Tales of a Mad World: Flight of the Sparrow

[SotF]

Note: This is set in the Mad World Mass Effect AU, it involves Jackson Udina.

xXx

The abused, leather tricorn hat was one of the first features many noticed of Jackson Udina, followed by the long coat that swirled about him in an odd way as he walked.

Jacks quickness to admit to being a pirate, as long as he wasn't within easy grabbing range of any officers of the law, was one of the distinguishing characteristics of his haphazard mark on galactic society. If the increase of heart medication taken by his father after any of his exploits reached the news were anything to go by, his casual admissions only covered the surface.

From the Citadel, to Omega, to Earth, and beyond, Captain Jack was known for both being one of the best pirates out there and in narrowly outrunning the bad luck that seemed to pursue him. His father was convinced the natal genetic repair to prevent the near sighted issue from his mother managed to include cockroach into the mix considering the mayhem he's walked away from just to get in another, oftentimes worse, scrape.

And that was just the way Jack liked it.

The Sparrow was his ship, with his crew of compatriots gathered from across nearly every government out there, most of which had warrants out for his arrest, if they managed to catch him.

Which, of course, they often did, mainly when he had just managed to leap away from a far worse situation only to wind up cooling his heels somewhere for a few hours until either he managed to escape or was sprung by his crew.

Though, it did explain the shackles that Jack currently found himself in as he waited in the courtroom amidst a rather angry crowd of Turians and a smattering of other races.

"Jackson Udina," the Admiral in charge of the gathering stated, "You've been accused of piracy, theft, espionage, inciting a riot, unlicensed use of demolitions charges, gun smuggling, public drunkenness, public nudity, contributing the delinquency of minors, public endangerment, and disturbing the peace..."

Jack's shrug was the only sign that he'd heard it before interrupting, "So, essentially pillaging and plundering my weaselly black guts out?"

The datapad held in the admirals had cracked, "Amongst other things, yes..."

"Well, I would say that I'm quite guilty," came his response, just as something caught his eye and a wicked grin crossed his lips.

Then all at once, hell broke loose across the station as lights flickered and alarms sounded.

"Report," the old turian yelled, "What happened?"

Quiet filled the chamber before the lights went off for a long moment before returning.

"Anyone?"

Jack cleared his throat, bringing the others attention back on the pirate.

"Well," he stated, raising his hands to reveal the lack of shackles, "I figure that it's time to let you know just how you almost caught Captain Jack Udina."

The admiral was fuming, even as he noticed that the human had pilfered his pistol in the moment of darkness.

"I knew that you couldn't resist the call of being the one to sentence me," Jack stated while adjusting his hat, "Nice gun by the way, but I needed you here because of that ship you were escorting, and the prize onboard."

"What prize?" the tone was off.

"Oh, I know you had the parts from your little stealth ship project on board, and I wanted them for my ship, so you had to be here."

"We caught you!"

"Did you now?"

The admirals look of outrage widened to full blown rage as weapons were drawn by nearly everyone in the room, turian naval officers, c-sec guards, and nearly a dozen crewmen from the Sparrow.

"We leaving boss?" came a familiar voice that left the pirate with a groan.

"Li," he asked as the pirates backed towards the view port even as the minor war breaking out to contain a single frigate filled the view of the station with flashes weapons fire drawing closer to their hosts alarm, "Why did you bring Verner?"

"Well, we'd considered your father and the monkey, but we had to go with someone unlikely to throw his own feces."

"Ah," Jack chuckled at the joke.

"You can't get off this station Udina," came the lead officers calm statement, "Drop the weapons and surrender, or we will shoot."

"Now Chellick," came the pirates answer with a laugh, "Always remember the day you almost caught Cap'n Jack!"

Then everything seemed to happen at once, starting with the pistols bark and the view port's rupture just as something big catapulted by in space. It was over just as quickly as it had begun, the admiral and the C-Sec officer staring as the emergency hatches slammed shut, but the pirates were gone, leaving those still there just to stare as the report of the Sparrow buzzing the security court reached those within, realizing that the pirate was correct.

They had almost caught Captain Jackson Udina, and he hadn't almost made fools of them all.

"That has got to be the craziest lunatic I've ever seen," Chellick muttered o himself as he holstered his weapon.

 

[SotF]

Megara moved through the small camp with a calm befitting her age. The name was an assumed one, her current profession made life a bit difficult in the more civilized portions of the galaxy.

Even still, an assumed name would shortly end up with questions asked if she remained for to long, especially in the confines of the quick shelters that were in use. An Asari matriarch tended to stick out enough that being one meant you could be recognized as one, limiting options.

She still wasn't entirely sure how the chain of events that sparked it led to her current occupation as a pirate.

The human was the cause of it, no other being in the galaxy was capable of taking a hammer to whatever order was in his path with a grin and laugh.

Megara had met Jack Udina in her bar on Illium, and that's when things got fuzzy. She'd had an argument over the extranet with a former lover about their daughter when he'd shown up.

