Chapter 1

Sigurd's Cradle, Padovan cluster, Freedom's Progress, Outskirts of capital settlement – 05.06.2185

A hale, hearty, and massively annoyed man sits in the cockpit of a spaceship.

Not altogether unusual. It's a big universe after all, trillions of intelligent lifeforms on hundreds of planets ride spaceships between stars all the time, and given the nature of intelligence (what with how much time it tends to spend angry at the slightest thing) it's entirely unsurprising that more than a few would be male, piloting a ship, and a bit cheesed off.

This sight in particular was at least a little unique though, after all, how many of those ships are bigger on the inside than on the outside, pack mass drivers able to punch a hole through a medium sized moon, and were cleverly concealed inside a perfectly scaled and waterproofed paper-maché hill?

Harry had never been very good at camouflage. Being spoiled in his youth by having a mystical invisibility cloak taken from death itself meant that when the time came to stand and deliver, or rather hold one's breath and hide in a convenient maintenance closet, he had found himself woefully under-prepared.

Conversely, from his many years preparing award winning rose garden arrangements for his aunt, he had developed a lot of skill in gardening and basic arts and crafts. It was only in his early 90s that he learned how to augment his lack of ability in one with his weird proficiency in the other.

"It's releasing... bugs?"

Harry turned to the Asari next to him, struggling for a hold on his temper, "Bugs? I... what?"

The monogender pushed her data to the screens Harry was using, and views that had been filled by charge levels and connectivity to his servers back in the house were replaced with scrawling sensor data. The massive asteroid with engines grafted on was hovering above the colonial capital settlement of Freedom's Progress (a city imaginatively named Freedom's Progress) and all along its bottom-most edge massive panels had retracted, releasing millions upon millions of bugs. Vast swarms darkened the sky as they flew down into the colony.

It hadn't been hard to figure out that the ship was hostile. It shot down all the deep space comm arrays on it's way in, and then all satellites in orbit as it arrived. In Harry's studied opinion that was nothing if not a dead giveaway. But seriously, for all the effort of securing his compound, assembling his temporary crew, and rushing flight prep for his ship, Harry had honestly expected something better. For all his effort he wanted something considerably more exciting than a cloud of midges with attitude.

"What are they doing?"

Liara had busied herself collecting data from sources inside the city. Cameras from weather stations, stolen access to traffic monitors, and even webcam feeds from the less productive but more risqué members of the local population, flitted across her station.

Harry pulled up his own feeds, mostly stolen from the local garrison's 'closed' network. Magic was great for opening doors into those delightfully misnamed 'unhackable' closed systems. Though in fairness to overall Alliance operational security, the local 'garrison' barely qualified for the name, and had the hardware to prove it. With just over a million people, Freedom's Progress was definitely a minor colony resting on an otherwise entirely unremarkable world. The average iron-rich asteroid was a more lucrative target for all but the most bloody thirsty pirates. The entire defensive complement consisted of one under-strength battalion of bored marines and a standard set of automated anti-orbital guns pointed in a generally skyward direction. Guns which had each disappeared in a blaze of high-precision kinetic glory just a few hours earlier that afternoon.

The marines were still scrambling for a proper response, and from all of the yelling and ordering about Harry got the distinct sense that they knew they were out of their depth, and that they knew something about this situation that he didn't.

Frowning, Harry thought longingly of the intel access and active system alerts he would have had forwarded to him if he had retained his Spectre status. Without the important information being flagged for his attention he was reduced to pulling encrypted files from their servers more or less at random, and tasking the server farm on his homestead with cracking it. Cracking the info took time, and time was regrettably finite, even for him.

He watched the security feeds idly as techs backed up all the sensor data they had as redundantly as possible. As they finished putting sensor logs and reports on external media they passed the drives and OSDs to waiting lines of grunts, who were hiding them across the base in secure storage, personal lockers, and even in the glove compartments of nearby vehicles.

They knew they were going to lose so they were trying to save data?

Harry directed his basement to look into that neat little mess, and turned to his combination co-pilot and intelligence analyst. God damn he missed military funding.

"Anything?"

Liara pushed more content to his screens without looking, forcing Harry's gaze back to his own terminal, "They're some kind of stasis bugs?"

The question was obvious in her tone, though Harry took it to be more confusion than outright disbelief, and looking at the footage she had passed across to him, he discovered he fell into the second category.

"What?"

A weather camera looked out over the Governor's Plaza in front of the capitol building, and it showed bugs latching on to stragglers that hadn't made it into shelters. They landed on their victims releasing a cloud of gas and a visible mass effect field, and the result was people frozen in place, in some cases almost exactly like a body bind curse with limbs frozen mid-movement, locked in place in defiance of gravity.

Harry didn't like any part of this.

"Okay, can you get a firing solution up? I'm turning us around."

Liara cleared her console with a gesture and brought up the gunnery controls for the main mass driver, while Harry switched his controls over to maneuvering. Mass effect cores across the inside of the ship lit up, and with somewhat jerking movements, the ship rose a meter off the ground of the makeshift hangar and rotated to face the hovering behemoth casting a shadow over the city.

"We're aligned, you got something for me?"

Harry's eyes were locked on his readouts, constantly making minor adjustments to keep them more or less on target, Liara's voice passed over his shoulder, "Give me a minute, there's something odd in the system."

Harry idly activated a comm line, and called out to his only other crew member, "Tali, how's it looking? Can you double check the main gun?"

Her synthesized growl met his question, driving a wedge of amusement into his anger as she responded, "You bosh'tet! What have I been telling you for weeks! We need a shakedown run, but no, your 'magic' " Harry could feel her delightful three fingered air quotes from all the way down in engineering, "says everything should be fine!"

"Just run a diagnostic on the weapon systems."

There was beat of silence, Harry corrected a half a degree for target drift, and then Liara spoke up.

"Wait, it's not an error, it's your safety. It's not letting us destroy it."

Tali piped up over the comm, "Agreed, I'm not turning up any errors down here."

As they spoke bugs continued to pour from the enemy ship, blanketing the colony. What few signals they were receiving from the colony died to just above nothing, and Harry's mind raced.

"The safety won't fire if the shot will hit and kill civilians. It takes into account piercing, but shouldn't consider the ship crashing. Check my sensor sweep, there's nothing behind it right?"

Liara sent another query to the ship's sensors, and double checked with reports from the colony's automated traffic control systems, "I've got nothing, it seems clear."

The hovering ship was clearly aggressive, it should have satisfied every condition Harry had set into the weapon system to make sure his couldn't mis-tap a control and find himself with a Tier I violation of the Citadel Convention on Weapons of Mass Destruction, and a hole in the nearest planet's crust.

In this case there was no reason the enchantments should be holding them back.

"Run a life signs scan."

Beyond his sight the Asari scowled as she brought up the scanner, "This is idiotic and impossible."

Harry cracked a grin, "You were the one who insisted we watch 'old earth classic science fiction', you gave me the idea, you should be expecting this stuff by now."

Liara's general disgust did not abate as the scan began, "You'll have to forgive me for a century of living not preparing me for a box you stenciled 'hominem revelio' on destroying everything I know about the limits of modern sensor technology."

Her gasp at the completed scan drew his attention from keeping the gun aligned, turning from his display he looked over her shoulder.

He didn't like what he saw.

"It's beyond that thing's sensitivity, there have to be more than half a million of them in there. A lot more."

The ship was lit up from the inside, like an x-ray view of some perverse bee hive, revealing what the safety wards interpreted as civilians stashed in a honeycomb over the inside of the whole ship, stem to stern.

"How is that even possible?"

Tali must have had Liara's station repeated for her in engineering, her voice sounded over the radio and broke Harry from his shock.

"I... where did they even get that many people? How have we not heard of this?"

He sat back into his chair, correcting the positioning again, letting them all have some time to absorb what they had in front of them. Before their eyes the ship touched down on the outskirts of the colony, dwarfing the build-up of pre-fab structures and newer ceramacrete buildings. The captain of the enemy ship had evidently met whatever condition they were looking for, and an idle glance at the local comm net gave him an idea what that condition was.

Zero chatter.

They got everyone.

As it settled, the cameras they had feeds from showed hatches opening and hundreds of humanoid insects getting off. They weren't affected by the swarms of flying stasis bugs, which showed an impressive degree of control over such tiny life forms, and between two of every three pairs of humanoid figures there floated some kind of terrifying organic coffin.

As an army marched into the city, the settlement's automated traffic control flared warnings, distracting Liara from the hostile forces spreading out onto the streets of the city. Something with the mass of a standard air car was emerging from an opening, higher up on the ship.

