Those Who Strove With Gods

by Shisumo

Summary:

Six months after the Battle of London, Jack and Miranda are trying to build a life together and heal the scars of war. All that changes, however, when a chance to help track down the Normandy appears, to save their lost friends - but one that comes with some major strings. Moreover, someone is hunting the remaining survivors of Commander Shepard's team, something that may not only threaten their lives, but also presage the descent of the galaxy into a new and very different war...

Chapter 1: Jack

Jack Lawson did not cry.

It was practically a trademark at this point, as much a part of her as her tattoos. She didn’t cry, and hadn’t since she was a young girl, right after she’d escaped from the Teltin facility. At the moment of her worst despair, when the shuttle she’d stolen had stalled out halfway between Pragia and the mass relay, out of fuel and with no way to get more, everything that had just happened had collapsed down on her: the riot, her fight to freedom, the euphoria of escape, the despair of realizing she had no idea where to go next and no idea how to survive long enough to to get there anyway. It hit her, all at once, and she had slumped from the pilot’s chair onto the floor beneath the console and sobbed until her eyes ached and her throat was raw.

That was the last time, though. She hadn’t cried when the slavers found her drifting shuttle, or when they’d done what they’d done to her afterward. She hadn’t cried when she’d been sold, or when she escaped again, or any of the many, many times afterward she’d been betrayed or beaten. She hadn’t even cried when she’d gone back to Pragia with Shepard and Miranda and blown Teltin sky-high, nor after the screaming match she’d gotten into with Miranda afterwards, when Miranda called her a “mistake” - though she'd wanted to, and at the time could not imagine why. She hadn’t given in, though. Jack didn’t cry.

She hadn’t cried then, and she wasn’t crying now. She wanted to, though.

This time she knew why.

Her fingers traced out letters carved into cold stone: JAMES PRANGLEY. Just the name, nothing else. Too many had died during the invasion for their grave markers to be more. Carver’s was on his right, Donaldson on his left; more flanked those, and filled the rows behind him. Her students. Her kids. The ones she’d failed.

The wind gusted, sending flecks of snow into her cheek and down the back of her jacket. She should have worn something warmer, but her look too was part of her trademark, and there wasn’t any point to the tats if they couldn’t be seen. Besides, being cold… felt right. It fit her mood. Her guilt.

The snow crunched behind her, and she felt Miranda’s fingers on her scalp, caressing the buzzed sides of her hair the way she only did when they were alone. Jack leaned into the gesture for just a moment, but was not comforted by it. Not today. Miranda had told her several times that her students had died as soldiers, as heroes; Kahlee Sanders had said it too, when they’d briefly spoken at the memorial for Anderson and Shepard. “They made their choice, and never regretted it,” Sanders told her. And then, as though she had no idea she was twisting the knife, added, “They wanted to make you proud.”

They didn’t understand. Well, Miranda did, a little. She disagreed, but she understood. But to Jack, the failure was crystal clear: survival was winning. Dying was losing. Pure and simple. She’d trained them, supported them, championed them to Sanders and Hackett as ready - and she’d gotten them killed. Every single one, excepting only Rodriguez, which was itself so ironic that it made her head spin. Somehow, Rodriguez had just come out of everything just missing an arm. The cybernetics were already healed and she was working on a recovery project in Sao Paolo. Miranda had suggested they take a hopper to go see her instead of coming here today, even pointing out that it was summer in Brazil, but Jack had shrugged it off.  This was where she belonged, freezing her ass off in the London winter and driving home the truth of her failure. Again and again and again, until her fingers and lips were turning blue and Miranda all but had to drag her back to the car.

Jack had tried to tell Miranda she didn’t need to come with her on these trips, that she could stay warm in their flat, and Miranda had nodded agreement and come anyway, all without saying a word. Miranda was difficult to argue with, impossible sometimes; when she’d decided to do something, she did it, and just refused to discuss it with anyone who disagreed. It always amused Jack to realize how incredibly rare it was for Miranda to truly lose her temper, and how their blistering fury at one another after Pragia had, in its own way, been the start of their courtship. Miranda’s iron self-control had cracked; Jack had gotten under her skin, and she’d stayed there.

She thumbed the wedding band on her left hand as Miranda lifted the car into the air, setting course for their apartment. It had taken a long time - most of a year, really - for Jack to finally realize why Miranda’s words after Pragia had stung so much. It was at Shepard’s party, the one the Spectre threw in her new place just before the Citadel was blown to hell by the Reapers. The party was the first time Jack and Miranda had seen one another since Jack had left the Normandy for Grissom Academy, and it was… awkward, to say the least. Until she decided to deal with the awkwardness the way she usually did, anyway, which was bull straight into it. Miranda was behind Shepard’s bar, and Jack dug up her most shit-eating grin as she strode up, jumping into the bar stool with a cocky, “Three shots of tequila, cheerleader, plus whatever you’re having.” Miranda laughed, but she poured. And then added three shots of tequila for herself as well. The cutting remarks and sniping started almost at once, a familiar dance they both knew well. Jack was certain she could drink the prissy cheerleader under the table, perfect genes or no, and was looking forward to seeing Miranda drop - until Shepard wandered up, smiling like a fucking cat full of canary, and asked if they were going to kiss.

“I mean, this is all just sexual tension, right?” the Spectre beamed, all wide-eyed innocence. “Two powerful biotics, forceful personalities, confident in their sexuality…” There was a "so get on with it" gesture with her hands, then - with Miranda and (though she hated to admit it) Jack both sputtering - the Spectre swaggered off, still smug as shit.

Something changed, though. An hour or so later, Jack found herself telling Miranda that she had fantastic tits (which was true, to say nothing of her ass) and thinking a lot about how much it had hurt her when Miranda said she was a mistake. Miranda had asked if they were going to hug, and Jack reflexively fired back a “You wish,” but even she knew how unsteady she sounded. The whole thing was uncomfortable. She tried to push the thoughts away, climbing onto the dining table to dance and lose her head in the music. Unfortunately, it turned out to be just about impossible to get lost in the beat with a quarian general and a human comm specialist shouting the periodic table at one another on either side of her, and a turian vigilante egging them both on. And that was before Shepard started trying to dance.

Eventually she gave up, heading back to the bar to pour another round or three for herself. She saw Tali stagger out of the kitchen toward the bathroom, and she spared a moment’s sympathy for the young engineer before downing another drink. A few moments later, Garrus and Traynor meandered into view, trash-talking one another over video games or some shit. And then Williams and Vega, followed shortly by Shepard and T’Soni, headed upstairs, both couples falling over one another and practically screaming “we’re about to fuck our brains out” to the entire apartment. They looked happy. They looked horny. Jack realized she was grinding her teeth and ducked beneath the bar for another bottle.

When she came up, Miranda was standing there.

Wordlessly, Jack poured them both another round of tequila shots. Jack did the first one, but Miranda hesitated, lifting the glass but not throwing it back, just turning it in her hands. “Jack,” she finally said in that absurdly flawless Aussie accent, “I feel I owe you an apology.” Jack just stared at her. Miranda saying she was sorry was like seeing a tiger just shrug off its stripes - no, to have the stripes transform into butterflies and fly off. It was just impossible, far enough out there to make Jack briefly wonder if someone had put something in her drink… or if she had actually, finally lost her mind. “It wasn’t just Cerberus that was wrong about you. I was wrong about you. I once… I once told you that you were a mistake,” Miranda went on after it was clear Jack wasn’t going to ask. “It was untrue and unfair. You’ve been an invaluable aid to Shepard’s cause and… and… a reliable ally on the battlefield.”

Jack almost choked. “A reliable ally on the battlefield?” she repeated. “Seriously?”

Now, finally, Miranda did toss back the shot, and a second one too. “No. That’s… not what I meant to say. The truth is, Jack, you and I are far too much alike, and those similarities make it difficult for me to maintain my equilibrium around you.”

“What do you mean?” Jack asked. She wondered if she should be offended by being told she was too much like the Cerberus cheerleader. Wait. She wasn't sure ? The very idea should have made her threaten to smear the walls with the other woman again. What was wrong with her?

“Surely you’ve realized how much we have in common,” Miranda replied, swallowing the third shot as deliberately as the first two. “Neither of us had ordinary childhoods. Both of us were projects, not children, tools meant to be used for a purpose. Both of us were… designed... and shaped to fulfill that purpose.” She paused and looked Jack straight in the eye for the first time since she’d said she wanted to apologize. “Both of us owe almost everything we are to the origins we hate.”  Carefully, then, she slid onto the barstool, letting out a sigh. “The truth is… when I said you were a mistake, I might as well have been talking about myself. Perhaps I was, even.”

And then Jack opened her mouth, and the least likely words in the fucking history of the galaxy came tumbling out. “Do you want to have dinner sometime?”

Miranda blinked, more than once, and even opened her mouth a couple times before she at last managed to say something. “Are you asking me on a date?” she said, sounding somewhat faint.

“Yeah,” Jack answered, still wondering what the fuck she was doing. “That’s what people do, right? Regular people? They dress up, they go to a restaurant or some shit, they kiss, they fuck, they live happily ever after? That’s what people do?”

“I… think that’s correct, yes,” replied Miranda. Her eyes were wide.

Jack nodded impatiently. “Then yes, that’s what I’m asking. Do you want to do all that with me? The dinner first, anyway,” and fuck if she wasn’t suddenly terrified that Miranda was going to say no, that she’d opened her mouth and exposed the worst fucking weakness imaginable and Miranda was going to go straight for the thro-

“Yes,” Miranda said. “I would like that very much.”

And they had, a couple days later. And again, a couple days after that. The first time had been at a fancy-schmancy Citadel restaurant, all china plates and gold-rimmed champagne flutes, and Jack had insisted on paying, because she hadn’t really touched her pay since starting at Grissom and because Miranda was used to that life and Jack had wanted to prove she could have class too, when she wanted. The second time had been in Miranda’s apartment, where she’d cooked them dinner - and not only could Miranda cook, but she was good at it, and when had Daddy’s spoiled little princess ever had to learn how to cook for herself? - and Jack had not gone home that night, nor for the remaining two nights of her leave. Though she’d never been one to dismiss the potential for biotic abilities in bed, biotic users themselves are rare and she’d never slept with another one until Miranda… and Miranda had as much imagination as she did. She’d taught Jack a thing or two, and the fact that Jack had done the same for Miranda didn’t quite soothe her ego all the way.

Fuck, the sex was good.

