Lazarus Station, Unknown Sector

"...owings signs of awareness of his surroundings." The male voice was gravelly, the tone had overtones of shock. "My god...Miranda...I think he's waking up!"

Light! Bright! Blurry...can't see...so bright...can't blink...why? With great effort, his head moved, slowly to the left. Ceiling...blue..pipes...lab? A figure moved into his view. Female, human...white outfit...dark hair. It was hard to breath...his lungs burned with the effort.

"Dammit, Wilson!" the woman growled. Her voice was strong, steady. The voice of a woman used to giving orders. "He isn't ready!"

"I know, Miranda!" the male voice again. His head jerked to the right. It was a man. Also, human, early forties. Bald. Lab coat...doctor? "I don't know why, but his brain is forcing him awake!"

Pain! It rolled through him is waves, he couldn't breathe, his muscles felt like ground glass was in them. Why couldn't close his eyes?!

"Give him the sedative!" the woman yelled at the man. She was beautiful, even in anger as she commanded the bald man. But her expression changed as she leaned over him. She looked...concerned. "Don't try to move Shepard, just lie still."

Shepard! His name...Shepard! Normandy! Hit...ambush...fire...Joker...pain...space...pain...no breath...Tali! As his mind raced, he remembered. He was spaced! It burned, but Tali...Did she make it out?!

The woman grabbed his hand as it rose up, her other pressing gently down on his chest, stopping him from trying to rise, but...Goddess! It Hurts! I can't breath!

"Try to stay calm," the woman...Miranda, said. As she attempted to sooth him.

"Heart rate's still climbing…" the man...Wilson. "His brain activity is off the charts! His stats are pushing into the red zone!"

Miranda's head snapped up as she scowled at Wilson. Glancing down at him for a moment, she then moved quickly around his head, towards Wilson. He was able to follow her path, he concentrated on her face, straining his eyes to focus, his ears to listen, even through the burning.

"It's not working!" Wilson exclaimed as he moved away from the monitors he had been working on, making room for Miranda.

The woman paused for a moment then seemed to nod to herself. "Another dose," she ordered, spinning back to face him. "Now!"

Then….darkness...slowly..closing…

Miranda leaned over him, filling his vision. Her dark hair...she was beautiful. Her face was soft, maternal even as her head was haloed by the light behind her.

"Heart rate dropping…." Wilson's voice sounded far….like it was underwater. "We almost lost him."

"I told you your numbers were off…." Miranda scowled as she looked up..looked away…

Then it was dark again.

Commander John Shepard, Council Spectre, Savior of the Citadel, Lion of Elysium, Lazarus Station, Unknown Sector

"...ake up Commander!"

It was the first thing he heard. It cracked the darkness around his mind as the light slowly came to him. And the shaking. A rumble.

"Shepard? Can you hear me?" the woman's voice yelled again. It was familiar. Accented, from Earth….Australian? New Zealand? Something like that. "You have to get out of that bad!"

Another boom, he rocked in the bed. Explosion...Tali!

John's eyes snapped open before he grunted in pain at the bright lights over head. His hand came up to shield them as another boom echoed from deep below him. He had heard enough explosions to recognize them.

'This facility is under attack! You have to get up!" the woman's voice was controlled, but John could hear the undercurrents of tension.

He sat up. Or, at least, he tried to, before the pain in his chest pulled a groan from him. Even his face burned "The fuck?" he whimpered.

"You're not fully healed, Shepard, I know, but we don't have any more time. The facility has been compromised and they are coming to kill you."

"Well, that's definitely some serious motivation…." John grumbled as he slowly rolled himself off the medical bed, his bare feet landing on the smooth carbon fiber flooring. "Yup, lab. Only reason I would have no socks on a floor this cold…."

"This is not the time for jokes, Commander." the woman chastised.

