paragonsoldier

"Watch the door," Shepard orders Garrus as she steps past the body of the technician she just drilled through the head with her pistol. To be fair, he shot at her first, and he was on the comm alerting the whole prison ship that she's loose. She steps up to the console across the room: the wall behind the console is a window looking down on Purgatory's cryo unit, which is guarded by two gargantuan Ymir mechs.

The unit, as it happens, also contains the person they came here to retrieve.

"I can't believe this," Miranda growls through clenched teeth. "Even the Blue Suns shouldn't be stupid enough to cross Cerberus." Or stupid enough to try and hold Shepard for ransom when she came here to make a deal, but in this case, they're pretty much the same thing.

Grunt, who Shepard brought along in an unsuccessful attempt to dissuade just this sort of behavior on the part of their hosts, makes a noise that might be a chuckle. "Better this way," the krogan rumbles. "I thought this was going to be boring."

Shepard examines the security console before her. The tech appears to have locked it down.

"I can hack it," Miranda says, "but there's no time for finesse. I won't be able to do it without triggering the alarms."

"Shepard," Garrus says from the door, "If you hack that control, every door on the cellblock opens."

"That doesn't actually seem like such a bad idea right now," Shepard says. "We could use the distraction. And it's the only way to get Jack out of there." She nods at Miranda. "Do it."

Miranda activates her omni-tool. "Be ready," she says, as she passes it above the console while pressing a few buttons.

For a few seconds, nothing: then there's a buzzing noise, and a large mechanical arm with tongs on the end rises up and unfolds itself beside the cryo unit. The arm takes a moment or two to position itself above the unit before grabbing onto the lid, turning it, and lifting it out of its containment cylinder with a hiss of supercooled fog.

Shepard and her squad watch with bated breath as the unit rises, revealing a person clamped at neck, wrists and ankles to a standing backboard in the center of the unit. Jack is...not what Shepard expected. For one thing, Jack is a she.

"Jack is small," Grunt says in a tone of disappointment. Shepard can't argue with that: Jack is indeed small, a petite woman with her hair shaved off and her body covered in tattoos. But this prison ship contains some of the most dangerous criminals in the galaxy - so Shepard's willing to bet there's more to her than is immediately apparent.

Down in the cryo unit, Jack begins to stir as she awakens from cold sleep.

Shepard's remains are in worse shape than the scientists had anticipated; there's little more than meat and tubes left. But, as the project director points out to them, they have their instructions, ample funding, and technology that is unavailable anywhere else in the galaxy. So they should stop wringing their hands and do their jobs.

What's left of Colene Shepard lies on an operating table in a sterile room, watched through monitors and attended to by machines that perform complicated dances over, under and through her. The machines close up gaps in her tissue with special locks and sealants before injecting her with a chemical cocktail that forces oxygen, nutrients and something like life back into her bloodstream, turning dead grey cells back to healthy pink.

The artifical seals, both inside and outside, are gradually replaced by grafts of cloned cells built into their proper shapes by armies of nanorobots. Some parts cannot be adequately repaired with biological material alone, and so Shepard's shattered bones are knit together and coated with spun carbon fiber; her ruined spinal cord is replaced with a column of steel and fiber optics; the machines spin new muscle and weave new skin with artificially grown tissue.

In just over a year, they get Shepard looking human again. Mostly.

* * *

The first thing Shepard is aware of as she comes to is the cold, hard surface beneath her bare skin. The second thing is the fact that she hurts everywhere, in some places more than others. And the third thing is a metal, flourescent-lit ceiling above her that she can't quite bring into focus. Something is beeping rythmically.

"There. On the monitor." That must be what's beeping. "Something's wrong," says a woman's voice nearby. It sounds distant and muffled at first; even when it clears up, there's a slight delay before Shepard can process the meaning behind the words.

A man's voice: "She's reacting to outside stimuli. Showing an awareness of her surroundings.

Shepard's eyelids - which feel like they weigh a metric ton - fall closed. She forces them open again. Her heart pounds in her chest, and she can't seem to get enough air in her lungs. The tempo of beeps from the monitor increases.

I died like this, something in her head says. Not enough air. The realization touches off panic. What happened to my crew? Where are they? She lifts her head with what feels like monumental effort and catches something off to the left, out of the corner of her eye.

There's a woman approaching her table - the woman who was talking about the monitor before, maybe? At first glance she looks like she should be on a fashion runway, or in front of a vid camera somewhere: she's too lush for this cold, angular place. Glossy brown hair frames a fair, oval face with high cheekbones and full lips. Her long-lashed eyes, though, are as hard and unforgiving as the empty vacuum, and just as cold.

(Somewhere in the back of her mind, Shepard is aware of just how melodramatic that simile is, but most of her isn't thinking straight.)

"Oh my God, Miranda," the man says somewhere off to Shepard's right. "I think she's waking up."

The woman - Miranda - reaches the edge of the table. She looks across toward the man, an angry grimace twisting her gorgeous lips. Shepard follows her gaze (with great difficulty, but she does) to a bald, bearded, nervous-looking man in a work coverall. Both the coverall and Miranda's outfit look like uniforms of some kind, with a black-and-white color scheme, but they're uniforms Shepard's never seen before.