The figure had an odd radar profile, and was outside the range of their cameras. The ship naturally had better sensors than the local traffic control grid, but anything more intense than standard radar would broadcast their location like they lit off a beacon. So they had to wait until the huge form landed near one of the first colonial bunkers to get a good look at it, and it did not disappoint.

It was huge and just as insectoid as the rest of its friends, like a scarab designed by an Egyptian god, mad with cybernetic power. It stood two and a half meters at the shoulder and was covered in armored plate, each of its four limbs ending in a wickedly sharp claw.

They watched helplessly as the thing walked slowly up to the bunker entrance, standing in front of it and making short, jerky movements back and forth. Scanning? Deciding on the correct action? Taking orders? With just seconds of build-up, it unleashed some kind of energy beam or particle cannon at the door, burning a huge hole through the reinforced ablative plating of the bunker. Before the edge of the hole could even cool to a dull red, a swarm of flying bastards were already rushing into the shelter.

Within moments, it was clear what they were doing here, and how they came across the incredible mass of life-forms in their hold. The humanoids began packing the first people they encountered into the coffins, and walking them directly back to the ship.

Kidnapping, even the aliens.

"Give me a firing solution on just the engines. Whatever these things are, they're not leaving this planet until I've had words with them."

With a quiet huff at the melodrama, Liara refined her targeting solution. A forward-facing point defense laser burned a hole into their cover, and the massive barrel of the main rail gun poked through their camouflage façade, the barrel appearing suddenly in a rather sheer valley wall. She went to inform Harry but before she could get a word out, he got there first.

Stabbing the control viciously he said, "Fire."

/ - /

There was darkness.

Then, there was panic.

Brief panic, but panic nonetheless.

Gravity stuttered around her. She felt a pull in a direction she labeled 'down', towards her feet, but as her brain switched from unconscious to conscious the pull flickered. Her stomach churned as different forces pulled her away from just 'down' toward odd angles all around her. The forces fought one another, pulsing on and off for a few seconds and stretching her skin uncomfortably, cracking her back for her. Intense vibrations wracked her world, bouncing from the formless black around her and inside her head, leaving her stunned and weirdly grateful for the relief of the tension in her back.

Almost as soon as it had begun, dragging her from slumber, it was over. She was left alone in the dark with echos of an inhuman noise fading into the nothingness around her.

As her world returned to silence she came back to herself, remembering who she was, and with that the adrenaline receded. She'd done the blind thing before during training, and for a while in her youth she'd done the panic thing. Then she left the Reds, joined the marines, and survived N-school, Harry Potter, and the invasion of Ilos. Now, at the other end of it all, panic no longer meant the same thing. You had to pass a very high threshold in order to freak her out. So why was she freaked out?

It was still dark for one, which was odd given that she had her eyes open and she had passed an eye exam just a few months ago

She tried to raise a hand to her head, but only moved her hand a few inches before she hit some kind of hard casing, or paneling, or something. Realizing that she was confined shot adrenaline right back into her system, and she immediately began feeling around, mapping out her environment.

She was in a coffin.

From the inside there weren't any buttons or levers or obvious touch interfaces. The surface she was laying against had a series of strangely organic curves to it, each curve mapping out a sinuous figure that didn't speak to her of anything. They didn't seem to serve a purpose, so she discarded them and moved on. The top of the coffin was lined with ports of some kind and again on the bottom there were more, maybe to let things in and maybe to let things out. She had no idea, but she didn't like it, whatever it was for.

She laid back and took a calming breath. A few meditative breaths determined that air wasn't going to be a problem, even after her first few moments following waking it was still relatively clean. She took stock. The darkness hadn't abated in the slightest, she couldn't smell any kind of chemical traces, there didn't seem to be any significant trigger for her to have woken up other than the shaking. Probably power loss then, either from some kind of mass effect stasis field, or from some chemical pump losing it's juice. Battle damage, then? An especially hard landing at some slave market? Pirates weren't known for their exacting drive core maintenance.

She didn't have a gun, and the hard shell of her armor has been stripped off at some point, but she was still wearing the flexible insert. Her omni-tool was still with her, but whoever caught her seemed to have taken her power cell and omni-gel reservoir.

If her captors hadn't been thorough and discharged the active reserve there might be enough juice left in the system and its capacitors to give her a few moments of flashlight, but that was about it.

Jane sighed, and took another breath. Nothing was impossible, she had seen proof of it. She had lived it more than anyone had any right to. She'd already woken up somehow, so she was already halfway out of whatever this was.

Shifting slightly, she banged her shin against the wall and caught the dull clack she was looking for. So they kidnapped her, took her armor and her guns, but didn't find the ceramic punch dagger beneath her under-layer.

Interesting.

She had a spare power cell and her own lesser version of a Potter special omni-gel reserve in her boot. Neither were large enough to do anything really fun, but the cell had enough power to flash form as many omni-blades as she could possibly need and the reserve had enough gel to kill everything between her and a gun. Maybe even two guns. Now she just had to take her pants and shoes off inside a coffin, and hope whoever took her had been consistent in their negligence.

As she worked, a part of her was worried that she couldn't remember being taken, or indeed anything about how she got here. She and Ash had been reassigned after Ilos and the Citadel, they had been called in, debriefed, given medical exams, and then the whole crew had been reassigned.

The Normandy dropped them all off at their new postings before taking the engineering crew, Joker, Kaiden, and the P5 analysts who hadn't been sent off to the ends of Alliance space, back to an R&D facility at Arcturus Prime. She and Ash ended up together protecting a literally nameless colony out in the traverse.

Official records had it with some kind of binary code an Alliance supercomputer had spun off when it was first observed, P3W-451, but the locals who had set up a city there had called it Dust. It earned its name.

She had taken command of the Alliance's token advisory company, and Ash joined in as one of the platoon commanders. The two of them had been forced into the mostly unwelcome position of being the liaison to the scattered local government. As more people showed up they gave advice on how to lay out the rough cities and utilities in such a way that a pirate couldn't cripple the entire planet's infrastructure from orbit with a handful of shots. Advice which had been poorly received and almost immediately ignored. Two years of banging their heads against sand dunes populated by idiots, lately just trying to convince them that preparing larger panic shelters for the colony was a good idea.

Then... nothing?

It had to be Batarians again. Fucking Batarians. It was really, really hard not to be racist when nearly every one you've ever met had literally been trying to either shoot or enslave you. Call it sampling bias, but she'd been causing trouble in the wider galaxy for around a decade, and she had never met a Batarian doctor, or a social worker, or even a florist. It was slaving and smuggling from hell to breakfast with those people, and they also had a bad history of picking methods of incapacitation that left behind amnesia and central nervous system damage. Probably why she couldn't recall getting captured.

When she finally slotted the power cell in, she powered on the omni-tool and took stock of her situation, running every scan she could on her surroundings. She was not a tech, but she did have a Potter Mark II, so she was still able to get something from the data. Scans showed she was surrounded by a shell made of metal-rich high molecular weight keratin.

Which didn't mean a hell of a lot to her.

In point of fact it meant nothing. Keratin was hair, wasn't it?

What it did say was that she could cut her way out.

With a familiar gesture, her omni-blade formed next to her thigh, bleeding off an unholy amount of heat and singeing her through her underlay. With a grimace, she drew the blade up, drawing a clean slice through the container.

Very dim orange light streamed in through the slit opening she made, the hideous smell of burning hair in her pod was quickly replaced by a distant stench of decay. Drawing her blade back in, and quirking her elbow as far up and to the side as she could, she drew a flat slice across the front of the pod, shearing a short window out of the lid.

Sticking her head out, she took a look around. As the sound of retching (someone's stomach couldn't take grav disruptions) filled her ears, she instantly realized one very important thing: It wasn't the fucking Batarians.

Her pod was mounted vertically, inset into a support pillar directly alongside six others. Her view opened directly into a corridor which opened to her left, and above into a massive cavern. All around her she could see pods, caskets, like the one she was peeking out of. The cavern must have been the better part of a kilometer wide, maybe a klick and a half long, and as far as she could see it was absolutely covered in pods. Stretching across the expanse were stalactite formations, each of which was also covered in pods.

If her pod was just a square meter or so in footprint, some very unqualified napkin math suggested there might be a couple million people here.

Maybe more.

The orange light was brighter outside her tube, consistent despite the flickering power she could see in the pods and control panels near her. Jane didn't consider herself a navy woman, and certainly not a ship-wright, but she was confident the power issues were due to the massive gaping hole in the end of the ship. A ten meter wide hole shot straight through to a fifty meter wide exit-wound on the opposite side, a low wind pushed slowly 'down' from the damage to where she was, playing through her sweat-stuck hair.