But then they’d had to split, Jack back to her kids and Miranda off to recruit some other ex-Cerberus agents to join Shepard’s massive alliance. When they’d gone their separate ways, Jack hadn’t known if that would be it for them or not. But the very next night Miranda had sent her a private message and she’d been exceptionally clear that she wanted more of Jack. Quite a bit more, and she’d been pretty specific about it too. Jack still replayed that message on occasion, when one of their jobs pulled them away from the other for a night or two.

For maybe a week or so, Jack was… happy. Really and truly and deeply happy. It was the weirdest fucking thing in the world, because she’d never felt happy like that outside of a firefight, and this… it just didn’t go away. It was like the best high she’d ever been on, and she couldn’t stop grinning, and it was Miranda of all people, and seriously, what the fuck? Her students started to worry about her.

For a week, things were amazing. Then the Reapers hit the Citadel.

They actually dragged the thing off, activating some kind of mass effect drive no one had known was inside it (well, Shepard had known, and Anderson, and most of Shepard’s crew, but no one had listened, because fuck politicians) and sending it through its own mass relay to the Sol system, and then to Earth. The Reaper fleets had broken off all across the galaxy, massive withdrawals, all falling back to Earth. To the Citadel, really, but it was the same thing at that point. Jack and her kids were given orders to prep to follow them, ready for the big battle they’d all been working toward, ready to watch Shepard pull off one more fucking miracle the way she always did. Miranda was headed there too, and Jack remembered thinking how little she was looking forward to Shepard finding out about her and Miranda. Because of course, Shepard had been right about them. She was right far too often, honestly. It was one of her most annoying traits, right up there with the speeches.

Oh, the fucking speeches. It was always a shock to hear Shepard make throwing your life into the meat grinder sound not just noble but like an actual good idea. Fucking bonkers. But if Jack had been really, really honest with herself, she would have admitted she could have used one of those speeches right around then too. But instead, she and the kids dropped into London, and she found herself actually giving one of those damn speeches instead. It sounded like the worst corny bullshit she’d ever spouted, but the kids ate it up. They’d charged out into the ruins of the city, eager to fight, eager to win it all, just the way she’d taught them. They’d charged out… and they’d died.

Jack’s lip twisted as she felt the stab of her failure drive into her gut again. She hadn’t spoken for the whole drive - she rarely did, after one of these visits - and Miranda had been content to stay silent as well, just brushing Jack’s knee on occasion with her free hand to remind her she was there. The next time she did it, Jack impulsively caught the hand, squeezed it, hoping the gratitude would come through where her words would not. Still watching the traffic, Miranda did not look at her - but she smiled, and her answering squeeze sent pulses of warmth and affection through Jack’s entire body.

They reached the apartment building where their flat was. Originally 50 or 100 stories high, the building now ended in a jagged break just twelve stories up. Of course that meant the roof pad was long gone, but the rubble had been cleared away around it enough to make a rough parking area. Cars were in scarce supply anyway, frankly, and even two heroes of the Reaper War, close allies of the great Commander Shepard, only merited one between them. Most of the parking area was empty.

They climbed out and began the trek up the stairs to their flat on the fourth floor. The building had power, but working lifts were very much another matter. Both women enjoyed the ascent most of the time; they were each, in their own way, fairly dedicated exercise and fitness enthusiasts, and Miranda in particular often ran the entire length of the stairwell, all twelve floors up and down, as part of her workout. Now, though, it was Jack who took the lead, a sudden burst of angry energy propelling her up the stairs. It happened a lot when she thought about her kids. She had little experience with sadness, loss, or grief, but anger was an old, dear friend. Anger she knew. Anger she could handle.

Miranda let her pull ahead, giving her a little space, so Jack was already stepping into the apartment when Miranda reached the top of the stairs. It wasn’t large or particularly well-appointed, just three rooms plus the bath. Two of those were intended as bedrooms, though only one was being used as such; the other was Miranda’s home office. If Jack had to do paperwork, which was depressingly often, she usually just did it sitting on the couch with her omnitool. Miranda, however, liked the formality of a desk with a terminal on it for work and remote meetings.

Jack had taken a job helping to set up crash-course biotic teaching programs around the planet. She’d flatly refused to actually teach students again, not after what had happened to her kids, but she was arguably the best expert on Earth for practical application and development of biotic talents and the Alliance wasn’t about to let that knowledge go to waste. She knew what could be taught fast, what needed to be learned slow, and how to safely get new biotic students into the field in the shortest time possible. Biotic abilities were huge advantages in recovery efforts, so the Alliance’s needs were insatiable and Jack knew how to best meet them. Accordingly, she had taken her own lesson plans from Grissom, a pile of notes largely unintelligible to anyone but her, and started working to turn them into something someone else could understand. She was advising on training facilities too, as well as testing standards to determine when someone was ready for the field. That last bit had made her wary, but these ki- these new recruits weren’t being trained to fight. Just to help rebuild.

Miranda, on the other hand, was organizing logistics for reconstruction projects across Europe, handling a job that would probably have been overwhelming for any three other people and doing it with what looked to Jack like almost casual ease. Earth was still technically under martial law, but the Alliance was scrambling to turn local authority back over to its national governments and put responsibility for rebuilding on them with it. Most wanted it badly, were eager to reassert their sovereignty, but the damage done by the Reapers to Earth's infrastructure was almost incalculable. Miranda’s insider/outsider position with regard to the Alliance put her in an excellent place to help smooth the handoffs and guarantee the flow of resources did not falter between the two. It was the sort of thing that would have bored Jack to tears if it didn’t actually drive her insane, but she knew it was important, and Miranda did it well. It felt weird, but Jack couldn’t deny she was proud of her wife. She’d never felt anything like that before she’d started teaching her kids. It was still something she was getting used to.

Having any kind of steady, long-term relationship was itself something that she was still getting used to. After the assault on the Reaper beam, while Jack was still in the hospital, Miranda had come to see her. Up to that point, no one had been willing to tell her anything other than, “It’s over,” but Miranda laid everything out: the firing of the Crucible, the disappearance of the Normandy , Anderson’s death. And, though she’d worked around it for a while, what had happened to Shepard.  Dead, apparently, but in her place… a thing : an AI, the Citadel, the Reapers, something else besides, or maybe all of them at once. No one knew for sure. All anyone could say for certain was that something calling itself “Shepard” was in apparent control of the Reapers, having issued a message promising peace and safety to the people of the galaxy shortly after the Crucible fired. It sounded utterly horrifying to Jack. It was actually a small relief to think that T’Soni, lost wherever she was, still remained blissfully ignorant of the digital monster now claiming her lover’s face and name. Whatever it was, it was already working to rebuild the mass relays, the ones destroyed in the Crucible’s firing, but no one seemed to trust it. Jack was in firm agreement with that attitude. She didn’t really have a problem with AIs - Legion had been fine, if boring, and she’d actually liked EDI - but Reapers were never going to be okay with her. She would never believe Shepard would have had anything to do with them either.

Miranda had told her about her kids, too, about how none except Rodriguez had been saved, and that had driven crazy, Shepard-masquerading killbots right out of her mind. Miranda had managed to stay away from the worst of the fighting, and what wounds she’d taken hadn’t been bad enough to justify treatment, not among all the critical casualties. So she’d been able to come see Jack, sitting with her, waiting while she healed. She’d been Jack’s emissary to Rodriguez too, since Jack couldn’t go herself. When Jack was released, it was back to the flat Miranda had found that she went, and stayed. Somehow Miranda had even tracked Eezo down and brought him to her place too, an invasion of Jack’s personal territory that normally would have made her explode but instead just seemed… sweet. (God she had it so fucking bad.) She found out the first time she’d walked in the door and Eezo almost knocked her on her ass jumping on her. She’d honestly thought the overeager varren was dead or disappeared somewhere in the London ruins, but miracle-worker that she was, somehow Miranda had found him. 

As guard varren went, he made an excellent doorstop; she found him sleeping under their bed as Miranda came in behind her. She decided to let him sleep. She went back to the main room, where one corner served as a kind of kitchenette: a counter, a tiny stove and fridge. It reminded her of Gardner’s old station on the Normandy , though at least he’d had a counter on either side. Still, it worked just fine for making coffee, and for holding a couple bottles she picked from to make hers Irish. She handed a mug over to Miranda, who was watching her with carefully-disguised concern. That fact that Jack could see it at all meant she was intended to; Miranda was far too good a liar for it to be anything else. She was letting Jack know she was worried, but leaving open the option of pretending there was no reason to be.

Six months ago, Jack would not have understood that. But living together had changed things. She’d learned.

It had been… uneven… at first. Neither of them really did relationships very well, and Miranda had confessed ruefully that this was really her first ever attempt at one. “I cannot imagine anyone I would have chosen less to try it with than you,” she’d chuckled, which Jack had to admit was a fair cop. Hell, the idea of permanently shacking up with someone as rigid as Miranda, even without the whole Cerberus thing? Fucking insane. But whatever it was between them, it didn’t go away. It wasn’t just the sex, either. She’d realized on their first date that, when she wasn’t busy hating MIranda anymore, she actually liked her. A lot! It was kind of horrifying. But Miranda was funny, in a sharp, sarcastic way that Jack envied. She was clever, with a penchant for poetic revenge that Jack frankly admired. She was smart, worldly, knowledgeable about an astonishing number of topics from the brutally violent to the classically artistic, and, once she’d stopped being condescending, she showed Jack some things Jack would have never have found on her own - some symphonies she liked, for example. Miranda was into a whole range of orchestral music, but some of it got pretty dark and edgy, and she’d correctly guessed a few that fit Jack’s sensibilities. Jack even found herself growing to like some of the lighter ones, especially a couple that reminded her of, well, Miranda herself.

The reverse turned out to be true too, in some ways. Miranda seemed constantly frustrated by the boxes she’d lived in for her whole life, but didn’t really seem to know quite how to break out of them. Breaking out of boxes was practically Jack’s specialty, though, and she was enjoying tutoring the cheerleader in the finer points of raising hell. Miranda had some ink now, though not where it showed in public. She’d asked Jack for help with the design, but Jack had refused outright. “It’s gotta be something that’s you, cheerleader,” she’d explained. “Especially your first time out. It has to mean exactly what you want it to mean.”  She’d told some of the stories behind her own tats, and was starting to think she might one day tell them all, something she would never have believed before all this. Miranda was fascinated. A couple months ago, Jack had finally realized that the one and only act of real rebellion Miranda had ever done was escaping her father all those years ago. She was hungry for more and Jack was more than willing to offer some tips.

