Just a BioWare Fan

It suddenly dawned on me why BioWare shoved the ME2 love interests out the air lock, as it were. They couldn’t explain, otherwise, why they waited 95% of the entire timeline to leap back into bed with the Commander. I haven’t played my lone Garrus-mancer yet and I never romanced Tali so I don’t know how they handle that but if Thane, Jacob, or Miranda were part of the crew why on earth would they be anywhere but sharing Shepard’s cabin? Damn, I’m going to have to do some research on this.

It’s only been six months since any of the second game’s love interests saw the last of the Commander. Why wouldn’t Tali or Garrus be right back into it, especially if they were on the mission that landed Shep in jail in the first place? All of the “three years apart, you worked for Cerberus and I’m a loyal Alliance soldier” trust angst that Kaidan and Ashley have for (completely believable) excuses fail in the face of anyone that accompanied Shepard on the ME2 journey.

So they get Jacob a new woman, which is okay because it always seemed like a fling rather than a romance to me. They give Miranda massive family issues (and then massive internal injuries) that keep her away from the Normandy. And Thane? Thane they kill,

Some of My Best Friends Are Artificial

Dance I did, a wild and wooly, high-kicking celebration with Garrus while Mordin sang salarian show tunes for accompaniment. The shuttle pilot finally told us to pipe down because he couldn’t hear Joker over all the pounding and yelling.

Garrus’s mandibles were spread wide in what passed for a cheese-eating grin among the Turians and Mordin’s flat lips were pulled back to show his own teeth. We sat as quietly as we could for about twelve seconds and then I jumped up and started pacing. The deactivated Geth lay in a tumbled pile off to one side and I was itching to boot it up but most of my energy came from relief at feeling no scrabbling claws in my head.

The shuttle docked and we staggered out, dragging the Geth between us, and found half the crew milling around the shuttle bay, slightly dazed and euphoric. They’d all been suffering the same sorts of exploration from the Reaper and were at least as relieved as I was to have been so suddenly released.

War of the Words

The nature of the place wasn’t the only surprise Pragia had in store for us. Halfway in we found a freshly-shot varren. I tried not to think of Urz, all alone on violent Tuchanka without me, while Jack, already edgy from the revelation that she perhaps hadn’t been the worst-off kid in the galaxy, paced about raging. It got tougher when the wild dog-lizards started rushing us from dark corners and corridors.

We soon began running into mercenaries, as well. Miranda made half-hearted attempts to counsel us on control, more to prevent Jack from bringing the whole place down on our heads than actual training. I remembered to toss the occasional blast at someone between sniper shots but mostly I just pegged idiots in the head from behind cover. At that I’d had plenty of practice and Miranda barely noticed.

We passed down a hallway of cells that seemed to frustrate Jack even more. “What the hell?” she finally asked. “These cages are even smaller than mine.” Her entire memory, everything she’d believed about herself, had been undermined by what we’d found here. Instead of the most-abused victim of Cerberus she’d been protected from the absolute worst because she’d been the strongest all along.

Some Powerful Therapy

Kaidan and I finished eating and he tucked everything away in that clever basket. It had begun to get dark by the time he finished and he came over to sit close, pulling me into him. We watched the sun set over the far hills, the lake turning a dozen unlikely colors, and a sense of unreality washed over me.

In all my life, I’d never known something like this. My defenses had dropped, even with my heart so exposed. It wasn’t that Kaidan would be with me forever, it was that he would never use my emotions against me. I trusted him never to exploit this weakness, something utterly new and wonderful. And so I sat with him, the most content I’d ever been, watching the sun go down on Horizon.

There were some other things soon after that that you don’t need to know about in detail. Suffice it to say that the springy grass under the blanket made for a comfortable surface and that we spent quite some time working off those sandwiches.

The Sins of the Mother

Jacob and I saw the women and what few men could be coaxed out of hiding into the shuttle the transport had sent. All of them were crying and some seemed as much afraid as relieved. I imagine nine years of chemically-induced forgetfulness would make any new and strange experience a little scary.