Okay. She was alive, she had an active omni-blade, and the pod next to hers was finished retching and had moved on to moaning. From waking up to rescuing a person who wasn't actively vomiting, it was all positive. Hell, the wind and the lack of choking on her part even meant they had landed, with a glance up to the gigantic hull breach, that was probably crash landed on a life-supporting planet. Things were increasing, getting better step by step.

Hell, this could make for a fun and diverting afternoon.

Igniting her omni-blade again, Jane cut a shallow slice off the top of the groaning pod, opening it to the air with a whuff.

The timbre of the groan took on a nasal-y cast, an all too familiar nasal-y cast, a voice she had been dearly hoping to never have to hear again. Why couldn't it have been Batarians? The Batarians would have just shot him.

There, before her very eyes, was Lucius Octavius Phelonius III. Self-described restaurateur, raconteur, and post-revival electro-operanteur. Regrettably the most technically inclined settler of P3W-451, he had been the technical contact for setting up the Alliance's proposed detection nets, surface-to-space guns, and defensive installation communication infrastructure, also he was a hideous and persistent pain in everyone's ass.

It fucking figured.

He sat up, poking his head out of the hole, and took a deep breath of the cleaner air outside his pod. The contents of his stomach were spread across his artsy shirt (faux-crocodile skin in highlighter yellow?), pooling in small catches across his rumpled jacket (a classical opera long-tailed coat, done in a faux-crocodile banana yellow?).

"Oh god, what year is it?"

Jane stared daggers at him, cursing her fortune, "2185, probably."

"Thank god, I thought I was back in art school."

This reflected very poorly, Jane thought, on both N school and art school.

"Where the hell am I?"

"We've been captured, some kind of power surge or something cut off whatever was keeping us under. I broke free and heard… that," she said, with a vague gesture at his state.

He seemed to look down for the first time, noticing his state as the caught pools of his own vomit shifted and ran down his front. With a jolt he sprang up, only to smack his lower body directly against the razor sharp lid of his pod, effectively shearing his shirt off at the midriff. The edge, severed and burnt by an omni-blade, scored a line across his stomach and shattered, leaving a dull charred surface.

He lay over the edge of his pod, groaning. Raising his eyes he seemed to really look at Jane for the first time, "Why aren't you wearing pants?"

/ - /

At the edge of Freedom's Progress a small hill, which had just shown up one fine winter morning about eighteen months ago, decided that it had enough of this regrettable physical existence and promptly blew itself to pieces. The shock wave of a fifteen kilogram slug accelerating very suddenly into the neighborhood of Mach 20 devastated the half of the hill facing the city, one edge catching fire briefly, and in the space of 90 seconds where once stood a proud make-out spot for horny teenagers, now flew a medium-sized frigate.

Built in the form of the illustrious SSV Normandy, the frigate deviated slightly from the original design. There were structures on it that hadn't been included in the original design, slim-profile domed pods under each 'wing' and on the top and bottom of the fuselage, dense and unconcealed clusters of GARDIAN laser defense projectors, and a sleek gunmetal blue on grey paint job. There were also some structures that had been removed from the original design, including the pyramidal 'tail fin' structure, which Harry had described as 'lame' during the design phase of his own vessel.

"Decisions, decisions…"

"Oh don't be dramatic, Tali and I didn't spend three weeks installing rail turrets in the wings for you to sit there and try to look cool while bugs kidnap a bunch of idiot colonists!"

From the active comm link in his console Tali's tinny voice chimed in with a "Yeah!"

Harry reflected that perhaps he should have done more direct, combat-oriented, engineering work on the ship. If only so they didn't shout that at him every time he wanted to enjoy himself while they shared these tense moments moving forward. Long term, this would lead to a place where he'd be their comedic set-piece, and that just wouldn't do. He was both captain and wizard, he suffered the company of others almost exclusively so he could make jokes about them.

It was overall a good thing then, that he had been hard at work on a project of his own while they had overseen installation and calibration of the pairs of twin-linked rail turrets under slung on each 'wing'.

"Well. If you insist."

He could feel the reverb of Tali's growl in his seat, which not only made him smile, but also told him installing speakers beneath the pilot's seat was as great of an idea as he thought it would be. With a very pointed motion, Harry selected a file from the menu he had been trawling through and then cleared his terminal, readying the flight controls for sustained hovering and fire-support.

"Confirm turret readiness."

"I have green across the board."

From behind him Liara agreed with a, "Confirmed".

With careful, deliberate moves, Harry guided his ship up from where it had been idling. His specific piloting expertise was more in the 'small one-manned fighter' range, so a vehicle massing around 45,000 long tons was a few steps up from his experience. He checked and re-checked all of his moves, and even then as the ship rose past the height of the capitol building, there was some minor-to-significant wiggle along the roll axis. The flight engines along both sides flared inconsistently before settling into a low and steady burn.

Across the hull, in strategically located areas selected not only for being out of common firing lines but also for their irrelevance to the structural integrity of the ship, panels withdrew, exposing three hundred-fifty kilowatts of the finest speakers and subs Harry could rig into a functional sound system without his two nosy compatriots being aware.

As the frigate took flight the first strains of Ride of the Valkyries, performed by the First Elysian Orchestra at the Grand Opera Hall of Illyria in the spring of 2174, began to play.

It had been a good concert, Harry had discretely donated some of the principle funding to get the orchestra off the ground, Jon Grissom, for all his normal reclusive and anti-social tendencies, had covered most of the rest.

Now, instruments made on humanity's oldest colony could begin to strike fear into the hearts of thousands of alien bastard kidnappers.

Or they would have, if the alien bastards felt fear as a human would recognize the emotion or indeed if they had hearts in the way a human would conceive of the organ.

Okay, so it really just confused the aliens, and the immense pressure of the amped up speakers played merry hell with the flight patterns of nearby flying swarmers.

/ - /

"I JUST DON'T KNOW!"

"WELL SHUT UP AND TRY SOMETHING ELSE YOU FUCKING NERD!"

"-jesus christ fuck what the fuck stop it jesus why-"

Jane fired her purloined heavy rifle blindly around the edge of a pod, wincing with every returned round that impacted her cover. From inside her cover a man shouted and beat his fists against the wall of his pod, invoking his god and asking a pretty genuine question. Why indeed.

Jane just wanted his stupid muffled voice to stop shouting, it was seriously damaging her calm. She wanted him out of there probably as much as he did, the air in those pods must have been getting thin, and if any of the idiots she had freed were going to survive, they needed people that could thump as loud as this guy, ideally with guns in their hands.

The shot that caused the power shortage releasing her, had cored the main generator from the ship. No main power meant disruptions to primary control, and disruptions to primary control meant no life support, and no life support meant that the million-or-so souls stuck in pods over the ship were all down to whatever air was in their local systems, nothing else. On Alliance ships they typically had decentralized back-ups for just this occasion, but their kidnappers had either bad engineers, or no strong desire to keep their hostages alive. Maybe both.

In a horrifying way, the shots penetrating the coffin she was using for cover almost made things better for him, at least he was no longer suffocating, but ultimately no one wanted to choose between getting shot to death inside a hair-coffin and suffocating. Jane couldn't help but wince at every hit.

The main halls of the ship weren't doing especially better in terms of life support. No forced air circulation in an enclosed area of more than five cubic kilometers, other than the ten meter hole in the side, meant that air was slowly becoming an issue even for her rag-tag group of escapees outside their gross prisons.

Every man, woman, and the singular Asari, with her was covered in sweat. The air was only getting muggier where they were fighting, in the bottom half of the ship.

From across the hall what had to be a member of some colonial militia was firing with her down the hall. He scored kill shots on three of the advancing four-eyed bastards before ducking back into full cover. He was a bear of a man, nearly two meters tall, muscled like a Krogan, pushing a hundred kilos if he was an ounce, and chest hair like shag carpet. Jane could see his breathing becoming more labored as time went on, and not just because of the fighting. Dark sweat stained the grey coveralls across his whole back, and down from each armpit.

They needed to jump-start secondary power, restoring it from whatever the surge from the death of the main power had done. They needed to do it soon.

It all left them here, in the nearest thing they could find to an engineering substation, with a hipster DJ trying to hack a computer system from a species none of them had ever seen before, in a language that wasn't in anyone's universal translator.

"WELL LUCY? WHATS IT GONNA BE?"

"DON'T FUCKING CALL ME LUCY YOU CUNT!"

