Welcome back to the beginning.

So, Darker Futures is a little idea I've been tossing around for a while, asking a fairly basic question: what would happen if Nicole was never rescued from Shadowhill? What if she was trapped in there to adulthood, and emerged not as an N7 Alliance Marine, but as an assassin working for an unsupervised black ops program? Darker Futures is, in short, the answer to that question. This will essentially be a novelization of Mass Effect, but things will be … different. Very different. It will also probably be quite a bit shorter and more concise, since I'm freeing myself from the narrative structure of the game.

If you haven't read the first Beyond the Fire, not a whole lot will be crucial to read this: reading the first chapter might be a good idea, but I don't think it's necessary unless you want that extra bit of background. Darker Futures has the same starting point as Beyond the Fire, but things diverge very rapidly after chapter one.

And finally: as the name would suggest, Darker Futures is not a terribly pleasant story. Themes of violence, torture, emotional and psychological abuse and manipulation, and physical mutilation are all present. I don't intend to make light of that kind of thing or use it as a cheap route to thrills, but if you're uncomfortable with any of that kind of thing, this might not be the story for you.

Okay. Pre-amble done. And now our story begins….

XXX

As the Dragon bore down on Eden Prime, Tobias felt the gentle rush of adrenaline that he associated with a mission. He felt, or thought he felt, the biotic pump in his chest beating faster, the pump he had instead of a heart. It was attached to a black exoskeleton that traced a pattern along his bones, glowing with fine blue lines among the metal. Their ship was small, but more than roomy enough for two people, and equipped with a stealth drive—a smaller verison of the stealth drive that was aboard the Normandy, orbiting the same planet right now. The Alliance didn't know their plans had been leaked into the small Cerberus cell once known as Shadowhill.

The Alliance, it turned out, didn't know a lot of things.

Tobias looked back over one shoulder, out of the cockpit and down into the medical center at the heart of the ship, where his counterpart was looming, running a systems diagnostic. She was back-on to him, hunched over in a backless chair, muscles twisting in her back unnaturally around the large, tear-shaped black marks on her skin. At first glance you might think someone had extensively tattooed her, before you realized that the tattoos ran all over her body, that they centered around her muscle groups, that they were beneath the skin and bit into the flesh, and that they glowed with the softest red light. They trailed from her back and along her arms and up onto her neck, even onto the sides of her head, making fine, artlike patterns through her shoulder-length tangle of fire-red hair. There was a long wire running from a device at the side of the ship directly into one of the cybernetic implants in her neck.

"Systems good?" Tobias asked softly, or as softly as he could. The biotic exosuit Gabreau had grafted onto his skin had permanently altered his voice, adding a rough growl to his normal smoother tones. Nicole had escaped that, at least. But not much else. She looked over her left shoulder and stared at him with her left eye, the eye that had been gutted out and replaced with a cybernetic one, black as night with a glowing red iris in the center.

"No. On the last mission I over-exerted myself. Burned through the nanites." Her voice was clipped and cold, the way it always was. But Tobias knew her, had known her for every day for the past five years they had shared as Gabreau's monsters. He could hear the softest shudder, the softest hint of fear. She hated admitting weakness, any weakness. No doubt that was why Gabreau had engineered one for her. "I'll need more."

"I'll signal the Hill and request he open the storage," Tobias said mechanically. And then, because he could not help it, because though sentiment had been trained out of them he still knew that it resided somewhere inside them both, he added gently, "I'm sure he'll approve."

"He has to. Unless he wants me seizing up down there." There was the slightest lilt in her voice. That was as close as she came to joking. Tobias sent the signal back to the Hill—no longer Shadowhill, not now that the two DRAGON-class agents were active. Gabreau had explained that they were no longer creatures of shadow, but creatures of fire.

Meant to burn, destroy, to vaporize. He can be unsubtle, Tobias thought, with both disdain and affection. Neither of them quite knew what to make of their surrogate father. Their creator.

The signal came back almost immediately, a simple text message flashing onto the cockpit's controls.

