Chapter Text
[22:03] Started new conversation.
[22:03] Invited John Shepard to join conversation.
[22:04] John Shepard has joined the conversation.
[22:04] John: Hey Jane!
[22:04] John: Haven't heard from you in a while.
[22:04] You: Indeed.
[22:05] John: How long's it been?
[22:05] John: Three weeks?
[22:05] You: Just about.
[22:06] John: So, what's up?
[22:11] You: You have absolutely no clue, do you?
[22:17] John: Was I supposed to be somewhere?
[22:18] You: Yeah.
[22:21] John: Did I miss your birthday?
[22:21] You: No. That's in six months.
[22:24] John: No clue.
[22:24] You: You forgot Mike's and my anniversary. Again.
[22:25] John: Oh.
[22:25] John: Sorry.
[22:26] You: You promised, you'd at least try to get to know him better.
[22:26] John: I was caught up at work.
[22:26] You: Oh, really?
* * *
"Oh man. Jane's so gonna kill me," John muttered to himself as he scoped out the target.
Anderson had assured him the mission came straight from Hackett and it was absolute top-priority, so against his better judgement Shepard had agreed.
The objective was to destroy a VI gone rogue in an Alliance training base on the Earth's moon. John had seen pictures of the Earth from afar, but being on the moon's surface and seeing it with his own eyes was quite a different thing. His mind drifted off to great cities, grand oceans and actual sunlight. The moon was almost in an eclipse, so there wasn't a lot of light to go with. Thankfully the base was outfitted with lights on the outside, so that ships could find it, no matter what time it was. The darkness gave him the advantage of being able to get closer to the turrets without being detected. Now he was lying on his stomach between his two squadmates, pressed to the cold, hard ground with just enough cover from the rim of the crater he was hiding in.
"Can't see any hostiles, but I'm sure those turrets are just waiting for us," the man to his right stated. Alenko had been a valuable asset to Shepard's team ever since he'd joined the Normandy's crew. His biotic abilities paired with a fairly expansive knowledge of tech made him ready to face any kind of enemy.
"Agreed. Let's head back to the Mako. Jenkins, how's your aim today?" Shepard asked the man to his left, as his squad started to crawl away from the edge. While Alenko had gathered quite a lot of experience by now, Jenkins was the rookie of the team. A little quick on the draw, a little more restless, but a good soldier once he had an actual target to shoot at.
"Well, I haven't had much practice with the Mako, so..." The young corporal's voice trailed off, as his face grew a little more red than usual.
"We'll just have to find out, huh?" the commander replied reassuringly.
The Mako was parked in the middle of the crater, an accomplishment Shepard was quite proud of. Steering this massive beast of a tank in a low-gravity environment was not an easy task and being sneaky with it? Near impossible.
As Jenkins took the gunner's seat Kaidan tried to sit down in front of the steering wheel.
"Move over, Lieutenant. You know the drill," Shepard ordered.
Kaidan muttered something his CO couldn't quite understand, but should have known that Shepard was going to drive. Shepard always drove.
"Anything you've got to say?"
Alenko swallowed the comment he was going to make about protocol dictating that he should be in the driver's seat and decided to focus on the task at hand instead. "I'd suggest starting off with the northern base and then using it as cover against the other turrets."
"Agreed," Shepard replied with a smirk. "Now let's take this slow."
He started the engines and began easing the Mako backwards, so they could drive around the complex and attack from the other side. At least, that's what would have happened, had he actually been in reverse gear. His eyes flew wide open as he realized he was not moving away from their scoping spot, but towards it. Slamming the break didn't do much once the ten ton tank was on it's way over the ledge, they'd taken cover behind. "Brace for impact!!" He shouted as four rockets shook the Mako to her bones.
"Why are there six pedals if there are only four directions? Damnit!" John swore. "Change of plans. We're going for a direct assault," he announced and accelerated toward the base. "You know when I said we were gonna see how good your aim is today?" he asked the man behind him as another firing barrage hit the vehicle.
"Yes?" came the nervous reply.
"Well, I need it to be really good now, Corporal!" John replied in his most authoritative tone, hoping to rouse the military man in his squad mate.
"Aye, aye, sir," Jenkins complied and managed to destroy the first turret.
"Alenko, how's the machinery holding up?"
"Running, for now. But maybe you should try to get-" He was interrupted by another direct hit. "Okay, you definitely need to get into cover, sir. I don't think she'll be able to take another one of those."
"Yeah, yeah. I know."
* * *
[22:27] John: I'm so sorry. Chloe got sick the day before I was supposed to head home.
[22:27] John: And then I had to make the trip to Terra Nova instead of her.
[22:28] John: Then the thing with the chicken
[22:28] John: Haven't really had time to sit down for like two weeks.
[22:29] You: Yeah, yeah. I get it.
[22:30] John: Oh come on, sis, don't be like that. We'll just do it another time.
[22:31] You: It's not just that you missed it.
[22:32] You: I know you two don't get along very well. And I wanted to do something about it.
