "I got yours too," she said, softly, before her resolve, and her aim, firmed. "Mind telling me exactly what you were doing sneaking onto the freighter we were meeting?"

"Suffocating, probably." He was no longer in his hardsuit. He'd tried to activate the small reserve supply of oxygen he'd brought with him before he'd lost consciousness. He had no way of knowing how long had passed since... whatever... had happened on the freighter, but the fact that he was still alive meant that he had probably been successful.

Shepard's mouth thinned. "I'm not in the mood for jokes," she warned.

"That's good, because I'm not up to making them." The world felt muted, like he was viewing it all from underwater. It took his sluggish brain a moment to recognise the sensation for what it was: the lack of a biotic amp. Its removal was standard procedure for any medical treatment, but, for a moment, it felt distinctly like Shepard simply didn't trust him.

"So let me ask you again," she said, "What the hell were you doing on that freighter?"

He lay there, for a moment, weighing what response he should give. He could think of several. "Looking for you," was what he finally, honestly, said.

The muscles around her eyes tightened, a flicker of anger passing across her face. "I didn't ask you to," she said.

"No, Anderson did."

She made a small, scoffing sound of disbelief. "The Council couldn't wash their hands of me fast enough. You're honestly telling me they sent you to keep an eye on me?"

"The Council," he said, slowly, still wary of the loaded gun which had its safety noticeably deactivated, "Didn't send me. Anderson did."

"To find out what, exactly?"

Kaidan reached up to wipe his lips. They felt encrusted, uncomfortable. "Whether or not you were still alive. Can I have a glass of water, please?"

Shepard frowned, and said, a little awkwardly, "Well, I am. Alive, that is."

"I'd noticed. You're far too beautiful to be a corpse."

As he expected, the left-field compliment seemed to disconcert her, as if she had a script in her head for how this conversation was supposed to go, and he was breaking it. He could see her drawing in her breath tightly, reinforcing her stern façade, and he couldn't help but wonder exactly what he'd done to piss her off, apart from being there.

And then, in a flash of insight, Kaidan realised exactly why she was so angry with him. She was Commander Shepard, big bad Spectre and saviour of the galaxy. She didn't fear anything, not geth, nor Reapers or tax collectors. She didn't get scared, she got mad. At some point along the way, she'd started to believe her own hype, so when confronted with him, half dead, in a ship that had been attacked, she'd gotten mad at him, at Anderson, at the pirates. But she wasn't angry, not really.

He wasn't sure whether to feel relieved that she did give a damn about what happened to him, or to feel sorry for her. What the hell had she been up to, these last two and a half years since she'd let the galaxy believe she was dead, to twist her about so badly?

Of course, actually calling her on her own behaviour would be suicidally insane. He pushed himself up on his elbows, forcing her to back off slightly to avoid pressing the gun into his face. "I'm not going anywhere," he told her, gently, "You can put the gun down."

Shepard hesitated a moment, then looked at the gun as if she wasn't sure why she was holding it, and lowered her arm. The pistol closed down to its inactive state, harmless. Kaidan felt the knot of tension leave his stomach. For a moment there, he really hadn't been sure whether or not she would have pulled the trigger.

Shepard set the pistol down on the edge of the bed, resting her hand on top of it. She stared down at it for a long moment. Kaidan didn't speak, letting her gather her thoughts. When she finally looked up, she was forcing a smile that didn't quite reach her eyes. "So," she said, with an artificial brightness, "How've things been?"

"Not nearly as exciting as they've been for you," he said, tilting his head. The position he was in was uncomfortable, but he didn't want to sit up while she was so close. She would back off, and he would have admitted, under duress, that it wasn't unpleasant to be so close to her. He could feel the warmth of her skin where her hand rested near his arm, could examine her features closely. He had realised on Horizon, with dismay, that his memories of her had started to fade. They didn't quite match up to the woman he saw in front of him.

When she gave him a quizzical look, he clarified: "The Omega 4 relay?"

"Ah yes," she said, "One of my finer moments, I think."

"It's the talk of the Citadel," he said, "On page twenty three of the gossip blogs listings."

Shepard actually chuckled, awkwardly though. "Nice to know my contribution to the continued existence of humanity is feted throughout the cosmos."

There was something she wasn't saying, and it wasn't the 'I can't talk about it, it's top secret' look he remembered from her Spectre days, when she'd come back from a meeting with the Council or the Ambassador and be unable to tell him what the topic of conversation had been. No, there was something she wasn't telling him, because she didn't like thinking about it.

It wasn't a look he'd seen often on her face. He'd witnessed it only once or twice, each time it had been related to her past. On Earth, on Akuze... when those subjects had come up, she just hadn't wanted to discuss it. He'd never pushed her for information, knowing their relationship was too new and fragile to survive him prying into her past. He had wondered at the time if he should be resentful at the fact that while he was so free with his history, she had said virtually nothing, but after she'd died... after he'd thought she'd died... he'd just regretted not knowing her better.

Maybe, he'd thought, she hadn't felt the same way about him as he had her. If he was honest, staring at her now, he was pretty sure that was the case. If Shepard had loved him, she wouldn't have hidden away for two years.

He reached out and touched her arm. The sleeve material was soft, rich-feeling, a fair cry from the standard issue military wear he remembered her in. "The Collectors?" he asked.

"Are no longer a threat," she said, firmly.

"I got that from your message," he said.

"I found out what they were doing, abducting colonists, destroying the old Normandy, what they've been up to all along." Shepard shook her head slowly. "I'm pretty sure if I told the Council they'd have me committed."

"So just tell me," he urged.

He watched her, closely, as she opened her mouth, a tense look on her face as she tried to think of what to say to him... then she shook her head decisively. "Not here," she said, "Later. In private."

At least she wasn't making noises about drop kicking him to the nearest planet with a breathable atmosphere. "Alright," he said, not willing to argue the point, "But just out of curiosity, how did you manage to strip out your email of all tracking information? I couldn't figure out where it had come from."

Shepard smiled, looking distinctly amused for the first time. "Thank EDI for that."

"Edie?" He echoed, and frowned in confusion, "Your... communications tech?"

"I am no simple technician." A female voice came over the communication system, sounding peeved.

Shepard smothered a laugh. "Kaidan, EDI. EDI, this is Commander Kaidan Alenko. Say hello."

A blue hologram sprung into life across the room. "Hello," the same female voice said.

"EDI is the ship." Shepard said by way of explanation.

"Edie?" he repeated.

"Ee-dee-eye," she said.

An artificial intelligence, then. "Huh," he said, "You've been up to a lot while you've been gone."

"You'd think," she said, and then moved, decisively, picking up the pistol and stepping away. "I'm sure the Doctor wants to take a look at you. I'll be back later, give you a tour of the place. You'll like it. Just like the old Normandy, only bigger."

"Can't wait," he said, dryly.

~*~

Shepard stepped out of the medical bay, to see Chakwas and Garrus lurking by the elevator in quiet conversation. They stopped and looked at her as the door closed behind her.

"We didn't hear gunfire," Garrus said, after a moment, "I take it that's a good sign?"

Shepard tossed the folded up pistol back to its original owner, who caught it one handed and attached it back to his side with a brief nod of acknowledgement.

Garrus took her silence for assent. "Good," he said, "I actually liked Kaidan. I'd hate to see his brain smeared over the deck."

Shepard ignored him and turned to Chakwas. "I think you should get back to your patient, Doctor. You can give him his amp back when he's ready."

Chakwas had worked with the military long enough to know when she was supposed to take a hint. "Of course, Commander," she said smoothly, stepping past her CO to return to the medical bay. There was a startled, "Doctor Chakwas?!" from inside just before the door slid shut behind her.

"Any word on the sensor data?" Shepard asked. She started to walk towards the kitchen station, where Gardner had left out tea, coffee and assorted snacks. Between meals, anyone in the crew could walk up and pick up something to eat or drink, and for the biotics in the crew, those bonus calories were nigh-essential.

"Tali and Legion are still working on it. It's so fascinating that she wasn't even bothering to glare at Legion."

Shepard tilted her head. "How can you tell?"

"You just know," Garrus said. If turians used winking as an expression, she was sure he would be doing so at that moment. "Jacob asked me to let you know that he's supervising the loading of the cargo from the freighter."

"Not Miranda?"

"She's in the CIC, obsessing over the tactical data from our brush with the pirates."

Garrus opened a cupboard, one labelled with the universal symbol for dextro-protein based life. Underneath, Gardner had stuck a label reading: GARRUS/TALI ONLY, EAT AT YOUR OWN RISK, IDIOTS. Inside were packets of mostly turian foodstuffs, and drinks containers. Some of them were sealed in sterile packets for Tali to insert into her envirosuit. Shepard had witnessed the scene when Gardner had shown Tali the food, and the variety he was making sure to keep in stock, she'd uttered a happy squeak and thanked him so effusively that Gardner had actually blushed a bit.

Shepard just poured herself some coffee and sighed, shaking her head. "I expect to see her studying every known treatise on ship-to-ship combat next. Miranda's determined to be an expert at everything."

"Oh, I don't think you've got to worry about coming after your job yet," Garrus said, then affected thoughtfulness, "Although, if you die we do all get a promotion."

"If I die, I'm going to come back again and kick all of your asses."

"Duly noted," Garrus said, taking a small sealed snack from the cupboard. He glanced at the large window separating the medical bay from the main eating area - currently greyed out for privacy - and nudged Shepard's elbow slightly as he moved towards the gunnery station, walking her in that direction. "So are you going to tell me what happened in there, or am I just going to have to guess?"

Shepard stiffened, tightening her grip on her mug and trying to affect nonchalance. "What do you mean?"

They were far enough away from the few crew members who were lurking in the mess area not to be overheard, but Garrus leaned towards her and dropped his voice anyway. "I mean you. And Kaidan. In the medical bay."

"He said that Anderson sent him to find out what I was up to." Shepard rolled her eyes expressively. "I'd say that man was worse than my father if I'd had one."

They'd entered the weapons area, and as the door slid shut behind them, Garrus just looked at her and said, "And that's all?"

Shepard sat down on the storage crates. "What do you mean?"

Garrus had torn open his snack. Shepard could have defined what it smelled like, only that it was unappealing. But, she supposed, she was biologically opposed to the food he was eating, so it would make sense that it didn't smell like apples and roses. She wrinkled her nose and pretended not to have noticed.

"Come on, Shepard, I'm not an idiot. I saw Kaidan after... well... after you died." Garrus shook his head, breaking off a piece of the pinkish foodstuff with his fingers. "A man doesn't get that torn up about his commanding officer, or his friend. What he said on Horizon was just a confirmation." He chewed thoughtfully for a moment and added, "And considering you spent four solid hours on target practice after we got back from that mission, I'm sure you felt the same."

Shepard clutched at her mug, willing herself to take a sip, but found that she instead just started at the surface, watching the ripples. "You're the best friend I have on this ship, Garrus, so answer me honestly. Am I an idiot for holding onto something that probably ended years ago, when he got over me?"

"How long ago was it for you?"

"Weeks." Her throat seemed tight; she coughed. "Only a few weeks."

"Then yes, you are a hopelessly romantic idiot and should immediately take to wandering the ship sobbing to yourself and reading elcor erotic poetry for comfort."

Shepard grinned in spite of herself. "Elcor eroticism? What's that like?"

"Drawn out," Garrus said, with a glint in his eye.

Shepard giggled, just a little. "You're useless, Garrus," she told him, not meaning a word of it.

Garrus finished off his snack, folding the wrapper neatly. "That's alright," he said, "I still like you anyway."

"Garrus! Is Shepard-! Oh!"

Tali burst through the doors, babbling as she moved, and almost tripped herself up when she came to an abrupt halt. Garrus, as used to Tali's occasionally moments of geekish exuberance as Shepard was, looking only fondly amused as Tali continued speaking a mile a minute, waving a datapad for emphasis. Shepard wondered when she'd gotten so good at reading turian expressions.

"The analysis the weapon which attacked the freighter," she said, "It's fascinating, combined with the data from Lieutenant Alenko's suit, which provided a wealth of information. It's not a new weapon, not by any means, in fact, it seems to have been derived from certain geth technology, at least according to Legion, who was surprisingly forthcoming with information-"

"You know, he's Commander Alenko now," Shepard said, mildly.

Tali hesitated. "I... I didn't mean... that is..." She cleared her throat nervously. "You've seen him then?"

Shepard decided to take pity on the poor girl. "What were you saying about the pirate weapon?"

"They weren't pirates," Tali said.

Garrus's mandibles flared slightly. "You sure about that?"

"Positive. No pirate would have the technology needed to create this sort of technology." Tali handed her the datapad, which was covered with graphs, spectral trace lines and an awful lot of technical language that was far past anything Shepard understood. There were even a few words in the original quarian that Shepard could guess were concepts that didn't translate into English.

She was saved from the necessity to ask what it all meant when Tali kept on talking, explaining.

"The weapon delivered a powerful charge, one that was designed to penetrate a ship's hull. A missile, containing some sort of capacitor was fired at a low speed from the attacking ship. Because of that low speed, it did not trigger the freighter's kinetic barriers. It impacted on the freighter's hull and delivered a charge. Most of that was absorbed by the hull, and what was left was sufficient to disrupt ship's systems. From the data from Lieu- Commander Alenko's hardsuit, it would have been sufficient to disrupt the motor nerves in most species, within a certain margin of error. It probably wouldn't be as effective against elcor, and might be lethal to hanar, but batarians and humans it would certain render insensate."

Shepard frowned, rubbing her finger along the edge of the datapad.

"A new sort of slaver weapon?" Garrus wondered.

"I doubt it," Tali said, folding her arms.

"Why don't you think that this could be pirates?" Shepard asked.

"Because the technology to deliver this sort of charge without killing everyone on board hasn't been developed yet. Not officially, anyway." Tali pointed to the datapad. "Legion says that the geth had intercepted some communications over secure networks indicating that research was underway. About two years ago, however, a lot of the scientists involved in the research stopped publishing. I've been conducting searches, and haven't been able to find any trace of them in public record."

"Perhaps they have been continuing that research in private?" Garrus sounded thoughtful.

"These were Citadel scientists," Tali said, "With a long history of working for official organisations, researching and developing technologies for Council species under contract from their governments. Hardly freelance weaponeers. Scientists like these don't stop publishing, unless there's a damned good reason."

"Like security," Shepard mused.

"So what," Garrus said, looking sceptical, "The Council is running pirate raids in the Terminus systems?"

"It'd be as good as declaring war," Shepard said, shaking her head, "They wouldn't dare, on the off-chance it'd be traced back to them."

"Maybe the scientists involved were kidnapped? Or their research stolen somehow?" Tali fingered the edge of her hood thoughtfully.

"Maybe," Shepard echoed, "And maybe there's someone on board who can give us the answer."

~*~

Nine: Enquiring Minds Want To Know

~*~

A smiling young redhead who said her name was 'call me Kelly' came by the infirmary while Kaidan was still sorting up from down and reeling from the knowledge that Doctor Chakwas had handed in her notice to the Alliance and had gone to work for Cerberus. It did nothing to detract from the strange sense of déjà vu he felt looking through the windows from the infirmary and seeing a crew area that looked a hell of a lot like the old Normandy's mess. The yeoman had set a pile of folded clothing down, and apologised for not having any civilian clothing, and that she hoped "this" was acceptable.

It turned out to be a pair of black trousers, a black t-shirt, and a black and white tunic with what he had come to recognise as the Cerberus insignia on the breast. It was the same uniform that Shepard had been wearing, some sort of officer-level dress for Cerberus members, as if a uniform gave it the slightest shred of legitimacy.

He balled up the tunic and threw it in the corner for Chakwas to find later. The t-shirt and trousers were relatively inoffensive, and he reluctantly donned them; since they'd taken his armour off him when they'd brought him aboard, it was that or walk around in the thin, backless medical gown that he'd woken up in.