XGS DRAGON-012 approved for additional nanite injection. Reminder not to overdose. They always included that last part. "Reminder not to overdose." As though she ever would. As though she didn't hate every minute of it. Tobias seethed at that sentence, knowing what Gabreau was doing. Knowing that he was trying to tell Nicole that she was like Ten, or Thirteen, the drug-addled addicts who Gabreau sent on lesser missions. The inferior specimens.

"You're cleared for injection," Tobias said automatically, dialling back one of the switches in the cockpit as they entered the atmosphere. Eden Prime was supposed to be a beautiful world, but as they broke through the orbit all his cameras saw was fire, oxygen burning against into their night-black hull. Their ship released absorptive gel at exactly the rate needed for safe atmospheric entry, no more. This made it so that the ship was harder to detect, but it also meant that all he could see on his camera was fire.

He heard the hissing of a container being released, and forced himself not to look back. He knew what she was doing. Injecting a long tube filled with thousands of teeming nanomachines into the port on her neck, the nanomachines that fuelled her implants and let her function. He had always been surprised that Gabreau had done that to her, made her so dependent. He had always thought that Nicole had been his favourite.

No. No favourites with Gabreau. Only tools.

"I'm done," Nicole said. He didn't need to know her well to hear the bitterness in her voice. He didn't look back, wanted to let her be alone in this. "Diagnostic complete. Systems optimal."

He heard the rustling of clothing, and the sudden swish of a long jacket. When he turned around, Nicole had pulled a grey tank top over her torso, and wore a long, dark trenchcoat, the sleeves clinging tightly to her shoulders and arms. Like him, she wore tight, black pants made of a Kevlar-like combat mesh with a pistol strapped to her right thigh, and a combat knife strapped to the other. He was the first to admit that their clothing was dramatic at best, and downright fetishistic at worst—he wondered if Gabreau had chosen that consciously, too.

"How're we dropping?" Nicole asked, as she turned to the weapon rack at the other side of the medical center. She selected a collapsed black sniper rifle and slung it over her back, in the same effortless, fluid way she always did. She wore gloves on both her hands, hiding her fingerprints. Tobias didn't bother with that; instead he burned his fingerprints away with small biotic flares.

"We'll drop together this time. Should be fun, don't you think?" Tobias grinned out of the side of his mouth at her. Nicole's stare, always so unsettling with her one metallic black eye and her one human one, didn't change. But he kept smiling, and he finally leaned back in his chair and cocked an eyebrow at her. She managed something that could have, in a very generous world, been called a grin.

"Like old times."

"Like Torfan." Tobias stretched and rested his hands on the back of his head. "Those Alliance soldiers never knew we were there."

"They should've. What, did they think seventy-nine batarians dropped dead?" Nicole snorted.

"I don't think they were thinking about anything aside from killing the batarians in front of them," Tobias whispered. "Certainly our hero was a little pre-occupied—Vargas, the one on the Normandy. The one who's supposed to be the Spectre."

Nicole glanced at the pilot controls and scoffed.

"Just some soldier."

"Mmhmm," Tobias agreed. "Just some human. You want me to do the deed?"

"No. I'm better at that sort of thing."

"I know you don't like it, Nicole."

"Don't be ridiculous."

"Nicole." Tobias looked back at her. "Have you ever known me to be a ridiculous person?"

Nicole's expression was unchanging as she said: "Of the two of us?"

Tobias actually laughed at that one, and went back to the pilot controls.

"All right. You wipe the marines, I'll get to the ground and find Williams." The girl from the distress beacon. The one who had been their first clue about the Prothean beacon. "Implicate the geth. The Alliance are still using outdated sensors—no doubt they've missed the geth vessel hovering at the edge of the system."

"You wouldn't think something that size would be able to hide," Nicole commented lightly. It was Tobias's turn to scoff.

"Nicole, you are exceptionally gifted at shooting people and at ripping metal doors from their hinges. Let the pilot worry about the finer mechanisms of ultra-long range scanning."

"Right. You do the thinking. I hit stuff."

"That's the spirit." When he looked back at Nicole, the corner of her mouth was turned upwards, as though against her will. "We'll be within drop distance soon. Better code in."