Ooof, ouch, my feelings, Jane thought. Risking a glance just around the corner, she fired wildly into a cluster of bug men advancing from out of her huge friend's line of sight. The Revenant was the kind of gun Wrex would carry two of into battle, but in her hands it kicked like an Elcor. She couldn't hit anything reliably, but she could lay down some very serious suppressing fire. The bug menace didn't seem to mind throwing bodies at a problem, but they did have just enough of a survival instinct to not walk into her line of fire.

"Fucking fine, I'll do it myself," she grumbled, mostly to herself.

Turning from the hall she whistled to Bear, whose name she really needed to figure out. He looked over and she hefted her rifle up, miming a throw to him. He looked uncertain about the trade, the M-27 Scimitar looking very comfortable in his large hands, but at her pleading gaze he nodded. She raised one finger, two, and three, then they tossed their guns across to each other.

The fire coming from the hall in front of them seemed to double as the bugs saw the flying guns and noticed the lack of return fire. He stuck the barrel around the edge, squeezing the trigger and grimacing at the kick, but putting seven hundred rounds a minute downrange. Jane nodded to herself, satisfied with his immediate impact on the firefight.

Turning to the ineffectual techie next to her, she poked his shoulder as she leaned in close to be heard without shouting.

"Do you have anything?"

"YOU KNOW I DON'T!"

He had the translation suite of her Potter Mk. II open, and was trying to get any of the tall curving characters to make sense. The alien, presumably engineering, screen didn't have anything she could recognize as a file system, or functional icons. There weren't tabs she could see, or any kind of readily identifiable menu. There also seemed to be three holo-keyboards, each an irregular shape of tessellated hexagons.

They were getting nowhere slowly, and at this point it was likely that hundreds, maybe thousands, of people had already suffocated to death in the pods. They only had a handful of breathing masks to pass around, enough to give every group of fighters one to share, hers currently rested on the face of a worthless hipster.

"New plan! Take this!," she said, thrusting the shotgun into his chest, "Fire it down the hall over there, point it in the general direction of the enemy and fire it sparingly so it doesn't overheat. We don't have any more thermal clips for you, so you'll have to wait for it to cool down when it overheats. Trigger here," she indicated on the rifle, "Shooty end here, don't die, GO!"

She hauled him to his feet and thrust him towards her former position, she could see Bear's unhappy expression intensify as he picked up on the situation.

Lucius held the gun in his hands as if it was some kind of poisonous snake, nearly dropping it as a fresh barrage slammed into the pod he was now taking cover behind.

"NOW YOU BITCH!"

"-fucking shoot what the fuck and get me out of here oh god why have you forsake-"

He glared at her, and then at the criticism coming at him from the pod, but when he looked back to her face he seemed to think better of whatever sass had been floating through his mind. She had threatened to shoot him back when they were merely unhappy coworkers on a backwater planet, he recognized with great clarity that, in that moment, the murder in here eyes wasn't reserved exclusively for the enemy.

As he began gingerly firing down the corridor, if there were such a thing, she squatted in front of the console trying once again to make sense of the system in front of her. Closing the translation suite, she paged through the programs on the omni-tool, praying for a miracle. She knew Harry had customized her unit a bit, he mentioned using hers as a kind of test bed for the enhancements that he planned for the Mk. IIIs he had on the drawing board before they separated. Even as a test bed it was leagues ahead of any conventional model, but she absolutely did not understand what all it could do, which was why when she saw a program called ' ', she activated it at random and hoped for the best.

As the buzzing from down the hallway intensified, and they lost the Asari who had been acting as a marksman with their one scavenged sniper rifle, a window appeared:

An update is available for , download the update from a secured network? [Y/N]

She hit Y repeatedly, and began scanning the nearby area for something she could shoot with. A progress bar began loading on the holo-screen, and with one eye on it she began actively scavenging.

All over the alien ship they had encountered piles of… refuse. The bugs clearly had about as much use for Citadel standard tech as they did for Citadel standard species, which was to say none at all. Weapons were intermixed randomly into piles of clothing, random omni-tools, and in one terrifying case, a small pile of raw unrefined eezo.

Piles of discarded material lay near the occasional suspiciously empty pod, perhaps one in thirty. They each raised the terrible question of what had happened to the people that the gear had belonged to, and who the previous inhabitants of the empty pods had been. More than being embedded in the walls, the pods also lay around in the hallways and rooms. Better than fifty were stored in open floor space in this secondary engineering center alone. It had been a running firefight just to get here, an area which they had identified only by the number of consoles and pipes either passing through or terminating in the room.

Scrambling across the room as the bar loaded on her wrist, she seized a bulky SMG half-hidden underneath a pair of overalls. Weapon in hand, feeling fractionally safer, she crouched back next to the weird console and checked progress.

Some kind of cute animated animal she had never seen before was on the screen bouncing in place. A speech bubble next to it read,

"You look like you're trying to hack an unknown alien's control system to re-establish power, would you like some help with that?"

Below that she had:

• Get help with re-establishing local power.

• Just hack the system on your own.

Don't show this kind of tip again.

Easy choice, she stabbed 'Get help' so fast that she overrode the haptic input in her omni-tool and caused the feedback sensor embedded in her finger to spazz out. A terminal opened on the screen, establishing a signal to a local installation, and shortly thereafter unfamiliar code began scrawling down her screen. The weird animated animal thing began performing some kind of quick back-flip in place, an idle animation of some kind. It didn't help anything, but she sucked on her finger as the program did it's business, trying to ward off the stinging.

Two of the three hex-keyboards in front of her began lighting up, and what looked like system diagrams began flickering by at a bewildering pace. Jane was lost instantly, more beyond her depth now than before her wrist had started taking control of an alien computer system. She took a look up, Bear was openly snarling as he fired, a fresh wound on his shoulder from where he had taken a very near miss. Lucius was openly crying as he pointed the shotgun vaguely towards the ever-encroaching bugs and pulling the trigger uselessly. The gun had long since overheated, but through his tears and all of the blood on his face which he'd acquired during their run through the ship, he didn't notice.

She stepped behind the crying man, and summarily pistol whipped the back of his head. Quickly separating the oxygen mask from him and kicking it over to Bear, Jane felt only a grim sense of rightness. The aspiring operanteur had fallen like the sack of shit he was, she stepped over him and eased her gun around the corner, opening up. The boxy form of her freshly-scavenged Tempest spat fire downrange, helping to cover the blind angle Bear was working against.

Immediately her wrist vibrated, the animated thing stopped jumping and was shaking it's head in a frustrated manner. A marquee flashed in bright red across the bottom of the screen:

WEAK SIGNAL – MOVE THIS UNIT CLOSER TO TERMINAL

Fuck-fuckity-fuckfuckfuck. She'd just got done pistol whipping the only other person who could cover this angle, useless as he was. Their Asari was down, and the rest of her very limited band of survivors were busy covering the three other doors into this substation. What if she could-

THIS UNIT MUST REMAIN IN BIOMETRIC CONTACT WITH JANE SHEPARD TO STAY ACTIVE

That was unhelpful, and more than a bit like mind reading, but it would be very like Potter to throw a security measure like than on the higher functions of her omni-tool so someone couldn't just steal his stuff. She extended her arm as much close as she could to the terminal, still maybe three paces away, and did her best to fire blindly down the hall. Risking a glance away from the firefight towards her wrist, the maybe-rabbit thing (?) was still busily shaking it's head.

Fuck. Okay, where did that leave her? No men to spare, no way to hack and keep the corridor covered. In the time it took for her to notice the inappropriately adorable maybe-rabbit and read the message, three buggers had taken cover behind a pod in Bear's blind spot and began firing at her.

She took a step back, keeping her arm outstretched towards the console. Edging the barrel around the edge of her pod, she blind fired towards the enemy. Shots spranged wildly off both her cover, and across the entire enemy sector. Across the room a very human voice cried out in pain.

Jane closed her eyes, growling in frustration and desperation. This was it, make-or-break. Goddammit.

She took a deep breath, and let it go.

She pulled the energy cell from the Tempest, tossing it to the side, and kicked the Scimitar from the ground to her hands. Muscle memory disengaged the automatic firing safety and began the process of overcharging a round. The plasma charge built in the gun, and at the last instant she pulled the thermal clip and shoved the much smaller energy cell into the thermal clip port. Violating every manufacturer safety that had ever existed in the modern small arms industry, she threw the gun into the corridor.

Bear's eyes tracked the gun, and widened. With a strangled cry he fell back into cover.