"Lady, then you have no idea who I am…." John muttered as he threw open a nearby closet. Inside looked to be a few sets of medical scrubs. A nice powder blue, too. Not his favorite color, but then purple would have been asking for bit much. Oddly, however, there was a pistol.

"You don't have time to waste Shepard!" the woman demanded. "Hurry!"

"Yeah, yeah…"John grunted as he looked over the pistol. Looked a lot like the standard Alliance sidearm, but...thermal clip port? That wasn't slated for release for another year! "What the hell is going on here…"

"There are mechs coming down the hall outside...looks like...two of them, standard LOKI security," she informed him.

"I'm on it, I'm on it…" John grumbled as he slapped one of the thermal clips he found into the pistol. "You're as bad as my sister…"

Stepping up to the door, John stepped to the side, pressing his back against the wall. He was stiff, in pain and very, very confused, but fighting, he could do that on instinct.

As the door opened, two robots, with a standard humanoid configuration, stepped inside. They were a surgical white, the kind one would probably expect to be security in some sort of hospital...or in this case lab.

John wasn't entirely sure how he knew it was a lab. Maybe it was the machinery in the room? The lack of doctors? The explosions? Who knows….not sure why I trust Mysterious Woman, but I do… John shook his head. It was something about her voice. It felt...familiar. Somehow it felt...comforting….

Not that this was particularly the best time for this bout of contemplation. The two mechs, realizing that nobody was currently on the bed, turned to survey the room, only to received two shots to the head, each.

"And that's why you should always have a human field commander with mechs," John sighed with a quick shake of his head. Crouching down, John leaned his head out to glance down the hall, but saw only saw an empty corridor.

"There are more coming Shepard, you don't have time to wait there," Mysterious Woman came back.

With a wave of his had, John grabbed the thermal clips from the bodies of the mechs before standing, and jogging the hall.

Pausing at the door leading deeper into the the building, John paused and looked up at the ceiling. "Well?" he asked, raising an eyebrow.

"... mechs just...door… Mezzanine...grenade launch…." static cut through the comm before going silent.

"Well," John sighed. "On my own now I guess…." His Mysterious Woman probably had her own issues at the moment. At least she had managed to warn him of the heavy mechs. One of whom, apparently, had a grenade launcher. "Wonder if I could just go back to bed…."

John, Several Skirmishes Later

"Progress is slow," the Mysterious Woman's voice played from the sparking terminal. It had taken some damage in the short battle in the room, but not so much that he couldn't salvage something. "Subject is showing signs of recovery, however. Major organs are again functional, and there are signs of basic neural activity."

The subject the woman was referring to, was most likely him. John was pretty sure getting spaced the way he had would require significant treatment. Assuming the subject survived the incident to begin with. But...he seemed to be intact….

Another couple of sparks from the terminal and the recording continued, now, however, with a face. A rather beautiful face, belonging to a human woman. A face he recognized. From a dream. Or more accurately, a nightmare.

"In an effort to accelerate the process, we've moved from standard organ repair to bio-synthetic fusion. The results are surprisingly positive," the woman, Miranda, as he recalled, reported. "Subject's body is not rejecting any of the synthetic additions. In fact, it seems as if his body is actively bonding to them at an accelerated rate."

John blinked a few times as his mind processed what he had just learned. Bio-synthetic? Like...cybernetics? Slowly he looked down at his hand. Then a memory…

The yellow beam cut through the Normandy's armor, shearing through the command deck. An explosion sends him hurling away from the escape pod. His hand reaches out, grabs the edge of a bulkhead, glowing with heat. A flash of pain, then the heat flashes his nerves away as his armored gauntlet fuses with the metal. Looking back, he can see Joker, his mouth is moving. There is no getting to him now. Reaching out, he slams his free fist down on the manual launch control of the pod, firing Joker to safety….

Shaking his head, John pushed the memory aside before looking back at his hand. There is no way he should have it. Let alone unscathed as it is. Not a single scar on it. Slowly John closed the fingers, squeezing tight before stretching his fingers wide.

