Other Fan Fiction ❯ N7 Echo ❯ Prisoners ( Chapter 4 )

Cargo Hold, Normandy SR-2

After the rest of the crew had returned to the Normandy, they had plotted a course for the last name on their roster, the krogan warlord Okeer.  Shepard had Miranda make the announcement before he headed down toward the lower holds.  Jack rarely seemed to leave the dark shadowed spaces.  But being captain of a ship meant maintaining situational awareness of all your crew.  That much he had gleaned from the Alliance navy.  That much more in the depths of black ops motives.

Vince came down the metal steps to find Jack sitting on a crate in the dark, hunched over a scattered array of omni-pads.  Her biker jacket was in a heap on the deck, next to her boot.  A swirl of colorful tattoos curved up her slender arms and encircled her shoulders.  Her once shaven head was now covered by a thin film of red-gold peach fuzz.  Her face was illuminated with the orange light of the omni-pads at her feet.  She turned and looked up when he approached.

“Hey,” she watched him curiously. 

He leaned casually against a stack of magnetically held food bins.  She had removed her shade visor. “Find anything?”

“There’s a lot to go through,” she admitted with agitation.  “I need to find specific names and places.”

“Do you know what you’re looking for?”

She sighed, dropping the omni-pad in her hand to the pile.  “I know I was held in a facility with other biotic children.  I know Cerberus ran it.  I remember faces, mostly.  It’s all a blur of nightmares and pain.”

Shepard thought a moment.  “Do you have any idea what they were after?”

“Why don’t you ask your cheerleader girlfriend?” she rose, sidled up to him, pressing close and looking right in his face, her pale face a wash in freckles.  He noticed that her dark eyeliner and glossy red lipstick worked together to bring out the red in her brown eyes – eyes that were pervasively searching his own right now.  “Why did you break me out?”

“I told you why.”

“First, I mean,” Jack turned away.  “Your airhead assistant said you did time at the Palace.”

Shepard exhaled.  “The Palace used to be a basketball stadium, about two hundred years ago.  It fell apart back in the 1990s.”  He smiled at the memory.  “For years it was left in ruin, an abandoned skatepark.  That was before the WEF and the Detroit lockdowns.”

Jack said nothing.  She was turned away from him, propped in a narrow opening in the hold that was illuminated by the pulsing red light of the cylindrical drive coupling shaft behind it.

He went on.  “Those of us who didn’t want to be caged fought back.  For once the gangs fought together against the authoritarian state they were trying to put the world in.  When I was captured and sent to the Palace, it was already well established as the worse place to be put.  That shit hole killed more of us than it released.”

The convict extended her fingers and slowly clenched her fist, quietly observing her tattoos as she moved her hand.  “So you took a deal to become a boyscout.”

“Hell yeah,” Shepard defended.  “When the Alliance recruiters came by – everyone was feeling patriotic.  I enlisted, passed all their combat and biotics tests, and was immediately sent out.  They promoted me quick because I kept doing what nobody else wanted to do.  That landed me in N7 special forces.  Echo team.”

“Echo.  The blackest arm of N7,” Jack chuckled sourly.  “You guys were supposed to be the boogey men.”  She looked at him sharply, accusingly.  “The gnarly shit you did, you did for the government – that’s even worse.”

“You’re not wrong,” Shepard admitted.  Jack looked up at this.  “The only time, in most of those black ops missions that I ever really felt alive was Torfan.  When I saw the batarian slavers abusing and molesting those people…”  His yellow-green eyes flashed.  “They got every bullet they had coming. But…”

For the first time since they had met, Jack seemed to take interest.  “But what?”  She was looking down at the floor but she was listening intently.  The coupling light flickered behind her.

“There was this guy, an old Palace veteran.  He’d been there long as anyone could remember.  He was sort of a hermit but whenever he talked in the yards, people listened.”  Jack glanced over and studied the scars on his unshaven face.  He continued.  “He told me about this psychology experiment one of the universities had done, way back when.  Harvard or Yale or one of those breeding grounds of presumptuousness. 

“They divided the students up into prisoners and prison guards and had them simulate a penitentiary.  They intended to see how their relationships changed because of the shifted power dynamic.”  His face contorted with mild disgust, “They didn’t even last a week before they were abusing the power and fighting with each other.  It was a disaster.  The power dynamic dehumanizes people and prevents any real recovery.  Not to mention most of the guards are greedy as hell, constantly pushing inmates to commit more crimes to make money… that or they’re the idiots prancing around tripping on mini-power highs and patting each other on the back.”

“Getting me out wouldn’t be enough for someone who hates prisons as much as you do.  I know,” Jack’s voice emanated from her silhouette.  “You’d avoid that place like I did.”

“Okay, so why would I choose Purgatory first?” Shepard seemed genuinely curious.

“I don’t know,” Jack shook her head.  “I know why Cerberus wanted my biotic powers and my expendable background.  I don’t know what you would want from me.  I don’t like being jerked around so I asked Zaeed.  That ugly ass bounty hunter told me you just did the opposite of what Miranda suggested.  He seemed to think you’re just inclined to be roguish.”              

Vince’s green-gold eyes flashed.  “I am roguish.”

Jack stifled a smile.  “You’re lame, is what you are.  I just had to see for myself that you weren’t another Cerberus stooge.  You brought me on the first outing in Omega to find the doctor.  We drank and partied in the club before we even started asking questions.”  Her dark eyes caught the red light.  She smiled deviously, “You did that on purpose.”

Vince smiled back.  “Maybe.”

Jack pursed her scarlet lips, “Fuck you, Shepard.”  She turned.  The drive shaft engaged and the red coupling light brightened to bask them in a soft ruby glow.  Jack arched her back and tilted her chin up, stretching.  Her feline silhouette did not go unnoticed by Shepard.  She picked up her weapon, an unmarked pistol, gun metal shade, and examined it.  “When I find where that facility is, I’m going to find names. I’m going to hunt them down one by one.  And then I’m going to burn it all to the ground…”

Vince watched the surreal scene of Jack bathed in fiery pulsing light, pondering her revenge, talking softly of those she would kill.  Tendrils of steam curled up out of the darkness and left mist clouds in the flickering crimson.  The ship rumbled gently, bass-like in the chest.  Her silhouetted head turned to him.