“So if you hated your dad so much, why’d you keep his name?” she’d asked her one night. They were both sweat-soaked and naked, lying tangled together in their bed. Jack was lightly tracing Miranda’s new tattoo with a finger. It was a stylized bird, very raptor-like with beak and talons, rising up from a few tongues of flame. She’d gotten it done low on her stomach, a decent-sized piece, probably 20 centimeters across. Jack was quietly proud that her girlfriend had not gone for something as soulless as a butterfly on her ankle or some shit. Jack thought she knew what it was supposed to represent, but she hadn’t asked directly. Wasn’t her place to dig for something like that.  Asking about Lawson’s name was as close as she’d come, or planned to.

Miranda sighed, looking up at the ceiling. “At first,” she admitted, “changing it just didn’t occur to me. Of course I used aliases during my escape and later, during my work for Cerberus, but they were always just that to me: aliases. It wasn’t until I finally met Oriana in person that I realized there was more to it than that. It was a connection to her, to the bond we share.”

Jack frowned, going up on an elbow to look down at Miranda. “But that’s not Ori’s last name,” Jack pointed out. She’d never technically met Miranda’s sister and only seen her once, across the length of a spaceport terminal promenade. Miranda talked about her a lot, though. Taken on those conversations alone, one could easily be forgiven for thinking Ori walked on water. Or maybe flew around on angel wings.

Nodding, Miranda said, “It’s not. But it is an indication of our shared origin. Changing it would have felt like a repudiation of that. And now, of course, I don’t have to share it with him. Whatever being a Lawson means, it’s in my hands to choose.”

Letting out a grunt, Jack flopped back down. “At least you have a last name,” she grumbled. 

Miranda blinked. “What about ‘Nought?’ It was all over your hospitalization paperwork.” 

Jack rolled her eyes. “That’s not a real name, and everybody knows it. Especially these snotty English bastards. I picked it when I was fifteen, and it seemed real clever then, but it’s gotten kinda old.” She glanced over to see Miranda now up on her elbow, studying her. “I think T’Soni knew what name I was born with, but I never got around to asking her. Now…” she trailed off. Something popped into her head, and suddenly her mouth went dry.  She felt her lips move, fought to keep the words from coming out, failed entirely.

“So… how about if I just take yours?”

Miranda frowned, then her eyes went wide as she understood what Jack was saying. It was too soon, Jack knew. Dating less than six months, living together for four, it was too soon, too fast. She could see in her eyes that Miranda knew it too, could practically hear her voice: “This is just a psychological response to trauma, the human need for affirmation of continuity in the aftermath of an unspeakable tragedy,” and on and on. Jack knew all of that, and right in that moment, couldn’t fucking care less. Some part of her was screaming that she’d lost her mind, that Miranda could only hurt her if she did this, and Jack discovered she didn’t care about that either. Maybe she had lost her mind.

She rolled out of the bed, knelt naked on the floor, took Miranda’s hand as the other woman sat up, still staring. “Miranda Lawson,” Jack asked, “will you marry me?” Fuck she was beautiful, sitting on the edge of the bed, the sheet fallen away entirely, powder-blue eyes fixed directly on Jack’s own. Perfect, designed to be by her father, and damned if the abusive, traitorous, insane, fucked-up son of a bitch hadn’t nailed it.

“Why?” she’d finally asked.

Jack couldn’t keep herself from a short laugh. “Fuck you. You’re going to make me say it, aren’t you.”

Miranda’s lips quirked in a small smile. “If you expect me to marry you, yes, I think I am.”

“Fine then,” Jack smiled back, and was shocked to find it wasn’t hard to say at all. “I love you, Miranda, and fuck me if I don’t want to spend the rest of my life with you.”

Now Miranda did laugh, sliding off the bed to kneel as well. “That’s unacceptable, I’m afraid. I think you’ll find I plan to fuck you and have you spend the rest of your life with me,” she murmured, raising Jack’s hand to kiss the tip of her fingers, and astonished joy simply exploded inside Jack’s brain.

Given how torn up everything was, a “real ceremony” was out of the question for years, and it turned out neither of them had much interest in the pageantry anyway. “I’ve attended far too many dull weddings in my lifetime,” Miranda had noted dryly, “I refuse to put myself through another one on my own wedding day.” Jack hadn’t been to nearly as many, and none had been boring - but that was because she'd been the reason they got interesting. She suspected that Miranda would probably not go along with her usual methods of spicing up a matrimonial event. So they’d waited the legal month, then signed the paperwork, swapped rings, and that was that. Well, almost. Jack had a new tattoo that read, “princess cheerleader,” and Miranda one that said, “psychotic biotic.” They’d gotten them together and laughed themselves silly all the way through.

Now, a month later, she was still getting used to being “Jack Lawson, married woman.” That same small part of her was still expecting the floor to drop out at any moment, but it hadn’t. And showed no signs of doing so, if she was honest. It was weird. It was nice.

Fuck, being in love was the craziest goddamned thing.

Miranda had taken her coffee over the couch and seated herself. She was making a great show of reviewing the news on her omnitool, but Jack knew she was keeping an eye out in case Jack decided she was ready to talk. She decided she was, but not about her kids. There wasn’t much new to say there anyway.

“Are you really planning on going to this baby shower thing? It sounds like the most boring thing in the world. Plus, who goes to the baby shower of their ex’s new girlfriend? That’s just fucked up.”

Miranda snorted, amused. “Jacob’s a friend far more than he is an ‘ex,’ and I find I rather like Brynn. I think she’s good for him.” She eyed Jack more directly. “You don’t have to come, you know. No one would question it. Your attitude toward us ‘ex-Cerberus types’ is well established.”

“Nah, fuck it,” Jack sighed, taking a drink of the coffee. “If you’re in, I’m in. But if anyone tries to make me wear a tiara, I’ll break their fucking arm. Just saying.”  She frowned. “I can’t figure why she even asked me.”

“I think she did it for Jacob,” Miranda replied, going back to her newsfeed. “Despite what you apparently think, Jacob thinks quite highly of you.”

“He does?” blinked Jack. “Since when?”

“Since we first met. You may recall Jacob was never keen on the full scope of Cerberus activities. Once your history on Pragia got out, I think he saw you as one of their victims, one whose anger was fully justified. He admires you, I believe.”

“That’s nuts. Jacob’s as straight-edge as they come. Shit, cheerleader, he makes you look like Aria T’Loak. Besides, I straight up told him he should’ve blown his dad’s head off. I would have. He looked like he was about to take a swing.”

“No, you wouldn’t have.” Miranda’s eyes flicked up, met Jack’s again.

“Why the fuck not?”

“Because you didn’t kill Aresh,” replied Miranda quietly.

Jack opened her mouth, then closed it again. They didn’t talk much about what had happened on Pragia; Jack suspected they were both worried it might somehow lead to them screaming at each other again, as absurd as that was. She was right, though. Jack hadn’t killed Aresh. She’d wanted to, had had the gun on him, finger on the trigger, but just couldn’t take the shot.  She still wasn’t completely sure why.  But she knew that, if she were back there right that moment, she’d make the same decision.

Somehow, it was probably Shepard’s fault.

“Yeah, okay, maybe I wouldn’t have,” Jack sighed. “Fucker would have deserved it if I had, though.”

“No disagreement there.”

“Well, fuck, if Jacob’s somehow convinced I’m hot shit, I guess going to celebrate his new crotch goblin is only fair.” Jack finished her coffee. “I mean it about the tiaras though.”

Miranda chuckled. “Duly noted.” She started to say something else, but the annunciator chime at the door went off.

Jack exchanged surprised glances with Miranda, and was reminded again why she loved her when she saw the heavy pistol that had appeared in Miranda's hand. Jack’s own gun was also pointed at the door, and she could feel a dark energy field beginning to form around her other fist. Admittedly, neither had been attacked by, well, anyone since the end of the war, but old habits die hard. And in Jack’s experience, were usually what kept you from dying at all.

Miranda pulled up the door camera feed on her tool, but static filled the screen. This did not reduce Jack’s paranoia. She quietly rose from the couch, crossing to stand next to the door. Miranda took up a position behind the end of the couch, gun braced on the armrest. At Miranda’s nod, Jack began to power up a Shockwave, then threw open the door.

Her jaw dropped.

It was Shepard.

Notes:

This is a multichapter story that lays the seeds for a multipart series, but since I have no idea if I will ever make it that far, I'm going to do my best to keep this one at least mostly self-contained. I hope you enjoy it!

Chapter 2: Miranda

It wasn’t Shepard, Miranda saw at once.

Oh, it looked like her at first glance. The face was the same, the same dusting of freckles above a strong mouth, the same slightly unruly red hair. Her build was the same, and she even wore the standard-issue Alliance fatigues Shepard had always preferred in non-combat settings. But Miranda had spent two years studying everything about the woman, watched hundreds of hours of vid, even before she had shared a ship and mission with her, and she knew in an instant it was not her. This woman did not stand like her, did not move like her. More obvious than either, however, were the eyes. Shepard’s eyes had been the green of summer grass.

This woman’s eyes were glowing a brilliant electric blue.

Miranda brought her gun up, but even as she lined up the shot, she hesitated - not because she was unwilling to shoot at this woman, whoever or whatever she was, but because Jack was in the line of fire. Jack’s biotic buildup had already started to fade with the shock, leaving her standing stock-still in the doorway. “Jack! Move!” Miranda shouted, throwing her other hand forward and shoving with her biotics. The dark energy flare slammed into the fake Shepard, but she was wearing a personal shield, and most of the impact was simply redirected across the shield’s surface. Jack snapped out of her shock and raised her pistol again, but the fake Shepard shimmered and vanished, cloaked. Just the way Shepard had always fought, Miranda noted absently. It was a distant thought. Most of her awareness was focused on running for the door to her office, trying to get out of line of sight before the sniper shot came.

She reached the comparative safety of the doorway without hearing any attacks or having her head blown off. Jack was flat against the wall next to the door, peeking just barely around, searching for a target. None appeared.

“Jack,” came a voice from the hallway. It sounded like Shepard’s too, but had an odd, echoing quality, as though more than one voice were speaking at the same time. “Miranda. I have not come for conflict. Please, end these hostilities so that we may speak.”

Miranda frowned. The words were as out of tune with Shepard as her body language had been; the phrasing sounded nothing like her. If this was intended as some kind of ruse to make them think Shepard was back, it was a peculiarly poor one. 

“Show yourself, you clone bitch, and we’ll end these hostilities quick!” Jack shouted back. “How fucking many of you did Cerberus make, anyway?”