He had been left alone to dress, and he wondered if that meant he was free to wander about the ship. The medical bay's door wasn't sealed; it slid open at his approach readily enough. Standing just outside, her hands folded in front of her and a slightly tight smile on her face was call-me-Kelly, and though she wasn't armed, she was clearly there to provide some form of escort. The armed guard that was loitering in the mess area glanced at Kaidan as he left the Infirmary, but out of nothing more than apparent curiosity, which was either meant that Shepard trusted him to a degree, or she didn't think he was a threat. He liked to think that she knew him well enough to know the latter simply wasn't true.

"You served with Commander Shepard aboard the old Normandy, didn't you?" Kelly asked, as she led him towards the elevator.

"Yes," he answered, fairly convinced that she already knew the answer to that question.

"I gather that you and she had a close working relationship," Kelly spoke with studious disinterest as she tapped the elevator controls.

"Ah... yes." He was half tempted to simply say 'Yes, we were lovers. Why do you ask?' just to see what her response would be. But she had that slightly-too-smooth approach to the question that would probably mean it wouldn't faze her at all, and only lead to more questions he didn't feel like answering.

So he avoided the whole issue.

"You must have missed her while she was gone these past years."

He ignored her. He had no obligation to answer the questions of a Cerberus terrorist who felt that working for Shepard gave her some sort of credibility. After a long moment of silence, Kelly got the message and stopped staring at him. She only spoke when the doors slid open again to say, "This way, Commander."

When he stepped out of the door, he nearly came to a complete halt and stared about him in shock. It was like taking a step back into the past, to a part of his life that he'd taken great pains to tuck away in the back of his mind and try to forget about. He imagined he could have blinked and seen Pressley standing over his station, grousing with Adams over some minor slight. Then he took a second look, and realised that it was all subtly wrong.

He didn't stop. His step barely faltered, and if Kelly noticed his brief hesitation, she gave no sign as she led him aft of the command deck, through a door labelled 'Armoury', behind which was an array of small arms that any Alliance military officer worth his salt would rightly drool over. Kaidan slowed slightly to get a closer look at one or two of them. One seemed to be a Collector weapon, similar to those taken off a few of the corpses that Shepard had left behind on Horizon, another was a geth rifle. Some others were clearly illegal, and there were those that Kaidan simply didn't recognise, and was aware that he saw no manufacturer's logo on the side.

Kelly led him through to another corridor, and stopped outside a set of double doors. "They're waiting for you inside, Commander." She was clearly not coming inside with him.

Inside was a conference room, if the fact that Shepard had assembled several of her crew around a table was any indication as to its purpose. Shepard herself was standing at the head of the table, her arms folded and a firmly neutral expression on her face. With her were two Humans both dressed in figure hugging jumpsuits decorated with the same angular logo as everything else on the ship, and-

"Lieutenant Alenko!"

Kaidan was nearly knocked off his feet as a tall, lithe female threw her arms around his shoulders, nearly knocking him over in the process. "Hi, Tali," he said, slightly breathlessly.

Her moment of exuberance over, Tali drew back. "It's so good to see you again," she said, sounding sincerely happy. "It's been too long, and I never thanked you properly for your gift-"

Shepard cleared her throat pointedly before Kaidan could make any attempt at keeping her quiet on that particular subject. He wasn't sure why he didn't want to bring up the subject of what he'd done with Shepard's bequeathed wealth, but it really didn't seem like a good time to do so. Tali made an embarrassed noise and glanced back to Shepard as if just remembering she was there.

"Oh," she said, "Sorry." She glanced at Kaidan, made an apologetic hand gesture, and moved back a couple of paces.

"Commander Alenko," Shepard said, stressing his title for what was presumably Tali's benefit, "I was hoping that you would be able to shed some light on the attack on the cargo freighter you were found on."

"I was rather hoping he'd tell us why exactly an Alliance soldier was hiding in the cargo hold of a freighter we'd hired." The dark-haired woman he recognised from Omega as Miranda, but the man was unfamiliar to him, and it was disconcerting to have a stranger scowling at him with such distrust. Kaidan liked to think that he was familiar with most people who didn't like him.

Shepard chose to enlighten him. "My second in command, Miranda Lawson, my security chief Jacob Taylor, and, of course, you already know my chief engineer, Tali'Zorah vas Normandy."

"Vas Normandy, huh?" Kaidan said, glancing at Tali.

Tali seemed to stand straighter. "I'm proud to call this ship my home," she said. The way she said it made Kaidan think there was a story there.

"I was on that freighter," he said, carefully, aware that the only thing that was keeping him safe from the tender mercies of Cerberus was probably Shepard's past relationship with him, "Because I was assigned to find out what had happened to cause the Omega 4 relay to open, and because we had reason to believe that this ship was involved it was a logical course of action to track it down."

"So you were spying on us," Jacob said, and scoffed, "I say we toss him out of the airlock."

"There's been enough of that for one week," Shepard said. She reached up to pinch the bridge of her nose. "As long as we get the ship up and running again, it doesn't matter if the Alliance knows where we are now."

"On the run now?" Kaidan asked, glowering at Shepard.

"Just from the elements within the Alliance who'd pass on our location to Cerberus," Miranda said, a smile tugging at her lips.

"About that," Tali said, "With the new materials we should be back at reasonable operating capacity within forty eight hours."

"Good," Shepard said, "Now about the attack on the freighter-"

"Until I woke up in your medical bay," Kaidan cut in, "I didn't even know the freighter had been attacked. All I remember is a lot of pain and then losing consciousness."

"That makes it a lot harder for you to provide useful information," Miranda said. She tilted her head at him. Possibly she was considering how feasible Jacob's suggestion of tossing him out of the airlock would be.

"EDI?" Shepard spoke up, "Display tactical scans of our encounter with the asari cruiser."

"Yes, Shepard." There was hardly a pause between the reply and a hologram springing into life in the middle of the room.

"What we've been able to determine so far is that the asari cruiser was using some sort of experimental weaponry." Shepard unfolded her arms to lean on the edge of the table. She stared at him through the thin screen of holographic planets. "Experimental weapons designed by Citadel scientists."

Kaidan frowned, looking at the hologram. It didn't provide him with much information, just the relative positions of the asari cruiser, the freighter, and the nearby planets, but it was better than meeting Shepard's gaze. "Stolen?" he asked.

"You tell us." He didn't have to see her face to hear the way her mouth twisted into a wry smile. "You're the Citadel agent."

"I work for the Alliance," he snapped. "C-Sec doesn't routinely share classified information with me."

Miranda folded her arms and fixed him with a look of arch-scepticism.

Kaidan stifled the urge to sigh and reminded himself that he was supposed to be gathering information on Shepard's operation, and that would be hard if he was at odds with her crew. Besides, there was something that he remembered hearing... back on Omega...

"There was something," he said, slowly, rubbing his chin absently as he cast his mind back to the overheard conversations on the station. "I overheard a few conversations about missing colony ships not too far from the Traverse. There's a certain failure percentage with non-Alliance colonies that goes unreported in the media. Pirates, accidents and the like."

"Like you say," Tali said, though she didn't sound disbelieving, only thoughtful, "There is always a certain percentage of loss."

Kaidan debated for a moment, then made a decision he hoped Anderson would back him on. Of course, it wasn't like Kaidan was planning to give him much in the way of choice. "If I can contact the Alliance I might be able to get them to forward some statistics about missing ships in the Terminus systems. Maybe a pattern will emerge."

"I thought the Alliance didn't keep track of colonists who decide to set up shop in Terminus," Jacob said, glowering faintly at Kaidan.

Kaidan just shrugged. He wasn't going to insult the man's intelligence by denying that the Alliance kept tabs on any humans attempting to leave their jurisdiction. Shepard's mouth quirked, a smile only half stifled, and he knew she was thinking the same thing.

"We're off the FTL comms grid at the moment," Shepard said, "But once Tali's finished repairs, we'll move back in range and you can make contact with whoever you need to in order to get that information." She looked at the hologram, and rubbed her fingertips together in an apparently absent-minded motion. "Something is going on here. Tali? Would you care to explain your research into the cruiser's weapons?"

Tali bobbed her head and quickly outlined her conclusions regarding the creators of the weapon that had targeted the freighter. It wasn't much more than Shepard had already said, but it at least let Kaidan see how they'd come to the conclusion that the weaponry could have been stolen from the Citadel authorities. As she spoke, Jacob's scowl depended, and Miranda looked more thoughtful.

"Weapons research of that level," Kaidan said, "Doesn't just go missing and wind up in the hands of pirates."

"Right," Shepard said, "Which leaves only two options."

"Either it's loss has been extremely well hidden," Miranda said, "Or it didn't go missing at all."

"The Citadel conducting slaver raids in the Terminus systems? Kidnapping freighter crews?" Kaidan shook his head sharply. "I don't believe it."

"You wouldn't," Miranda said, and sniffed pointedly.

Shepard held up a hand, forestalling any argument. "Any speculation is academic at this point. I'm satisfied that Commander Alenko knows nothing right now. Hopefully we'll be in a better position to learn more in a day or so."

"And you're just going to drop your mission to chase up leads on a mystery that might come to nothing but piracy?" Kaidan looked at her, scrutinising Shepard's expression, looking for some hint to her thoughts. There had been a time when he'd spent hours watching her out of the corner of his eye, learning to read her moods, her thoughts, but that had been years ago now.

Shepard gave him a grin that showed more teeth than amusement. "What mission? Besides. My ship, my rules. Being outside the chain of command has perks, which I'm guessing you've figured out by now."

Jacob glanced at her sharply, but she was just smiling placidly at Kaidan.

Kaidan had no intention of airing his current occupation in public, so just inclined his head in acknowledgement of the point.

"If there's nothing else?" Shepard glanced about the room. "Very well, you're all dismissed. I believe I promise Commander Alenko the tour."

~*~

There were enough similarities, Kaidan learned, between the original and new Normandy to make treading the deckplates a decidedly eerie experience. It was like walking through some twisted hall of mirrors, a dream-distorted variation on a cherished memory. Everything was a little off, proportionally, or there were doors where he didn't expect to find them.

The people were different too, all of them wearing the same Cerberus logo that Kaidan had come to despise, as if by giving themselves a uniform and a symbol, Cerberus granted themselves some sort of legitimacy. Most of the crew were ex-Alliance, who looked at him with a combination of scorn and nerves, as if he were about to arrest them. Then they would glance at Shepard, and subtly straighten. Kaidan knew the look. It was the one that said 'I'm on Shepard's crew, so screw the rest of the galaxy'. He'd worn it himself at one point. They all had, back then.

Shepard had also introduced him to a few of the specialists she had recruited. Some, she told him, had already left the ship, but others had made no mention of their plans, or weren't in a position to leave. Tali, he knew, had chosen Normandy for her ship name and wasn't leaving, and there was a krogan that Shepard had briefly introduced him to who had just looked him up and down and wondered out loud if Kaidan were truly as soft and squishy as he looked and who had pointedly referred to Shepard as his 'battlemaster', as if trying to impress on Kaidan exactly the sort of woman she was. It was almost touching.

Kasumi Goto was warm and friendly, and had been lounging in her observation room quarters, reading a book, when Shepard had shown him in. She had offered him a drink which he'd politely declined, and Shepard had taken him out, showing him engineering and then hesitating at the top of a set of stairs.

"Hmm, probably not a good idea for you to meet Jack just yet," she said, without explaining herself, and hurried him on. She ended the tour back where they'd started, on the CIC deck, walking him forward. It had been such a familiar path to tread that he'd half-expected to find Joker sitting in the cockpit, instead of the dark-haired woman in a Cerberus crew uniform that was there.

Shepard paused there, and frowned. "EDI, where's-"

"The main shift pilot is currently off-duty, Shepard." The AI spoke before Shepard could finish her sentence.

Shepard stared at the holographic ball that was the AI's avatar and narrowed her eyes slightly. "I see," she said, "Please remind 'the main shift pilot' that I'm very familiar with the roster and he's kidding no one, so man up and get back to his station."

"I will do so." If he hadn't known better, Kaidan would have said the machine sounded embarrassed.

Throughout the tour, Shepard was polite, professional, and didn't say a word to him that she wouldn't have offered to a total stranger. Kaidan had tried, and failed, to come up with the perfect opening line for a conversation that could somehow start to broach the subject of two years absence. Eventually he'd just followed her around, nodding politely and playing role of the mute guest.

They walked back through the CIC, and it looked for a moment, just a moment, like she might say something, but her expression abruptly shuttered tightly when the same redheaded woman that had first escorted Kaidan from the medical bay stepped up to them.

"Hadley's psych eval," she said, succinctly.

Shepard sighed, almost imperceptibly, and took the datapad off the crewman and rubbed the back of her neck. "I should-" she waved it vaguely in the air. Kaidan had no idea who Hadley was, but he could guess that it was a sore subject for her. "Kelly, could you show Commander Alenko where he can bunk?"

Kelly bobbed her head and smiled brightly. "I took the liberty of having starboard obs repurposed, now Samara has vacated," she said.

"That's fine," Shepard said, and offered Kaidan a small shrug. "We're not big on passenger space here."

"Whatever you have is fine." And if it was a private room, all to the better. Kaidan would be able to learn much more if he wasn't being observed all the time.

"This way please, Commander." Kelly stepped back and gestured for him to precede her to the elevator.

Shepard had already turned away, focusing her attention on the datapad in her hands.

Kaidan went the way indicated, and when the doors opened, he started to step sideways to allow the crew already in the elevator to disembark onto the CIC deck, but came to an abrupt halt when he realised the crewman who was staring at him with a look that was best described as a combination of guilt and chagrin.

"You've got to be kidding me," Kaidan said, loudly, as he stared at the man who, until a few moments ago, he'd been sure was piloting civilian freighters halfway across the galaxy.

"Uh, hey Alenko," Joker said. He rubbed his hands together nervously. "Long time no see."

"Oh, of course!" Kelly said. "You two know each other from the old Normandy, don't you?"

Kaidan decided that Anderson was giving him a payrise. There was no way he was getting paid enough to deal with this sort of shit.

~*~

Ten: Progression

~*~

"Those records are classified, Commander, as you aware."

Kaidan shifted on the spot. "I'm aware of that, Councilman."

The communications setup on the Normandy was pretty impressive. This sort of full-room holography was generally reserved for major corporations, who liked to be able to show off exactly how much bandwidth they could afford to waste, and how much money they could spend on outfitting whole rooms with projectors. Even the Council stuck to the single-user projection plates. Kaidan could look around and see a fairly decent simulation of Anderson's office, and the man himself pacing back and forth before the communications units.

He could also see Shepard, leaning against the wall, outside of the pickup range. Anderson couldn't see her, and she couldn't see him, but she could hear everything that either party was saying. She hadn't asked if she could observe, simply walking in with him after informing him that they were in range of a buoy, and taking up her position against the bulkhead.

It was the first time he'd seen her for the better part of the last two days. She'd been engrossed in dealing with the matter of the repairs, he was told, when he found someone to ask. It was for the best, perhaps. It let Kaidan concentrate on matters in his quarters, allowing him to distract himself from the encounter with Joker that could only be labelled 'frigid' in hindsight.

It could have gone worse. He could have punched the son of a bitch like he'd been so desperately tempted to.

"I don't suppose you're going to tell me why you need said records?"

Kaidan pointedly didn't glance at Shepard as he spoke. "I'm afraid I can't, sir. It is, however, directly relevant to my mission."

His mission to find Shepard, that was. Kaidan was sure that the significance of the phrase had not been lost upon his superior. Anderson would know two things now: that Shepard was indeed alive, and that Kaidan was with her. It was a simple codephrase, the word 'relevant' being assigned the meaning of 'successful mission', the caveat being that since he was speaking in code that there were additional issues to deal with.

Kaidan felt no need to try and convey them to Anderson. He knew the man trusted him to get the job done, as he'd once trusted Shepard.