There was a double bang, one bang on par with a 'carnage' shot almost overlapped by a much louder explosion. The gun itself became an improvised grenade as an energy cell powerful enough to fire sequential electromagnets thousands of times cooked off inside a metal and polymer shell. The shrapnel cleared the immediate area, shredding nearby pods apart and clearing the immediate area of cover.

Bear swallowed visibly, nodding to himself and then leaning back into the corridor, clearing the area of all of the wounded stragglers.

They had a moment, she had a moment, dashing to the side she pressed her omni-tool against the computer control unit and prayed for the best. The console flickered, commands passing across the screen even faster than before.

Gunfire started coming in again from the corridor now guarded only by Bear, his answering fire rang in her ears. Then the maybe-rabbit popped back up on her screen, jumping up and down in visible excitement. A speech bubble popped up next to it.

Power re-established! Control established!

Secure the local area? [Y/N]

/ - /

In regards to the effective use of aircraft in battle it was said that dog-fighting made excellent movies, but close air support won wars.

In Harry's youth close air support took the form of an enterprising man or woman on a broom, firing downward onto the field of battle, necessarily from within immediate visual range. On good days they may even have had a full wizard's staff to give them a bit more oomph.

These days the scene was a different kind of exercise, even if the basic principles remained the same. Air support from flying-broom to AC130 gunship range was still critical, but it's use was superseded entirely by ship-mounted weapons hundreds to thousands of kilometers up.

There was a new higher ground, as it were.

Despite that fact, and the decades of time and scientific progress separating the fire support experience of Harry's late fifties from current accepted methodology, his general experience with the process remained valid. Close air support was at it's best when it took the form of a well planned and high precision military operation.

Every air mission requires detailed integration between with the close support fire platform and those forces deployed on the ground. Generally that meant communication and sensor integration between ground forces and orbital assets, managed by well defined ground commanders and a fire support controller in orbit.

Ideally, essential fire support tasks are defined ahead of time, enemy air defenses are identified and their suppression pre-planned, friendly forces are positively identified with their general movements and their ingress and egress routes in he area of operation. Gun-target lines are cleared and, eventually, close support is offered from the air.

It is a process defined by it's incredible utility, it's immense risk, and the precision and control required to manage these two factors enough to make it all worth it. Like so many military operations proper execution was long in coming, but fast and vicious in execution.

Now if, for the sake of argument, an experimental frigate with gimbal mounted rail turrets were to have disabled all other starship-grade fire support assets in orbit, taken control of all local colonial security systems and traffic monitoring sensors, integrated life-signs detection into their sensor net, and had a full super-computer server farm managing the operation…

Well, that almost met the standard requirements for a close air support fire mission.

Almost.

Now, further to that point, if the experimental frigate in question was captained by a wizard of immense power and questionable sanity, things began lining up a bit more.

As his cover burned and disintegrated behind him, Harry brought the ship up to two hundred feet and brought it in, over the city. The music blasting from beneath drew the eye of the bugs on the ground and the ire of the two women in the ship. Liara actually moved back from her console, turning her station's chair entirely to face him. Harry could feel the aggression behind her gaze without looking, but he smiled as she paused, her eyes locked on the view of his console over his shoulder.

Across the entire city the unknown aliens had stopped what they were doing to watch the ship pass by. Swarms of the flying bugs that had first appeared made runs at the engine of the ship, probably hoping to clog intakes and bring the ship down, but as they closed the embedded speakers repulsed them with physical waves of force. Flocks continually made runs at engine intakes and sensor pods, trying to force their way into any sensitive surface or inlet. Liara watched all of this with a stony gaze, but at the clouds of swarming hunter-seeker bugs, she seemed to have an epiphany. Turning back to her own console she immediately warmed up the GARDIAN system and set the on-board computers to targeting the harassing swarms as soon as they were ready.

Harry banked his ship over the Governor's Square in front of the capitol building as the final strains of the Ride of the Valkyries filled the air. There was a moment of relative stillness, the frigate above throbbed as it's massive engines kept it afloat, the swarms throbbed in answer as they hesitated to close with so dangerous a foe, and the kidnappers below stood uneasily gazing up at it all. Time stood still.

Just as the swarms got over themselves, just as the ground-pounders readied their weapons, just as the opening notes of Dies Irae from Verdi's Messa da Requiem cried out into the stillness, Harry smiled, and the ship's guns spoke.

Eight 15mm rail turrets opened up from the underside of the frigate, stitching fire in dizzy lines across the plaza, chewing up ceramacrete and the bodies of every one of the bipedal bugs that had the misfortune to be standing outside, all with identical ease.

The aliens had been using the south side of the plaza as a temporary collection point for their filled storage coffins. They were piled ten feet high and each was lit from within with a gently pulsing orange glow. A few enterprising buggers ran for the pods, taking cover behind a target that the ship dare not shoot. A bare handful made it, just the one's lucky enough to not get called out as priority targets by the ship's fire control.

Thy fell by the dozen, by the score, all firing wildly up just as the ship thundered down upon them.

From their cover, and in the bare moments they had while exposed, they began taking shots at the ship, their weapons pinging pitifully off the starship's hull. One winged bugger fired a stream of yellow light at them, a continuous particle beam that blackened the frigate's plating wherever it touched, drawing a waving line across the hull to an under-wing turret. The aliens in cover seemed to concentrate fire at the turret, hoping to disable or destroy at least one of the pods which were still picking off anyone who set foot sufficiently far away from the pile of the pods. The turret rocked in it's cradle, until a beam shot caught the barrels, bending one to the side and shearing the other off halfway down it's length.

More infantry charged in, they had been following the movement of the ship as it flew in from the edge of the city, and the tide of bodies rose to fill the courtyard as the first and soon second turrets were disabled. There was no cheering, but they visibly rallied. The chitinous aliens left the cover of the walkways and doorways that lined the plaza, flooding from all directions, many bearing additional beam weapons. The ones who weren't so well equipped stood guard over those that did, interposing themselves between the better equipped aliens and the rail shots aimed for them. It didn't help a lot, there was enough force in each shot to blast clean through even three bodies, but it was enough that the concentrations of beam fire quickly took out three more turrets.

From the north end, from inside the capital building, a different kind of alien appeared. Shaped roughly like the rest of the bipedal ones, it was visibly… changed.

At first glance it seemed to glow from within, but a casual sensor sweep revealed that it wasn't any kind of holographic effect. There was a constant high-level barrier around the new alien, charging through eezo nodes that ran along it's outer carapace like mineral veins. The lighting effects were the vein-nodes running hot, too hot. There was no obvious current source to power the barrier, but it was running so hot along the nodes that it was actually burning off the carapace that lay between the eezo veins.

The new-comer surveyed the field of battle, projecting a sense of command effortlessly without any overt noise or gesture. The beam-bearers near it all wordlessly deferred to it, responding to a wave by charging into the square where they were immediately cut down by a burst from one of the remaining turrets. With a negligent gesture it fired a biotic warp, one so steeped in dark energy that it traveled slowly and was visibly darker than any biotic power Harry had ever seen, up at the frigate hovering above the plaza.

Before the warp bolt had traveled half-way to the frigate, the plaza filled with light. Every GARDIAN projector along the entire lower half of the ship had finally warmed and prepped, and they all fired simultaneously and with pin-point accuracy. The high-intensity lasers reflected and refracted through the smoke and particulate in the air of the plaza, flash-frying every single bug both flying and ground-bound, and disrupting the biotic attack.

The commander held on for an instant longer than the rest, it's eye's flashing defiantly, but that one instant was all it had. The starship-grade laser from the frigate above cut it down just like all the rest.

In the cockpit of the frigate, Harry and Liara both closely examined their sensor readouts. The average air temperature had very briefly jumped twenty degrees, but was already cooling from the sudden burst of energy. The floor of the plaza had been utterly destroyed, stray shots from the rail turrets having over-penetrated targets down to the dirt and gravel under-layer. The pods looked unharmed, but in many cases their outer layers were covered in a fine ash from micro-second exposures of the re-tasked GARDIAN defense systems.

Tali was forwarding increasingly irate reports from engineering as the ship's automated systems performed diagnostics on the turrets that had been ruined by incoming fire. Her reports flashed on-screen alongside the reports generated automatically by the system, insistent reds and yellows filling Harry's console as a living Quarian and the ship's automated digital systems warred for place in the "LIVE FIRE AROUND CIVILIANS IS NEVER AN ACCEPTABLE ENVIRONMENT FOR A WEAPONS TEST" queue.

"Aw, baby," Harry said as he patted the solid presence of the holo-projector in front of him, "But I knew you could do it!"