There were more shouts from the hallway now, other residents of their building. So far no actual shots had been fired, but that could change at any moment. Miranda quickly activated her omnitool, preparing to notify the local police, but whatever had been scrambling the door camera feed was also interfering with outside comms. She swore softly - aware that her language was deteriorating the longer she lived with Jack - and looked up again.

The fake Shepard uncloaked directly in front of her, the barrel of an M-98 Widow sniper rifle no more than 10 centimeters from Miranda’s nose.

But the other woman did not shoot.

Instead, she met Miranda’s gaze levelly. “I have not come for conflict,” she repeated in that same, oddly echoing voice. Even as Jack spun at the words, the fake Shepard stepped back and raised the rifle, letting it collapse back into its smaller carrying configuration.

Even with her barrier at full strength, Miranda knew that she’d likely have died had the intruder fired, especially at that range. Widows were absurdly potent weapons. The point had been made.

Jack knew it too, and she threw a questioning glance at Miranda. Her pistol was pointed directly at the intruder’s head, but she did not fire. Miranda slowly leveled her own gun as well, unwilling to trust too much, but rather than firing, she asked, “If you’re not here for conflict, why are you here? And who or what are you?”

The false Shepard returned the gaze, unblinking. The blue glow seemed to brighten. “I am not Jane Alice Shepard,” she replied. “But I remember her. She created me and instilled my purpose. I remember you as well. You are among those who cared for her, and for whom she cared. I have taken up the task of guardianship she began. I have chosen to call myself the Shepherd.”

“You’re the AI controlling the Citadel,” said Miranda flatly. “What I’m looking at here is some kind of mech.” Jack cursed. She probably would have fired, too, except that Miranda raised a hand. 

The Shepherd tilted her head slightly, as though considering. “What you consider an AI cannot compass my existence,” she answered, “but for the purposes of this conversation, that is accurate.”

“Shit,” Jack growled, “it even talks like a Reaper.”

“You didn’t answer my question,” Miranda pointed out. “Why are you here?”

“Repairs on the relay network are functionally complete,” the Shepherd said, “and access to the rest of the galaxy has been restored. I intend to recover the Normandy and her crew. I have come to request that you two accompany me.”

Miranda’s eyes widened. The Reapers who had been repairing the Charon Relay had seemingly finished their work months ago, but the element zero core had not activated, for reasons no one in the Alliance had been able to determine. The assumption was either that the relay was not as fixed as it appeared or that the Reapers themselves were leaving it off for unknown reasons. Miranda’s contacts in Alliance Command were privately terrified of the latter option, although they were fighting to keep the possibility out of the media.

“You want us to come with you?” Jack snapped. She began to shimmer in blue ripples, dark energy responding to her anger. “You’re just as crazy as the rest of those fuckers!”

The mech did not appear concerned, though she did turn to regard Jack. “Surely you must realize I am no threat to you.”

“Why the fuck would I ‘realize’ that?” demanded Jack.

The Shepherd made the smallest of movements, a barely perceptible shrug. “Because,” she replied calmly, “ you are no threat to me . While you might well be able to destroy this vessel with concerted effort, it is not me, and replacements are readily available. Such harms are negligible. Thus conflict between us is meaningless and irrelevant. By revealing to you my intent, I have willingly provided you with the only weapon you could realistically apply against me. You might be able to interfere with my actions - and this is a risk I have voluntarily taken on, as I judge the benefits worthy of it.”

Jack was still boiling, but she hadn’t launched herself forward yet. Miranda took the opportunity to step into the breach again. “You might be waiting for our answer and then planning to kill us if we don’t agree,” she pointed out.

The Shepherd’s eyes flicked toward her, but her focus was clearly still on Jack. “Though I judge this mech capable of rendering the two of you unable to offer resistance, there is considerable margin for error in that assessment, and regardless, there is no way to do so without attracting attention from those in the vicinity,” the mech answered. “Jack’s preferred methods of engagement in particular would make that nearly impossible. Using any of my other resources to the same end would draw even more attention, and more swiftly. In either case, the result would be the same: interference with my actions. Nothing would be gained.”

“Maybe you plan to indoctrinate us,” Miranda said.

The mech shrugged again. In that strange, echoing voice, she countered, “You have access to the research of Drs. Garrett Bryson and Rana Thanoptis, I believe. If you feel that to be a risk, the shielding Dr. Bryson developed should satisfy your concerns.”

Miranda and Jack exchanged glances. Jack’s confusion was plain on her face, warring with her anger and desire to lash out. Miranda thought she was doing a better job hiding her own feelings, but she was every bit as unsure as her wife.

“You said the benefits of coming to us would be worth the risk,” she asked after a pause. “What benefits?”

“Some variation of this confrontation would be likely to occur with any of your former shipmates I might approach. I hope to engage you as liaisons with the others here in the Sol system so as to smooth over the introductions.”

Jack gasped at the audacity. “You want us to tell all our friends that you’re not nearly as psychotically murderous as all those other Reapers out there, so they should just jump board with whatever little scheme you’ve got planned?”

“Just so,” the mech agreed.

Jack shook her head, as though unable to believe what she was hearing. “If you control the Reapers and the relays, why the hell do you need us? Any of us?” she asked. “You could just fly off whenever you wanted.” 

“I do not,” the mech answered calmly. “But she would have wanted you there.”

Shepard. Shepard would have wanted them along when the Normandy was recovered. The hard truth of that statement hit Miranda right between the eyes, and she found herself slowly lowering the pistol. Jack’s gun was still aimed at the mech, but the biotic energy around her had dissipated once again.

“Do you expect us to give you an answer now?” Miranda asked.

“That would be ideal, but I acknowledge the improbability. My schedule is flexible, but the longer I delay, the more possible harm comes to the Normandy ’s crew. If you wish to discuss the matter in my absence, I would request only that you do not inform the Alliance of my intentions until you have elected not to accompany me. I will depart in one week, unless you have contacted me sooner.”

“And how would we go about doing that?”

“There is an extranet mailbox attached to the name Alison Gunn of New Canton. I will monitor it for any communications.”

Miranda nodded. “Very well. Now get out.”

The mech’s hesitation was almost imperceptible. Still, she nodded and turned for the door without replying. She had to carefully step around Jack, who was not in any way interested in moving aside for her, but in moments she was gone and the two of them were alone in the flat once more.

“You’re not seriously going to do this,” Jack demanded, rounding on her wife. Across the room, a confused Eezo appeared in the bedroom doorway, having apparently slept through the entire encounter.

Miranda’s jaw tightened, but she could only answer with the truth. “The alternative appears to be letting that thing track our friends down without anyone I trust around to protect them.”

“The hell it is! We tell the Alliance, and they blow that creepy thing out of the sky!”

“Even assuming she is not monitoring Alliance communications, which seems like a very foolish assumption to make, it would take every ship in every fleet in the system to have a chance of destroying the Citadel, and the price in blood would be... incalculable. Likewise, if we don’t have any say in how she approaches the Normandy , she will likely use a Reaper - or the entire Reaper fleet - for transport, and again, if the Alliance tried to intervene the cost in lives would be staggering. In neither case would success even be assured.” Miranda felt cold just thinking what she was saying, but the logic was inescapable.

Jack was pacing now. Eezo fell into step behind her, clearly picking up on his mistress’s agitation. Little flickers of biotic energy began to appear around his eyes. “Fuck! Can we get there ahead of it?”

“We don’t even know where the Normandy is. I suppose we might be able to get her to tell us before she leaves, but I don’t like our odds of success in fooling her long enough to get out of the system,” Miranda grimaced. “And that’s assuming she doesn’t control the relay network enough to prevent us from leaving - or worse, using it to send us into the sun.” That, at least, seemed unlikely; if the Reapers had had such power, they would have used it during the invasion to shut down any chance of the Council worlds helping one another. She couldn’t rule it out, though. Whatever the Shepherd was, she clearly wasn’t just a Reaper.

Miranda shook her head, amazed at her own thoughts. “Just” a Reaper. What a concept. Apparently that was the new baseline for horrors these days.

“Fuck!” Jack repeated, this time drawing out the vowel. Fuuuuuuuuck! She stopped pacing, knelt to put out a reassuring hand on Eezo’s back. The varren nuzzled her, making his own attempt to reassure in kind. “So what do we do? Are we actually going along with this?”

For an instant, Miranda was distracted by the power, the unshakable certainty, of that “we.” Jack, the very same Jack that had raged at her, insulted her, threatened her even on their very first meeting, had continually been the one to take the first steps in their relationship, the one who was willing to risk rejection and pain for her, just for the chance to be with her. From the first, Miranda had known that Jack didn’t do things halfway, but it would never have occurred to her back then that a relationship with her would be one of those things.

She remembered their fight after Pragia so clearly, but she understood it so differently now. At the time, she’d been embarrassed, almost ashamed at her loss of control, especially at the provocation of someone as unsophisticated as Jack. She should have been able to just shake the matter off, deflect or refuse to engage, and that would have been the end of it. But she couldn’t. Only after the Omega Relay mission had she understood, and the understanding had forced her to reassess almost everything.

The two of them had stood on that platform with Shepard, preparing to destroy the Collector base, only for the Illusive Man to appear and order Shepard to save the technology instead. When Shepard refused, he’d turned to Miranda and ordered her to stop the Spectre. Instead, she’d resigned. Jack had barked a delighted laugh, though at Miranda’s action or at the expression on the Illusive Man’s face she couldn’t have said. It had felt so right in the moment, but afterward, she’d looked back on it and been shocked at her decision. Why had she been so willing to turn her back on everything she’d spent more than a decade building? She agreed with Shepard’s moral stance in that matter, certainly, but she’d made compromises with her morality before for the sake of Cerberus’s larger mission. What had changed?

And then, like a supernova, realization had burst through her: Pragia.

She’d never been able to truly convince herself that Teltin had genuinely gone rogue, no matter what the Illusive Man said. The project was too much in his style, too much in line with his greater vision for humanity. It made too much sense as an area of research. When she and Shepard and Jack had gone down there, Miranda had seen it, really seen it, seen it through Jack’s eyes. And then, in utter defiance of the ruthless, heartless, merciless woman Miranda had been certain Jack was, Jack had spared Aresh’s life. Suddenly Miranda was looking not at an uncaring killer, but a broken child who had rebuilt herself entirely on her own into a woman too strong to ever be broken again.