"I see," Anderson said after a long, significant pause. "Then I will get those records forwarded to you immediately, Commander."

"Thank you, sir. The receiver address is on a subcarrier."

"Keep up the good work, Commander." Another code phrase. Report back soon.

"As always, sir."

The hologram faded from existence, the room's main lighting coming back up to full, and Kaidan turned to see Shepard looking at him with an odd expression he couldn't interpret.

"What grade?" she said, abruptly.

"Excuse me?" He pretended not to understand, but could take a pretty good guess at what she was talking about.

"What. Grade."

Kaidan decided not to push her patience. "Three," he said, putting his hands behind his back in an at-ease stance. "Though supposedly I get the fourth grade assessment in the next two months."

"Four's easy," Shepard said, and ran a hand through her hair. "N5's really where it starts to become a bitch."

"I'll keep that in mind."

"Was it because of me?" Shepard looked like she hadn't been planning on speaking, if her sudden embarrassment was any indication. "Did you... because of me?"

Kaidan opened and closed his mouth for a moment, trying to decide whether to lie to her or not. Eventually, he opted for the truth. What harm was there in being honest in this one small thing, after all? "Yes," he said, bluntly, "But that only got me into the programme. One of my trainers threatened to cut my balls off if I was only going to stay in there to live up to some ideal memory of an old CO. At that point I figured pretty quickly that I was really there for myself."

Shepard didn't seem to know quite how to respond to that, just thinned her lips and made a noise of acknowledgement.

"How'd you guess?"

Shepard shrugged slightly. "Not everyone gets classified records sent to them so easily."

He was frankly surprised she hadn't learnt of his status already, given the rumours Kaidan had heard about Cerberus's high level contacts within the Alliance itself. "I'm sure Anderson would have offered if you'd asked nicely," he told her.

Shepard laughed. "That's sweet. A lie, but sweet nevertheless. N-rating, secret missions for Anderson; anyone would think you were itching for Spectre candidacy."

Kaidan shrugged slightly, rolling his shoulders under the plain black shirt. He still refused to wear the overtunic he had been provided, but the shirt wasn't intended to be worn on its own. It was a little too cool on board to be wearing the thinner material. "I don't think I'm a likely choice. Anderson's last protégé supposedly went crazy, talking about ancient alien invaders before getting herself killed and her ship destroyed." He pointedly looked away from her, turning to step away from the holographic plate. The table rose back into position as he moved aside. "And then she resurfaces after two years, working for terrorists."

"If you think I was working with Cerberus through choice-" Shepard checked herself mid-sentence, biting off the words. He turned back in time to see her visibly clamping down on her emotions, her face returning to the cool professional mask that he didn't remember seeing on her quite so often back in the old days.

"Oh?" He tilted his head. "Care to explain it to me?"

Shepard stared at him for a long moment, hesitantly opened her mouth, perhaps to answer, to explain-

"We have received the forwarded intelligence reports from Councilman Anderson." EDI's voice ran out loudly. Clearly the AI either didn't notice or didn't care that she was interrupting an important conversation. Kaidan could have cursed.

"Thank you, EDI," Shepard said. "Please ask Jacob, Garrus and Miranda to report to communications at once."

"Yes, Shepard."

Kaidan wanted to shout, to stomp forward and shake her shoulders and demand answers from her. "You told me we'd talk," he reminded her, tightly, trying to clamp down on his own emotions the way she was. He was sure he wasn't succeeding as well. "I'm going to hold you to that."

Shepard, just for an instant, looked uncertain, but before the exchange could progress further, the door slid open to allow Jacob Taylor entrance.

"Where's the fire?" he asked, with plain amusement.

Shepard smirked and leaned forward, calling up the files, browsing through the headers and instructing EDI to provide them with a holographic representation of this particular arm of the galaxy. By the time Miranda Lawson and Garrus arrived, Shepard had her omnitool open, and a determined expression on her face.

"We're going to go through these records," she told them all, including Kaidan in her statement by the way she looked him in the eye while she spoke, "And we're going to find some sort of pattern, some sort of hint to explain why a heavily armed asari cruiser is going around stealing crews. If you had any lunch plans, I suggest you cancel them."

~*~

There were no chairs in the Normandy's communications room. Clearly it had never been intended for lengthy conferences. Shepard was used to staying on her feet for long periods thanks to years of military service, but that didn't mean she enjoyed it. The cybernetic implants that riddled her body made it simultaneously easier and harder to deal with; they increased her endurance, her raw physical strength, meaning that she didn't actively tire easily, but they also meant her mass had increased fairly substantially, and there was more of her to keep upright.

There might have been a psychological element to her weariness as well, but Shepard had no intention of confronting that until she was found passed out on the deck and had to be hauled into Doctor Chakwas. And since she had no intention of allowing that to happen, she had no reason to be concerned.

The others looked similarly tired. Even Miranda looked wilted, and periodically massaged her temple, no doubt feeling the effects of a lingering headache. Shepard would have preferred if Miranda were resting, but her second in command's genetics had given her an excellent brain that made her an asset in any sort of strategic or tactical assessment.

A picture was starting to emerge from the raw data, and it was an unpleasant one.

"So, we can definitely pin the start of the attacks to within the last year," Jacob said as he leant heavily on the table, squinting at the neon lines of the hologram. "Several dozen attacks, all apparently random at a first glance, easily dismissed as pirate activity."

"But with a heavy weighting towards hitting colony transports. Large numbers of people, with no corresponding increase at the same time of slaves on the market." Garrus had pulled some of his old files from Omega, which included details of slave trafficking that he'd been careful to keep an eye on. "No particular targeting of species. If you'd asked me a month ago, I would have said it was a prime candidate for the Collector's being responsible."

"Except we know they were only interested in humans," Miranda said.

Shepard rotated her shoulder absently, trying to loosen the muscle before it started aching. She saw Kaidan frowning slightly as Miranda spoke. She had instructed EDI to give him records of their assault on the Collector base, but she had no idea if he had availed himself of them. She did know that he'd spent the last two days in his makeshift quarters attempting to hack into EDI's databanks. The AI had been quite irritated by the attempts, but Shepard had just told her to keep quiet about it. She was curious to see what Kaidan was going after.

She had been equally curious to know what his reaction was to seeing Joker again, but after the two had run into each other at the elevator, Kaidan had simply said nothing and, as far as Shepard knew, hadn't tried to talk to his former comrade. Shepard had even broached the subject with Joker himself, only to be snippily shot down.

"No offence, Commander," he'd said, not looking up at her, instead tapping out do-nothing commands on his console, "But since we're not in the military anymore, I don't have to answer questions I don't want to."

EDI's avatar had pulsed once, but the AI had stayed silent. Shepard knew when to take a hint, and hadn't pushed the topic. Whatever had happened between them had no doubt caused some deep rift between the former friends, and she suspicions that it was over her death. She wondered if it had been the reason why Joker had quit the Alliance to join Cerberus.

Shepard could understand Joker's reluctance to talk, especially about Kaidan. She would have been lying if she said she hadn't been avoiding him. She had been hiding in her quarters, doing little more than going through damage reports and grabbing the few hours sleep she needed to keep going when the need became overwhelming. She'd turned the photo of Kaidan she kept in her quarters face down, feeling like he was looking out at her and making her feel guilty for not going down two levels and having a grown up conversation with him.

Commander Shepard, big bad Spectre, afraid of a frank discussion with a former lover. Her enemies would wet themselves laughing.

"All the attacks were within this region," she said, pointing out a roughly ovoid shape EDI had drawn on the map. "So why? What's there?"

"According to the records, nothing," Miranda said. She had her own omnitool open and was paging through datafiles with sharp stabs of her fingers. "Nothing much in the way of resources that anyone would stake a claim to. No habitable worlds."

"But there is a mass relay," Kaidan pointed out. His arms were folded and his body language spoke to his reluctance to work with Cerberus. But for whatever reason, he hadn't argued with Shepard's edict that he participate. "Any probe data?"

Miranda shook her head, scowling. "According to this, no one's ever sent a probe through that relay."

"That's nonsense," Garrus said, sharply. "Someone must have, or else how would it be known to be an uninhabitable region of space?"

"Someone's tampered with the records," Jacob said, voicing the conclusion that Shepard had already reached.

"How very suspicious," Miranda's voice was dry as she flicked her omnitool closed.

"We're going. Unless anyone can think of anything better for us to be investigating?" Shepard said, raising an eyebrow and looking at her assembled crew.

Jacob smirked and rolled his shoulders in a shrug. "Well, as long as the Reapers don't put in an appearance in the next few hours, I think we've got time."

Shepard smiled and looked to Miranda. "Have Joker set course for the relay. Make sure the stealth system's fully operational."

"Aye, Commander," Miranda said, nodding sharply and sashaying from the room.

"Jacob, Garrus, I have no idea what we'll find on the other side..."

"We'll get to work preparing our weapons," Jacob said.

"Mine are bigger," Garrus said, eyeing Jacob.

Shepard tried not to laugh. "I'll leave you boys to your toys," she said.

Then she was alone with Kaidan, who gave her a speculative look.

"I have to go check on my tank," she said, the first thing that came to mind, and strode past him. When she didn't hear his footsteps on the deckplates following her, she allowed herself to breathe again.

~*~

"When you said 'tank', I actually thought you were kidding."

Shepard, who had come down in part to do as she had said and check on the status of the Hammerhead whilst also seeing what the newly repaired hull looked like, realised that her thoughts of escape had been too good to be true. Apparently Kaidan had just decided to give her a fifteen minute head start.

"Every girl should have her own tank," she said, turning slightly to face him. "It's the little black dress of ground assaults."

Kaidan looked up at the underbelly of the Hammerhead as he crossed the cargo bay, and frowned. "I don't recognise the configuration."

"Experimental technology, courtesy of Cerberus."

"Ah." Kaidan looked directly at her. He'd stepped close. There was less than an arms length between them. "If I'd known that was all it took to win your loyalty was a bit of experimental hardware, my report to Anderson wouldn't have been quite so damning."

She looked tired. He'd spent most of the day around her, ever since the call to Anderson, and he could see the strain that was fraying her at the edges, making the corners of her eyes tight. She had never been so tightly closed off when he'd first known her, and he had every intention of poking at her until she cracked and showed some genuine emotion.

"Damning huh?" She shifted her weight to one foot and folded her arms, jerking her chin upwards as she spoke. "You figure the Alliance is better off without me then?"

"You come back two years after you supposedly died, working with a known terrorist organisation." He stepped closer. Shepard stiffened, like she wanted to back away, but held her ground. "I have to wonder when exactly they contacted you, when they made you their ally. Was it when we while we were still looking for Saren? Before we found Admiral Kahoku's body? After?"

"Fuck you," she said, her voice a low growl, her façade shifting for the first time. "You don't know anything."

"I know that the Alliance wasn't good enough for you anymore," he said. "I thought you were a soldier, I thought you were loyal, like me. I was wrong about that, wasn't I? I have to wonder what else I was wrong about." He deliberately softened his tone. "Like my feelings for you."

"You made your feelings quite clear on Horizon," she said. There was bitterness there, close to the surface.

"You think it didn't kill me to find out that instead of having died, you just faked your death and-"

"I didn't fake my death, you son of a bitch!" Shepard was an experienced soldier, a quantifiable expert at hand to hand combat. Most people, when she threw a punch, would be down before they saw it coming. But Kaidan had served alongside her. He knew exactly how she moved, and, honestly, he'd been expecting it.

He ducked as her fist drove forward, leaving an impressive dent in the cargo container behind him, and loosed a biotic slam purely out of reflex. It caught her in her centre of mass, sending her flying backwards into a pile of discarded scrap metal. He winced as he saw her land heavily, instantly regretting his actions, but she didn't make a noise of pain, nor was there any blood. Instead, she lay there, staring at the ceiling, making no move to retaliate.

He stepped over cautiously, fingers curled loosely into fists that crackled with slowly dissipating dark energy. Her eyes were clear, focussed, so she wasn't stunned or unconscious. She simply seemed to have no inclination to stand up. He let himself relax, releasing the mass field he'd been building about himself.

"You really did a number on that crate," he said, lightly.

"You should see me headbutt a krogan," she replied. She closed her eyes and sighed deeply. "And I didn't fake my death."

"Shepard-"

"Kaidan, shut up."

Shepard picked herself up out of the debris, but made no move to dust herself off, rearrange her hair or otherwise straighten herself out. It gave her a slightly wild look. "I haven't been hiding for two years," she said, staring at him with wide open eyes that had a slightly unsettling look behind them. "I was dead. In the non metaphorical sense. No heart rate, breathing or brain activity."

Kaidan looked at her, thinned his lips and narrowed his eyes. "I don't believe you." He heard the uncertainty in his own voice, and wondered if she did too.

Shepard made a sound of pure frustration and buried her head in her hands. "Do you want to know what it took to bring me back? Surgery. Cybernetics. God knows what I'm riddled with. I probably have more tech lining my bones than Saren had before Sovereign burned off the fleshy bits it didn't need. Technically, of course, I don't have what you would define as 'bones' anymore. And you know something? It hurts. Not as much as it used to, that's for sure, but then they hadn't quite finished putting me back together when I got woken up."

As she spoke, she reached up, plucking at the fastenings of her tunic. Kaidan almost asked her what the hell she was doing, but the way she couldn't bring herself to look at him told him to keep his mouth shut this once. Eventually, the jacket slid from her shoulders, and she let it slip to the floor in a puddle of dark fabric. She had the same black undershirt on that he did now, but she was pulling the hem out of from where it was tucked into her trousers. "Mostly I'm healed," she said, "But some scars go away faster than others."

She pulled off her undershirt and stood before him. A functional black bra remained, but it wasn't enough to obscure the ragged lines that ran across her chest and body. Some were lines of lighter tissue, but some were thin enough to reveal something glowing underneath. Starting just under her collarbone, stretching diagonally down to her sternum, a good three or four inches in length, her skin didn't seem to quite meet up in a line, revealing something... artificial.

He forced his eyes up to her face. She was looking away. Once she had been unselfconscious about her body. "What is-"

"A dermal weave," she said, interrupting him. "It anchors the skin. Technically, I don't need this fleshy pink... stuff..." she ran her fingers over her cheek, "To survive. It's an aesthetic nod. When they found me, I didn't have any skin."

The bottom had fallen out of his stomach. Looking at her, he could see lines in the flesh, like someone had taken a living jigsaw and not quite matched the pieces up perfectly. He honestly, truly, had no idea what to say. The tightness behind her eyes, the lack of sleep, that single minded focus and determination... Kaidan, for one moment, tried to imagine waking up two years in the future, in pain and with a job to do, and realised that Shepard was probably the only one who could do it and stay sane.

"I remember, you know," she was rambling now, talking without any apparently aim. "Suffocating to death isn't quick. You lose consciousness after ten or fifteen seconds, but the worst is that you know exactly what's happening. They put us through all those drills, tell us exactly what was happens when a body gets exposed to vacuum, all in the name of scaring us into checking suit seals properly. And then it happens and it feels like an eternity, and you're breathing, and there's nothing there and all I could think was 'shit, shit'." She laughed, but it was hollow, and he could hear tears buried in her voice. "I suppose I should be grateful I was unconscious. I was probably still alive when I started to burn up in the atmosphere."

"Stop." He didn't want to hear that. Never wanted to hear that, and he thought if she was forced to tell him that he wouldn't be able to handle it.

Shepard lapsed into silence, and started to pull her shirt back on. "One cyborg sin against God, as Ash would have said. Can't blame you for not wanting to have anything to do with me."

"That's not-" He took a deep breath, trying to stop himself from being so lightheaded. "I never-" The words wouldn't come. He'd gotten good at turning a phrase to his advantage, after he'd carried out so many missions for Anderson, after he'd spent all that time watching Shepard talk around the most unreasonably sorts, but now he had no idea what to say.

So why say anything at all?