It felt like his hand. It moved. It felt. It was...his hand. "What the hell did they do to me?" John wondered aloud.

"Log update," a man's voice startled John, making him jump and nearly shoot the terminal. Real smooth Shepard, he admonished himself. That's how you get your ass shot off..

What had startled him was the console. It seemingly had jumped to the next recoverable entry it had access to. It appeared to be the log of one of the doctors...or rather scientists, he supposed.

"The cost of this project is ridiculous. We are well over the four billion mark, and nobody seems to care that we are over budget. I have no idea where the money is coming from, but I certainly wish the higher ups would kick some my way…" the recording cut off in a burst of static, and this time, the sparks cut out, signaling the demise of the console.

But seriously...four billion credits? That's a hell of an insurance premium…

Later

As the door opened, John could see what appeared to some sort of...waiting area? Benches lined an area with an overlook to the floor below, but what caught John's attention first, also shocked away his breath. Large windows, floor to the overly high ceiling looked out into open space. A sea of stars looked back at him. Right before he was being shot at again.

Cursing to himself, John ducked down behind a couple of the benches. Four billion credits, and you seem determined to get your ass shot off by an Evil Overlord's minor minions...What would Tali say?

The thought sobered John quickly. Tali. Wrex had gotten her out. He remembered the krogan saying as much. Tali was alive. And if he wanted to see her again, he should probably respond to the man trying to get his attention.

"Shepard!" the man called out from where he was crouched, behind a large plasti-crete planting box. It even had a little decorative tree in it. Or it probably did before it got into a firefight.

The man himself was wearing an armored body glove, similar to the type worn by light back duty combat operatives, usually adepts or engineers. But this man's was in an unfamiliar cream and black coloration. The logo seemed to be a stylized letter O, bracketed by a couple vertical lines. Or, maybe, it was a zero?

Regardless, John shuffled his way around the bench and hurried to the darker man's side before the mech across the gap could get a bead on him.

"What the hell are you doing up?" the man looked surprised. "I thought you were still a work in progress!"

Ignoring the man's question for a moment, John shook his head. "Are you with Miranda?"

With a slight frown the man nodded. "Yeah, sorry, this must be a bit of a shock. I'm Jacob Taylor," Jacob introduced himself. "I'm stationed here- dammit!" Jacob cursed as the mech's fire began to chew through the plasti-crete of their cover. "It must be worse than I thought if Miranda has you running about in that getup."

Looking down at the singed hospital scrubs he was wearing, John couldn't help but chuckle. "Yeah, well, Let's go with my not wanting to get airholed by robots with less computing power than a calculator."

"Heh, fair enough," Jacob smirked. "We should get you to the shuttles and out of here though. Hate to waste the time and effort they put into you."

"Yeah," John nodded. "This isn't the greatest of times, but I'd like a wee bit more information about what the fuck is going on?" John knew his voice was getting a little hysterical, but he figured, at this point, he had decent right to be.

Jacob paused a moment before nodding. "Right, I'll give you the quick version.

You and the Normandy were attacked. The ship was destroyed and you were killed." Jacob held up a hand when John opened his mouth to reply. "I know how it sounds, but a person doesn't get more dead than you when they brought you it. You weren't even a full corpse just a pile of meat and tubes. The people here spent a stupid amount of money and over two years putting the pieces back together. So...welcome back to the land of the living."

John sat there for a moment staring at Jacob, trying to decide if the man was crazy. Or he was. "I...am having a bit of trouble with that…" John settled on, as his eyes narrowed. "Two years?"

"Ha," Jacob laughed. "I can only imagine. The Alliance declared you killed in action, there was a whole elaborate funeral on Mindior. They put up a rather tacky statue. Whole galaxy thinks you're dead at this point. Which…" Jacob paused as he glanced over thier cover. "May not be wrong in the not too distant future."