The color pattern of the report headers grew more aggressive, giving a clear sense of what the system thought of Harry's enthusiastic excess.

"But baby, we have a whole city to cover, at least we know everything works and where the system can use reinforcement now."

Liara audibly growled behind him.

"What? We were supposed to have weeks before we went into proper combat."

Her snarl remained uncharged.

Wasn't it just fascinating how similar Asari facial expressions were to human ones? What were the sheer odds of that, really?

/ - /

Jane Shepard's day was looking up once more! She carried a dead guy's rifle, two dead guys` rifle if you wanted to be technical, and based on the room in the crotch of the greaves she was wearing, she also had a dead man's pants. Thankfully her torso was covered by some gender appropriate armor, but regrettably it too was salvaged from one of the collector's piles of refuse, so it probably had belonged to a now dead woman.

This was becoming a bit morbid. Overall she was pleased! She had armor now, which beat the ever-loving shit out of fighting in her impact-cushioning underlayer.

Restoring power at their happy little substation got them very definitive control over local systems. With the help of her adorable back-flipping VI hacker they were able to seal all of the bulkheads leading immediately into their room. Then local life support kicked in, and the level of O2 in the air rose just as the humidity fell. Most importantly every pod in their sector of the ship had a fresh supply of air.

Bear was still sweating through his jump suit, but now it was a healthier thing. Bear no longer looked like he was actively dying, for one thing, his actively bleeding gunshot wounds aside.

She had said it before this day, and hopefully she would live long enough to give it at least one more go, but they could work with this.

Looking at her collection of resistance fillers, she even believed it. Eleven battle-weary survivors, rescued at random from coffins she had encountered along the way here. She had rescued twenty-eight, originally. She had cut open every pod in her vicinity when she started, "saving" Lucius, and a group who had been caught together in an aircar garage, Skip's Air Garage. Who the hell knew how they had been stored near her. She didn't even recall being caught, let alone willingly being near that hipster fuck, so storage next to some random civvies from a different colony was not out of the question.

It didn't matter, she had freed Bear, his aging uncle who owned the place, their two engineers, and a pair of dumbass teenagers who could barely afford their bodywork with all their money pooled together. They had remembered what drew them together when they were all confronted by one another, Skip had laughed at the rescue, telling the kids they still had to pay.

They had been very, very unprepared for combat.

Jane learned very fast to not try to rescue everyone, but she had poked air holes wherever she could.

Her survivors clustered and put their resources together. An enterprising former aircar engineer distributed a refresh on a home-made inferno ammo mod, and everyone with a sliver of first aid training bandaged their neighbor.

She approached Bear, who sat on some kind of bank of wires getting his arm disinfected and bandaged, "We don't have long, this is their ship, they have to have some kind of workaround we won't spot."

Bear, Michael according to the patch on his coveralls, grunted. When he spoke, a low basso rumbled from deep inside his chest, "I agree of course, yet what can we do about it? I mean no disrespect, you have led us well to get here," he took a deep breath as their temporary medic tied the bandage off tightly, "But it is clear that we do not know where we are or where we are going."

Jane hmphed her agreement.

"I don't have a good command of local systems, so I don't know how far the power we've restored goes. My program can lead us to another substation, and it looks like maybe an armory as well."

Michael took his turn to hmph, "The armory, I would think, and then perhaps we may re-evaluate. I do not know ships this size, but there must be a bridge or command center somewhere. If I ran a ship, I would control armories with more care than engineering backup stations."

"Excellent points," She gave him a very visible look up and down, "You're big and you can shoot, consider yourself deputized. Shout at these," she said, gesturing at the rest of the survivors, "And get them ready to go. I'll go wake the idiot and see if I can't pull any more from the computer."

He grimaced again, stronger then he had when trading for an unfamiliar gun, but he stood and his rumbling voice began gathering their meager personnel and supplies.

Jane walked over to the banana colored pile of dolt. She prodded him with one foot while she tried to find that adorably helpful little animal again, it had disappeared after solving all of her immediate problems, so she naturally missed it immensely. Poking around in , she found exactly nothing helpful. She wouldn't describe herself as any kind of software engineer or coder, but one did not pick up an N7 designation without getting a crash course in a bit of every thing. She needed a working familiarity with computer systems across the galaxy, if nothing else. However the more she looked around more she became convinced that something was very wrong with Harry, or whoever wrote this program.

Options like a 'Plum' or 'More Plums' switch, some sliders that seemed to belong in the character creator of a bad RPG video game, or a series of red buttons labeled 'Summon Monster' with various stylized depictions of vegetables, all abounded. Nothing made sense, which she had missed before in the heat of the moment. She ran through everything she could think of that might lead to a different options menu, or even re-initialize the 'hacking an alien ship' wizard, which had saved her ass.

Feeling like an idiot, and not having any better ideas, she brought her omni-tool to her lips and quietly whispered, "Please help me get to the armory, find the control center, and save everyone from dying from failing life support."

Unable to look at her idiotic last hope for survival, and getting anyone else out of this insectoid hell-hole, she looked down to the unconscious hipster at her feet. Lucius stirred, groaning and clutching the back of his head. His returning to their common consciousness did not stop her from continuing to kick him.

"Hey, Lucy, get up."

"Uuuugh, dunt cll meh luffy"

When he started moving with purpose she gave him a minute to get himself together, allowing him to sit up and wipe the drool from his chin while she watched the progress of the rest of her crew, and steadfastly refused to look at her omni-tool. Jesus, what the hell was she doing here? If she got out of this, when she got out of this, she was going to take some classes. Hit the Salarian Learning Annex. Tech had never been her specialty, but she was going to sit Tali down and get some masterclasses in how to get out of thes-

"YOU HIT ME!"

"Uh, no," she replied disinterestedly, someone had kicked over a fresh pile of crap revealing a military bag filled with MREs, Bear, or rather Michael, ran over, "It was probably one of those bug guys."

From the corner of her eye, he didn't look like he was buying it.

"Definitely one of them. Snuck right up on you."

In her attempt to not meet his eyes, she began to play with her omni-tool, where she found good news. On her display lay a rabbit-eared thing, it's fluff concealing it's limbs and forming one coherent, and smug, cotton ball. There was an expression on it's face like it knew a secret, every secret, and it adored that you were slowly figuring that fact out.

A new speech bubble rested above it, "Well, why didn't you say so?"

She tentatively tapped the message, it wasn't highlighted like a link, but that was apparently acknowledgment enough, it's smile widened and it disappeared.

A map of the local area popped up, a path highlighted from their current location to what was clearly labeled 'The Armory'. Local comm protocols opened, sharing the map and route with every omni-tool they had been able to scrabble together for the group.

Smiling, resolute, she turned from the coughing man in a leather suit and moved back to her group. Michael had them in a rough formation, looking almost ready to meet their fates. She stopped in front of them, and at her gaze spines straightened and grips firmed. One man in the back wiped the remains of a chili mac with beef packet from the corner of his mouth. She nodded, and waved them after her.

They stacked up at their exit, heading out one of the smaller doors. At her omni-tool's command the door cracked, and they volleyed fire out into the ranks of buggers in the hallway. The insects had reinforced while the survivors had been holed up, the half dozen that had been trying to break in before Jane took control of local systems had become more than twenty during their respite, but their advantage in numbers meant nothing before the regimented fire of Jane's survivors.

Ugly and crude organic welding gear lay discarded near the door, whatever plan the bugs had for breaching the door were interrupted forever as the survivors streamed in a ragged advance out of the substation and into the hallway. Jane kept their pace rapid, as harsh of an advance as she dared, running through the corridors to keep from being flanked. Bear kept to one side, and Jane the other. They passed cross paths and poured punishing fire into each to suppress any aliens and keep rolling. The others helped where they could, but the mechanics tenacity and Jane's skill anchored their charge.

The armory was two hundred meters along the hull of the ship, but in practical terms was closer to half a kilometer away. They made amazing time, and managed to reach the doors without more casualties. Their blitz carried them into the armory, where the momentum of their advance overwhelmed what passed for a quarter-master among their enemies.

"I want a guard on the door way!" Jane shouted, "I want three of you on those particle rifles, and the rest of you grab anything that looks like Omni-gel or power cells, GO GO GO!"

Michael and his remaining colleague took the doors, each covering half of the corridor. They were clear for the moment but their momentum had been spent reaching the armory, the bugs were sure to be right behind them. Inside the armory Jane watched as her people ran around, flipping open more storage coffins, which seemed to just be how the bugs stored anything of value. Her omni-tool vibrated at her side, and when she checked she discovered that there were oddly specific instructions laid out. She was guided around the room towards the back, behind shelves like bunk beds, filled with more and more storage coffins. From behind her gunfire picked up from the doorway, and she hastened to wherever it was that the cute animal was bringing her.