He strode across the deck. She looked at him, her arm halfway through the sleeve of her vest, and opened her mouth to say something. What she might have said, he didn't know, but he didn't give her the chance to speak. He cupped her face in his hands, and pulled her lips towards his. Her skin was unnaturally warm, almost feverish, and if he'd been paying attention he might have wondered if that anything to do with the augmentation she'd received. But then she made a muffled, incoherent noise, and dropped her undershirt, reaching up to press her hands against his back and draw him closer.

Eventually, he pulled away, just enough that he could speak to her. Her eyes were close enough that he could see a glimmer of red behind them. "I couldn't stop wanting you," he said, voice low. "I miss you."

"Prove it," she said.

There were several very good and valid reasons why that would be a bad idea. And Kaidan decided that he would give them all due consideration some other time, such as tomorrow. At that moment, all he could do was tilt her head just slightly so as to make it easier to kiss her, and lose himself for a little while in her, his hands travelling down her body, stroking her breasts, her stomach, before moving to her back to pull her closer, her body flush against his.

She made a noise, a wanton moan that went straight to his groin, and he used her moment of distraction to push her a few steps backwards, raising her up the few inches necessary to perch her on the edge of one of the knocked over cargo containers. Her legs came up about his waist and she tilted her head back to give his lips access to her throat.

He was rediscovering how sensitive she was just behind her ear when she stiffened, fingers tightening on his shoulders.

"We're not alone," she said, and raised her head to look behind and above him.

Kaidan turned as much as his position allowed him to follow her gaze, looking up at the observation window that overlooked the cargo bay. There a young krogan and a bald human woman were staring down at them. There was a long moment where the four stared across the intervening space, before the bald woman leant forward and pressed the intercom button.

"Please," her voice said, filling the cargo bay, "Don't mind us. Continue."

Shepard's forehead thudded down against his shoulder, and he thought he heard her mutter 'damn it, Jack' in an undertone.

"What are they doing?" was the krogan's contribution, overheard before the woman let go of the intercom. Kaidan saw her turn to him and start to describe something with a lot of illustrative hand gestures.

"The advantage of commanding a civilian ship," Shepard said, drawing his attention back to her, "Is that no one cares who I sleep with."

"Is that so," he murmured.

"But unless you want explicit surveillance footage posted to the extranet, we should probably take this elsewhere," she said. Her expression had become guarded as she pulled back from him slightly. "If you're still interested."

It didn't solve anything between them, but he honestly, at that moment, didn't care. "Always."

The tension around her eyes eased slightly and she slipped off the cargo box as he stood back. As she bent down to pick up her discarded clothing, Kaidan glanced up at the woman, Jack, presumably, and the krogan. Jack made a lewd gesture, and grinned at him.

Fingers went around his wrist, and Kaidan didn't resist as Shepard gave him a tug, leading him towards the elevator. "EDI," she said, "No calls in the next hour unless the ship's under attack."

"Yes, Shepard."

~*~

Eleven: Unexplored Depths

~*~

Shepard's quarters were a mess. In fairness, they hadn't been when she and Kaidan had entered, and she would have been hard pressed to pinpoint the moment where her room had transitioned from tidy to 'bomb site', but she honestly didn't care. The sheets were tangled around their ankles somewhere, the environmental controls set a little higher to keep them comfortable while naked, and she felt more relaxed than she had in days. She wasn't totally at ease; all the worries and problems she had were still there, but they seemed distant, less important, their edge dulled by the endorphins buzzing about her system.

Kaidan lay on his back next to her, his attention momentarily taken up by the Prothean relic in his hands. It had been knocked to the floor during their exertions, and Kaidan had noticed it glinting in the low light when they had paused to catch their breath. Shepard ran a hand absently through damp hair as she watched him awkwardly attempt to pick it up. She knew from experience that it was like trying to hold a soap bubble.

"What is this?" he asked, as he moved his hands around the silver sphere. No matter where he moved his fingers, the sphere stayed the same distance away from him, rolling and contorting in the air.

"It's Prothean," she said, idly, and reached over to poke the skin of the relic. It flexed in response. "No idea what it does."

Kaidan eyed the orb with distinct alarm. He looked like he wanted to drop it but wasn't convinced it wouldn't explode if he did. "And you use it as a paperweight?"

"Don't be silly," she told him, "It hovers. Can't hold anything down."

Kaidan, very carefully, set it back on the floor.

"So are you going to tell me you use your wrecked, burnt helmet for that?" he asked, voice slightly strained.

She was rather hoping he wouldn't notice that. "No," she said, "I just like to have that there to remind me that I'm mortal, in spite of what everyone thinks."

He shifted his weight, rolling her onto her back and fitting himself close to her, above her. His weight was solid, both achingly familiar and alien at the same time. They had never exactly had a lot of time to enjoy each other's company on the old Normandy. There had been snatched moments when no one had been looking, mostly in her Council-granted accommodation on the Citadel while the Normandy was in port, but she could count those times on one hand. Mostly they had been forced to restrict themselves to surreptitious glances and fleeting touches.

She would have been lying if she'd said she hadn't thought about exactly this, hadn't fantasised about it. Thoughts of him had been the first thing she'd reached for when she'd spent time in the shower making sure that Cerberus hadn't messed up any important wiring. After Horizon, he had been painful to think of, but she'd clung to the memories of what had once been, and snapped at Kelly when her Yeoman had tried to get her to talk about it. To have him here, now, heavy and warm and pressed against her skin, didn't seem quite real.

"I've missed you," she said, honestly, "So much."

Kaidan looked her in the eye for a long moment. She let herself enjoy the moment, even if it was clear that he was looking for something. "Come back to the Alliance," he said. "No one's going to arrest you. You're a Spectre. You only answer to the Council, and the Council decided to reinstate you."

He ran his fingers over her arm as he spoke, and she allowed herself to be distracted by the sensation, forcing the knot of tension in her stomach that had suddenly sprung up at his words to disperse. "So I'd be welcomed back with open arms?"

"I'd be lying if I said people weren't suspicious," Kaidan said, "But no one knows anything for certain. Only Anderson and he has a tendency to keep his cards close to his chest these days. And, truthfully, most of the Alliance brass isn't even sure that Cerberus exists. It's half urban legend, half conspiracy theory to them."

"Those that aren't on the Cerberus payrolls," Shepard murmured, and sighed when his hand stopped.

"Seriously?"

She shrugged awkwardly, the motion not easy while she was lying beneath him. "I don't know for sure." She raised a hand, passing it over her face. She felt tired, and for the first time in a while, she felt like falling asleep, felt relaxed and secure enough to do so. She forced herself not to let her eyes droop. This wasn't a conversation she could get out of so easily.

"I wish it was so easy," she murmured, "I wish I could just go back to the Alliance and everything would be the way it was when we were the big heroes who'd saved the Citadel. But the Council doesn't believe in the Reapers even existing, the Alliance would hang me for consorting with the enemy, however much that it wasn't exactly a choice, and the fact is that the worst is coming and no one seems to want to help."

He kissed her gently, silencing her for a moment. When he drew back, Kaidan said, "There are always options. Haven't you made a career out of figuring out the way to do things that no one else can see?"

"Oh come on," she said, "Are you honestly saying no one else would have thought about taking on an ancient machine race with nothing but a pistol and their wits?"

Kaidan shook his head minutely. "No, and that's why I love you."

His weight suddenly seemed oppressive, and even though her body temperature was noticeably higher than his, Kaidan's presence suddenly felt stifling. He'd said as much on Horizon, giving voice to thoughts she'd batted around in her own head for the few weeks after Ilos, before she'd died. Neither of them had said anything back then, and Shepard hadn't been able to bring herself to hold out hope that, after two years, those feelings would have survived. He'd surprised her, even as he put his feelings in the past tense, by saying it. But then, Kaidan had always been much freer with his history to her than she'd ever been with him.

She'd never told him about her past, although he had to know a lot of it from the news vids that had suddenly gotten made about her after she was uplifted to the hallowed rank of the Spectres. She had never told him what it was like to grow up feeling constantly hungry, always looking over your shoulder, wondering if today was the day you'd be taken out by some rival gang member looking to make a name for themselves by putting a bullet in your brain. She'd never told him how it made you calculating, suspicious of everyone, and that to survive you had to be either had to be more brutal or much cleverer than everyone else. Deep down, she thought he might think less of her. She'd never told him that, really, what did she know about love? Even parental love was an alien concept, seen more often in vids than in person. She'd imagined she'd found it with him, but she just hadn't been sure...

She opened her mouth, to say even a few of those thoughts, and found that she couldn't speak, her throat closing off before she could make a single sound.

To his credit, Kaidan didn't seem to be waiting for an answer, a return of the sentiment. He just reached up to stroke her cheek gently. Maybe he'd picked up on all the things she'd never said.

Haltingly, she said, "I've... I've lost two years."

"That's a lot of catching up still to do then," he told her.

She wanted to say something to make sure that he understood, but perhaps it wasn't necessary. Shepard sighed as he kissed her neck, just below her jaw, and then made a noise of exasperation as EDI spoke up, intruding onto the moment.

"Commander Shepard. Operative Lawson has asked me to inform you that we are holding position off the mass relay, awaiting further orders."

"EDI," Shepard said, in annoyance, "What did I tell you about calls?"

"You told me not to allow you to be disturbed for one hour. That was two hours and sixteen minutes ago."

"Hmm," she said, eyes half lidded as Kaidan's fingers and mouth continued to work their way down her body. "The galaxy held off on me that long, huh? Tell Miranda I'll be down in five minutes."

"Yes, Shepard."

That was when Kaidan's tongue pressed against her, and she threw her head back, breath hitching. "Ten minutes," she amended.

~*~

In the end it was eighteen minutes, but no one would have dared to call their commander on her poor timekeeping. Miranda just looked at her, and then at Kaidan as he emerged from the elevator behind her. Her expression was unreadable, but Shepard was pretty sure that she didn't approve. But then, Miranda seemed to possess a rather dim view of the Alliance and its soldiers.

"We're holding position off the M16 relay," she said, putting a hand on her hip as Shepard stepped up the galaxy map. For lack of anywhere better to stand, Kaidan stood at the base of the steps, by her private terminal. "Ready to jump when you are."

Unspoken was the 'we've been ready for a while'.

"I want us stealthed the moment we jump in," Shepard said, tugging a wrinkle out of the sleeve of her tunic. "Whenever you're ready, Joker."

"Aye, Commander." Joker's voice filtered through from the forward cockpit.

It was a proven fact that biotics felt the distorted mass effect fields generated by relays more strongly that non-mutated humans, but everyone felt the same sense of being flung across space, the same sensation of being stretched too thin for an instant. Returning to normal speed and mass left the odd feeling that one should be taller.

"Stealth systems are running," Tali said, from engineering.

"Confirmed," Joker said.

Shepard leaned closer to the map. "Where are we?"

The galaxy map spun on its axis and enlarged to show their current location. They were on the edge of a spiral arm, a region of space less populated by stars, towards the trailing end of the Perseus Arm.

"We have exited the mass relay on the edge of a three planet system," EDI's voice narrated the hologram shifting, filling in detail that was previously blank. The star was given no name, but instead was labelled with a number string that was probably the AI's way of adding to her database. "I am not detecting any starship activity in this region. If this is where the cruiser that attacked the batarian freighter came from, it is not here."

"Small favours," Miranda muttered, and Shepard thought she heard a huff of agreement from Kaidan's direction, but when she glanced at him, his expression was neutral.

"I am also detecting signs that there has been at least one ship travelling through this area in the recent past," EDI said.

"How so?" Kaidan asked, raising his voice. Shepard imagined that part of the reason he asked was that the technology to detect such things wasn't exactly well-used in Council space. The costs were prohibitively high. For a moment, she felt a sort of smug pride in her ship and its capabilities, even if its builders were unsavoury.

"There is a plasma trail leading away from the mass relay. The density of ionised gas would normally be far too low to detect in high-traffic areas of Citadel or Terminus space. However, without other interstellar traffic in the area, particle distribution shows a distinct increase along this line against normal background radiation." A line appeared on the hologram, clearly leading to a nearby system. "As star density is likewise low, the destination is obvious."

"They were relying on no one coming to look for them," Miranda mused, aloud.

"What about the planets in this system?" Shepard asked, frowning at the scrolling numbers that passed by too quickly for the human eye to read.

"The innermost planet has no atmosphere with surface temperatures of up to approximately five hundred Kelvin. The second is a hothouse world. I am unable to get clear readings of the surface from this distance. The third is a Jovian-type gas giant with several moons."

"Second planet would be a good bet for a hiding place," Shepard said, thoughtfully.

"That is the logical end point of the ionisation trail, if I were to extrapolate."

"Certainly wouldn't be fun flying through that soup," Joker commented. He was listening to the discussion via the internal communications. "Atmosphere's pretty acidic. It'd start chewing away at the hull pretty quickly."

"How quickly?"

EDI was the one to supply the answer. "The Normandy's hull would be able to withstand corrosive effects for prolonged periods. However, the shuttle or the Hammerhead would succumb much more quickly. I would recommend no more than thirty minutes of exposure to the atmosphere."

Shepard leant forward on the barrier separating her from the galaxy map. "Keep us on silent running, and bring us in close enough to drop a probe."

"Aye, Commander," Joker said.

~*~

"Anomaly detected."

Shepard looked at the planet floating before her, and at the flashing dot that marked a point near the southern polar region. "You couldn't be a bit more specific than 'anomaly' could you?"

"There is a detectable power source on the planet's surface, located within a mountain on the southernmost continent. While the probe's sensors cannot penetrate the mountain itself, the power signal is consistent with a low powered kinetic barrier."

"Enough to keep the atmosphere out?"

"That would be a logical conclusion to draw from the available data."

"Sounds like we should pay them a visit," Shepard said, turning away from the galaxy map and stepping down to the CIC's deck.

"You're just going to go charging in without a clear idea of what's down there?" Kaidan sounded like he was amused and trying not to show it. "You really haven't changed that much, have you?"

"Commander Shepard knows what she's doing," Miranda declared, hotly, folding her arms and glowering across the space between them.

Shepard stopped half a step from Kaidan, close enough that she could feel his breath on her face. She held his gaze as she slapped a key on her terminal. "Garrus. Get your prettiest armour and shiniest gun out. We're going dancing."

"Sounds like fun, Shepard. I'll be ready in five."

Shepard raised her chin slightly, not breaking eye contact. "Feel like coming groundside with me? For old time's sake?" Trust me enough to follow my orders?

For a long moment, he didn't say anything, and Shepard felt something tighten in her gut. Then Kaidan gave her a small, almost invisible smile. "Don't I get a shiny gun?"

Shepard's innards uncoiled and she looked behind him to the armoury. "Jacob'll get you set up. Tell him what you need."

"Yes, ma'am," Kaidan said, his smile broadening into a grin that, for a moment, took Shepard right back to the original Normandy, when she had told him he was on her ground team, and he'd flashed the same pleased expression.

"I want to join the team," Miranda said, pulling Shepard's attention away from Kaidan as he walked away.

Shepard wasn't sure when exactly Miranda had acquired a death wish, but she was getting tired of it. She turned, and offered her a sceptical expression. "Is that so?"

"Yes."

"Tough. You're going to be in command while I'm below."

Miranda hesitated, obviously surprised. Shepard usually let Joker and EDI run the ship in her absence. "I... I think my talents would be better put to use assisting you," she said.

"Really?" Shepard stepped close and looked Miranda in the eye. "How's your head? Think you can manage biotics yet?"

Miranda grimaced and said nothing. Shepard just nodded sharply.

"You're in command, Miranda. Don't break my ship. I just got it fixed."

~*~
Twelve: Deep Deep Down

~*~

Garrus Vakarian had been accused of enjoying his work far too much on occasion, usually by people he was arresting. He wouldn't be lying if he said that sitting on a drop shuttle, checking his weapons, sitting across from probably the most dangerous woman in the galaxy, and about to get waist deep in a firefight, wasn't a little bit exciting. With Kaidan Alenko there as well, sitting relaxed, hands loosely resting on his knees, he could almost kid himself that he'd travelled back in time to two years ago.