Next thing she knew, was ending up on a prison transport and on her way up to one of the mobile prison ships transferred to Citadel control from the Turians after the war. The ships being a byproduct of the capability the Empire had in raiding planet based prisons.

Then he pulled something that she'd never thought possible, the pirate managed to convince nearly every prisoner onboard to join him in hijacking the prison ship itself. Megara still wasn't sure how he managed to get them out of the shackles either, but all eighty prisoners on their way to the larger prison craft were loose in a flash of madness.

Once, and only once, had their relationship been more than friends and allies, and that was during one of the short term breakups that Jack had with the girl he probably actually had feelings for. Megara had taken lovers from pretty much every relatively civilized species out there, but Jack, well, Jack was Jack and anything trying to touch his mind was liable to end up with a headache at best.

She still felt the migraine coming back at the mere thought of that incident.

Biting back a curse after her foot caught the edge of a chair in the makeshift cantina, she almost wished that her daughter could be dragged into this rather than getting it from a second rate translator. But then again, while she didn't know the source of what needed to be translated, knowing that involved Jack and Protheans, well, the resulting chaos would not be something she'd want her involved in.

But Santiago was a good kid, rather naive but still a good kid.

Not to mention one that wouldn't create issues with the crew. Not to mention that lacking the utter insanity of the rest of the Captains crew would help her deal with the coming trip.

And that was if Jack's crazy plan didn't get them all killed by the Turians before picking her up here. A plan that begins with let them capture me tends not to imply normal thinking. Adding an escape plan which involved timing with a ship at combat speed and both shooting out a viewport and a leap through space for a small team of pirates without the aid of a suit.

But that was normal for Jack...

 

[SotF]

Donnel Udina sat there in his office upon the Emissarius, watching the shifting cascades of the nebula through the window.

Keeler had finally been removed from the ship and on his way back to Earth, the mess that stim junkie created was in the process of being fixed. The companies concerned with the deal were still sending him demands for the "better deal" Elias had been pushing for.

That was one headache that he wasn't going to miss.

But it wasn't the only problem, his son had managed to rile up a good portion of the Turian fleet after some hair brained stunt that managed to involve C-Sec. Of course, Jackson's antics had managed to find him a decent drinking partner after the boys recurring liaisons with a Turian admirals daughter...

Part of that he blamed on his own actions after his wife died.

Leah had been the best thing that happened to him, and her death led to him wanting to find a less stressful job that politics for a while. He'd taken a position as head of one of the containment facilities the Empire was running.

His former boss had been rather disdainful of the concept that the Empire had to do anything for the prisoners taken over the course of the conflict. But the citizens would have had riots if the corporates had gotten their way, and he'd have been right alongside them.

Work camps utilizing them as little more than slaves wouldn't have made the Empire any better than they were.

Of course, he ended up with a job that left him dealing with families. Primarily overseeing the schools and food distribution channels.

One of the things that the Empire did do to prevent a lot of the POW's from trying things was simply to separate the food supplies. Dextro prisoners grew normal food for the non-dextro camps on other worlds than they lived on and vice-verse. If they rebelled, well, it would be easy enough to limit their access to food.

Not really the nicest thing, but one of the better options.

The Krogan thought we should have just killed them all, eminently practical but something that was not in the nature of the rest of us.

Perhaps it was his own dealing with Turian children that gave Jackson the impetus to seek them out. But he still wasn't sure where his boy got the impetus to go pirate, especially with such a lack of self preservation instincts.

Pulling an amber bottle from its place in a drawer along side a small glass, he watched as the Citadel came into view from his ships slow rotation.

It was one of those things that everyone remembered seeing for the first time. A strangely delicate looking thing compared to most Imperial construction. He'd seen the ward arms open as if it were a flower at first light. It was a dainty thing next to the Juggernaut, and yet it carried a very different work of art.

The Protheans were artists it seemed, at least to an extent.

But the Juggernaut was a work of art as well.

A surface of swirling patterns where metal had cooled in space while being hurtled through the depths of the void. Thousands of small structures where the weaponry and other essentials that needed to be on the surface hidden in the landscape, giving it a barren and empty look save for the cavernous docking bay and massive engine array.

While costly in time and resources, the feat of engineering had given the Empire one advance they hadn't expected.

There were two ways that eezo cores worked, the first was a simple increase in either core size or supplied energy to raise output. The simple method as many described it, and what tended to be the most commonly used.

The second option was one that the Protheans had to have understood when they built the Citadel, if you aligned smaller cores with the right positions, power levels, and other variables, then you could do a heck of a lot more with the same amount of Element Zero as with the normal method.

It was a tradeoff between required precision and brute force, and the only real way to make a mobile mega structure was with either an exponential increase in power and eezo, or to work out the precise layout of smaller cores.

And those on the extranet pondering about which would win between the two titans of space, well, in Donnel's opinion rock beat plant anytime.