"Right." Nicole brushed back the right sleeve of her shirt and tapped one of the glowing veins in the black cybernetics along her forearm there, triggering her implanted omnitool. Tobias couldn't see it—you needed a cybernetic eye to see the images projected from her implants, and Tobias felt no urge to have his eye ripped out to share that privilege. "XGS-dragon-zero-twelve coding in."

Tobias, for his part, activated the omnitool that was embedded in his exoskeleton. His own display was much more typical.

"XGS-dragon-zero-nine, coding in." With both his and Nicole's codes entered, a little green light blipped on his omnitool. Tobias's smile gained relish. Now, he had command of the mission. For the last time, he keyed the recorder that would send a message directly to Gabreau. "Dragon-squad ready to deploy."

Tobias set the ship to descend to the orbital level and got out of his pilot's chair, turning to face the rest of the ship. Nicole was standing there, having slung her sniper rifle down over her shoulders. Standing erect in the center of the ship, her long trenchcoat trailing the ground around her feet, Tobias could appreciate the deadly grace and raw physical power she carried with her so easily. Gabreau had done his work well on the both of them.

"Alliance marines typically have low level shields and moderate armour, shouldn't need disruptor rounds," Nicole was muttering. It was for his benefit, he knew, in case anything during the mission would rely on his knowledge of her kill methods. That didn't make her cold, dispassionate tone any less disturbing. She unslung the sniper and flicked a pair of switches on the sides, the long, rectangular black weapon glimmering with holographic symbols. Apparently satisfied, she stowed the weapon and jerked her head at him.

"All right, let's go."

They descended down the long hallway of the piloting section, dodging around the surgical chair and array of machinery Nicole spent so much time attached to, and down through the small, second level of the ship, a large oval which housed their living quarters along the flank. At the center of the oval floor was a large panel which could fall away to open the bottom of the ship. Nicole took her place on the panel without instruction, and Tobias joined her. As she looked at him, a series of fine wires twined their way out of the black implants along her neck, splintering into an even finer network of fibers that reached around her face to form a thick mask which concealed her lower jaw. He wished she wouldn't stare at him as that happened. He, meanwhile, summoned a biotic barrier around his head.

"Dragon-squad, away," Tobias ordered, and at once the floor gave away and they plummeted through the air in rapid freefall. Tobias grinned broadly as he felt the sudden exhilaration of falling out of the sky, the ground rushing violently up at them. As they approached, he reached out with his biotics and ensnared them in a massive, swirling cocoon, cushioning them against the force of impact. As they landed, the cocoon imploded, the energy retracting in on itself and absorbing the noise. When he looked at Nicole, the mask around her mouth was already unravelling and retracting back into the implants in her neck. Her left eye was glowing faintly red, indicating she had already overlaid her vision with her targeting visor.

"My targets are going to be southwest, emerging near likely landing cite Delta," Nicole informed him. Tobias gave a short nod and consulted his own omnitool.

"I'll search for civilians at the space port. We'll rendezvous once you've disposed of the nonessentials." Nicole nodded brusquely and pointed in the direction of the spaceport. Tobias watched her leave and wondered why she had insisted on being the one to kill the marines. He knew she hated it, knew she didn't have nearly the stomach for it that she pretended to have. Maybe that was why. Maybe she thought that if she did it enough it would get easier.

But Tobias knew better, or he was at least a little more self-aware. He knew that Gabreau would never let their lives become easy. There could be no pity for creatures like them.

XXX

The worst part of it was the adrenaline rush. Gabreau must have designed that, she was sure of it. Whenever she stuck that tube into the slot at her neck, whenever she felt millions of tiny machines forcing their way through her veins like grains of sand, she felt exhilarated. She hated it. Hated that she could still feel the aftereffects. Hated that it made her feel sharper, more focused. Hated that there was no other option for her.

For a long time she hadn't allowed herself to hate, or to feel anything. But before long that hadn't been enough. Hatred gave her a sharper focus than an endorphin rush ever could. Anger gave her life meaning that Gabreau, for all his speeches about the destiny of humanity, had failed to impart in either her or Tobias.