She was guided to the rear wall, and to a creepy organic safe embedded into it. The fluffy maybe-rabbit was doing back flips again, one tiny arm pointing to the safe.

Shrugging, one ear on the firefight continuing back the way they had come, she lit off her omni-tool blade and sheared off the door to the safe. It seemed to be made of the same chitin that nearly everything in the ship way made of, and it burned away just like the rest.

Inside the secured storage was a weapon that she hadn't seen in ages, something she hadn't seen since N-School. An N7 Piranha with, she counted as she spun the rotating cooling chamber, a full set of thermal clips. It was a peerless shot gun, and as these things went, it wasn't a bad light machine gun. Normally it was about as accurate as spitting, with a similar effective range, but if the extended smart choke on it was what it looked like, this thing was going to lay down fire that would make a Krogan green with envy. The Piranha had been designed for close-in work in the enclosed hallways and cargo areas of boarded ships or pirate strongholds, where rate of fire was king and a suddenly overheating gun was a death sentence.

Instead of answering this design challenge with water-cooling, or standard radiators, or one of those fun new turbo-fan forced convection units the Elcor were using to cool heavy weapon platforms, they decided to hook it to a rotating chamber of thermal clips tied in sequence and processing 'spent` thermal cells in parallel. When one clip begins to approach overheating, the chamber switches over to the next in line for an instant relative cool-down, and the thermal load was shunted around the remaining clips to roughly octuple the relative area over which the heat dissipates.

She could work with this.

She loaded an inferno-modded ammo block, and filled the secondary block slots, for no beast of this pedigree would be sated with merely one source of ammo material. Charging the initial shot, she sprinted back to their front, vaulting through bunks wherever there was space.

She reached the door to the armory as another wave of bugs rushed her defenders, Michael poured fire into the doorway, and as she sprinted towards them, gun up and ready, she saw his trigger finger in a moment of adrenaline driven clarity. His face wide open, hostility and hate and despair writ large across every inch. His teeth bared, his knuckles white, he was pulling the trigger on his Revenant hard enough to bend it inside the trigger guard. On his left a team of three had to volley fire as a unit to even approach his defense. Her blood was filled with fire as she closed with the door and her gun spoke, calling the name of these fucking alien's gods.

Three, hiding just outside of the door's view, flew to pieces at her hands. She clustered shots into the heads of the next pair to the right. She trusted her back to Michael, putting shots carefully into one still in flight, before pulling the trigger and holding it down. The piranha chewed through the last four down that side of the hallway, and their cover.

A squad rounded a corner, coming out of an adjacent hallway just ten meters further down the line. Her smart-choke adjusted automatically and the one in front became shrapnel, it's hard shell joining the pellets that began tearing into the ranks behind him.

She turned, her third heat sink clicking into her fourth, and began filling the other direction, past the doorway junction that led into the armory, with fire. Each resounding thump followed by another, putting inferno rounds down range to her targets at three hundred fifty rounds per minute. Her own triumphant scream matched Michael's before they both ran out of things to shoot, her gun finally succumbing to thermal overload and shutting down, the last bug-man long since dead.

The battlefield was a wasteland before her, flaming rounds having laid waste to any possible cover and scorched the hallways black down both directions, clear through to the next intersecting juncture.

She turned back to her people, her crew, her survivors, with a deaths head grin.

"Pack it in people, we're taking this ship!"

A strained Michael took charge again, and under the over watch of what had to be the most expensive gun on the planet he began rounding the people up and distributing the power cells and other supplies they had been able to appropriate. As she swept her gun across the hallway, Jane pulled up her omni-tool again, looking to interface with local systems and see if they couldn't find a path to whatever passed far a CIC here.

She glanced to her display in just enough time to see her animated friend tie on a small skull and crossbones neckerchief. A new alert filled the bottom:

LOCAL SYSTEMS CONTROL ESTABLISHED

As she noticed the alert, a fresh speech bubble popped up:

"Yo ho ho! You seem to be engaging in privateering, would you like assistance with that?"

•Yes!

•No!

While she wasn't sure if this was technically privateering, Jane did know that she would give this little thing her first born if it got her the fuck out of here in a way that didn't kill a million people.

They had been running around and trying to get things going for coming on three hours. Being generous with local system tolerances and their own response to life support going out, there was already a five-figure death toll. The old and infirm would be the first to go, people like Michael would be next, and then the lack of oxygen would work it's way down to every last man, woman, and child.

She stiffened at the thought, dozens of lives, dozens of people with mortgages, and air car troubles, and what would have been tests at fucking school the next day, had all died in the time they were currently taking to shore up resources and get ready for their push to-

Her wrist buzzed insistently at her, the maybe-rabbit shaking it's head with a stern expression. Wincing, she pressed 'Yes!', and breathed deeper as local life support in the area kicked on.

Fuck, that should have been her first priority, not this fucking gun.

A course lit up on her local map, which had expanded upward along the spinal line of the ship, taking her from their newly-secured armory to a large room about another 300 meters further along. The relative top of the room seemed to be flashing an alternating red and white though.

Jan stepped out of the hallway and back into the armory door, checking her troops. One pair seemed to have themselves put together, a heavily mustached man and what appeared to be his waifish girlfriend. Michael was towards the back, helping someone strap more power cells for the beam rifles to himself.

Jane waved the pair to the door, and exited the navigation mode, opening the full map she had available to her. The control center room roof was indeed flashing red and white, as she zoomed out she found that it was at the edge of a cone that covered a lot of territory, all flashing that color. The CIC had been located close to power generation and central engineering, which had all been blown out whenever that shot had cored the ship.

The CIC had been at the extreme edge of the damage zone, and was open to the atmosphere. There was no telling what damage had been done to the room, or if any of the systems in it were still powered or functional.

She tapped her wrist in thought. Tali would know what to do. On the Normandy the bridge was filled with interface terminals… but interface terminals weren't central computing! The Normandy distributed the actual computing power that controlled the ship throughout the ship, which allowed damage control to access and establish positive controls for repairs, as well as assisting in mitigating the damage of a hit to the bridge.

Feeling like a fool again, she leaned down to her omni-tool and whispered, "Can you take control of systems in the bridge even if everything is shot to hell?"

The rabbit's smug grin was everything she had been hoping for, the mini-fabricator in her tool began spinning up production of wireless interface devices they could attach to consoles or individual data lines to create a network that she could at least engage with, and unbidden her navigation suite opened again, bringing her back to the path to the damaged CIC.

An updated was sent out to their salvaged omni-tools, which had multiplied while she hadn't been looking. There was a stock in the armory it seemed.

From across the room Michael's rumbling basso declared, "All is ready!"

"Excellent timing, we have a route. The damage control system is reporting that the CIC was caught at the edge of the blast that cut power, so there will be some damage. I'm sending you all plans for some interface tools that we'll use to establish control when we get there. Set your omni-tools to begin fabricating them while we're going. Everyone has the nav data, Michael and I will take point again."

Getting into his role, Michael shouted, "Move! Line up at the doorway, we move at once!"

Realizing he was getting into his role, he grimaced again. At some point he had switched from the Revenant she had forced him into back to another Scimitar, like what he had started with. Perhaps he thought she had the weight of fire covered, but now was not the time to investigate or yell at him.

They began another blitz through the hallways, Jane's gun decisively ending any arguments that the locals may have had about their trespassing. Three hundred meters wasn't a short run, especially through the winding corridors of the ship, but they made good time. It was do or die, and if they kept running and refused to be pinned down, they couldn't be flanked. The strategy that had gotten them to the armory carried them up and away to the control center.

Perhaps too easily.

They breached the doors to command, and discovered why.

The first thing they noticed was the breeze. The air didn't smell recycled, and it certainly wasn't the muggy nightmare they had been sweating though when they started down below. The roof of the room opened out into the massive damaged cone that had been shot out of the core of the ship. It looked as if god's own cake server had been inserted into the side of the ship, and given a harsh twist. Exposed seams of the rocky outer armor and the underlying steel structure mixed with the organic material that lined the inside of the ship.

It was so vast from side to side that the majority of the interior lay in a shadow cast by the afternoon sun failing to penetrate the interior. The sparks of shorting power lines along both brought flashes of light to the holes in the ship, and the nearest edges of the shadowed cavern. Each spark exposed cut fluid transfer lines, and a hundred honey-comb rooms. Each flash provided just enough illumination to glimpse the incredible power of whatever had run the ship through, and also just enough to reveal that the edges of the wounds were positively crawling with more bugs.