Instinctively, she’d tried to ignore the surge of empathy she’d felt, shove it down and away, force her previous image of Jack back into place. She had thought it had worked, but now she knew it had not. That had been why she was so brittle in the face of Jack’s rage. And it was why, later, she had turned her back on Cerberus at the critical point in the mission against the Collectors. Because she’d been a part of the same group that had tortured a little girl solely for the sake of a megalomaniac’s “grand design.” Because she had looked at Jack and seen herself. Because she had looked at herself… and seen her father.

Things had moved quite quickly after that, at least for her. She was an insightful woman, even toward her own nature; it hadn’t taken her long at all to realize she was in love with Jack. She had never dreamed that Jack might feel the same way, however, and Miranda was simply not built to pine away. She’d acknowledged the emotion, acknowledged its impossibility, and gone on with her life. Until that party at Shepard’s apartment, when the Spectre had oh-so-casually torn open her carefully managed emotions and spilled them all over the finely-woven carpets. But it had been Jack who had had the courage to say something, to push things from “what if” to reality.

Miranda would never stop being in awe of her wife.

The surge of love and memories raced through Miranda’s awareness in an instant, leaving only their warmth behind as she refocused on the matter at hand. “I think we are, yes. But we do it our way. If ‘the Shepherd’ wants us to come along so badly, then she’ll have to accept some conditions.” Jack met her gaze, and there was fire in those brown eyes.

“I like it,” was all she said.

Chapter 3: Samara

In a way, Miranda discovered she was grateful for the Shepherd’s arrival in their lives. As horrifying as the implications of her existence were, her appearance had resulted in one unqualified good, at least from Miranda’s perspective: it had shaken Jack out of her obsession with her fallen students. Not that she had forgotten them by any means, but she no longer seemed to be ground down a bit more every day by the simple fact of their deaths. Jack had always been at her best with an enemy to fight; if Miranda had realized how much it would help, she probably would have manufactured one months ago.

With less than a week to prepare and the need for every bit of secrecy they could scrape together against an AI with all the power and knowledge of the Reapers at her command, things became a bit frantic. They’d both taken leaves of absence from their jobs; Miranda had found people to replace her, at least well enough to handle things until her (hopeful) return, while Jack had just said she was leaving and would be back when she was back. That hadn’t gone over terribly well with the Alliance, but Jack was a civilian contractor, not a soldier; she had simply threatened to quit outright if they didn’t give her the leave she wanted, and there hadn’t been much the military could do about it.

They’d immediately agreed that they were not going to wait for the Shepherd to reach out to their former crewmates. “What, so it can just feed us lines like a fucking elementary school play? Yeah, I don’t think so,” Jack had scoffed when Miranda raised the question. So next they had to determine who to go to, and how.

“You’re not going to tell Jacob?” Jack repeated, her eyes widening.

“Jacob has a noncombatant girlfriend and a child on the way,” Miranda replied firmly. “Neither of whom belong anywhere near the Shepherd or her plans. Jacob belongs with them, and they belong safely on Earth.”

“Okay, cheerleader,” laughed Jack, “but I would not want to be you when he finds out.”

“He isn’t going to find out.”

After Jacob, the remaining members of Shepard’s former crew still on Earth after the Battle of London were Samara, Grunt, Zaeed, and Kasumi from the Normandy SR-2, as well as Urdnot Wrex, from Shepard’s previous mission against the rogue Spectre Saren. Neither of them knew the Urdnot clan chief very well; he’d also been at Shepard’s party, but that was the only time either had spoken with him. Even that little acquaintance was enough to suggest he probably wouldn’t handle dealing with the Shepherd well, though. (Jack could sympathize, and said so.) They decided to leave him out of the matter, and that unfortunately also meant they had to exclude Grunt.

“There’s just no chance he won’t tell his own clan leader what we’re doing,” Miranda said, shaking her head.

Jack looked disappointed. “Yeah. Damn shame, though. He’s pretty handy in a scrap. Got good taste in shotguns too.”

Miranda could well remember. She’d never been sure about the wisdom of waking the genetically-modified krogan up in the first place; even after he’d accepted his place on their team, she hadn’t really warmed up to him. Jack, though, had found a kindred soul of sorts, and the cargo bay he had adopted as his cabin was one of the few places Jack could sometimes be found outside her hidey-hole on the engineering subdeck.

Given her preference, Miranda would have gone first to Kasumi, but that proved impossible. No one had any idea where she was. The unassuming master thief had put in a quiet, somber appearance at the memorial for Commander Shepard and Admiral Anderson, then silently slipped out and, as far as Miranda could learn, fallen off the planet. She had to still be somewhere in the cluster; the relays weren't working, after all. Where that somewhere was, though, seemed to be anyone's guess. Instead, they turned to Jack’s first choice: Samara.

Jack had been in occasional contact with Samara since leaving the hospital. They weren’t really friends - Miranda wasn’t sure Samara had such things, with the possible exception of Shepard - but the asari justicar had graciously agreed to handle some of the direct teaching responsibilities for young biotics that Jack was unwilling to take on. It was not a full-time job by any means; Samara would not be swayed from her duties as a justicar or the requirements of her Code, but when she did not have evildoers to slay or corporate financial malfeasance to unearth, she was a patient and effective trainer. Most of the students she worked with were advanced level, nearly ready for the field, and she and Jack would at times consult on the needs of one such student or another. The two women had little in common in many ways but they were among the most powerful biotics on the planet. It made them colleagues of a sort.

Attempting to avoid any official record of their travels the Shepherd might be able to follow, they took the simple expedient of stealing a shuttle to reach Samara. On an Earth not ravaged by a recent Reaper invasion, flying a stolen craft from London to Tokyo would have been impossible for anyone without the kind of hacking acumen that Tali or Kasumi had, but the communication satellites were still mostly gone and the Alliance fleet had larger concerns for its patrols. No one spotted them, or had the time or inclination to chase them if they did.

An hour and a half after taking off from the London airfield, Miranda brought the shuttle down, breaking through the thin clouds over Honshu into a thin, sleeting rain. Even knowing intellectually what she would see, the sight caught her breath for an instant.

Tokyo, once one of the most densely populated cities on the planet, had been a prime target for Reaping. Only a few places on Earth - Mumbai, Vancouver, Beijing, London - had suffered more, and the physical toll taken on the city was almost incomprehensible. During the initial reports of the invasion, she’d seen images of the largest, Sovereign-class Reapers landing in and among Tokyo’s elegant skyscrapers, and it had reminded her in an almost surreal fashion of the old kaiju vids that had once been so popular in Japanese culture. These had not been actors in comically clumsy rubber suits, though. Across the planet, almost 18% of the planet’s population had died during the occupation, with the proportion in the cities usually closer to 30-35%. In Tokyo, the total was nearly half.

It had been the scale of the destruction, combined with Samara’s interest in the culture, that had drawn her there, once it was clear none of the ships that had come to Earth to help in the battle were leaving it again any time soon. She had taken a small apartment and gotten to work helping wherever she could. Looting, organized crime, corporate graft and corruption, all had sprung up in the wake of the Reapers’ departure, but Samara was single-handedly putting a dent in those activities in and around Tokyo. She could not be everywhere, but she had already gained a reputation in Tokyo’s underworld.

Miranda made a note not to mention to her how they’d acquired their shuttle.

As it had been in London, the priority for cleanup in Tokyo had first been simply making places for cars and other transports to be able to land safely. Miranda guided the shuttle smoothly into the sparse traffic, heading toward Sagamihara, on the western side of the metroplex, where Samara had her apartment.

“She might not be home,” Jack pointed out as they landed. She gave Eezo a rub and a treat, then settled him into a bed at the rear of the shuttle’s passenger compartment.

Miranda shrugged, opening the shuttle door and stepping out into the cold rain. “We have to start somewhere, and calling risks alerting the Shepherd. If she’s not there, perhaps she has a home VI we can leave a message with.”

Not normally one to flaunt her biotic abilities openly, she was perfectly prepared to simply deal with the rain, but Jack lacked such compunctions. After only a moment, a glimmering blue bubble enveloped the two of them, water sliding off in wide rivulets. Miranda sent her a brief, grateful smile, and took her wife’s arm as they approached Samara’s building.

The building was tall, most of 200 stories, but something had struck it about half way up, crushing several floors on the eastern side. Shimmering mass effect fields were holding that side of the building up, but glowing windows suggested power - and occupants - from the ground all the way to the top floor. Shelter that could be used was being used, no matter the risk. There were simply too many homeless or displaced to do anything else.

Mercifully, the working power extended to the building’s elevators. Samara lived on the 91st floor, and walking did not sound particularly enjoyable. As it was, the ride was short, for which Miranda was quite appreciative. She hated slow elevators. (For some reason, Tali and Garrus had frequently complained about how long elevator rides with Shepard could feel. That hadn’t been Miranda’s experience, thankfully.) In mere moments, the doors were opening, and they stepped out onto Samara’s floor.

At the far end of the corridor, the wall simply was not there. The crumpled part of the structure, intimidating from ground level, was something closer to nightmarish when you were standing only about 40 meters from it. The floor, walls, and ceiling were twisted, bent; the metal supports looked almost literally ripped apart. Miranda saw all of that in a single glance - but her attention was instantly on the group of Blue Suns mercs gathered around a door, partway down the hall, in classic breach formation.

They were here for Samara too, she knew immediately. It beggared coincidence to believe they had accidentally accepted a contract on some other target who just happened to live on the same floor as an asari justicar - and then had somehow failed to note that justicar’s presence in any of their preliminary intel gathering. Miranda’s pistol was in her hand even before she completed the thought, and beside her, she heard the clicking of Jack’s Evicerator unfolding from its carrying mode.

“Hello, dead people,” the other woman said, eyes alight with sudden glee.

The Blue Suns looked up in surprise, but Jack was already hurtling down the corridor, barrier at full strength, shotgun booming. Miranda threw herself behind a nearby planter, then peered around it. Nine total enemies, including two engineers and one pyro. Eight, now, as Jack already had one of the regular troopers down. Not odds she liked, but they’d handled worse. The mercs were refocused on the new targets, though, and Jack’s headlong charge, effective as it was for scrambling their discipline at first, had left her caught in the crosshairs of every weapon there. Seeing the pyro light his flamethrower up and turn it Jack’s direction. Miranda threw out a hand, channeling her biotic abilities, and the pyro flew into the air, then slammed into the ground, staggering.

