When last we left our hero, he had stolen some machinery that had previously resided in a criminal's brain from another, worse criminal, in order to secure the trust of a third criminal, and was now fighting his way out of previously-mentioned worse criminals house, destroying priceless artifacts, ruining facilities and killing staff, since we gained entry under false pretenses. Shepard is the hero, but he's kind of a bastard of a house guest. 
 
We've reached the shuttle pad, and when we get out there, the bad guy in this scenario, Donovan Hock, he of the bad facial hair and worse accent (on review, it could be a New Zealand kind of thing they were trying to hit, but it still sounds bizarre), is waiting for us in a gunship, initiating this games version of the helicopter boss battle. Helicopter boss battles have been discussed extensively by better folks than I, so I will leave this topic be, and we will talk about this one, specifically. 
  
But first, a digression on difficulty and player-deaths: I have been honest so far in these little screeds about any difficulties I am having with the combat,  whether they be due to the game mechanics( i.e classes, weapons, cover wonkiness) the AI (teammate kamikaze runs, or super aggressive enemies) or in most cases, my own struggles with the way you have to approach the combat on the harder difficulty settings. I have said, and will say before, that careful, cover-based shooting is not something I have an innate knack for, and as we have seen so far, I have paid for my own aggression or errors with Shepard's life. 
 
This is the case in the battle out on the landing pad, but here we also see the fruits of the labors of our task here: I am learning what works and what doesn't, and there are already less cases of trying to brute-force my way through things than in earlier missions, such as the Garrus-shutter incident of a few posts back. Instead of repeatedly bashing myself against the scenario, I am getting super-cautious, changing tacts with my squad-mates, and leaning heavily on biotic/tech powers. Basically, I suck less, but it's still often a process. 
 
The layout of this battle is that Hock is hovering above and in front of you, and is heavily shielded. Waves of 5 or so enemies will come at you from center left or right. This isn't so bad, since you have plenty of cover, especially the initial piece you start behind, which is pretty much where I hung out for my (several) attempts here. Kasumi (in the last session, I realized i hadn't allocated her skill points - I told you I was deep in  a bottle of Maker's Mark - and  I dropped all her points into fully upgrading her Shadow Strike ability and upping her Overload skill)  is rather useful in going across the area to keep enemies off of me, though the Eclipse troops are not too rough to fight off, unless they start on your left flank, in which case they can quickly move up to an area where they can negate your cover and cause some significant issues. 
 
The big obstacle is the LOKI mechs, which don't share the merc's sense of self preservation, and walk right up on you, unless you get at them first. The four times i bit it here, three of them had to do with LOKI's getting close and either causing significant enough damage to kill me or to cause me to panic and try to find new cover, only to get myself killed. I said I was getting better, not that I was good, or perfect.
 
The way this goes down is slow and steady, using Kasumi and the reave ability to focus down the mechs for four or five waves of enemies, and then taking down the gunships shields, which regenerate, triggering Kasumi to comment that she can take the shields down if she can get close. At this point, I bum-rushed the landing pad, Kasumi does her thing, and then I retreated to my original cover to hack away at the armor of the gunship, while mostly letting Kasumi hold off the ground forces. All goes well, bad guy goes boom, and we're out. 
 
-  
 
So now Kasumi's loyal, reunites in memories with her partner/lover and then, as is the good thing to do, we erase his dangerous memories. We now have a little more cash, but never enough, and now I lack clear direction on a next step, so naturally, the best idea is to walk into a fairly obvious trap on a deep-space super-max jail full of psychos that planets will allow themselves to be blackmailed into paying to keep them there. this has to go swimmingly. 
 
- 
 
I have to say, i was totally surprised that this whole operation wasn't on the up and up and that the warden was evil and wanted to take Shepard hostage and ransom him off to his enemies. Shocked. I guess now our team will have to run roughshod over everyone between us, our new recruit, Jack, and the door.  
 
And that's pretty much how it goes. I don't want to sound cocky or nothing, but this is where it begins to appear that the tables have begun to turn on the whole skill vs. difficulty relationship that has had me slogging through some earlier missions. The only section that offers significant resistance here is the opening sequence, in which Shepard turns down a invitation to give up. He, Mordin and Miranda (my running crew of choice, I think, for the next good while), are at the far end of a room with a couple waist-high barriers, and a bunch of Blue Sun troopers and more heavily-shielded Legionnaires come piling into the room to try to get you to reconsider by shooting you to death. The troops aren't so rough to deal with, unless they advance up on you. The thing that did me in the first 4 goes I had at this were a couple of FENRIS mechs that roll on in after the first group of soldiers, and right in front of a back-up wave. These little dog-looking buggers act just like the LOKI's during the Kasumi missions, getting right up close and personal, and until I could manage to get at them from distance and get my team to prioritize them properly, they caused me some trouble, at the least making me focus less on the other enemies, who would do me wrong with bullets. 
 
Really, the rest of the mission goes great, proceeding through wreckage and holes in the wall that the newly-freed superbiotic, Jack, is ripping in the structure and fighting whatever guards and mechs are in the way. I remembered the battle with the warden, who is surrounded by guards, and under a shield which is powered by three generators you need to shut off to nullify it, as being a rough go in earlier playthroughs, but my new cautiousness, and use of reave, overload, warp and incinerate allowed my crew to engage and terrorize from a distance. I only lost Miranda once or twice when she wandered out into heavy guard fire, her ample bust taking an impressive number of rocket hits before she decided to lie down for awhile. that was funny to watch. I also incorrectly rallied Mordin once right into the middle of a group of enemies, but he didn't seem too upset about it, before during or afterwards, and I think we're still cool. 
 
So, with the Warden dead, and Jack talked out of tearing us and our ship to pieces with her mind and self-expressive body art and clothing stylings, we depart, now flush with 100,000 in credits two new crew members since the beginning of this entry and our next destination in mind: Space Vegas!