The woman who’d given me the datapad wrung my hand awkwardly, not quite able to shake it normally but knowing some such gesture was appropriate. It gave me hope that they could recover. “You brought us the sky,” she said, “just like he promised.”

I nodded solemnly at her. “I will remember,” she said insistently. Then she turned and shuffled up the ramp. She lifted her hand briefly before disappearing inside and I realized I didn’t even know if she knew her own name any more than I did.

All Dressed Up and Somewhere to Go

On the way across the galaxy I had time to get into an argument with Miranda about removing the Cerberus logo from the shuttle. “Look,” I said for the fifth time, “we’re undercover. A badass pirate isn’t going to be flying around in a shuttle with that freaking logo on it.”

“This is Cerberus property, Shepard,” she said, crossing her arms and cocking her hip. “The logo stays.”

I cursed colorfully for a bit. “I’m in charge, damn it, and the logo goes.”

We stood in the cargo hold and the crew I’d detailed to paint over the thing all sat around watching the show. I gestured at the shuttle and they crawled to their feet, waiting to see if she would try to countermand my orders.

Fool Me Once, Shame on You The afternoon went as badly as I’d suspected it would. We popped out of FTL travel and cruised to the coordinates we’d received. Garrus and I stood behind Joker, staring as the ship came into view. All of us recognized its design. Indeed it looked identical to the one that had been abducting colonists on Horizon which had been, coincidentally, the very same one that had killed me two and a half years earlier.

I heard Garrus growl beside me and I put a hand on his shoulder in agreement. No matter how comparatively well things had turned out so far we still had a score to settle with the bastards. They’d wrecked our first team, the one that hadn’t included thieves and liars and turncoats. The bastards had killed some of my closest friends and destroyed the only home some of us had had. If I could find a way to blow up that pile of crap I was going to do it today, no matter what TIM wanted.

Miranda and Jack met me at the shuttle and we flew over to land on an outcropping of sorts that I presumed served as a cargo bay. We worked our way in cautiously. Along the way we found piles of rotting corpses, colonists discarded like table scraps, that made all three of us gag in our helmets. I angrily considered the thousands upon thousands of pods stacked throughout the corridors and lining the walls of vast chambers.

Back in the Saddle Again

Miranda started scolding like a magpie as soon as she was within finger-shaking distance. Somehow I had to find a way to bribe EDI to quit announcing my arrivals and departures so people stopped ambushing me like this. I really, really needed a nap.

“Where the hell have you been, Shepard?” Miranda started. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Garrus’s head snap around at her tone. I decided to let him take point on calling her a bitch while I stayed reasonable and found out why she was so mad in the first place. I could hear his rumbling growl and had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from showing my amusement. He couldn’t stand her and I figured she was going to push his buttons if he took my side…when he took my side.

I smiled sweetly at her and cocked my head to the right. “Whatever business is it of yours? Have I missed a planned event?” Kelly would have envied the perky innocence in my voice.

Miranda was pacing the CIC when we got back, anxious to head for the planned rendezvous with Niket, the old friend who’d arranged the relocation. The fact that we had a full hour to travel the five hundred feet to our destination mattered nothing to her but I had to eat something or I was going to fall down halfway there. Thane and Jack came with me and I hit up Gardner for a mess of nachos.

I had been kidding, not expecting he'd have the ingredients, but he produced an enormous platter filled with some sort of green chips, beans, and all of the trimmings. I offered to promote him then and there but he declined with a proud smile. “Just keep enjoying my cooking so much and I’m happy right here,” he said.

I did a little spicy dance of thanks and ferried the whole pile over to the table where we fell on them with a will, tasty Elcor cheese flying and sour cream from the milk of who knew what creature decorating the corners of our mouths. Thane said he’d never had them before but that he would again be requesting a plate. I was pleased to introduce him to some Earth cuisine, of a sort, and asked him to have Gardner fix us something Drell enjoyed later.