"Dammit, Wilson!" Miranda snaps. Shepard turns back to her. All this shouting and moving is making it harder to breathe; she feels a spike of pain in her chest. "She's not ready yet! Give her the sedative!" Miranda looks down at Shepard with those cold, calculating eyes. "Shepard. Don't try to move."

Shepard tries to lift a hand to forestall her, to say that she doesn't want any sedatives until she gets some answers. But all she can manage is a sort of plaintive croak, and her hand...good God. It's just sickly pale skin stretched over bone, almost transparent.

Miranda takes Shepard's wrist, gently but firmly, and pulls it down as if she's trying to keep it out of Shepard's sight. "Just lie still," she instructs. "Try to stay calm." The monitor is beeping fast and urgently now. Shepard knows that's bad, but she can't remember why. Her breathing is faster too. She still can't get enough air.

"Heart rate still climbing," Wilson informs Miranda. "Brain activity is off the charts." A keening alarm goes off somewhere close by. Miranda looks toward Wilson and strides around the head of the table (or whatever) that Shepard's lying on, to her right. Shepard turns her gaze to follow, defying Miranda's instruction to lie still.

Wilson is over by some kind of medical-looking control panel. "Stats pushing into the red zone. It's not working!" he insists as he scurries to the foot of Shepard's table.

"Another dose," Miranda orders. "Now!"

There's a warm and tingling feeling in Shepard's left arm; she wonders, idly, if she's having a...what do they call it? Cardiac arrest. The feeling spreads throughout her body; when it reaches her neck, Shepard can't keep her head from dropping back to the table. Her almost-clear vision goes blurry again. The keening alarm falls silent, and the beeping of the monitor slows.

Somewhere in the distance, she hears Wilson say, "Heart rate dropping. Stats falling back into normal range."

Miranda appears in Shepard's field of view, looking down at her with what Shepard would call concern, if she thought Miranda were actually capable of real human emotion. "That was too close. We almost lost her." Miranda looks up, glaring at Wilson. "I told you your estimates were off. Run the numbers again."

The warm feeling is all over her now. Shepard struggles not to sink into it - she wants somebody to tell her what's going on, dammit. But she can't fight the sedatives.

The last thing Shepard sees before she goes under is Miranda's faint smile.

* * *

They build Shepard's muscles back to their former strength - and then some - with a combination of forced cell division, electrical stimulation, physical therapy, and the careful addition of artificial fibers. Full-spectrum lamps wash the sickly paleness out of Shepard's skin, returning it to its former light bronze. They let her hair grow out and, when it's long enough, crop it to just below her jawline.

One of the scientists convinces the project director that they should reinforce Shepard's skin with artificial fibers, to make it more resistant to punctures and burns. Unfortunately this additional feature leads to unanticipated cellular breakdown. Correcting the problem will set the project back another four months, at least. The project director is extremely displeased. The scientist responsible for the problem vanishes without explanation.

Three months and two days later, Shepard wakes up again.

* * *

"Wake up, Commander."

The voice draws Shepard out from the depths of deepest sleep. She recognizes it instantly - Miranda, the woman who was there when...she doesn't want to think about that.

Her ears register the distant sounds of weapons. A heavy thud shakes her, rocking her a bit on whatever hard surface she's lying on.

Dammit, she thinks, Didn't I do this dance once already?

"Shepard? do you hear me?" Miranda again. She's on a loudspeaker. Shepard manages to open her eyes. Her eyeballs feel uncomfortably dried out. She blinks several times to fix that problem. "This facility is under attack." Shepard experimentally works her jaw as she starts to sit up. Her face feels...odd. She puts her hand to it and is somewhat alarmed to find strange textures there, ridges and fissures that she never had before. They feel numb, not painful, and somehow this makes it worse.

"Shepard, your scars aren't healed, but I need you to get moving. This facility is under attack!" Miranda repeats. Shepard scans the room, looking for a camera. It's some kind of medical laboratory. She's not sure if it's the same one she woke up in when...before.

A flash above catches Shepard's eye. She looks up to see a viewport above her. Not the same lab, then; all she remembered seeing there was metal ceiling and flourescent lights.

Bursts of tracer fire go by outside the viewport. The gunfire noises sound like they're getting closer.

"There's a pistol in the locker on the other side of the room. Hurry!" Miranda insits.

Shepard looks around, spotting the locker off to her left. She levers herself up, gets her feet on the floor and stands - an operation that's far more difficult than it should be. Her muscles and joints complain as if she'd pushed them way too hard the previous day. She winces and grips at a pain in her side.

"Grab the pistol from the locker," Miranda says. Shepard, although she does not at all enjoy being bossed around by this woman, complies - it would probably be a very good idea to be armed right now.

Shepard goes to the locker and hits the controls. The door opens, revealing not only a pistol but a suit of N7 armor as well. She starts putting on the armor, her stiff fingers loosening up as they go through the familiar movements of opening and closing the seals. Once she's suited up, she checks the pistol. The readout says empty - no thermal clips - which means the high-tech weapon is basically no better than a paperweight for the time being. Great.

There are more gunfire noises and a scream, abruptly cut off. Shepard had better find some thermal clips soon.

What a way to start the morning.