Attack on Lazarus Station
From FABT
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 A squad of LOKI mechs hunting down and slaughtering Cerberus personnel on Lazarus Station.
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2 August 2185 CE | ||||||||||||||||
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Cerberus victory
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- Jacob Taylor: "What the hell are you doing!?"
- Miranda Lawson: "My job. Wilson betrayed us all."
- — Miranda Lawson after confronting and killing Albert Wilson towards the end of the attack.
The Attack on Lazarus Station was an attack on Lazarus Station orchestrated by the defector Albert Wilson with the aid and resources of the Shadow Broker that served as the official conclusion to the War for the Corpse. Following the successful recovery and acquisition of the remains of Commander Shepard thanks to the efforts of Liara T'Soni and Feron Huul during the Raid on Alingon, Cerberus was able to gain access to the body and had it transported to Lazarus Station in an effort to resurrect the deceased commander in the ambitious Lazarus project. The project's lead, Lieutenant Miranda Lawson, was given full discretionary oversight of the project, and had Dr. Albert Wilson, one of Cerberus' best scientists, assigned to the project as its chief medical officer. The project would make steady progress for two years, encountering a slight operational hiccup in mid 2184 CE when operative Rasa went rogue and attacked the station's growth lab, managing to steal and escape with Shepard's abandoned clone and causing damage throughout the station during her escape attempt, even killing several personnel: operations continued shortly after without further incident, and immense progress would be made, with Shepard's body fully reconstructed by early 2185 CE. Unbeknownst to the rest of the station's personnel and the rest of Cerberus, Albert Wilson had become compromised a month after the project began, and had been feeding information to the Shadow Broker on the project's progress with the intent of eventually reclaiming Shepard's body for the Broker so they could sell it to the Collectors, promising Wilson a large sum of money to betray his employers. Although initially believing the project to be doomed to failure, the Shadow Broker was startled by Wilson's reports that the project was progressing smoothly, and that Shepard would regain cognitive functions in just a few months: determined to stop this, the Broker ordered Wilson to awaken Shepard before he was ready to revived, hoping the experience would kill Shepard and set the project back long enough for him to deploy a company of his elite troops to the station and aid Wilson in taking the body by force.
This had the opposite effect: despite Shepard going through severe respiratory and psychological stress in the revival process, Miranda was able to stabilize his condition and Shepard's neural pathways and cognitive functions were revealed to have been restored ahead of schedule, allowing him to awaken early: during this time, Miranda became suspicious of Wilson, unwilling to believe he was capable of such incompetence and that the action had been deliberate. Knowing time was running out and their opportunity to recapture Shepard's body was slipping away, the Broker ordered Wilson to hack the station's security mechs and reprogram them to attack the Cerberus personnel on the station, buying him time to grab Shepard's body, get it to a shuttle, and rendezvous with the Broker's troops at a discrete location to exchange the body, where the Broker planned to have Wilson killed to cover up the incident. The plan had Wilson nervous, especially as he was aware of Miranda's suspicions, but he proceeded as planned. On the morning of 2 August 2185 CE, after just completing the night shift, Wilson retired to his quarters and used his private comm terminal as a gateway to hack the station's security mainframe: with ID he had snagged from a security guard, he was able to access the computer that controlled the station's security mechs, switching their allegiance to hostile and programming them to attack Cerberus personnel, including himself (in order to maintain his cover), and directed them to key points of the station to commence the attack. He ordered a large portion of the mechs to specifically attack Miranda in her office, hoping the overwhelming force would be enough to kill Miranda: once the attack started, Wilson made his way to the lab where Shepard's body was being kept, but encountered resistance early on from the same mechs he had programmed and was shot, forcing him to hide to avoid being killed.
The attack was a massacre. Unprepared for their own mechs to turn on them, the Cerberus security personnel were largely overwhelmed in the first wave, with a large concentration of mechs attacking the barracks and wiping out the entire company of Cerberus commandos that was assigned to the station, before moving onto the standard security personnel, wiping them out as well. Jacob Taylor, the station's chief security officer, was able to survive this initial attack but was boxed in, forced to entrench himself and hold out against the waves of mechs trying to kill him. The rest of the personnel onboard the station, roughly a thousand scientists of varying degrees and specializations, were defenseless and slaughtered by the mechs, only a few ragtag groups managing to arm themselves and trying to survive, although most would be hunted down and killed, helpless against some of the bigger mechs the station's security possessed, including the 5 YMIR mechs in the station's compliment. Within minutes much of the station was in chaos, bodies littering the halls and resistance dwindling as the mechs, following their rewritten programming, performed a room-by-room sweep to ensure there was no survivors. Miranda, despite Wilson's best attempts to kill her, manages to fight her way through the mechs and contacts Shepard, trying to wake him up. Fortunately for Miranda, Shepard was already in the process of being woken up by the gunfire, screams and explosions echoing through the facility, and after directing him to the shuttle bay, Miranda deliberately broke off contact, believing Wilson to be listening in and hoping to manipulate him into believing she was distracted, making her way to the shuttle bay to get a shuttle prepped for extraction. Meanwhile, Shepard was able to get access to a weapon and fought his way through the mechs, linking up with Jacob Taylor and heading for the shuttle bay. Along the way they run into a cowering Wilson, still reeling from his injury: with Shepard and Jacob unaware of Wilson's betrayal, the man decides to scrub his mission and tries to manipulate both of them into leaving with him on a shuttle, now just wanting to escape. The three finally manage to reach the shuttle bay after some extensive fighting, only to be met with Miranda, who immediately executes Wilson on the spot, revealing his betrayal. The three escape on the shuttle, leaving the burning station behind and successfully foiling the Broker's plan.
The Broker's men waited for two days at the RV point before informing the Broker Wilson had not turned up and failed to make contact. Believing the mission a failure, the Broker reached out to his contacts in Cerberus and was able to confirm Shepard's survival and Wilson's demise. With the massacre and its failure to neutralize Shepard, the Broker officially gave up on recovering Shepard's body, believing such efforts to be too costly and risky with the commander now alive. This brought an official end to the War for the Corpse, as well as ending the first phase of the Collector campaign. With Shepard's return, his campaign against the Reapers resumed, now with Cerberus resources and backing, the Lazarus project had succeeded in its goals and the Broker was deprived of a potentially valuable asset to be sold. The losses for Cerberus had been significant however, with thousands of high ranking scientists lost and the entire station having to be abandoned: with nobody to stop it, fires raged throughout the station, severely compromising the superstructure and causing explosive decompressions that exposed several decks to vacuum and severely damaged the station's core systems, including its orbital stabilizers. When a Cerberus retrieval team arrived to assess the damage, they found the station in a decaying orbit over Parnack, no survivors present and its superstructure beginning to crack. The Illusive Man ordered it to be abandoned, and shortly after the station entered Parnack's atmosphere, disintegrating and breaking apart as it fell to the planet's surface, spreading debris across a dozen continents. Despite the cost and loss of material, the price was deemed worth it to have Commander Shepard alive and active again.