Of course, two years ago, he didn't have a few hundred thousand credits worth of cybernetics fixing the damage from getting a missile to the head. It tended to remind him of the present rather forcefully whenever he realised he couldn't hear exactly as he used to be able to.

Also, Kaidan was... different. It wasn't anything obvious that Garrus could point to as a definitive personality change; Kaidan was still very much the man that Garrus remembered working with to defeat Saren. As he watched Kaidan, sitting across the passenger area of the shuttle, he could see that the man was at once more relaxed and yet more watchful than he had been in the past. It was not to say that Kaidan hadn't paid attention to his surroundings, but he seemed more settled, more focused. It rather reminded him of Shepard back when he'd first met her.

Shepard herself was leaning forward, elbows resting on her knees, staring thoughtfully into space. She said nothing, having briefed them as they were boarding the shuttle. Idle chit chat was unnecessary, and Garrus wasn't sure what he would have said anyway.

"Touchdown in three minutes," the shuttle's VI reported. "Air-barrier detected. Continue approach?"

"Continue," Shepard ordered, without looking up.

"Acknowledged. Touchdown in two minutes forty five seconds."

"What's the plan, Shepard?" Garrus said, leaning back and settling his pistol against his hip.

"Go down, find out what's down there, and shoot anything that takes a shot at us."

"Standard procedure then," he said, understanding.

Shepard smiled, ever so faintly, and the remainder of the descent passed in silence.

The VI started a countdown from thirty seconds to landing. When it set itself down, the shuttle rocked for a moment, and then the engines spun down along a descending scale, leaving the more subdued sound of the shuttle idling.

"Touchdown achieved. No lifeforms detected in local area."

"Atmosphere report?" Shepard asked, as she got to her feet, checking, with several short and precise motions that all her weapons were firmly adhering to her armour and correctly in place.

"External atmosphere is pressurised to C-standard and is breathable, however, due to proximity of planetary atmosphere and possibility of contamination, full armour is recommended."

"You heard the VI," Shepard said, "Suit up properly. I don't want whoever's here dropping the shield and killing us with an acidic bath."

Garrus's helmet was already in his hands. Fitting it was the work of a few moments, the motions habitual after years of practice. Shepard passed Kaidan his helmet, hand resting on his shoulder for a moment while he settled it into place and checked his seals. Then he nodded sharply to her, and she slapped the shoulder plate, removing her hand in order to don her own helmet. Maybe it would have passed another turian by, one who hadn't worked with humans, but Garrus had known both of these humans while they fought to save the galaxy. You got to know people very well in those sort of circumstances. Prolonged physical contact had started occurring between the two towards the end of their fight, and it was only when Liara T'Soni had commented on it that Garrus had realised the change in their behaviour over time. Behaviour that they seemed to have continued.

Interesting, indeed.

Shepard rolled her shoulders and pulled her assault rifle from her back. "Let's go, gentlemen."

Garrus hit the door release and Shepard took point, jumping the short distance to the rocky ground, bringing up her rifle and moving it back and forth, scoping out the area. Garrus and Kaidan fell in behind her.

"Spread out," she said, after a moment, "See if you can find a way deeper inside."

The cavern was wide and high, more than enough space for the tiny shuttle to land in and still have enough room for twenty heavy personnel transports to land side by side. There was no lighting other than the neon blue of the kinetic barrier that held back the roiling cloud of gaseous sulphuric acid that made up the planet's atmosphere. According to Garrus's suit's sensor package, unlike that which lay beyond the barrier, the air in the cavern was breathable to anyone who relied on oxygen for life, if a little too hot to be pleasant. The cavern itself was clearly artificial; the exposed rock was glassy, obviously carved out through artificial means. Excavation on this scale would have been expensive and time consuming, and beyond the means of the average pirate or slaver. He might have suspected them of taking over an old Prothean facility, unknown to the rest of the galaxy, but the edges of the rock were clean cut and not worn away through time.

And there were also fairly recent additions to the cave.

"Shepard!" he called, looking upwards. There were footsteps and then the human woman was standing next to him, following his gaze.

Garrus shone his omnitool's light on the ceiling. "Charges. It's just a guess, but from where they're placed, if they blew they'd probably collapse the whole cavern."

His helmet commline clicked, and Kaidan's voice came through. "I've found a tunnel that leads deeper into the mountain."

"Stay put. We'll come join you." Shepard jerked her head, and Garrus followed her towards the small blue dot that indicated Kaidan's position relative to him.

The Alliance soldier was standing by what could only be described as a hole in the cavern wall. There was a perfect circle cut into the stone, extending deeper into the mountain, and a metal walkway had been placed on the floor to make it traversable.

"No sign of movement or activity," Garrus reported, after a moment.

Shepard nodded, the motion mostly hidden by her suit. "Let's go," she said, raised her assault rifle and proceeded down the tunnel.

There were thin strips of blue-white light affixed to the walls, casting eerie and elongated shadows on the floor as they moved past them. Every few dozen metres down the tunnel were more charges, wired up to a remote sensor but currently inactive, according to Kaidan's scans. There seemed to be no pattern to the tunnels, they forked and branched and doubled back on themselves. They were able to keep track of their progress with omnitools, but Garrus couldn't help but thinking that this chaotic, disorderly arrangement was quite deliberate.

"They really don't want people finding their way deeper," Shepard murmured, as they followed another tunnel around on a loop that brought them back to an intersection they'd already passed through twice. Their omnitool's sensors could only penetrate so far into the solid rock, so mostly they had to explore the tunnel network through trial and error.

"They're preparing for an invasion force," Garrus said, as they picked the only tunnel they had not yet passed through, and started walking through it, moving cautiously with weapons at the ready. "Elaborate tunnels, charges at intervals. Whoever's down here could get the invaders running in circles and then collapse half the mountain on their heads before they found what they were looking for."

"I think it's pretty safe to say that we're not dealing with ordinary pirates," Kaidan said, wry humour in his voice. "To even think about this sort of stuff is expensive."

"Cerberus could probably afford it," Shepard said, thoughtfully.

Kaidan made a small noise that Garrus couldn't decipher. "As you're very aware."

Garrus expected Shepard to come back with some defensive statement about how she wasn't at Cerberus's beck and call, not any longer, but Shepard just acknowledged the sentiment with, "This whole setup probably cost as much as my left foot."

That drew genuine laughter from Kaidan, though Garrus was too startled to join in. It was the first time he'd ever heard Shepard refer to her cybernetics in a jovial manner. In fact, it was the only time he'd heard her talk about her implants.

"Scans show this tunnel opens out," he said, grateful for something to divert his attention.

The others lapsed into silenced, and the three of them moved down the corridor silently, changing position only when Shepard gave the signal with quick, curt movements of her hand. Sure enough, after two hundred meters, the tunnel opened out into a roughly rectangular area. They hugged the tunnel walls and held position there as Shepard risked a glanced into the open space.

She cursed and yanked her head behind the lip of the tunnel for cover. "Turrets," she said, tersely. Keeping quiet no longer mattered; automated turrets didn't listen for voices.

"Looks like we're on track," Garrus said.

Kaidan was focused on his omnitool. "I'm not picking up any power signatures, or tracking sensors."

Shepard thought for a moment then held up a hand, opening her omnitool. She did something that Garrus couldn't make out, then waved her arm in front of the tunnel mouth, in clear view of the turrets inside.

Nothing happened.

Shepard stood and entered the room, the other two following behind. Since the turrets had failed to response to Shepard's electronic lure, the turrets were plainly harmless, but habit and good practice kept their weapons raised.

Inside the room were two unmoving anti-personnel turrets, standing either side to a large metal door that had been embedded in the stone wall. It was the first physical barrier they'd found.

"Inactive," Garrus said, crouching down to examine the turrets more closely. "They're not connected to a power source, though the connectors are here. They're not even loaded with ammunition."

"Not expecting visitors I take it," Shepard murmured, nudging the nearest turret with her boot. It spun unresistingly on its bearings. "Can you get us through the door?"

"I might have something to help with that." Kaidan flicked open his omnitool, holding it up to the door, presumable attempting to run decryption software on the door's control system.

"I have an unlocking package you might find useful," Shepard offered.

"Sure," he said, and the two of them stood close, omnitools throwing a sickly orange glow on their faces, as they exchanged datafiles. Time, it seemed, had not entirely dimmed their smooth way of working together.

The door slid open.

~*~

Miranda had never stood in the centre of the CIC before, on the raised platform of the galaxy map. She had been in theoretical command of the ship during Shepard's groundside excursions in the past; in practice, Joker had made the decisions about the ship, where it went and what it did. Miranda had been content with that arrangement. Joker was a combat-experienced former Alliance officer. Part of the reason that the Illusive Man had been so keen that he was on board was that there were few that could be counted as better pilots, his experience with the Normandy's predecessor notwithstanding.

This was different. Shepard had gone out of her way to tell Miranda that she was in command, rather than letting it be tacitly understood. She felt an obligation to make her authority visible, present, rather than simply stay belowdecks in her office, as she had in the past.

So far, at least, her first formal command experience was going well. They hadn't been blown out of the sky yet, after all.

"The relay just activated!" Joker's voice was raised slightly, in urgency, not alarm. He'd been too well trained to panic in a situation where the unexpected occurred.

Miranda instantly and deeply regretted her naive optimism. "What's the status of the stealth system?"

"Still functioning within operational tolerances," Joker reported, "But we're going to be pushing it soon."

Miranda frowned and opened a line to engineering. "Tali'Zorah, we've not been running the stealth that long. Why am I getting told we're close to the limits?"

"Because the ship just got through a major fight with ancient forces of evil, and I've only been able to do a patch job. We can go into combat, but I certainly wouldn't recommend that combat be with anything larger than a frigate or a cruiser if you want to push it."

Miranda's fists clenched loosely, an unpleasant and unfamiliar feeling of unease settling into the pit of her stomach. "I thought you told Shepard we were good to go."

"That was before we discovered the portside heat sinks aren't working as efficiently as they should be. I have to get back to them."

"Understood," Miranda said, hearing the click of a closing channel halfway through her word. She could give their quarian chief engineer a certain amount of latitude, given that she had put the ship back together in record time, but that didn't mean Miranda liked her attitude. She'd accepted it before, knowing that Tali resented Cerberus for their attack on the Migrant fleet, but knew the girl was professional enough not to let it interfere with their job.

But things had changed now...

Miranda mentally shook herself, forcing herself back onto the more immediate problem they faced. "What's come through the relay?" she asked.

"Silhouette indicates a cruiser-class ship of possible asari origin. It closely matches the vessel previously encountered. I would estimate a high probability of them being the same ship." EDI's voice was preternaturally calm.

Miranda endeavoured to make her own words similarly level. "Are they heading this way?"

"Yes," EDI reported.

"Any sign that they've detected us?"

"They are on a standard approach vector for planetary insertion. I am not detecting any active targeting scans, nor increased heat output characterising weapons preparation. I do not think they have detected us yet."

"Keep us stealthed," Miranda said, and tried to make it took like she wasn't gripping the railing too tightly. Part of her desperately wanted to contact Shepard, but any signals coming from them now would be detected by the incoming ship.

"Aye, sir," was Joker's response, and it was a mark of Miranda's discomfort that she didn't even notice the honorific.

~*~

Garrus's suit reported that the air temperature had dropped considerably beyond the door. There was an active environmental system keeping the air recycling, and a power source that was running the lights. It was difficult to tell where exactly the power was coming from, although it was somewhere deep below their feet. At a rough guess, Garrus would have said that the excavated base extended deep into the planet's surface.

The tunnels no longer looped in on themselves, instead becoming more orderly. It lent credence to Garrus's theory that the outer tunnels were to stop invaders. This level was clearly meant to be protected, sealed off. No doubt there would have been more defences in place other than a couple of turrets and a door in the future, when the base had been finished. It was clear that the occupants hadn't expected anyone to find them.

It meant that their chances of encountering anyone had suddenly increased even if, so far, their progress into the tunnels had been unchallenged.

They had been moving through tunnels, making steady progress, when Shepard directed their attention to a small gap in the tunnel wall. It was a room, small, unevenly shaped, with a console in the middle facing the entry and a black glossy panel on the wall behind it. They moved inside at her signal.

"See what you can pull of that," Shepard said to Kaidan, directing him to the console.

He nodded sharply while Shepard took up a position at the door. Garrus would only have gotten in the way if he'd joined her, so he moved. While Kaidan stood over the console, his omnitool open over his left hand, his right hand moving across the console, Garrus stepped past him to the darkened panel on the wall. He pressed a hand against it even though, through the suit, there was no way to determine texture. "What is this?"

Shepard stepped up next to him. "Just a window I think." There was a small round circle on the wall next to the panel. Shepard touched it, and the window went from opaque to transparent. "That got it."

"Uh..." Garrus stared through the window at what lay beyond. "These are definitely not pirates," he said, with absolute conviction.

Shepard stood silently. He had no idea what she was thinking.

Kaidan left the console and joined them at the window. "Are those... are those stasis tubes?"

That hadn't been what had first drawn Garrus's eye, but he couldn't fault the Commander's attention to detail. What had first attracted his attention was the fact that beyond the window, which was clearly for observation, was an enormous space dug out of stone. It went on further than Garrus could make out with the available light, and was anything but empty. Artificial drones of some sort flitted around the empty space between great pillars of stacked lights. He tweaked the visual pickup on his helmet, and got a magnified view of what those pillars were. They were stacked stasis pods, connected to some sort of cradle that presumably provided all their power needs. There were dozens of them, hundreds, thousands.

There was space enough for millions, from what Garrus could see.

"Collectors?" Kaidan asked.

Garrus felt a momentary sick feeling before he dismissed it, allowed rational thought to override his initial, involuntary feeling of fear. "The Collectors used organic technology," he said, "This... this reminds me of..."

"Ilos," Shepard said, her voice subdued.

Kaidan leaned forward, stared at the pods. "It looks like Citadel tech," he said, moving back to the console, staring at his omnitool with intense concentration.

"I guess this is the reason they were kidnapping people," Shepard said. She sounded calm, and that was always when Shepard was at her deadliest. "But why?"

She abruptly spun on her heel and marched over to the console. "Have you pulled anything useful off that yet?"

"It's all encrypted," Kaidan said, "I'm trying to see if I can read the lower level data that's less protected." He stepped away from the main console, moving over towards the processor bank.

Shepard stood, looking down at the console. Garrus wondered if she might hit it, but Shepard had never been given to such theatrics. It was a pity really, because-

Just on the edge of hearing, there was a click, just like-

Shepard dove to the right, towards cover, as a hail of weapons fire obliterated the console she'd been standing in front of. It gave Garrus precious few seconds to swear, press himself against the wall, and release his assault rifle from its mounting. There was no way to tell who their attackers were, or how many of them there were, though Garrus guessed no more than three or four, or they would have just swarmed the room. They'd been smart, not announcing their presences, and opening fire the moment they had a clear shot. Their mysterious attackers simply had the misfortune to have tried to kill Commander Shepard, of all people.

"Stealthy bastards, aren't they?" Kaidan asked, his voice carrying over the suit comms, the only way to hear him above the deafening sound of close quarters firing.

There was a brief lull; one of the attackers presumably swapping out their thermal clips. As if they were of one mind, the three of them popped out from their cover either side of the doorframe. Garrus laid down a barrage, joined by Kaidan, forcing the attackers to halt their assault and duck out of view. Shepard didn't raise her gun, instead flinging her arm upward as if heaving something towards the ceiling. Garrus felt the familiar stomach-twisting sensation of biotics disrupting the local gravity in short sharp pops all the way down the corridor. There was startled screams, and the attackers were flung into the air, driven out of cover, to be cut down in mid air by concentrated fire from the three of them.