Tall, Green, and Handsome

Having had the wind so thoroughly taken out of my sails by Miranda’s unexpected capitulation, I decided to try a different tack. “I need to know why you did this, Miranda. Did you change something to give me biotic abilities or were you testing to see if the implant would work without them? If you’ve done things to my body that you haven’t told me, now is the time to come clean.”

Conflicting loyalties showed clearly on her face. Sure, Cerberus had been home to her but I was in control of whether anyone went along to protect her sister from the mercenaries their father had hired. No matter how skilled or determined she may be she knew she couldn’t do it alone. It felt pretty sleazy to use that leverage but knowing that I was going to go with her anyway made it bearable.

“It’s a standard L5 implant,” she said after a few minutes’ consideration. “Since the whole point of the project was to bring you back, personality and quirks alike, we didn’t dare try gene therapy to add biotics but we wanted to see if someone without powers could still use the device. Without specific action from me it should not have begun working. You’ve fought dozens of biotics in the past few weeks and you’ve spent plenty of time with Jack. What happened?”

Oh, for the Love Of...

“And I thought my training was intensive,” Kaidan said later that night as we were eating again. We’d been hard at my practice for two full days. My head throbbed from the unaccustomed effort. We took another nap and continued working on my newfound biotic abilities, including generating and funneling my own energy without running around like a loon. The fact that I had no innate abilities made everything harder, despite the juice supplied by the L5 in my head.

“You’ll never be really powerful,” Kaidan told me, “but with the implant you can at least create a decent barrier or knock down someone’s shields to give yourself an advantage.” I still intended to have it out with Miranda over putting the damned thing in my brain and then apparently just hoping it didn’t get activated. I hoped she’d enjoy the surprise when I knocked her over with a blast.

Another few hours and a hefty snack later, Kaidan decreed that I was ready to start shielding myself from the energy that biotics naturally put out and from absorbing too much when one of them touched me. He explained how he had learned but that everyone had to create a personal method that worked because differences in brain chemistry and structure made no one technique effective for everyone.

“They’re alive!” I yelled as the others piled through the doors behind me. As I watched in horror, Chambers’s face became blotched and the skin began to peel away. The fluid in her pod turned a frothy, bloody pink and she beat at the port with hands from which the flesh had sloughed down to bone. “Get them out,” I screamed frantically.

We hammered and pried at the pods on the floor as the eight plugged into the network of tubes along the wall flushed obscenely behind us. I didn’t know who had been in the other seven pods, didn’t want to know. I may have scorned Yeoman Chambers’s attempts at manipulating my life but nothing she could ever have done could have merited the torture and dissolution that she’d suffered. I saw Garrus help Dr. Chakwas stand shakily and would have started crying if tears hadn’t already been streaming down my face since the moment I saw that at least some of my crew was still alive.

We opened the pods that we could reach, finding twelve more of my crew and seventeen colonists. Empty pods hung across the vast walls and across the ceiling. Hundreds of them filled each of the distant outcroppings that dotted the chamber. There was no way to tell if those were empty and no way to reach them directly, beyond the fact that the Normandy couldn’t carry all of them even if we could release the prisoners. My heart ached as I realized that anyone still alive in this chamber would have to be left behind. I wanted to smash each of those pods, preferably with the face of a Collector, and save every human on this station but we simply couldn’t. They were as doomed to die as if we’d never come.

The hull was intact as we approached the ship. None of us was prepared for the destruction we found inside. We stared at the remnants of the cargo, what had been secure enough not to get blown out of the hold when EDI had opened the doors. I made my way through the halls and rooms, finding only two of my own crew, both dead before the decompression had gotten to them, as Garrus and I supported Thane on the way to the med bay with the hope that we could do something for him.