She left deep footprints in the soft earth of Eden Prime, her footsteps heavy with the weight of her implants and modified body. The terrain was rendered in fine red lines by the implants in her left eye. The lines guided her to a hill that overlooked the landing site she knew Vargas and her crew would use. The Alliance used protocols, which made them predictable. For that reason Gabreau ensured that they had few protocols to follow, which was one of the small pleasures Nicole took in life.

As she reached the hill she laid flat on the ground and unslung her rifle, propping it up on the ground at the edge of the cliff. Her weapon was large and heavy, with two separate barrels that could each be calibrated differently. One fired a fraction of a second quicker than the other, so she could fire both barrels in one short burst; she had her first shot calibrated to fire armour-piercing rounds, while the second would fire a shattering round to skewer the flesh. She fitted the scope to her right, still-human eye and triggered the mental command to force her left eye to act only as an extension of her sniper's scope. The sensation was always disarming, suddenly losing vision in her left eye, but it made her a better marksman than any normal human.

"XGS-DRAGON-012." Nicole winced as a voice erupted in her head, channelling through the communications embedded in her omnitool. It wasn't Gabreau's voice, but an automated message that only he could have sent, droning in monotone inside her head. "Reminder to exterminate all nonessentials. Mission failure is unacceptable."

She forced her eyes shut and waited for the voice to speak again, but it didn't. Breathing a sigh of relief, she looked back down her scope again. She wasn't sure just how far the control Gabreau could exert over her implants went, but every time he sent her one of those messages, she was reminded that she didn't want to find out. She couldn't disobey.

This was what she had been made for.

She lay in wait for over an hour as the Normandy stole into orbit and deposited three soldiers on the dirt. They were outside the range of her sniper, but she knew they would wander into the kill area she'd established. They'd want to get to the Beacon, and they'd want to take the quickest, safest route there. Nicole was counting on that.

Like clockwork, three little blips flickered at the corner of her vision, telling her that three heat signatures consistent with humans in Alliance armour had just wandered into range. She pointed her rifle at the narrow pass where she knew the marines would emerge, from out around a high rock wall. She set her scope at eye level and waited.

A young soldier ran out first, almost quicker than Nicole expected. Before she could even pull the trigger, a geth sentry drone gunned him down, lacerating his chest and spine with high-impact bullets. He hadn't even thought to raise his shields.

A biotic barrier bloomed around the boy's body and two more soldiers ran out, trying to drag the boy behind cover. One was a male, the biotic, while the other was a female and clearly the Commander, wearing jet black armour with a red-and-white stripe down one arm. That was Vargas. The Spectre-to-be. Nicole had seen her once before, on Torfan, where people had started calling Vargas "the Butcher." She was competent and commanded soldiers well. She possessed many admirable qualities. Nicole didn't want to kill her.

As Vargas extracted a medigel packet to try and work on the boy soldiers wounds, Nicole placed her head in the crosshairs overlaid on her vision. Nicole couldn't make out the face through the helmet, but she didn't need to. She knew what Delilah Vargas looked like. Knew, despite all the infamy, that she was a good person who cared about her crew. And Nicole knew, with a stab of regret, that Vargas's care for her crew was going to get her killed.

She raised her rifle up and to the right and squeezed the trigger. Two loud explosions issued from the twin barrels of her gun and bullets roared through the air. Nicole didn't have to look to know that the bullets hit their mark, that the first ruptured Vargas's armour and that the second skewered her skull in a burst of bright red mist. She swung the point of her barrel and the crosshairs in her scope to the other man, who was frantically running towards Vargas's body. Foolish; she was clearly dead. Nicole executed the other soldier as easily as she had the first, and then, for good measure, gunned down the geth that had gathered in the clearing before they had time to triangulate the position of the shooter. She activated her comms.

"Nonessentials eliminated."