When the gravity returned to normal, and they had stopped firing, there were nothing left in the corridor but gouges in the walls where rounds had gone straight into the stone, and three dead bodies on the ground.

"Neat trick," Kaidan said, knocking the heat sink out of his rifle with the side of his hand. It lay on the ground hissing malevolently. "Where'd you learn that one?"

"That's nothing," Garrus told him, "You should see her do her Relay trick."

Shepard grunted as she stood up and holstered her pistol. "I told you to stop called it that."

Garrus mimed a 'zooming' motion behind Shepard's back as she strode over to the bodies. Kaidan just looked at him in confusion.

"Mercs," Shepard said. She bent to pick up cold and unused clips that had been knocked free of the weapons when their owners had been hit by the biotic field. "Eclipse, Blue Suns... Garrus!"

"Not my fault," Garrus protested, stowing his rifle and accepting the extra clips she offered as he approached. "I haven't done anything around here to piss off the mercs. More likely they banded together against you."

Shepard snorted. "This isn't my normal stomping grounds. I doubt they were waiting for me."

Garrus could see Kaidan staring at them with a frown on his face, a deep set scowl that he had learnt meant that the human wearing the expression was not happy at all. Both he and Shepard had donned helmets with semi-transparent faceplates, meaning that their expressions were visible. Before Garrus could say anything, though, Kaidan stepped forward, joining them.

"Do we keep going?" he asked.

Shepard smirked. "If whoever's in here thinks this is going to stop me, they've got another thing coming. I'm pretty sure, though, that I can hear reinforcements coming."

Garrus cocked his head, trying hard to listen. It was hard to hear distant sounds these days. Chakwas kept telling him his hearing would be better than it had been when he'd finished healing from that missile attack on Omega, but he'd yet to detect any improvement. "If you say so," he said.

"I downloaded a map of the complex from the terminal before it got trashed," Kaidan said. "Nothing's labelled, but there's a large open space in that direction. A lot of power lines converge there."

"Seems like a logical place to keep your evil lair," Shepard said.

Garrus could hear the sound of running now. There were people heading towards them, a lot of them if he wasn't mistaken. "Company's nearly here," he said.

"What would our lives be," Shepard said, as she took out her shotgun, "If everything was easy."

"Safer," Kaidan said, changing his stance and a neon biotic aura enshrouding him. As new waves of mercs rounded the corner of the tunnel, he threw out his hand and twisted his arm, bodies clattered against the ceiling as the gravity inverted.

Shepard prepared a grenade as Garrus gave that some thought. "Yes," he said, "But certainly duller."

~*~

Thirteen: Hotting Up

~*~

"Jack! Unless you want to burn to death I suggest you find somewhere else to lurk!" Tali'Zorah vas Normandy yelled her advice down the stairwell, then turned and headed into engineering, using her suit's sleeve to wipe condensation from her faceplate.

"Ok," Daniels was saying, "We need to repatch this trunking line over to the portside coolant shunts-"

"Are you mad, woman?" Donnelly said, shaking the ratchet he was using to unfasten the below-deck conduit seals, "All you'll do is fry the portside damage control cam-"

"We can afford to lose them," Daniels snapped, "Now come and help me connect the hose before we boil."

Donnelly grumbled but he got to his feet, following her out of engineering at a near run. It was only sensible, Daniels was right about the damage control sensors being an acceptable loss. Tali stood over the management console, trying to rebalance heat loads.

"What the hell's going on?"

Tali hadn't been expecting Jack to come into engineering. She barely afforded the woman a glance; Jack's skin was slick with a thin sheen of sweat, but she otherwise looked unperturbed by the heat. "The stealth system's running too hot," she answered, shortly, staring so hard at the data that her eyes started to cross. Crew on the CIC were doing the lion's share of balancing heat loads throughout the ship, given that most of EDI's automated control had been wrecked by the Collectors, but the fact was that the stealth system hadn't been fully fixed before they'd started running it, and there had been no real way of testing those repairs until they'd run the system.

When this was over, Tali was having a long, loud discussion with Shepard about how proper repairs needed a drydock, and that Shepard was never to abuse the Normandy in such an appalling matter ever again. On the other hand, if she said nothing and kept the system running, it would undoubtedly add to her 'I am a genius mechanic' air, which Tali was privately rather fond of. It was well earned, after all.

"Huh," Jack said, looking around, "Anything I can do to help?"

Tali snorted too quietly to carry over her exterior speaker. "Is that a genuine offer or just a platitude?"

"Platitude," Jack answered with a toothy grin. "I'm much better at breaking stuff than fixing it."

Tali resisted the urge to say something uncomplimentary. "If you're going to stick around down here," she said, "You'd better get an environment suit on. We're venting a lot of the excess heat down here, and it's going to get too hot to breathe soon enough. I hear blistered lungs aren't fun."

"Please. Like you'd catch me dead in anything as unflattering as that."

Tali really didn't like Jack. "Then you need to get out of the way." She leaned forward and hit the commline switch. "Donnelly, where's that coolant patch?"

"Coming, boss, coming," was Donnelly's response.

Jack rolled her shoulders. "I think I'll go grab Grunt and head upstairs," she said, "Maybe crack a window or something." She strode out of engineering without so much as a parting farewell.

Tali released an annoyed sigh once the human woman was out of sight, and patted the lip of the console. "Keep together just a little longer," she murmured. "Just a little while?"

Later, she would regret having said anything, as that was the moment that a loud tearing sound tore through the air, and alarms started blaring.

~*~

Gabriella Daniels was an experienced engineer. She'd suffered her share of conduit blowouts, minor electrocutions and even, memorably, the one time on the Perugia when the kinetic barriers had failed during a pilot skirmish and a hole had been punched in the hull. Half the air in the hallway had been sucked out while Gabriella clung to a support stanchion and prayed to a God she'd never honestly believed in, and it had seemed an eternity before the internal barriers kicked in and sealed the breach.

She'd also been witness to a fair number of ship-board disasters. Fire was the biggest fear aboard a ship, consuming oxygen faster than it could be replaced, but the one that had truly scared her was coolant leaks. It had been her first posting, an engineer, one of her classmates from training, as green as she was, had failed to properly seal off a section of coolant line that he'd replaced. As soon as he'd started to run coolant through the line again, the pressure had caused the hose to rupture, spewing supercooled liquid into the air. He'd been standing directly in its path.

Gabriella had been on the damage control team that responded to the emergency. When they'd got there, and after they'd managed to seal the leak, she'd gotten a good look at the unfortunate boy. He'd been flash frozen by the coolant, his face eternally pinched into a grimace of pain and terror. One of his fingers had broken off when the medics moved him into a body bag.

She couldn't even remember his name now.

But, she was an engineer, and a damned good one at that. It had scared her, made her triple check every patch she put on a coolant line for years to come. Eventually, it had just become habitual, rather than fear-driven. She'd even stopped thinking about it.

So she wasn't worried when she and Daniels started yanking wall panels out of the portside storage area, Zaaed's old haunt, with the intent of exposing coolant lines with the intent of patching them together, diverting coolant from where it was needed less to where here, where the sensors said it was so low pressure that the stealth system couldn't regulate pressure properly. It was just a job, and it needed to be done quickly and efficiently with no time for worrying about what might happen.

"OK," Ken was saying, "Now all we need to do is expose 4B and attach-" he only got that far before he twisted the ratchet around the sixth and final bolt securing the panel.

The moment Ken loosened the bolts, the pressure built up behind the bulkhead forced the panel backwards with explosive force, taking them both with it. Ken got the worst of it, slammed full in the body and pinned underneath it when it finally came to land. He didn't move; dead or unconscious Gabriella couldn't say. She was closer to the door, only having been caught by the edge of the panel. But it had hit her leg with a surprising amount of thrust, and Gabriella knew without checking that she'd broken it.

Over her head, the reason for the pressure loss was easily apparent. The coolant line had ruptured, and had been leaking out behind the panel. Now it was vaporising on contact with the air, reducing the temperature by several degrees per second. She wasn't standing in the face of it, and that was probably the only thing that was saving her life. She and Ken had both been wearing environment suits, knowing that it was going to get a lot hotter in engineering, but they'd left their helmets off, given that they hadn't been needed as yet.

Gabriella coughed convulsively, and tried not to breathe too deeply. Freezing the alveoli in her lungs didn't sound like a pleasant way to go. There was an alert sounding in the background, urging an 'immediate area evacuation', but there was no way that she was leaving Ken here to freeze to death in a coolant bath. She crawled over towards him as best she could, thankful that the room wasn't very large at all. The panel wasn't heavy either, pushed away easily, but Ken was, and Gabriella had to blink back tears as the effort of dragging herself and a heavy man across the floor sent jagged lines of pain all the way up her side.

She scrambled backwards awkwardly, trying to drag Ken with her one-handed, her leg screaming at her. Her hardsuit was stiffening automatically, responding to the detected break, but, unlike a combat model, shipboard environment suits weren't equipped with medical units to dump painkillers into the system for bad injuries. The leak, though, was spreading as the cracks widened. Clouds of coolant gas were forming in the air, ice crystals appearing on the bulkheads and on her hardsuit. Gabriella's vision blurred, becoming nothing but smudged white.

For a moment, Gabriella recalled seeing that boy, flash-frozen and lying dead on the deckplates. Andy, that had been his name. Andy Hesh.

A flash of blue and a dark shadow interrupted her vision, and Gabriella blinked a few times to try and clear her sight, realising that the biting cold had suddenly stopped getting worse. Then a pair of hands looped under her arms, her hand was prised off Ken's arm, and she was dragged out into the hallway even as she made protesting noises. She rubbed at her eyes and as the world came into focus, she realised that the dark smudge was Jack, standing with her hands raised, a biotic barrier holding back the gas, her expression one of fierce concentration. Grunt had Ken slung over his shoulder and as soon as he cleared the storage area he barked, "Got 'em!" to Jack, who released her biotic field, leaving the door to slam shut, sealing the leak.

Tali was the one who had dragged Gabriella out, who was still holding on to her even now. She'd never realised that the quarian's suit was actually pleasantly textured, not the hard plastics and synthetic polymers that the Alliance preferred. It was an odd observation to make, Gabriella realised, but her brain was still fixated on the fact that she wasn't dead.

"Thanks," she said, to Jack, meaning it.

Jack looked uncomfortable, wiping her hands on her pants like she'd touched something distasteful. "Yeah, well, Shepard'd be pissed if I let you people die, even if you are Cerberus."

The elevator door slid open and disgorged Doctor Chakwas and her corpsmen, Gabriella brushed aside all attempts to get her onto a stretcher, saying, "No, no, I have to get back to engineering."

"Crewman, you're injured," Tali started, clearly about to pull rank as Gabriella's superior in the ship's hierarchy, but Gabriella shook her head sharply.

"If the coolant's leaked that badly, then it's only a matter of time before-"

Tali hissed and swore. "I know." She handed Gabriella over to one of the corpsmen, hurrying to her feet. "I have to go and make sure this ship's up to a firefight." She darted back along the hallway; the door to engineering almost didn't open fast enough.

Gabriella wasn't sure it was; they kept finding little cracks that had been silently growing, without enough time to trace them, but she had faith in Tali'Zorah. She also knew exactly what her place was. "Give me a painkiller, Doc," she instructed, "Then get me back in engineering."

Chakwas frowned in disapproval. "You're in no condition to be working, crewman," she said, each word outlined with a sharp rebuke. You could only hear that in a British accent, Gabriella thought.

"We don't have enough engineers to spare, our stealth system's probably going to futz out any second, and there's a cruiser out there that's probably going to start shooting the moment it does. I have to get back to engineering."

Jack, who had been standing back, watching the show, snorted. "Got spunk, at least," she said, thought it didn't sound like she was trying to offer a compliment.

Chakwas still didn't look happy, but she was at least experienced enough to know the truth of what Gabriella was saying. "Very well," she said, and dosed Gabriella with something that made the world seem a much more pleasant place to be. Then she pulled a small med-module from her kit and inserted it into her environment suit. "That'll keep you going, but not forever. I want you in my medical bay the moment we're not all about to die."

"Aye, Doctor," Gabriella said, and took the assistance of the corpsman to stand up. Her hardsuit had completely stiffened to hold the bones of her leg in place, and so walking was awkward. She had to hold onto the bulkhead and limp back towards engineering.

"I'll send Legion down to assist you," Chakwas said.

"Just take care of Ken," Gabriella said, and hoped that her last words to him hadn't been, 'If you don't stop bitching, I'll shove that ratchet where the sun doesn't shine'.

~*~

Joker didn't swear, but Miranda thought he wanted to. At least, that was what she picked up from listening to him tersely report, "Our stealth system just bugged out. We're going to be hot and clear on their scopes in a few minutes."

Miranda stared dumbly forward to where she could just see the back of Joker's chair through the hologram. "How?" she demanded.

"There has been a coolant leak on the engineering deck. We will have to drop stealth before internal systems overheat in approximately two minutes."

They had two options: run, try to make it for the relay, abandoning Shepard on the planet below, or stay. Miranda was ashamed to admit she spent entirely too long seriously contemplating that as an option before she abruptly dismissed it, reminding herself that she was being too easily panicked. "Can you get us behind the planet before they spot us, Joker?"

"No guarantees, but I can certainly try."

The cruiser hadn't made orbit yet, though if Miranda's adhoc mental calculations were correct (and they always were) they should be out of line-of-sight view by the time the cruiser arrived. Of course then it would depend what the cruiser did: what orbit it chose, whether it was in contact with any ground stations, whether the stealth system held out that long...

Miranda held her breath and stared at the tactical hologram without blinking. She'd promised Shepard she wouldn't break the ship, promised to prove that she could be trusted. She couldn't let them all get blown apart now, not after Shepard had managed to take them to hell and back in one piece.

Luck was, unfortunately, not with them.

"The cruiser has altered course." EDI said, at the same moment as Miranda's stomach twisted into a knot as she watched the image of the ship changing direction. "They are increasing speed and arming weapons."

"Action stations," Miranda snapped, and ran through the possibilities in her head while EDI's voice repeated the order throughout the ship. "Joker-"

"I can't go any faster without jumping to FTL," Joker barked before she'd even had a chance to frame her question.

Jumping to FTL would get them out of the system, but they'd be leaving the shuttle and team behind.

"CIC, Engineering." Tali's voice came over the internal comms. "That coolant blowout damaged our portside barrier generators. Those won't take a sustained hammering."

"Got it, Tali," Joker said.

So they'd have to evade fire and keep their portside turned away. Miranda at least had great confidence in Joker's abilities as a pilot.

"They're firing!" Jacob barked, and Miranda clutched at the railing at Joker banked the ship hard to avoid the incoming fire.

There was a jolt, a loud bang reverberating through the bulkheads from somewhere below her feet. Miranda banged her hip against the railing as she was knocked sideways.

"Direct hit," EDI reported, with eerie calm, "Kinetic barrier at seventy percent, section two."

Section two wasn't part of the crew habitation section. It covered part of the nose of the Normandy, where nothing but conduits and plating sat. A minor hit. The ship continued to twist and jerk as it dodged out of the way of the super-accelerated metal fired at them.

"Standby weapons!" Miranda barked, and felt more than heard the mass accelerators that were the ship's main guns below deck spinning up. It made the back of her teeth ache, which she put down to her biotics still being oversensitive.

The asari cruiser had sped up, drawing closer, but as she watched, they stopped firing. Mirana hesitated, briefly uncertain, and it was into this space that EDI gave her report.

"The asari cruiser has ceased fire. They received a transmission from the surface and are standing their weapons down."

Jacob leaned forward, his fingertips clutching the edge of the console. "We should hit them now," he told her, "While they're not prepared to retaliate."

"I am unable to discern the content of the transmission," EDI said, "However, I would hypothesise that it was a stand-by order, ordering them not to attack us. Further provocation may be unwise."