The bipedal ones they were so familiar with were joined by small clouds of swarming flying things, and gigantic tank-like beatles. There had to be twenty-five or thirty of the tanks, and ten times that number of the man sized ones.

Jane immediately halted their advance, and forced the majority of her squad back into the hall, through the door they had forced open. Michael stuck by her side, but physically pushed the others back into the hall, ordering them to kill their lights and focus on covering their backs.

At Jane's fast whisper he began collecting up the interface devices that the squad had been able to put together, before returning to where she was crouched behind what had once been a command console of some kind.

"Not damage control, I think."

His low tone shook her from her thoughts, "You're right. Look at the big ones, they're pulling up sections of plating and moving them around. It looks like they're forting up, and they're all facing the big hole, no one is covering the entrance wound over there."

The beatles were using their wickedly sharp legs to shear off chunks of the steel super structure and they were passing them to the bipeds, who were working in gangs of ten to twenty, moving the chunks into position, making small forts with tens of small openings, apparently for small arms fire.

Michael grunted, before dropping a double-handful of the small flash-formed devices at her feet, "We must focus, if they are not searching for us, all the better. Life support must be restored. I do not know how you are taking over these systems, but take care that you do not restore their communications. It would be unfortunate if they were to hear from their brothers inside that someone was heading to the command center."

"I agree. Here, you take a few and start wiring them to anything that looks important. This place is wrecked worse than I thought, there's no way we're going to get a proper active console in here, even if it wouldn't drag all their attention to us."

He hmmphed agreement, taking a few of the devices, she grabbed the rest and moved quietly off to another important looking piece of wreckage.

The ship had definitely been hit by a huge mass driver. This wreckage pattern looked just like what you would see in a physics textbook, the round had struck on what she was going to call the western side, the impact had blown out a chunk of the armor, leaving a ragged ten meter-ish hole. From there the round broke exactly as it had been intended to, with tungsten carbide fragments blasting forward from the impact point, shredding armor and internals until they impacted the other side of the great open space at the core of the ship. From there the debris from the internal wall and the remains of the frangible round spread out to form the nearly fifty meter exit breach.

But that didn't make sense. There was a reason that you only saw stuff like this in physics textbooks.

Mass driver rounds never fragmented that neatly. Even if they did, the internals of a ships weren't a solid wall of ceramacrete or ballistics gel, they were filled with voids, had armored sections with different impact response characteristics, they were reinforced, or had generators that failed creating secondary explosions. The real world just didn't produce ship damage like this.

The gun that made this shot would have to have the power generation and computing capacity of an entire Citadel ward behind it, it would have to have heat dissipaters the size of a small moon and it would have to have more superconducting mass driver coils it in that any four dreadnoughts, from any species of construction you would care to name. The Destiny Ascension couldn't poke a hole this neat into a ship.

So some weird fuckery had to be afoot. If she was a suspicious person, and she was, she might have suspected that Harry Goddamn Potter was somewhe-

Wait.

She knew that sound.

She wasn't exactly a music buff, but every military band ever has always been fond of any music which could be made to incorporate artillery.

Across the cavern all of the bugs stood to attention, the tank beatles abandoned their work, and the bipeds began clustering behind the ramparts they had been working on. The glittering yellow beams of particle rifles crisscrossed the open space as they test fired and cleared their barrels.

The music seemed to be getting louder, almost too loud. From behind her Lucius craned his neck out from behind the bulkhead.

Jane definitely recognized this, in fact, they were getting very near the finale. Just as orchestra and the horns rose up, the Normandy flew in front of the 'eastern' side of the ship.

No, not the Normandy. It didn't have the distinctive SR1, or the coloration she remembered, and written large across the side was FORTITUDE. It hovered there, back-lit against the sun, and then as the first great crash of the overture sounded everyone opened fire.

Particle beams shot from the cavern, focusing fire on a series of gun pods she definitely didn't remember the Normandy having, and on every engine cowling that they could reach. Their fire blackened the plating, and seemed to rock the ship, but ultimately there was no effect. They must have been inside the shield envelope of the ship, to be hit so directly.

From the Fortitude every GARDIAN emitter with a clean line of sight opened fire at the same time. The lasers were invisible in the first instant, overshadowed by the particle beam fire, but as the first of the ad hoc super-structure fortifications began to ablate and burn away, the vaporized material began to fluoresce in the air, showing the passage of the lasers as they swept across the whole interior of the cavern.

Scores of bipeds were just ashed in the first few seconds, their cover was just… insufficient… when measured against the power of a starship-grade direct energy weapon. And that was when they could take cover from the pinpoint accuracy of the lasers and their targeting system. Then the beatles seemed to reach some kind of critical charge, and began firing their own immense particle beams from their eyes. Their impacts rocked the ship further, one gun pod recessed into the wing, it's gaskets catching fire.

When the particle beam fire stopped, because there stopped being humanoid bug-men to wield them, the tank beatles became the next targets, and in seconds they were nothing more than burned out hulks as well.

Jane peeked over the edge of a console, a very crude flash formed helmet and breather over her face. The flash formed quartzite structure that made up her faceplate gave the whole scene a certain waviness that made the nightmarish scene in front of her hard to make out. With all of deck plate that had boiled away, and with all of the ash from the keratinous walls and people that had done their own boiling, the atmosphere in the cavern had become very suddenly hostile. She and Michael had been able to throw something together to keep going while the holocaust in front of them ran itself out.

A muffled "EY!" drew her gaze to Michael, who gestured furiously back at the panel in front of her.

Right. They had a job to do.

She had run through better than half of her wireless connectors, splicing them into the line of any data cable that looked like it connected to something important. None of the cables were colored differently, or marked in any obvious way. Her animated friend was shaking it's head whenever she looked, thought bubbles displaying a series of check marks and red crosses.

It looked like they had control of weapons, and basic security, but they didn't have any lead into the one thing they needed. She pulled a few of her units, losing control of weapons in the process, somehow. This was going nowhere, again. Slowly, again.

She moved down the line to another console, picking new lines and making fresh connections. Still no joy, navigation was pointless when there was no main power in the first place.

The Fortitude rotated in place, bringing the airlock around to face the cavern. A spotlight descended from a recessed position in the airlock doorway, blinking a few times before training itself on their general area, and then focusing down onto a console across the room. The music quieted down, finally, replaced by the comparatively low roar of the engines of the Fortitude in atmosphere.

Jane looked to her compatriot, and in a rush they both stripped every connector they could reach and dashed for the console. They stumbled over each other as they spliced something onto every line they could find, and in a moment there was a soothing tone playing from her omni-tool, where the pirate rabbit-thing stood with a proud smile.

They did it.

They fucking did it.

A great mass of air, from deep in the open core of the ship welled up, pressing against her crude mask.

She closed her eyes, settling against the still sparking console behind her. She removed her helmet, experiencing bliss for one clean moment.

"Oi," his annoying ass voice called out to her from across the air between them, nearly washed away by the sounds of the air recyclers compensating for the massive hull breaches that ofcoursehefuckingcaused, "you doing alright over there?"

"Ugh," she said.

Feeling more than hearing Michael settle down beside her, "I hate him," she said conversationally.

"Who's the big guy? And who's that fruity looking fellow in the bloody yellow midriff shirt?"

"God damn you, Harry Potter."

[A/N]: Well, there you have it. Welcome to Getting Too Old For This 2: Electric Boogaloo. I hope you liked this chapter, and found it at least as entertaining as the last story one, if perhaps a bit ruder. I'll tell you this, it was written while considerably more sober than the last one, so make of that what you will I suppose. This story will explore the events of Mass Effect 2, and likely flirt with the events of Mass Effect 3, I haven't defined the cut-off very precisely. It will also capture the principle events that lead to Harry's being kicked off Earth, which will have a very different tone from both the first story and the ME-portions of the story, but I hope you will find it enjoyable all the same.

As always, I can't promise you this will update quickly, but it will update. The bulk of the original story was written under a very different set of personal circumstances, I was in a different place both physically and mentally when I put it together, so writing this comes from a fundamentally different place as a result. My job may be having me travel a lot in the coming months, depending on how some factors which I cannot predict shake out. If that comes about, it will be good news for this story, because I find that hotel rooms and airports make for fantastic places to write. If it does not, then nothing will have changed.

Before the author's ramblings, this chapter weighs in at 14,821 words. As always, I welcome PMs and reviews.