[22:33] You: All I want is for my brother and my husband to be able to be in one room at the same time.
[22:33] You: It's not like I've got anyone besides the two of you.
[22:34] You: Could you not at least pretend to like him?
[22:35] John: Again, I'm sorry Jane. I'll try to make it up to you.
[22:35] John: I hope at least you two had a nice evening.
[22:36] You: Yeah, the place was really good.
* * *
Shepard hadn't had a lot of time to prepare for this mission, but though she didn't exactly consider herself an expert on the matter, she knew that VIs weren't supposed to go haywire. If it wasn't in their programming, they simply couldn't do it. So something had to be different about the VI on Luna, and she was going to find out what it was.
As her team entered the base, she took in the chaos around her. A lot of bullet holes in the walls instead of their targets, a few blood stains here and there and of course the deactivated defense drones scattered everywhere. She could tell that the squad that had been send in to solve the original problem hadn't exactly been very experienced in taking out any technical equipment with something other than a gun. Only a handful - more in numbers than in size - of drones had been shut down via overload instead of shot down, which resulted in a lot of unnecessarily scrapped metal. "Amateurs," Shepard muttered under her breath.
They made their way into the main storage room and Shepard bit her lip. It was a nervous trait she'd picked up as a kid and never managed to get rid of. This wasn't going to be as easy as she'd hoped. Most of the VI conduits had taken serious damage, but she had experts on the matter at her side and a particularly useful algorithm on her omni-tool to help her do what she had been sent in for.
"Okay everyone, we don't have all day, so we'd better get started," announced Lieutenant Gordon, the mission leader. Shepard nodded in aggreement and walked over to one of the conduits that seemed a little more salvageable. She'd thought she had enough technical knowledge to fix the shot cabling herself, but after about half an hour of tinkering, she was greeted with nothing but more broken parts.
She stood up and looked around the room to see if anyone had managed to get one started.
"You need to reduce power to the holo-emitters first. If they are running at full capacity, you'll just overload one half of the circuit, while you're trying to fix the other," a young red-head next to her whispered.
"Damn, you're right! Thanks!" How had she missed that? Shepard mentally slammed herself on the forehead and proceeded to follow her colleagues advice.
"Gabriella Daniels, by the way. But everyone calls me Gabby," the engineer added with a smile.
"Diana Jones," Shepard replied, "Nice to meet you."
After about ten more minutes, she was finally greeted with the familiar orange glow of a working console.
"Ha! It worked!" she whispered cheerfully.
"Told you that was it," Gabby answered, grinning herself.
"You know what? We should try rerouting the other conduits through ours, so we don't have to go fishing each one individually," Shepard suggested.
"Good idea! Can you go grab some more cabling? I don't think the network is running properly at the moment, so we should go with a hardline connection."
A few hours later, the two ladies had restored the pieces of hardware they needed for data extraction almost on their own, while the rest of the conduits, terminals and data cores had been safely put away into storage boxes to be sent to an Alliance research facility.
"Jones, Daniels, do you have everything set up?" The Lieutenant turned to them.
"Yes, sir. The upload is stable and the Alliance should receive all the data within the next 24 hours," Shepard replied, setting off a few final algorithms to secure the connection.
Gordon gave them a satisfied nod, then turned to the entire team: "Alright people, we're done here. Good job, everyone," he finally announced and they made their way to their respective shuttles.
"You know, we should work together more often," Shepard said.
"If you're not headed for the Perugia, that might take some time. I'm going to be stationed there for the next year or two," Gabby announced.
"Too bad," Shepard remarked with a bit of disappointment and boarded her shuttle. "Well, maybe in two years then."
Gabby smiled. "Yeah, maybe in two years."
As the door behind Shepard closed and she could feel the shuttle taking off, she let out an audible sigh. "About time," she muttered under her breath, grabbed the blue beret on her head and flung it into a corner.
"You dislike something about your uniform?" The question came from the shuttle's co-pilot with a heavy undertone of sarcasm. She had apparently been waiting for Shepard's return in the back.
"Oh believe me, if I never have to wear that damned thing again, it will still be too soon," Shepard replied and handed the woman in front of her a datapad. "These are the shipping routes they'll take for the components. The uplink to our servers is stable and should be done in a few hours. Your algorithm made sure the Alliance won't be so lucky and we'll be long gone before they notice."
"Good job, Shepard. So I'm guessing the intel was good?"
"Yes, the Alliance was definitely experimenting on AI technology, the coding was far too complex, the hardware too expansive. I think we hit the jackpot. And we should see if we can't get this one engineer on board as well, Gabriella Daniels. She definitely knew what she was doing back there," Shepard reported.
"I'll see, what we can do," the slender figure replied with a slight smile.
"Any word from Michael yet?"
"Your brother didn't show up. I'm sorry, Shepard."
"Well, hadn't really expected him to," she sighed. Swallowing her disappointment, she added: "But hey, at least the mission was a success. Should make the Illusive Man quite happy to finally get his hands on an AI, don't you think, Miranda?"
* * *
[22:36] You: Too bad you missed it.