"That's a guess," Jacob snapped. "They could just be waiting to see what we do. Either we run now, or we fight and try to take them down before they take us down. The Normandy can take out half their ship before they can counterattack."

Miranda stared at the hologram blindly, not seeing any of it. If they ran now, they abandoned Shepard, Garrus and Commander Alenko on the surface. While she didn't care about the latter two, Miranda had thrown her loyalty behind Shepard, superseding that she'd once given the Illusive Man. Shepard had helped her with Oriana, even though she'd had no genuine expectation that the woman would help, given her blatant dislike of Cerberus and Miranda herself at first. But loyalty was a liquid, changeable thing, wasn't it? Miranda was useful to Shepard, her biotics and her brain assets to Shepard's cause. For all Miranda knew, Shepard was just using her the same was everyone else had in her life, without having the courtesy of being upfront about that manipulation.

Miranda had command of the Normandy. They could run. Shepard would almost certainly be killed, and Miranda would be free to chose whether to go back to Cerberus or do something else with her life, without being beholden to anyone at all.

The thought lasted only as long as it took for her to remember that while she might command the ship, Joker would shoot her before allowing her to fly away and leave Shepard alone. Grunt would probably try and crush her skull, Tali would probably cause life support in her quarters to stop working, and Jacob would never forgive her.

And Miranda realised that even without these things to discourage her, it didn't matter. Miranda would never leave Shepard behind.

The cruiser was still hanging there in space, watching them. They'd clearly received orders from the surface, and Miranda chose to mean that meant Shepard was still alive and either causing a lot of trouble, or negotiating. If Miranda gave the order to fire, and destroyed the ship, it could mean that whoever was down on the planet might take retribution on Shepard's team. She simply didn't have enough information to make a rash decision and so Miranda Lawson, so used to decisive action, elected to do one of the more painful things she could do: wait.

Miranda bit the inside of her cheek, and hoped that she wasn't wrong. "Hold our fire," she said, "Don't do anything."

Jacob stirred uneasily. "They could just be waiting for explicit orders from the surface to destroy us," he said, "We might not get another chance at this."

"I've made my decision," Miranda said, and deliberately turned aside, dismissing him from her attention.

She heard him mutter something uncomplimentary, but ignored it. She really, really, hoped that Shepard was alright.

~*~

It was somewhat uncouth, in normal human society, to claim that one enjoyed a good fight. It wasn't considered good dinner party conversation, in certain circles. But Shepard had once thought that anyone who signed up for Special Forces had to enjoy it, otherwise they were just crazy. Perhaps there was a little insanity in her. After all, when you considered that they were being faced with what seemed to be an endless stream of attackers from the front, and others had cut off their path of retreat by circling around them in the tunnels, and she found the challenge of pushing through, using every trick at her disposal to keep the advantage with their small three man team, stimulating; well, she had to be a little bit crazy.

At least the others seemed to be enjoying it as much as she was. Garrus had developed a certain bloodthirsty edge since she'd left him two years earlier, cheerfully calling his more impressive shots as he made them. Kaidan just had a steely, determined look in his eye that he considered this a definite challenge but a not insurmountable one.

They were slowly but surely pushing forward. According to Kaidan's map of the complex, they were roughly fifty meters away from what might be the command centre. They were just consulting which way to turn at the next junction, keeping their heads ducked out of the way as they crouched in one of the alcoves clearly designed to provide cover to defending fighters, when their attention was pulled away by a louder noise than weapons fire.

"Hold your fire!" A loud, female voice, augmented by some sort of audio amplifier, cut across the sound of gunfire. It took a few, stuttering seconds, but their enemies stopped firing. When Garrus and Kaidan looked at her in askance, Shepard held up her hand, gesturing that they should hold off from attacking for a few seconds.

"Commander Shepard!" was the call, into the silence.

Shepard tilted her head, raising her voice. "Can I help you?"

"Our cruiser has detected your ship in orbit. You will present yourself, or we will order it to attack your ship."

Shepard's mouth twitched. "Not hearing what exactly would be in that for me."

"Our leader wishes to speak to you. You will not be harmed, as long as you stand down."

Shepard glanced at Garrus, raising her eyebrow, silently asking for their opinion.

"We could fight our way in," Garrus said, "But this might be easier."

"Besides, as long as they've got the Normandy pinned down, we don't have a lot of choice," Kaidan added.

"Don't count her out just yet. Even damaged she's got a good set of teeth." But both of them had a point. Shepard was curious about exactly who was behind this as it was. "Can you send a message to the Normandy at all?"

Kaidan shook his head slowly. "Not through this rock."

Hopefully, Miranda would have enough common sense to rabbit to FTL if their cruiser made any sudden movements in their direction. For now, Shepard would just have to wait and see. She took a deep breath and stood in one smooth motion, coming around into sight of the enemies who had their weapons still pointed in her direction, and she was intently aware of how exposed she was.

There was an asari in an unmarked commando uniform standing behind the front line of soldiers. She nodded with satisfaction as Shepard revealed herself. "Stand down," she told her men, who relaxed instantly, lowering their aim.

Mercenaries didn't have that sort of instant obedience and uniform behaviour trained into them. These were professional soldiers, not guns for hire. Given the evidence so far, Shepard was willing to bet that they'd been drawn from the ranks of ex-Citadel military. There were too many signs of the Council's indirect involvement to think that this was a bunch of rogues acting on their own. Maybe the mixed mercenary armours confused the issue, preventing easy identification.

"Commander Shepard," the asari said, gesturing behind her, "If you'll come this way, please."

Garrus shifted, clearly uncomfortable with going along with the asari, but he followed silently as Shepard nodded and went the indicated direction, the asari commando falling into step behind her. Garrus and Kaidan followed behind them, and they were trailed by a substantial number of soldiers. Shepard could see Garrus's hand resting by his waist out of the corner of her eye, close to where he kept a stash of concussion grenades. He'd just have to throw it behind them to scatter the gathered ranks into disarray, probably giving them enough cover to make a run for it if they had to.

Shepard had a good team.

The asari didn't make any attempt to disarm them, which was probably for the best as far as everyone was concerned, but she didn't so much look as Shepard as she marched down the tunnel, leading the way to what Shepard knew was close to the control area. Shepard didn't bother to ask any questions, knowing they would be ignored.

Eventually, they turned down a side tunnel just before the area where Kaidan's map had showed the control area. The asari commando waved the soldiers back, who took up positions along the walls, and crossed to a large metal door. She pressed her fingers to a biometric scanner, and the door rolled aside, revealing a decently sized rectangular room, the majority of which was taken up with a large desk. The back wall was mostly transparent, a window into the cavernous area filled with the stasis pods they'd seen back in the small monitoring room, and silhouetted against it was an asari.

It wasn't until they were fully in the room, and the asari had stepped forward, into the light, that Shepard realised that she recognised her. She'd seen her picture numerous times when reviewing the data that had been collected for her by her extranet crawler bots when she'd been trying to gather information on what had happened in the two years she'd been dead.

"I was hoping that you would come to the surface yourself. When our cruiser detected your ship in orbit, I realised that this was moment was inevitable." The asari bowed with the sort of formal grace that Shepard associated with diplomats of long standing and experience. "Greetings to you, Commander Shepard."

Shepard regarded her thoughtfully. "Defence Minister Lesh T'Vann. I honestly didn't expect to find you here."

The asari smiled politely and inclined her head. "The feeling is definitely mutual, Commander. And I am no longer defence minister for the Citadel Council."

"Lesh T'Vann," Kaidan murmured, obviously searching his memory. After a moment, he sucked in a sharp breath, obviously placing her in his recollections. "Didn't you 'disappear'?"

"Yes, I did. I couldn't create this sanctuary under the watchful eyes of the galaxy." Lesh gestured widely, encompassing her office and the massive hollowed out space visible through her window. "Disappearing was an unfortunate necessity."

If she'd accomplished all of this in less than two years, then she must have been working virtually day and night since she'd left Council space. Desperation was one of the few ways anyone could drive themselves and their people to such extremes. Lesh T'Vann had a tired look around her eyes that Shepard recognised from herself. She wondered if the asari was as haunted by knowledge and duty as Shepard was.

"This is quite the operation you've got going here," Shepard said, stepping forward, stopping when the asari commando that had escorted them to the office stiffened and clenched her fingers around her pistol, one step shy of pulling it. "The resources to construct this place, and to outfit your ship with experimental weapons, to hire and train all these soldiers... the costs must have been extravagant." She might have thought that Cerberus would be the only ones with the finances to pull off an operation such as this, but the fact that asari were in charge seemed to dispute that.

Lesh shrugged lightly. A wry smile flitted across her face, as if she knew that Shepard would likely not believe a word she uttered in protest. "I may not be a Citadel minister anymore, Commander, but I still have my resources."

"But what's the point?" Shepard asked. She raised her hand to gesture to the window, to the vast number of stasis pods that could be seen beyond. "Why kidnap people? Why bring them here?"

"To keep them safe." Lesh T'Vann sighed, and shook her head slowly. "This world is Sanctuary, our one hope of surviving the oncoming slaughter. It was not my idea, of course. If anything, Commander, we have you to thank for this endeavour."

Shepard tensed, feeling her muscles tighten unpleasantly around her shoulders. "I don't follow," she said.

"You discovered Ilos," Lesh said, "You discovered a solution, a way to survive the coming onslaught of the Reapers."

"I thought the Council had decided that 'Reapers' didn't exist," Garrus said, making little quotation marks around the name with his hands in such a near-perfect mockery of the turian Councillor that Shepard might have grinned had the situation been different.

Lesh shrugged, fluidly. "The Council cannot afford to acknowledge the existence of an enemy both vastly older and vastly more powerful than all the races in Citadel space combined. What would happen if they did publicise this knowledge? Chaos, mass suicides, religious and para-scientific fervour that would consume worlds. No, I do not blame them for their decision."

"You spoke out against their unwillingness to acknowledge the Reapers," Kaidan said. He spoke harshly, as if he took the slight personally. "You defended Commander Shepard's conclusions. Then you just disappeared and let it all die down."

"I did not say I agreed with all the Council's decisions, only that I do not blame them." Lesh turned to the window, put her hand up it, resting her fingertips against the glass. "I had bigger things to do. I had to create Sanctuary, a place that does not exist in Citadel records or in any other knowledge base. A place where we could hide enough of every species that we could repopulate our races after the Reapers have been and gone."

"The tubes on Ilos broke down," Shepard pointed out, "By the time the Reapers had moved on, there were only a handful of Protheans were left alive."

"Our study of Ilos indicated that the stasis chambers there were never meant for such long term storage. The power systems could not hold out." Lesh took her hands away from the glass, leaving smudged fingerprints where she had been touching the surface. They roughly lined up with the marker lights on five of the nearest towers, like Lesh had been reaching out to try and touch them herself. "Everything in Sanctuary runs off geothermal energy. The only thing that does not are the kinetic barriers we were using for the docking bay, and those would have been destroyed when we collapsed the tunnels and sealed ourselves and our wards inside. Then we would have slept for a thousand years, with no one any the wiser as to our existence."

"All that," the asari commando said, "Has now changed. Thanks to you."

"Peace, Myral," Lesh said, gesturing to her underling.

"So you've been kidnapping people for, what, a year? And I'm guessing that none of them knew what they were being taken for."

"We couldn't advertise for what we needed," Lesh said. She smiled, but she looked sad, rather than amused. Shepard found, uncomfortably, that she couldn't hate the asari who clearly thought she was doing the right thing. "Wanted: a few dozen krogan, a few thousand humans and turians, a few hundred asari, and enough genetically diverse stock from all other sentient races to restart species after coming galactic genocide. We tried to be subtle, taking a few at a time from lost ships or captured slaver transports, but your activities in investigating the Collectors meant that we didn't have as much time as we thought. We realised that if you were digging into their activities, it would no doubt alert the Reapers, and it would make them arrive sooner rather than later."

Through the window, Shepard could see drones moving between towers of stasis chambers, slotting some into place, removing others. She could see construction bots welding new skeletal frames together, designed to hold yet more pods. This was kidnapping on a massive scale, abducting people and sealing them away with no guarantee that they'd ever wake up. If they had friends or family who hadn't been with them, were they now wondering what had happened to these people?

"So in a thousand years you wake these people up and explain to them that they're the only people left alive in the whole galaxy?" Shepard jerked her chin towards the window. "How the hell do you think they're going to take that?"

"It doesn't matter," Lesh said. "At least they'll be alive. At least civilisation will survive, and maybe we'll be better prepared for the next time the Reapers show up."

A few hundred thousand people abducted against their will, for the possible survival of galactic civilisation. Was that really so terrible?

"What happens now?" Shepard turned and deliberately glared at Myral, who stiffened her back and did her best to look threatening. There was no doubt there was a lot of them, but Shepard was willing to give a damned good attempt at fighting their way out. "You kill us? Destroy my ship? Prevent any information leaving this place? Because I don't think that's such a clever idea."

"The thought had crossed my mind," Myral said, tartly.

Lesh T'Vann looked at her commando fondly and shook her head, stopping in her pacing and sitting down calmly, smoothing her hands over the skirt of her dress to stop it from wrinkling. "That's very much up to you, Commander." She reached forward, and a holographic interface sprung up. "I am aware that you are a Spectre, once of the most dangerous sentients in the galaxy. I realise that I cannot truly deny you what you desire. If I were to attempt to block you, or send you away, you would no doubt kill us all."

Myral stirred, uneasy, unhappy. "Minister-" Lesh waved her off.

"It appears that the future of Sanctuary rests in your hands." Lesh sat back after pushing the interface across the desk so that Shepard could see it. They were the master controls for the entire complex. "You can release these people, allow them to awaken and take the knowledge of Sanctuary to the greater galaxy. It will almost certainly not be a safe haven when the Reapers arrive, but if you are so confident in your ability to defeat them, it doesn't matter."

She spread her hands. "Or, you can leave them here. We will take what we need to create viable populations of as many species as possible from the abandoned and ignored in the Terminus systems, and we will seal ourselves off from the galaxy when we hear that the Reapers have arrived, and awaken when the danger has passed. The choice, Commander, is entirely yours."

~*~

Fourteen: Live With It

~*~

Miranda wasn't sure what she was expecting to happen, but she wasn't expecting the cruiser that had been hovering off their bow to abruptly move to a different orbit, putting them neatly out of weapons range, at the same time as she received a hail from Shepard saying that the shuttle was returning. She was intensely curious. She knew something must have happened down on the planet, something important, but when she stepped off the shuttle, onto the deck, Shepard barely glanced at Miranda as she unlatched her weapons, handing them off to a crewman waiting to take them back to the armoury.

"Tell Joker to take us to the Citadel," Shepard said, tightly. She'd removed her helmet, her hair clinging damply to her forehead, and her jaw was tight enough that Miranda was surprised she couldn't hear her molars cracking under the pressure.

"What happened down there?" Miranda asked.

Shepard closed her eyes briefly, and tilted her head, and Miranda regretted asking. "Carry out my orders," she said. Her voice was soft, but firm. Miranda knew she wouldn't ask a third time.

"Yes, Commander," she said.

Shepard nodded slowly and walked past her, ignoring the other crew members who were approaching to stow the shuttle. After Shepard had left the deck, Miranda turned to Garrus and Commander Alenko, who were still there, handing over weapons and unlatching armour plates.

"Well?" she prompted, backing up her query with a raised eyebrow.

"Vast conspiracies," Garrus said, and grunted. "There are a lot of those around these days."

Miranda scowled at the non-answer, and looked at Alenko. He didn't seem particularly inclined to help her. She briefly wished that the Normandy were a military ship, and she could just order Garrus to tell her what had happened. If she tried, he'd probably laugh at her.

"I assume you'll be leaving us at the Citadel," she said to Alenko, and folded her arms. "And that you'll report back to the Council about everything that you've seen so far." She shook her head. "If Shepard were smart she'd kill you or keep you locked up."