The two engineers turned their attention to her at that, one launching an Incineration burst down the hallway and the other calling up a combat drone. The plasma charge struck the planter and detonated, sending a wave of heat over her and blackening the carpet, but leaving her unscathed. The drone was floating down the corridor toward her, but for the moment she ignored it. Her Carnifex barked once, twice, and another trooper dropped, quickly joined by a third as Jack’s shotgun roared again. “Night night!” Miranda called out, almost giddy, and heard Jack’s answering laugh.

It was all so familiar. Six months since the Battle of London - six months since she’d last had to fire a weapon for anything other than practice - but everything felt as though she’d been doing this every day of her life. It felt right, somehow, in a way that left her breathless from a mix of excitement and fear. When had she become a soldier? When had she started missing firefights like this, living for the razor’s edge?

Jack had fallen back a few steps to get a bit of breathing room, but her barriers were flickering badly now. She threw a Shockwave at the mass of troopers, hurling them back. One, caught most directly in the blast, flew two dozen meters, right through the space where the corridor’s far wall should have been, and disappeared into the gray void beyond. “Jack!” Miranda called. “Fall back! Get clear!” She readied a Reave, wanting to prime a biotic detonation as soon as Jack was out of the blast range.

Unfortunately, the drone chose that moment to reach her, appearing around the corner of the planter and letting loose a hefty electrical charge. Her barrier took most of it, but her muscles jerked and clenched in a white haze of pain nonetheless. The one-use drone immediately dissipated, but the other engineer had launched hers now as well.

There was a shuddering boom. She heard Jack’s pounding feet, and when she forced herself to glance around the planter again, she saw her wife sprinting toward another planter on the opposite side of the hall, away from the smoking remains of what must have been the pyro. The tanks on those flamethrowers were notoriously dangerous, as she’d seen many times before, and the grisly death of this merc proved it once again.

Raising her left arm, Miranda pointed her omnitool at the drone in Jack’s path and quickly Overloaded it. It fizzled out with an electronic gurgle as Jack ran through the space it had been and dove behind the other planter. The remaining mercs, wary now of getting too close to Jack’s shotgun, weren’t following, but their rifles sent bullets spraying down the hallway in an almost constant stream. Miranda and Jack got their barriers back up, but Miranda could hear more drones being called into existence, and she’d be risking heavy fire if she tried to lean out to Overload them again. They’d cut the enemy’s numbers in half but were pinned down, and she didn’t like their tactical situation at all. Jack was still grinning, but there was blood on her jacket too, and the grin had a death’s-head look to it.

They still had an ace in the hole, though. At least, Miranda hoped they did.

A drone appeared around the corner again, but this time she was ready for it, Overloading it before it could zap her. Jack wasn’t nearly the hacker she was, but her shotgun boomed and the one threatening her dissipated as well. “Jack,” Miranda hissed, hoping the weapons fire would keep the Blue Suns from hearing. “Shockwave on my signal!” Jack nodded, still grinning, and blue ripples of dark energy began to swirl around her.

“Cover me!” one of the mercs shouted, and she heard more footsteps, this time a steady advance. They were making a push. If they spread out too far, Miranda’s plan wouldn’t work - but she still needed one more piece…

Samara’s door slid open.

There was a sharp rattle, like the first quarter-second of a snare drum roll, the distinctive sound of a Vindicator assault rifle. The three-round burst caught the Blue Suns completely unprepared, a spray of blood accompanying the death of one of the two remaining troopers. The last three mercs all spun toward the now-open doorway, and as the hail of bullets down the hallway slackened, Miranda leaned out and fired twice, finally seeing the satisfying sparks of a shield going down around one of the engineers. The Vindicator fired again as well, but the other engineer’s shield held against it, at least for the moment.

It wouldn’t save her, though. Miranda’s free hand made a fist toward the unshielded engineer, wrapping him in a biotic field and squeezing with unbearable pressure. She could feel her barriers strengthening as she drained the man’s vitality directly into the force-warped space around her, and she felt a small smile twist her lips as she looked at Jack and nodded.

Jack’s Shockwave raced down the corridor, hurling the last trooper into the wall before reaching the engineers. The instant the biotic pulses touched Miranda’s Reave field, the unstable dark energy erupted, tearing at space and time itself, waves of force and spatial disruptions blasting outward. The engineer she’d been Reaving simply vaporized, while the other’s shield collapsed completely and she crumpled. Samara’s Vindicator finished her before she could struggle back to her feet.

Miranda raised her pistol toward the only survivor, the lone trooper forcing himself to stand, half way between her position and Samara’s doorway. He’d been far enough away that he hadn’t been caught in the biotic detonation, but without medigel, he wouldn’t be able to put up a decent fight for weeks, most likely. Before she fired, though, Samara appeared in her doorway.

The justicar was wearing the distinctive red armor she never seemed to be without, her Vindicator held steady and eyes glowing with biotic energies waiting to be unleashed. Seeing the remaining trooper still alive, she strode swiftly toward him, one hand thrusting out as her biotics seized him, lifting him into the air and pinning him to the wall. “Who hired you?” she demanded, her voice steady and controlled but brooking no refusal. “Tell me and I will spare your life.”

The trooper struggled feebly for a few pointless moments, then sagged. “That’s… that’s not how it works, lady,” he managed finally. “I’m dead either way. But if I talk now… the next guys might have a harder time taking you down. And I promise you… one of us will.” 

Samara’s fingers moved just a fraction, but the man spasmed in sudden agony. “You have one remaining chance to tell me,” said the justicar calmly. “Who hired you?”

“Not… happening… bitch…” gasped the trooper.

For a moment, a look of regret passed across Samara’s face, but it was gone in the space of a breath. “Find peace in the embrace of the Goddess,” she intoned, then clenched her fist tight and jerked it sideways.

The crack of the man’s neck breaking was loud in the quiet hallway.

Samara let her biotic field fade as the trooper’s body dropped bonelessly to the ground. She turned her attention to Jack and Miranda, both now standing a few meters away, giving the asari room to work. “Miranda, Jack,” the justicar said warmly. “I am pleased to see you again. Did you somehow have knowledge of this attack?”

“Just fortunate happenstance,” Miranda shook her head. “We came for our own reasons, but we’re glad to have helped out.”

Jack rolled her shoulders. “Honestly, I probably owe you a thank you,” she grinned. “I was starting to get a little rusty.”

The justicar’s eyes flicked briefly over them both, but then she turned her attention to the slaughterhouse that the hallway had become. “I need to check on the other residents of this floor, to make certain none were injured by stray fire. If you like, there is medigel in my apartment, just inside the doorway.”

“Will there be any issues with the local authorities?” asked Miranda. Jack started for the apartment. She was still grinning, but the red stain on the white of her bodysuit was spreading. Miranda hadn’t taken any fire except from the electric jolt of the drone - some medigel wouldn’t go amiss, but Jack definitely needed it first.

“I do not believe so. We have come to an… understanding… these past few months. The nature of my work often draws attempts such as this, and I have witnesses who can testify to the circumstances of the attack.”

“That… might be a problem,” Miranda frowned. “We’re trying to keep our presence and movements off the grid for the moment.”

Samara studied her for a moment. “I see,” she murmured. “Please make yourself at home in my apartment. There is tea if you wish to make some. If you do, please make a cup for me as well.”

Miranda nodded and followed after Jack. As she approached the doorway, she spotted a getabako just inside and felt her eyebrows lift in surprise. How much of local culture had Samara absorbed? The justicar was knocking on a doorway at the end of the hall, too far away to speak to without shouting, so Miranda shrugged to herself and quickly doffed her boots, sliding them into the cupboard next to Jack's before turning to look around the rest of the flat.

Unsurprisingly, the dwelling was bare to the point of monastic, one room taking up almost all the available space, with only a small lavatory to go with it. The floor was covered with a combination of simple rugs and woven bamboo mats, and the only seating was in the form of a few thick cushions scattered around. A freestanding food printer, a single cupboard, and a hot plate on a low table constituted the entirety of the apartment’s “kitchen.” There were three wall hangings, each a reproduction of a famous watercolor painting, but no other decoration of any kind was visible. The only other things on the walls were weapons racks and the promised medigel dispenser. Those plus an armor stand in the corner completed the flat’s furnishings.

“Where the fuck does she sleep?” Jack asked from her seat on one of the cushions. She had casually taken her top off so she could get the gel on her injuries - it looked like one of the rifle rounds had skipped along her rib, and another had gone completely through her shoulder - and was busy getting herself fixed up. “I always wondered that back on the Normandy too. Asari do sleep, don’t they?”

“They do sleep,” Miranda confirmed, grimacing at her wife’s wounds. Jack had an astonishing tolerance for pain, one gained at great cost and too high a price by far, but they had to be hurting her. Deciding tea could wait a moment, she instead headed for the lavatory, where she found a hand towel that she put under the faucet of the small sink. “Samara does not, however. Her meditation techniques serve the same purpose, I assume.” It was a guess, though an educated one. She had never discussed the matter with Samara, to be sure. She only knew that Samara didn’t sleep because she’d had monitoring devices all over the Normandy , but it didn’t seem important to mention that part.

Bringing the wet towel back to the main room, she knelt beside her wife and began to carefully sponge away the blood. She would have to replace the towel, but it seemed safe to assume Samara would not begrudge her this use. Jack watched her, dark eyes gleaming, but moved her hands out of the way so Miranda could tend her more freely.

“I could do that myself,” Jack said quietly.

Miranda nodded. “Yes, you could.” And continued her work.

Samara came in just as Miranda finished, and Jack unhurriedly rearranged her clothing to be more decent. Miranda rolled her eyes. Jack liked to tease her over their differing attitudes toward casual nudity, but she had never once made Miranda feel jealous over it. Samara, for her part, likely noticed - very little was missed by those piercing justicar’s eyes - but either did not wish to comment or, more likely, did not see any need to. Almost a thousand years of existence had a tendency to make one a bit jaded, Miranda imagined.

Instead of saying anything, the asari set about making the tea Miranda had not, producing a kettle and leaves from the cupboard and filling the kettle from the food printer (water was a basic ingredient in almost any printing matrix). As the water began to heat, she turned to look at her guests. Miranda had begun applying medigel to the lightning-shaped electrocution burn on her arm. “The authorities arrived a few minutes ago and I gave my statement. I did not mention your involvement, though if they request additional information I will be obligated to give it.” Samara looked them over. “It is my professional judgment that they will not, however. Even a basic forensic assessment would reveal the presence of additional combatants, and as they did not feel the need to ask about them when that was done, I do not expect they will change their minds later. I suspect they are eager to simply resolve the matter and proceed to investigations with higher stakes.”