But Dr. Chakwas was gone and Mordin had his hands full just running triage on the team’s injuries. We got Thane settled into a bed, back on oxygen as dry and pure as it came. I wanted nothing more than to stay beside his bed, stroking his forehead and holding his hand. He shooed me away, however, speaking calmly despite the rumbling in his chest.

“Joker needs you now,” he said, “more than I do.” I wanted to argue but I knew that we had to go straight after the Collectors. I would be damned if I would let them have my entire crew, regardless of their nominal employer. These were my people. I kissed his fingers and headed for the bridge.

Getting to Know You

We wended our way across the galaxy once more, stopping to check out distress signals and perform other research projects for the Alliance and Cerberus. We dropped probes on twenty or more planets along the way and generally had a leisurely journey. Until I heard more from TIM about how to chase the Collectors we were mostly chasing our tails. I decided to take a little time on the way to learn more about my crew and the members of my team that I’d mostly ignored. Since I wanted to work out some of the weapons upgrades we’d picked up on the Citadel I started with Jacob.

As I chatted with him about maximizing damage and restocking ammo for our power weapons I tried to draw him out about his history as well. He told me he’d been rated an M6 before he’d left the Alliance. That was pretty impressive. My own N7 ranking was the highest you could get before they classified your entire existence and made you an O-Zero.

O0 meant that they’d mark your record KIA, deny you were ever born, and may eliminate any living relatives who would swear differently. A lot about the O0 program didn’t make sense. That wouldn’t have been a problem for me but the few other N7s I met were a bit concerned about walking that fine line in job performance: if you do too well you disappear forever and your mom gets axed but if you don’t do well enough you get busted down in rank or a court martial or you die from sucking at your job, any of which might kill your mother with grief, if I understood this family thing correctly.

Thane was as slow and thoughtful in kissing me as he was in so much else. I luxuriated in the feel of his mouth on mine. But when my hands began to wander too far afield he stopped me. "Siha, are you sure?" he asked. I glanced up at him, prepared to laugh, but his face stopped me. He looked concerned, tentative. I ran my finger across his lower lip, giving myself a moment to seriously consider the question. The hell of it was that I couldn't, as much as I wanted to, say yes.

I heaved a massive sigh. "No." Thane knew me too well. I may have decided to put Kaidan on the back burner, if not in the fridge entirely, but that didn't mean that I had gotten over him. They say the best way to do that was to get under someone else but it was still too soon. I wrapped my arms around Thane again and snuggled in close. As badly as I wanted to be with him I simply wasn't ready. "I seem to spend half my time thanking you, Thane," I said, "right after I apologize."

He held me close and I lay still, listening to his heartbeat and his not-quite-right breathing. "We need not rush," he said calmly. "This will suffice for now."

Introductions

Once upon a time I died. Let me tell you, that hurt. What hurt even more was coming back to life. When a scary-smart, cat-suited, mad scientist woman reconstitutes you from dehydrated space debris and screws ninety percent of your bones back together, that should come as no surprise. To be fair, that part didn’t hurt because I had no working nerves or brain function. It was the part where I was alive and awake, with holes in my skin and my bones still knitting, that really killed me, so to speak.

I woke up in a blinding white room with some woman on a loudspeaker telling me to get up and grab an empty gun. Except for a few crazy glimpses, the last thing I remembered was my ship getting sliced to bits by unknown parties. I’d shoved everyone into the escape pods, been slammed into a bulkhead, and then floated out into open space with two blown seals in my suit. Needless to say, waking up was the last thing I expected. I presumed that I was in some Alliance facility, as that’s for whom I was working when I died. I presumed wrong.

It turns out that some psychos whose nefarious experiments I'd repeatedly foiled had gotten hold of my body and resurrected me. If you don't think that's creepy you try it once. They figured I'd be so grateful not to be orbiting junk any more that I'd happily go to work for them. The kinky mad scientist was named Miranda Lawson and she worked for these goons as part of an organization named Cerberus. How a three-headed dog made sense as the name for a bunch of freaks who wanted humanity to rule the galaxy is still beyond me.