Alenko looked at her for a long, searching moment, then smirked slightly and shook his head. "I have no interest in what your crew is up to, Ms. Lawson, now that you're not affiliated with Cerberus. Trust me on that one."

"I don't trust you at all," she said, "But apparently Shepard does. I suppose that'll have to be good enough."

Alenko looked past her, to the elevator doors through which Shepard had left the deck. "Sure," he said, somewhat distantly. "If you say so."

~*~

The AI didn't try to deny him access to Shepard's quarters, so presumably she either had expected company, or she hadn't thought to specify his exclusion. Inside, she was lying on her bed, still in her hardsuit, staring up at the ceiling with a dull, vacant expression. He recognised the look of one so far past the point of endurance that they honestly no longer had the energy to get emotional.

Kaidan had spent more than a few hours in that state after she'd died.

"Come to tell me that I made the right decision?" she asked, without looking at him. "Or maybe the wrong one?"

"Which would you like to hear?" He leaned against the wall next to her fishtank, looking down at her.

"The one where everything from about two years ago to today is all a dream, there are no such things as Reapers, Cerberus, or Spectres and I'm just another Alliance grunt counting the days til her next shore leave." She rubbed her hands across her face, leaving faint pink blotches on her skin where she pressed too hard.

He stepped forward, crossing to the side of her bed and sitting on the edge. He'd already changed out of his armour into the plain black clothes that he'd been wearing before, and he didn't make the mattress dip nearly as much as the fully-armoured Shepard did.

"When did you last sleep?" he said, and reached out to prod her shoulder. "Roll over."

Shepard pulled her face into a brief grimace, but did as she was told. "I don't need as much sleep as I used to. The tech does a pretty good job of filtering out the fatigue poisons."

"So does a dose of noxedrin. People still go crazy with no sleep." On her side now, she'd exposed the power plant. While the armour wasn't exactly standard issue, apparently based on experimental tech that Kaidan was certain wasn't on general sale, it was similar enough to standard issue gear that he had no trouble finding and depressing the manual override, sending the power plant into shutdown. It slowly stopped giving out the low frequency hum that you never really noticed until it was gone. He ran his hands over the joints of the hardsuit until he felt his fingertips brush the releases. He started with her gloves, pulling them and the gauntlets off her arms. Her skin was pale, clammy and cool to the touch. "So when did you last sleep?"

"When did we come back through the relay?" Shepard didn't sound like she was giving him the smart alec response; she seemed genuinely curious.

Her torso armour unlatched at the front, splitting open like a clamshell, and it took a little shuffling around to pull over her arms. Kaidan had no idea where she stored it, and just set it aside on the deck for the moment. Her boots came off easily enough, still covered in the dust and dirt of the Sanctuary, and she lifted her hips obligingly when he prompted, wriggling out of the last few pieces of armour. Underneath, she'd been wearing the standard abbreviated tank top and shorts that easily fitted underneath a hardsuit without interfering with its medical and tactile packs.

Someone had remade the room since they'd left it last, perhaps through the efforts of Shepard's yeoman. The bedsheets were tucked in tightly, and it took Kaidan a moment to pull them loose enough that he could pull it over Shepard. He slipped in next to her, still fully dressed.

"You made the right decision," he told her, as he dimmed the lights.

"Yeah," she said, the words carrying on a sigh. She'd already closed her eyes, lulled by the low lights. "Now I'm no better than a bunch of kidnappers." She shifted closer, and he wrapped an arm around her waist. "You're going to be reporting back to the Council, I take it?"

"Yes. Care to join me?"

Shepard harrumphed softly. Clearly not.

He kissed her neck. "Promise me you'll call me if you need me. Do you still like Massenet?"

Shepard made a noise that could be construed as agreement. It was the work of a few words to the AI to make the sound of a violin come floating through the air. Kaidan had no idea if she fell asleep after that, but if she didn't she gave a remarkably good impression of it, and she didn't stir when he whispered in her ear, so he allowed himself to fall into slumber not long after.

~*~

The Citadel hadn't changed since Shepard had last been there. For some reason, part of her thought that everyone should have been aware of their great victory over the Collectors. Instead, their arrival brought the same bored-sounding docking clearance. She supposed she shouldn't have been too bothered about the lack of attention to their exploits, considering that Anderson had sent Kaidan out to investigate.

Shepard sat on the dockside, outside the Normandy's airlock, and watched people go by over in the public area at the end of their berth. She was there saying her farewells. Kasumi's had been brief and upbeat. The thief had pulled her into a hug and told her that she hoped they saw each other again, before bouncing away. She was going to ground, Shepard knew, planning to keep her head down to avoid those who might want the knowledge she had inherited from her lover. Only time would tell if she succeeded.

Thane was also leaving, and his departure was harder to take. Shepard hadn't realised that she had counted the softly spoken drell as a friend until she was faced with the possibility that she might not see him again.

"A year can be nothing but the blink of an eye," Thane told her. He held her hands loosely. "Or it can be an eternity. I hope for the latter, and that I will see you again before the end."

"If you ever need anything," she told him, urgently, "Please don't hesitate to contact me."

"I hope to be staying out of trouble. My son and I need to get to know one another again, and that will be much harder if we are getting up to, as you might say, mischief." He offered her a smile, and his fingers tightened over hers for a moment. "No matter what happens, I am here for you, siha, as long as I am alive. Do not forget that."

Shepard was usually reticent about hugging people, but she felt it was justified in this case.

Tali, of course, was staying aboard. The vas Normandy suffix said all it needed to about what she thought of her ship. Garrus and Grunt too. Jacob and Miranda might have had options, but both had chosen to stay with her, and in a moment that Shepard would deny to her final days as having made her well up, not a single one of the Cerberus—former Cerberus—crew had decided to leave, throwing their lot in with her as well. Even Hadley, who told her that the Normandy was the only family he had left, and he wasn't going to leave them now.

Jack had surprised her. When Shepard had asked her if she was planning to leave, she'd just snorted, and kicked back on her bunk. "What?" she'd said, "Just after I got this place setup the way I like it?"

Shepard hadn't argued, but she did wonder if maybe she hadn't gone crazy as well.

There had never been the possibility of Kaidan staying, though Shepard would have been lying if she'd claimed the thought had never crossed her mind.

"Come back to the Alliance," he said to her, as he stood on the docks, clad in the armour they'd picked him up in.

Shepard shook her head, leaning back slightly on the shipping crate she was sitting on. "That was never a tenable offer and you know it. They wouldn't take me now I've been associating with terrorists. Very bad PR."

"Amongst other things." He didn't look distressed by her refusal. He knew as well as she that he had to ask, and that she had to refuse. The two of them having sex solved nothing, but it did mean they could at least look each other in the eye again. He held out a small slip of flimsy between two fingers, and when she unfolded it, she read an address on Presidium Junction.

"Just in case," he told her, and cupped her face in his hands and kissed her thoroughly.

"You should go," she said, when they finally broke apart. "Before I knock you out and tie you to my bed."

He smiled, and kissed her once more, briefly. "Don't be a stranger, Shepard," he told her.

Kaidan left her sitting alone on the dockside to watch workers and civilians moving back and forth, unknowing and uncaring of the sorts of things that lurked further out in the galaxy. She was watching the meandering patterns of foot traffic, thinking of nothing in particular, when Miranda appeared at her shoulder. She'd changed out of her Cerberus outfit. Her new garb was no less figure-hugging than her previous, but it was a dark royal blue that looked less harsh than her usual affair. Mostly notably, it lacked insignia.

"Tali'Zorah's ripped out most of the lower decks," she said, when Shepard didn't immediately acknowledge her. "She sounded positively orgasmic at the prospect of rebuilding damaged systems from the ground up."

Shepard nodded slowly, then turned to look up at her 2iC. "Did I mention that you're an idiot for not having taken the Normandy to FTL to avoid a firefight?"

Miranda wrinkled her nose slightly. "Fine. Next time I'll leave you to get shot to death by crazy asari conspirators. I've always wanted my own ship, and your cabin's bigger than mine."

Shepard slid off the edge of the cargo box, landing heavily on her feet. She could feel the extra mass she carried with all her enhancements. She would never be called a featherweight, but somehow that thought didn't seem as dreadful as it had a few days ago. The headache that had been nagging her had receded, and while there was the shadow of the Reapers still looming over them, she almost felt like she could deal with it.

Strange how a good night's sleep could help one's resolve.

"Do you want to get coffee?" she asked, stretching, ignoring the way her spine popped.

Miranda looked at her in open surprise. After a moment, she visibly shook herself. "I... that is... sure. Of course."

"Great," Shepard said. "Bring your credit chip. You're paying, since you nearly broken my ship."

Miranda made a squawk of minor indignation, and Shepard, for the first time in a while, laughed in genuine humour. The Reapers would wait until tomorrow.

~*~

Epilogue: Wheels Within Wheels

~*~

"Councilman Anderson, please go in."

Anderson inclined his head politely to the asari councillor's personal secretary, sitting behind her desk. She'd been working for the councillor for as long as Anderson had been at the Citadel, but she showed as much polite disinterest in his existence as she had the day he'd first arrived. Inside the councillor's private office, there was a tea set laid out on a low table, and potted plants from a variety of worlds added colour and variety to an otherwise drab room. The councillor herself stood up from where she'd been kneeling at the table, holding out both hands to him.

"David," she greeted.

"Tyli, thank you for seeing me so promptly." He took both her hands holding them for the few seconds that was appropriate. As always, her skin felt slightly too warm to be natural.

Tyli wasn't her 'official' name, of course. Anderson wasn't even sure if it was the name she'd been born with, but she seemed to use it as a way to differentiate between her private and public personas. He'd done some reading that indicated this sort of naming convention was common in some asari cultures, but he'd never felt like it was appropriate to ask.

"I always have time for my fellow councillors," she said, gesturing that he should kneel opposite her at the table, before settling herself down again.

Anderson had known from the moment he'd joined the Council, even without Udina's coaching, that Tyli was the most important woman in the galaxy. She was the asari representative, the oldest of the spacefaring races. Her voice was the one which spoke for the Council, gave a voice and a face to their decisions, and given that she had achieved the position without being a Matriarch of her people said a great deal about the influence she wielded. Anderson had made special effort to gain her acquaintance, and while he also took the time to visit with the turian and salarian councillors, he made a special effort with her.

He was certain that she knew exactly what he was doing, but she had never called him on it, or refused him when he'd asked to see her. Anderson even thought that they rather could have been friends if the pressures of interstellar politics hadn't precluded that. They'd shared a surprising number of interests, he'd introduced her to jazz, and she had given him her daughter's recipe for a delicious asari variation on blackforest gateau.

Such things made moments like this, where he was forced to play politics with her, somewhat unpleasant.

Anderson set the OSD he'd brought with him on the table between them as she poured a thin and hot blue liquid into delicate clay cups, putting it down next to the sweetener bowl. If he let the conversation open with pleasant small talk, it would be all the more unpalatable to say what he had come to discuss. "That," he said, "Contains copies of information on exactly what Lesh T'Vann has been getting up to since she left the Council's service."

It wasn't, of course, the only OSD he'd received from Commander Alenko. The man had stood in his office still clad in his armour having come straight from his mission and having given Anderson a brief report. He had handed over the first OSD and as Anderson turned it over in his hands said,

"I managed to scan a copy of their database in before they shot up the console I was using to access their systems." Alenko shifted from foot to foot. "I haven't looked at it, obviously, but I'd imagine that there's some rather interesting material in there."

Alenko had then unsealed a pocket in his armour, usually used for storing extra ammo, and took out a second OSD, unlabelled. "And this I got from the Normandy." He turned it back and forth; its surface had refracted the uncomfortably bright light of the Citadel into a rainbow of colours. "Managed to divert the AI with some pathetically obvious attempts to brute-force their firewalls. While it was distracted, I copied their system files. It's all encrypted, of course, and I wouldn't try breaking that encryption unless it was on a standalone system, but since I didn't attempt any access, the AI didn't seem to pick up that I'd copied the data."

Alenko really was impressively adept with technology. The OSD, when Anderson had taken it, was still warm from lying so close to Alenko's body, under the hard outer shell of the armour.

"At a guess," Alenko continued, "I'd say that it probably has a lot of information about Cerberus operations, not to mention the rather impressive assembly of experimental and supposedly non-existent technology that Shepard has aboard the Normandy."

"Good work, Commander," Anderson had told him. "This information will be a great asset to the Alliance."

Alenko had nodded, his expression an impenetrable mask that gave no indication of what it might have cost him personally to get the data. "Thank you, sir," he'd said, neutrally.

No, Anderson had no intention of sharing the existence of that second desk with Tyli or his colleagues on the Council.

"Lesh T'Vann," Tyli said, affecting surprise, "I thought she'd vanished after the scandal of her refusal to let the matter of mythical creatures drop."

Anderson wasn't fooled for a second. "Lesh T'Vann is your sister," he said.

Tyli stiffened, all pretence of warmth suddenly dropping from her face. Suddenly, Anderson was sitting opposite a very old creature who'd managed to get to the most prestigious and politically powerful position in the galaxy. "I won't ask how you found that out," she said, acidly. "Considering that it's supposed to be confidential."

"You're right," he said. He raised his tea to his lips and sipped. It tasted like a lemon and pepper, with a hint of cinnamon apple in the aftertaste. It wasn't unpleasant, as far as non-human beverages went. "How I know that really isn't important, it's what it means. Lesh T'Vann didn't 'disappear', she was dispatched on assignment, wasn't she?"

"You shouldn't make accusations you can't substantiate. What purposes would I have for sending Lesh anywhere? She hasn't been seen in over a year, and a politician is hardly a deep cover spy or some such nonsense."

Anderson ignored the rebuttal, and continued. "Asari have always taken the long view in any situation, and I'm guessing that you decided that the risk of the Reapers being real was too genuine to ignore. So you asked Lesh T'Vann, your sister, to prepare a contingency plan. You probably didn't know exactly what she was doing. It's much easier to deny it when you genuinely don't know what she's doing. But you threw resources behind her. Money, ships, contacts in the scientific community to give her experimental weapons."

Tyli hadn't made any move to drink her tea. Her fingernails had paled, showing how tightly she was gripping the cup. Anderson pretended not to notice.

Tyli very carefully set the cup down on the table. She folded her hands in her lap and breathed slowly and deeply. Anderson had essentially just revealed that he could take her down in a single leaked story to the press. The people would tear her down, ruin her, the moment they realised that she was involved in a plot to kidnap vast numbers of sentients and that Reapers were in fact real.

Anderson knew exactly how much chaos such information would cause.

"What do you want?" she asked, every word bitten off tightly.

He could have asked for anything. He could have blackmailed her for years, or at least until she could concoct some way to remove him from his position. She might even decide to cut her losses and have him killed. It wouldn't have been unheard of in Council history, although such instances were supposedly just stories put around to subvert confidence in the ruling body.

"From you? Nothing."

Tyli narrowed her eyes. "You expect me to believe that?" she asked.

"The Reapers are real," Anderson told her, "We have the proof of that."

Tyli scoffed. "The word of a compromised, crazy Spec-"

He set down his cup with a thud and glowered at her. She subsided, looking rather sulkily like a child. She turned her head to look away.

"The Reapers are real," he repeated, "But we're not going to get anywhere by acting independently of each other. We can't hide information from each other. I know you and the others don't think I'm worthy of being included on certain decisions, but that's going to stop. We're going to have to work together from now on. In more ways than one."

Tyli took a deep breath and turned back towards him. "What are you suggesting?"

Anderson offered her a smile. "Lesh T'Vann's contingencies are still in place. That's fine as a last ditch attempt to ensure our survival. Survival isn't enough. I intend us to meet the Reapers and give them a fight they'll never forget."

Tyli raised her cup in salute. "Then," she said, "We have little time to waste."

He clinked his cup against hers.

~*~ End ~*~