"Excellent. Meet me at these co-ordinates." Tobias beamed a set of co-ordinates into Nicole's omnitool, and then went silent. His tone had been pleasant and cloying, as though he were trying to hide in the growl in his voice. That was an easy enough riddle to solve: there was someone still with him. Someone useful. Nicole brought the co-ordinates up on her omnitool, on the projection that only her cybernetic eye could see. It was always red, always a deep, burning red. Tobias wanted her to join him in the space port. She collapsed her sniper rifle and slung it over her shoulders, turning her back to the valley below, the valley filled with the dead bodies she'd put there.

XXX

She found them standing over a dead body in what once must have been a shipping yard. In amongst the piled up crates and pieces of debris, Tobias was with a human woman in white-and-pink armour, contemplating a turian corpse. Nicole approached from behind, but the heavy thud of her footsteps gave her away. Tobias turned around and nodded in greeting; the woman stared slightly too long, shocked by Nicole's appearance. Most people were.

"Who was this?" Nicole asked, gesturing to the corpse.

"Nihlus Kyrik, a turian Spectre," Tobias explained gently. "Nicole, this is Gunnery Chief Ashley Williams. Chief, this is Nicole, my accomplice I told you about. The Chief here has been telling me about how her squad were ambushed by geth."

Nicole looked at the woman, appreciating that she didn't immediately avert her gaze. She had handsome features, and had tied her hair back in a tight bun that was starting to come loose. Her armour was dented and there was a scratch on one of her cheeks, but she otherwise seemed healthy. Nicole expected to see defeat and weariness in her eyes, but instead she only saw silent, burning anger, and a thirst for revenge. That, too, Nicole could appreciate.

"We're here investigating the geth as well," Tobias was saying. "So for the time being it would seem our interests have aligned. Would you be so kind as to direct us to the beacon?"

"I'm still not sure who the hell either of you are," Ashley replied bluntly. Tobias put on his warmest smile.

"As I said, we're Black Ops. The reason you don't know about us is because the Alliance doesn't want the word to get out about—well, you can tell we've obviously had more than gene therapy. The other Alliance marines are dead, ambushed by geth when they landed planetside. I'm afraid, Chief Williams, that we're your only option. We can't risk the geth making off with the Beacon before the Alliance can send reinforcements."

Ashley looked away, a muscle flexing in her jaw. After a moment's deliberation, she looked back to Tobias.

"It was supposed to be here, in this clearing. I saw it just this morning. The geth must have moved it. If I had my guess, they'd take it to the space port using the tramway. That'd be easiest."

"Right, then, let's get a move on—"

"Wait," Nicole said, speaking for the first time. She activated the cybernetic overlay in her eye, and scanned the area around them. Two blips for Tobias and Ashley … and then a third. With a subtle twitch of her left hand she switched her vision to infrared and looked around. In a sea of violent red and blue light, it was easy to see the lone human huddled behind storage crates. Nicole walked over and ripped the crate he'd been hiding behind out of the way. Immediately he screamed and backpedalled away from her, throwing his hands out in protection.

"Shit shit shit don't shoot!"

Nicole glanced back to Tobias, who was already making his way over. He knelt down next to the man and gently persuaded him to calm down, to tell him what he'd seen. In short order the man explained that he'd seen another turian named Saren gun down the Spectre, though Nihlus had at first thought that Saren was his friend. Tobias convinced him to hide again, and made a small hand signal to confirm to Nicole that she didn't have to kill him. As Tobias walked by her, he muttered beneath his breath,

"No reason to kill assets when we don't have to." He raised his voice to speak to Ashley, in that disarmingly cheerful tone of his. "Now that we're all one harrowing story of betrayal richer, let's go to see about that tramway."

Ashley didn't say anything as they walked. That was fine. Nicole preferred the silence; she didn't mind Tobias talking, but that was only because Tobias knew that she just liked to listen. She didn't like to talk. She didn't like how people always expected her to say something herself. By the time they mounted the tram, her cybernetic overlay had already activated itself, warning her that there was unfriendly activity nearby; geth activity. She caught the corner of Tobias's eye and nodded. He nodded back, but didn't seem bothered. He was always confident.