Miranda nodded. “Thank you,” she replied, rolling down her sleeve again. The burned-through hole where the shock had landed framed the pale scar neatly. “Do you know who sent them?”

“It could be any number of criminal groups that I have frustrated during my time here,” Samara said with a slight shrug. “The Blue Suns have been anxious over their lack of employment since the end of the war. For all I know, this was a demonstration job, intended to display their prowess by attacking a prominent target.” The kettle boiled, and she smoothly poured and served tea for the three of them. Jack sniffed hers a bit warily and made a face at its bitterness, but Miranda found it lovely, complex, and aromatic. “I am more interested,” the asari continued, “by what has brought you here, and why in secrecy.”

Miranda exchanged glances with Jack, then took a breath and began the story. Samara listened in silence to the short, precise summary she provided. “We want those we trust - that Shepard trusted - to come with us. Not with the Shepherd, but with us ,” Miranda finished finally. “Obviously, that includes you.”

“I see,” Samara said, sipping her tea thoughtfully. After a brief consideration, she went on, “Did the Shepherd tell you whether she will reopen the relay network as a whole once this is done?”

“No,” answered Miranda slowly. “She might have implied it, in a sense, but she certainly did not say it.”

The justicar nodded, still considering. Miranda was surprised. She had expected the asari to review her Code and its requirements and either agree at once or refuse at once, based on whatever the Code demanded. This hesitation was uncharacteristic, to say the least.

“I will come with you,” Samara said quietly, setting down her tea. “But I cannot do so as a justicar. The Code does not permit it. So I will have to renounce the Code.”

Chapter 4: Zaeed

Jack’s mouth fell open. And then she found herself laughing, laughing so hard that her eyes were watering.

And she’d thought Miranda was learning to rebel!

Miranda and Samara were both staring at her, she realized, and it dimly occurred to her that she was probably being kind of dick. With an effort, she forced herself back under control. “You?” she finally managed to gasp. “You’re going to quit the justicars? Hell, I’d’ve figured I’d stop getting ink first!”

The other two women exchanged glances. Jack thought Miranda looked like she was trying to seem apologetic, but she was as shocked as Jack was, no matter that she was hiding it better. Samara simply gave a slight nod. “This is not a decision reached lightly or in the moment, though I understand how it would look that way to you,” she explained calmly. She didn’t seem offended, which was a good thing; the stick up the asari’s ass was pure neutronium, to be sure, but Jack genuinely liked the other woman. She was a cop, true, and Jack definitely a criminal, but it was hard not to admire someone who was so absolutely certain of who she was and her place in the universe. She was also breathtakingly ruthless when the situation called for it, something that had occasionally led to Jack and Samara united in disagreement with one or another of Shepard’s more merciful decisions, much to the surprise of the rest of the crew. (Both of them, for example, had argued strenuously that Shepard should have killed - or let Mordin kill - Maelon back on Tuchanka.) And, if Jack was being honest, she was kinda fun to watch in a fight, if you had a breather and could look around a bit. Elegant and deadly, powerful and poised; Jack could admit to seeing the appeal, especially now that she’d come to appreciate similar qualities in Miranda. Samara went on, “Even before the Battle of London, I had begun to consider whether my time as a justicar was coming to an end. So many of us were lost at Thessia, and many more in other battles across the galaxy. I am not certain that there are enough justicars left to continue the order. It may be that our time is done.

“Even more than that, however, there is Falere. After we reconnected on Lesuss, I found myself thinking more and more of her, living alone at the monastery. I have every faith in the strength of my daughter to survive there, but I have found it increasingly difficult to accept the need for it. I do not wish for her to be alone, trapped in the grave of her sister, not if we can be together. The Code would not permit that, however. So I can no longer uphold the Code.”

“Falere… is an Ardat-Yakshi,” Miranda pointed out slowly.

Jack stiffened. She had never fully understood what Ardat-Yakshi were; some kind of asari bogeymen, apparently, but she’d never learned much more. Shepard had let slip that one had somehow been involved in that odd mission on Omega, the one that Samara had insisted involve only her and the Spectre, but how or why Jack didn’t know. What she did know, though - had paid in blood to learn - was that somehow the Reapers could turn these Ardat-Yakshi into the nightmares the Alliance had called Banshees. 

For a terrible, horrible moment, she was back in London, leading her kids through the streets toward the Reaper beam lancing up into the clouds. Squatting next to the beam like a colossal cockroach was a Reaper itself, guarding the approach. Somewhere to her north, probably no more than half a klick away, Shepard and her squad were escorting artillery trucks into position to try to take out the Reaper. She heard on the comms that they’d reached the firing point, saw a pair of rockets hurl into the sky over the ruined buildings - and veer widely away, detonating in a useless blast. EDI said something about luring the Reaper away from the beam, but she heard nothing else; in an instant, everything had gone to hell.

Banshees came pouring out of the nearby streets like bees out of a kicked hive, escorted by dozens or even hundreds of Marauders. Their screams echoed off the walls, pounded into her brain, even as they began to slaughter her kids. The students had no time to combine their talents into the artillery strikes they’d practiced, no time to do much of anything at all. Jack had hurled Warps and Shockwaves as fast as she could, felt blood beginning to run down her face as blood vessels in her nose split open, ignored it and kept going. She fought, and fought, and fought, and all around her, her kids fell. Prangley was the last, and she’d jumped into the air with the last of her biotics, landed on the Banshee that killed him and planted her shotgun on its skull just before she pulled the trigger. The recoil had knocked her off, sent her sprawling, and then a Warp sailed past her, slammed into the wall of the store she was slumped against, and brought the whole building down on her head.

She shuddered, abruptly coming back to the present. Miranda was at her side, holding her, as Samara watched them both with concern. Jack shook her head, pushed Miranda away. “I’m fine,” she lied, hearing the tight roughness in her voice. “I’m fine. Just… go on with what you were saying.”

Samara seemed unsure, but at Miranda’s firm nod, said slowly, “What I was saying was that Falere was right when she pointed out that she could have left the monastery at any time. Especially if I am with her, I have no fears that she would fall prey to her instincts, no matter where she is.”

Miranda still looked skeptical, but her concern over Jack was clearly distracting her from disputing Samara’s claims. “If you’re certain this is what you want to do,” she said instead, “then we’ll be happy to have you with us.”

Samara rose gracefully, balancing on her bare feet for only a moment before kneeling. Her eyes began glowing white and a tightly-woven biotic field shimmered around her as she placed her fists on the floor and bowed her head.

“With these words, I sever myself,” she murmured. “I am separate, unguided. The Code and I walk apart. Never again will I wear the name justicar. Never again will I take the authority of a justicar into my hands. Righteousness is now another’s to shield, vengeance another’s to lay. I am lost. I am free.”

Her voice broke a little on the last word. Jack wasn’t sure if it had been meant as part of whatever this ritual was or not.

The asari - justicar no longer - rose and simply stood there for a moment, her expression unreadable. Then she shook herself, just slightly, and looked down to where Miranda and Jack were sitting. “It is done. I can leave as soon as you are ready to do so.” To Jack’s eyes, she seemed eager, as though the room had become uncomfortable all of a sudden. 

Miranda seemed taken aback, but Jack levered herself to her feet, as much to prove that she could as to match Samara’s readiness. “No sense just sitting around here then. Clock’s ticking anyway, and we still have a couple stops to make.” She reached down and helped Miranda to stand as well, and they moved to the doorway to put their shoes back on while Samara gathered her weaponry: the Vindicator, her Tempest submachine guns, and a white-handled, single-edged sword that she slid into a round, similarly-white sheath and attached to her belt. 

As they headed for the elevator, Miranda looked questioningly back at the apartment’s front door. “You’re not taking anything else?”

Samara shrugged. “There is nothing else to take,” she replied. “The apartment was furnished as you saw it when I rented it. It will be left for the next occupant in the same state. I left a few credits in the room account to cover the medigel and towel.”

Even though Samara wasn’t technically a justicar anymore, Jack noted with amusement that Miranda still glossed over where the shuttle had come from and their intentions with regard to filing a flight plan with Tokyo’s airspace control systems. In mere moments, the craft was in the air and Miranda was guiding it east and south, over the Pacific.

Seeming content with her own thoughts, Samara settled herself in the shuttle’s passenger area and began cleaning her guns. Eezo jumped up onto a seat next to her and began worming his head into her lap, which she allowed with a patient smile. Jack swung into the co-pilot chair, where she’d been on the flight from London, and looked out at the dark gray clouds as they swallowed the shuttle.

“That hasn’t happened before,” Miranda said quietly, not looking away from her controls.

Jack looked away. “Yeah, it has,” she said just as quietly. “A couple times. Just not when you were around.”

“Jack,” Miranda began, but Jack cut her off.

“Don’t tell me I need to see a shrink,” she said fiercely. Then, more gently, “I'll get through this. I’ve learned my lesson about getting stuck in one place forever. I’m not gonna be Aresh. Just… give me some time.” She'd gotten past Teltin, and yeah, maybe it had taken a small nuke to get there, but she was in a better place now. Among other things, she had Miranda.

That thought made her realize something, and she grimaced with disappointment in herself. "I should have told you though," Jack admitted. "I'm sorry. I'm still kinda new at this whole 'relying on people' thing."

Miranda was silent a moment longer, then nodded. “Okay,” she murmured. Jack kept staring out at the clouds, but she reached out and took her wife’s hand all the same. The shuttle flew on.

In contrast to Japan, the widely-scattered geography of Micronesia had worked in its favor during the invasion. Several aquacology cities, both floating on the waves and perched on the continental shelf below them, had been ravaged by Reapers, but many of the smaller islands had been bypassed entirely. The cloud cover faded away after about ten minutes of flying, and about twenty minutes after that, Miranda smoothly guided the shuttle down, over a sparkling blue ocean, to touch down on a stretch of unsullied white beach.

They had left London late the night before and had been racing to meet the sunrise on the other side of the planet, so it was mid-morning as they stepped out of the shuttle. “Where are we?” Jack asked, looking around.

“Mokil Atoll,” Miranda replied. She raised a hand to shield her eyes, searching the horizon. “Specifically Mwandohn Island. Recently purchased by one Zaeed Massani.”

“He bought the whole island?” Jack blinked.

Miranda didn’t answer, instead just pointing up the beach toward a small bungalow perched on the edge of the sand. A small dock led into the water, currently unoccupied. Jack shrugged and started toward it.

As they approached, Samara suddenly stopped, readying her rifle. “Something is wrong,” she said, eyes searching. “There are bullet holes in the door.”