With a groan, John ran his hands over his head as he thought furiously. My hair...shaved my head. Not much growth. Maybe a month's worth… Jane is going to be pissed after two years. Kelly will have graduated, probably in college now...Tali!"

"Okay," John nodded looking back at Jacob, his usual fire back. "First thing, Did my crew make it?" Please Goddess, let Tali be okay….

"Yeah, most of them, but…" Jacob nodded before being cut off by renewed fire from the mechs. "Look, we can go over everything once we get rid of these mechs. We don't have a lot of clips left, but we are both biotics, so it shouldn't be too much work."

"Yeah," John nodded. "I had been hesitant to use my biotics after the wake up. Not sure if my head would break or something."

"Heh, yeah, I can see how that would be a worry," Jacob chuckled and slapped John's shoulder. "Don't you worry. When the fixed you up they put new and improved implants in you. They jumped you all the way to XL-5s. Beyond bleeding edge. Probably 3 years ahead of their time."

"Well…." John frowned uncomfortably. "Glad to know I have such well tested and reliable hardware…but..fuck it…"

With a grunt, John stood quickly, wrapping a bitotic field around in front of his as a shield as he reached out with his power. His intention was to pull a mech into the air so that Jacob could hit it with his power, crashing it back against the wall behind it.

However, that is not exactly how it went down….

Jacob Taylor, Lazarus Station

It had been a rather boring day right up to the point that all the security mech spontaneously activated and began killing everybody. All in all, Jacob would have prefered the boring.

Now he was standing besides a living..well...re-living legend who just smashed eight mechs into the ceiling with enough force to drive shards of robot into the structure. The legend himself seemed more than a little surprised.

"..." Shepard stood there for a moment, his mouth was moving slightly, but no sound was coming out. Slowly the blue flare around him dimmed before vanishing in a puff. A field that, Jacob noted, was brighter and not nearly as well controlled as he had seen on Shepard in the vids.

"WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT!" Shepard yelled, finally seeming to find his voice. "I should have felt effort just picking up one of those things, not all eight of them! I just meant to lift it! Not send them through three floors! I shouldn't be able to do that!"

"Yeah…" Jacob surveyed the scene, his own eyes wide with shock. "I honestly got nothing. Whatever that was, it's a hell of a side effect."

"Side...effect…" Shepard muttered under his breath as he rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. "I couldn't control it properly. That is bad. I can't risk using my biotics until I figure out what fuck is going on."

Again, Jacob nodded. "Yeah, that would probably be a good idea…."

"Now tell me about my crew."

The subject change was so abrupt Jacob blinked a couple of times before his brain caught up. "Yes, right...your crew. Just about everyone made it off the Normandy. Some of the service men in the lower decks were killed in the initial attack, including the Navigator, Pressly. Everybody else, including the non Alliance crew, like the asari, and the quarian made it out alive."

Shepard frowned darkly at Jacob for a moment. "They have names," the man growled. "Liara. Garrus. Wrex. Tali."

Jacob quickly held up his hands. "Yeah, no offense Shepard. I'm just a little distracted right now."

After a moment Shepard nodded with a sigh. "Yeah, sorry," he conceded. "Same, didn't mean to snap."

Nodding, Jacob smiled tightly. "If anybody gets a pass right now, it's you. But right now, we need to get out of here. The woman you were talking to, Miranda Lawson, she's the station's ranking officer. Her job was to bring you back, no matter the cost. She would skin me alive if I let anything happen to you at this point."

"I lost contact with her not long before I ran into you," Shepard turned and glanced out the window. Jacob saw the man repress a shudder before he turned to look toward the door out. Not that Jacob could blame the man. Getting spaced sounded like one of the worst ways to die.

Jacob was about to say more before Wilson's voice cut in through the comm. "Hello? Is anybody alive out there?"

"Wilson?" Jacob called back. "This is Jacob. I'm here with Shepard."