"There are geth. Let me take care of them," Nicole said, unslinging her sniper rifle as she spoke. She checked the sights as it locked into place, whizzing and clicking with abrupt efficiency.

"I can fight," Ashley insisted automatically.

"Not like her," Tobias promised. He was still smiling. "Don't worry, neither can I, and I'm probably the strongest living human biotic. With one or two possible exceptions."

Nicole was already kneeling, looking into her sniper scope. Again her left eye de-activated and synced with her scope. The tram was whizzing rapidly, but it was only moving forward, parallel to a long series of platforms at the spaceport. Nicole could already make out several geth in her scope. Dialing a small button on the side, she re-calibrated the first shot to disrupt shields, and her second shot to pierce armour. Then she lined up her shots. First the two easiest geth, standing in the middle of one platform. Then a geth that was partially hidden behind weak cover; then the last two she could see, standing around the edge of a corner. They were guarding something.

They came in range. She fired five times, ten shots roaring from her rifle in staccato bursts of two, the geth shattering and warping into pieces of twisted metal. She paused to see if any reinforcements were coming. There weren't. Unsurprising for the geth. Individual units were disposable, didn't represent the monumental loss that organic races perceived when someone died.

"Is that all of them?" Tobias asked briskly, the warm emotion snapped away from his voice like ice breaking over water.

"Yes. But there's something else. My eye's picking up radioactivity. I'm guessing a dirty bomb." Nicole paused and tapped the implant on her wrist, enabling a more dedicated scanning algorithm. There was a reason she had to turn it on; activating her embedded omnitool's more powerful effects drained her nanites much more rapidly than normal. She didn't like to think about it. "Time to detonation is three minutes."

"Disarm it," Tobias said. Nicole nodded. When the tramway skidded to a stop, Nicole walked off. She didn't run, but she did move quickly. When she reached the device she took one look at it, determined it was a standard model, then drove her fingers between the gap in one of the metal panels and ripped it off. By applying a basic program on her omnitool she rendered the device inert before Ashley and Tobias caught up to her.

"That was solid plate metal," Ashley said. When Nicole looked back, she saw Ashley was staring at the metal panel she'd ripped off, bent around her handprint.

"Those implants aren't for show, you know," Tobias said dryly. Ashley looked like she wanted to say something but couldn't think of exactly what it was. Tobias saved her the trouble. "The beacon should be ahead, yes? Let's move along."

The beacon was standing at the far side of a clearing up ahead, a slim metal pillar that pulsed in strange rhythms with a faint green light. The clearing was empty save for the beacon, which appeared almost sacrosanct and holy, standing alone on that lonely, flat metal surface. Here was technology that had somehow survived fifty thousand years, and now it was standing alone on a prefabricated clearing space on a human colony. It almost seemed sad, its rhythmic pulsing like a quiet heartbeat.

"It wasn't doing that when they dug it up," Ashley said. She was approaching it, slowly. Nicole felt the same impulse, though she wasn't sure why. She didn't trust any impulses whose origins she couldn't place.

"They turned it on," Nicole observed.

"The question," Tobias said, taking a step towards the artifact, "Is why they left it—be careful!"

But no sooner had Tobias spoken than Ashley had walked an inch too close to the beacon, and a tendril of green light turned shockingly bright and reached out from the pillar, ensnaring the human around her midsection. Nicole's thoughts moved so quickly that she could almost watch them happening. Likely some sort of reaction in the device, something automatic, triggered by millenia-old protocols. Perhaps an information dump. Perhaps just a defence mechanism. Either way Williams was unlikely to survive.

Unlikely to survive. There was still a chance.

Against everything she knew, she felt herself breaking into a run. Almost dispassionately the same part of her that had diagnosed Ashley Wiliams' chance of survival watched herself running, noting how much faster she was because of synthetic muscle fibres woven into the natural ones in her legs. She jumped towards the human soldier, not really knowing why. She knew she jumped farther than anyone else could have. She knew when she pushed the soldier out of the way, it was with such force that she might be injured when she landed.

She knew all those things. But as the light snared her and twisted into her mind, as the dying screams of a distant world intruded on her thoughts, she didn't know why.