Jack could see them now too. She pulled out her shotgun as Miranda drew her pistol, and all three women brought their barriers into existence. Quietly, they began to approach the door, Jack taking point. She reached the bungalow’s wall and pressed herself against it, signaling to the others as she prepared to throw the door open.

“You might as well just come in,” came a gravelly voice from inside. “All the action’s already taken care of.”

Jack exchanged surprised looks with the others, but at Miranda’s shrug, opened the door and stepped inside. The bungalow’s interior was a wreck, with nearly every piece of furniture bullet-riddled or simply blown apart, blood covering the floor and walls, and glass crunching under Jack’s feet as she walked. There were half a dozen dead bodies, mostly vorcha, though there were two dead krogan as well. All wore the reddish-yellow armor of the Blood Pack. In the middle of the room, holding a half-shattered tumbler filled with some amber liquid, was Zaeed Massani.

He looked older than Jack had last seen him. Unlike many of Shepard’s former crew, he hadn’t attended the memorial for Shepard and Anderson, so Shepard’s party had been the last time they’d crossed paths. He’d seemed as imperturbable as ever then, but now, she thought he looked tired. “What the fuck happened here?” she asked, looking around. 

“A few surprise guests,” Zaeed grunted. “Didn’t call first. Still, I showed them a proper welcome.” He grinned. “If I’d known you were coming, I’d have saved you a couple.”

“Just this morning?” Miranda inquired, following Jack in. “That’s odd.”

Samara stepped in as well, brow furrowed as she studied the scene. “Hello, Zaeed,” she murmured. She knelt, pushed one of the krogan bodies onto its back so she could study its face. “Odd seems too mild a word for such a coincidence.”

Zaeed looked them over, raising his eyebrows. “Thought this might not be a social call,” he observed, “but it sounds like there’s more than a bit of business in the wind.” He tossed back his drink. “Well, retirement was getting a bit too quiet anyway.”

“Samara was just attacked as well, not two hours ago,” explained Miranda. “By a squad of Blue Suns.”

“Too much coincidence by half,” agreed Zaeed. “Do we know who’s trying to kill us?” He seemed unfazed by the prospect.

Miranda frowned, and Jack realized she was shaking her head. She wanted to blame the Shepherd, but she couldn’t see any way it made sense. Why wouldn’t it have just tried to kill them when it was in their apartment? And why send them off to find the exact people it was trying to kill? To ambush them all together? Maybe, she supposed, but it had worked out just the opposite, and the thing had seemed too smart to risk it. Also, it didn’t seem likely it would have underestimated Zaeed this badly. He looked barely scratched.

“No,” Miranda said finally, “but it seems likely to be related to what did bring us here.” Again, she summarized their encounter with the Shepherd. Zaeed’s frown deepened as she went along.

“So either this Reaper thing is after us, or someone who knows what it’s planning is,” he said when she was done. “Damn. I was really hoping it was just a disgruntled client or the like. Gets more complicated when you don’t know what the other side’s endgame is.”

Miranda nodded, but partway through the motion her eyes widened and she jerked her omnitool up, tapping on it rapidly. There was a short pause, then Jacob’s face appeared in the air over her wrist. “Miranda?” he asked, looking surprised. “Isn’t it the middle of the night where you are?”

“Jacob,” Miranda cut him off sharply. “Get Brynn and find somewhere to lay low as fast as you can. Samara and Zaeed have both been attacked in the past few hours. The rest of us may be targets as well.”

He was surprised, Jack could tell, but he didn’t waste any time. “Copy that.” The background image, which looked like the interior of an office building, began to blur and bounce as he started running. “Who is it?”

“We’re not sure,” admitted Miranda. “Samara and Zaeed were attacked by different mercenary groups. We have theories but nothing I want to discuss over an open channel. So far, they haven’t tried anything subtle, but that could change, especially since these first attempts have failed. When you find a safe location, contact me with the Ampersand protocols. You remember?”

“Got it,” he replied. “Taylor out.” The image disappeared.

“So much for staying off the grid,” Jack muttered. She shook her head. “Gonna call Grunt now?”

“Attacking Clan Urdnot would require an entire army,” said Miranda, considering. “And assassinating a krogan is not easy. We likely have time to at least try to find a more secure method of communication - although direct conversation might be better still. They may be krogan but I would feel much more secure surrounded by a few thousand warriors commanded by an ally I believe we can trust than I do now.”

“I might have an alternative,” Zaeed rumbled. “Sounds to me like you’re going to need a ship. Especially if you’re planning to get some shielding in place to prevent indoctrination. One big enough to hold anyone coming along - and if something’s gunning for us, we’d be bloody stupid to stay here and wait to take a bullet.” He grinned, an expression that still reminded Jack of a spinning-saw-wielding mad doctor from an old horror vid, and added, “It would probably be even better if the ship had stealth systems and an untappable QEC, I’d reckon.”

Everyone turned to look at him.

He rasped a chuckle. “Back when I was planning to retire after all this, I decided I wanted two things: my own island and my own ship. I found the island on my own, but T’Soni put me in touch with someone developing some cutting-edge, hush-hush new designs. No idea what they were developing them for, but I don’t really care, either. The only thing I cared about was the stealth systems. Took everything I had left after buying the island, but thought it would be worth it.” He chuckled again. “Looks like I was right.” He rose easily to his feet and disappeared into the bungalow’s back room. After just a few moments, he returned, a duffel bag slung over the shoulder of his armor. He was carrying a heavily scuffed-up M-8 Avenger and a bandolier of grenades now crossed his chest. “You have a car?”

In just a few minutes, the shuttle was skimming across the surface of the lagoon in the center of the atoll. On the far side, the atoll’s tiny spaceport appeared, revealing itself to be nothing more than a crumbling concrete runway, probably well over two centuries old, with a small cluster of hangars crouched around one end. They did not appear to be much newer than the concrete, but Zaeed unhesitatingly directed Miranda toward one in particular, and in just a moment, she had settled the shuttle down next to a door in the rear of the building. Even as she jumped out, Jack had her shotgun out and was covering the doorway - if the mercs had known about Zaeed’s other big purchase, then an ambush here seemed like an obvious trap to set. Zaeed and Samara also had their rifles out, the same thought obviously having occurred to them as well; when Miranda didn’t immediately follow, though, Jack risked a glance back into the cockpit. She was rapidly pushing buttons, programming something, and she looked up and gave Jack a very self-satisfied smile. Then she was out of the shuttle as well, pistol in one hand and Eezo’s leash in the other, also eyeing the door warily. Behind her, the shuttle lifted smoothly into the air and rapidly dwindled into the eastern sky.

“Gonna need another ride if this one doesn’t pan out, cheerleader,” Jack noted, but Miranda was unconcerned. 

“If anyone’s watching, let them think we changed plans.”

As before, Jack readied herself to pull the door while the others positioned themselves on either side. Forcing every bit of effort she could scrape together into her barriers, Jack grabbed the handle and pulled.

Disappointingly, there was no one inside. Jack sighed. She’d really enjoyed taking on the Blue Suns in Tokyo, but it had mostly just whetted her appetite.

As the door opened, a series of overhead lights boomed on, illuminating the interior. It was a fairly large hangar, big enough to have once held one of the massive bombing aircraft of two centuries prior, but it was nonetheless filled to capacity by its current occupant. Jack’s breath caught.

The ship was fucking gorgeous.

Now, Jack wasn’t really into ships as a rule; that had always been Tali’s bag, and she was welcome to it. Even so, Jack knew a pretty ship when she saw one, and this one was absolutely beautiful. It was two-tone, a slick, shining silver and a glossy black, with sweeping wings at the rear and a pair of much smaller wings near to the nose. It looked a surprising amount like the Normandy , she thought; maybe she should have expected that, if it had the same stealth abilities, but she didn’t really have a clue how those worked. The biggest differences she could see between this ship and the Normandy were that it was a whole lot smaller and its lines were so much more fluid. It almost looked liquid. As her eyes followed the sweep of the ship’s body, she finally spotted the name, painted just over the smaller nose wings: Jessie II .

Behind her, Samara made a very quiet choking sound. Jack glanced at her, but the asari just shook her head slightly.

“Well, here she is,” smiled Zaeed, stepping around the rest of them and moving toward the ship. Still checking the surroundings for an ambush, the women trailed after him.

The inside of the ship was every bit as gorgeous as the outside, but if anything, it made even less sense. It had three decks, though admittedly one of those was only a single briefing room toward the aft. There were the rooms she’d expected to see: a bridge with seats for pilot and navigator, an engineering room, a cargo hold, the captain’s cabin. But the bunkroom for the crew was large enough for four, there was an infirmary, an armory, two different labs (though Jack had no idea what either was for), and the cargo bay even held restraint brackets for a ground vehicle like the Hammerhead back on the Normandy SR2. Zaeed owning a ship like this was ridiculous - it was like buying an ocean liner for a small-time fisherman.

Miranda was the one who asked the question they were all wondering. “Why would you buy a ship like this, Zaeed? And how could you possibly afford it?”

Running a possessive hand along one bulkhead, Zaeed chuckled. “Guess you never really saw how much the Illusive Man paid me for the Collector job, eh? As for why, it was a bit of missed timing, really. I’d been planning to put together a crew for a job. Figured we could use a ship with enough room for everyone and stealth systems to keep the target from knowing we were coming. I put the money down for the ship, but she wasn’t finished when I located the target. Wound up making a raid on my own. Before I could get to him, though, the Reapers dropped in on all of us, and I wound up just running like hell. Last I saw of the target, he was getting dragged off by a Harvester.”

The jovial tone had drained out of Zaeed’s voice by the end, replaced by a quiet, cold anger. For a moment, the mercenary just stood there, gazing at something none of the rest of them could see, caressing the ragged-looking assault rifle. Then he shook himself, forced another grin, and finished, “Then the ship showed up anyway, and seemed no point wasting it. Figured it would be nice to have around in case I ever got an itch for some travel again.”

Miranda nodded slowly. “Well, it certainly seems to have everything we might need,” she agreed. “We should get into orbit for safety, then we can call Wrex.” Zaeed nodded his agreement, and the two of them headed for the bridge after Miranda handed off Eezo’s leash. Jack decided to take the varren to get a closer look around the armory, just in case Zaeed had any goodies hidden away.

To Jack’s great disappointment, he did not.

Notes:

I admit, I didn't much care for Mass Effect: Andromeda overall. But I fucking loved the Tempest.