"What?" Wilson sounded oddly incredulous. "How the hell is he alive?! I mean….he wasn't ready…"

Something was...off. Looking up at Shepard, Jacob could see the commander raise an eyebrow. "Yeah, Wilson, tell us where you are, and we will meet up."

Dr. Wilson, Lazarus Station

Shepard was alive! How the fuck…. Wilson cursed internally. When the virus was released, the mechs were supposed to home in of the man, kill him while he was still out!

Wilson slammed his hand against one of the pipes he was hiding behind as he shuddered. Shepard shouldn't be able to wake up, let alone move at this stage! He's months away from being to that stage! And yet, somehow….

No, he couldn't panic now...his hand hurt. He shouldn't have hit the pipe. Now Shepard was coming for him. Shepard would know! Cover story, cover story….

Looking down at the pistol in his hand, Wilson slowly looked down at his leg, and bit his lip.

John

"Weren't you listening?" Wilson growled. "I came here to try to stop this! They shot me! How do you explain that!"

Frowning, John looked over at Jacob, as the man turned to to look back at him. Jacob wasn't buying it either. The shot to the leg, for instance, was a flesh wound. The round had barely grazed him. And the angle was downward….

It was clear that the snake shot himself. Out of cowardice or maliciousness, that question would have to wait until they were out of there. They didn't really have time for a full interrogation.

"Yeah, sure, let's just get out of here, shall we?" John grunted. "I just came back to life, I'd like to not die here."

"We need to find Miranda," Jacob nodded. "She probably knows more about what's going on."

"What!" Wilson exclaimed. The man seemed to be trying to hide panic. "No! Miranda...she's probably the one behind all this!"

"What?" Shepard shook his head. "I doubt that. She wouldn't have bothered to wake me up and guide me as far as she did."

"Well...still…" Wilson stuttered. "She probably didn't make it!"

"Right…" Jacob muttered. "We can probably meet up with her at the shuttles anyway."

As John turned to head out, jacob placed a hand on his shoulder stopping him. "Wait, Shepard," Jacob sighed. "You deserve to know the whole deal."

"Well, that would be nice," John agreed, crossing his arms over his chest. "I take it this is going to be the big reveal about how this is some dark clandestine conspiracy?"

John was joking. Until he saw the surprised look on both Jacob, and Wilson's faces. "What? Seriously?"

Nodding, Jacob took a deep breath. "Me, Miranda...this whole station, the whole project is a Cerberus operation….."

Later

"Surprised?" Miranda asked Wilson's corpse, as she dropped the arm holding the pistol to her side.

"What the hell Miranda?!" Jacob exclaimed, seemingly as shocked by the incident as John was. He didn't pull his gun on the woman though. Must be a lot of trust there.

John, however, didn't know this woman from a vorcha. And she was Cerberus. So his gun stayed pointed at the woman.

"Wilson was the one that betrayed us," Miranda said matter-of-factly.

"Right," John sighed looking up at the ceiling. Goddess give me strength…. "Now we can't question him." He looked back at Miranda. She was beautiful, but cold blooded.

"Not much we needed to know," Miranda shrugged. "He was paid by an outside person, probably the Shadow Broker. He released a VI virus that turned the mechs against my staff, killing them all. He killed my people."

John was a bit surprised in the possessiveness in the woman's voice, though he wasn't sure if it was actual caring, or a more selfish nature. "Suppose I couldn't expect much more from Cerberus," he said, shaking his head.

"Ah, Jacob," Miranda half smirked at the other man. "Always the soft touch."

"He won't trust us if we aren't upfront with him," Jacob scowled, crossing his arms.

"Yes, well," Miranda sighed. "We need to get you out of here. The Illusive Man will want to talk with you." The, without another word, Miranda turned on her heel and strode purposefully into the shuttle.

"Well…" John turned to look at Jacob. "That's certainly a thing that happened."