When they emerged from the cargo hold, David, Hann, and Elsai found Dahlia rooting through every drawer, box and locker she could crack open. The orange light of her omni-tool washed across the dingy bulkhead walls as she kept a digital record of everything she found.
"We need your help down below," Elsai entreated.
"No thank you," Dahlia replied. "I need to inventory our spoils of war. The three of you are probably better suited for working with trauma survivors, anyhow."
"They need a human face," David said. "One of the men would've lunged at me if my uncle hadn't vouched for me. They don't know me. I'm just another batarian, and they've seen too many of us lately."
"And I don't think they find our faceplates very welcoming," Elsai added. "A friendly human face could go a long way towards bringing those people through what they've suffered."
Dahlia practically chewed a sliver of flesh from the inside of her lip. Even if they had just punished their victimizers and were now bringing the colonists to freedom, she truly did not want to see the misery concealed below deck.
Among the items she'd catalogued so far, Dahlia counted six combat-ready hardsuits. She was already mentally disassembling them, brainstorming on how to incorporate her arc reactor and repulsors to create a flight-capable suit of armor. The fact that some of the hardsuits included kinetic barrier generators made her all the more excited for the next stage in her tech experiments.
"Dahlia, what would Imani'Barael say if she were here?" Elsai asked pointedly, forcing Dahlia from her thoughts.
"She'd tell me to take care of my fellow humans," Dahlia said with a grimace.
"And wouldn't you listen to her?"
"Nope."
"Really?" Elsai asked incredulously.
"Yeah…..but then she'd threaten to get Captain Brill on my ass, and I'd agree to go along while muttering grumpily under my breath."
Elsai dragged Dahlia, ignoring her largely incoherent mutters, to distribute the ship's scant supplies to the prisoners. There was a fair amount of water in the storage tanks, but Dahlia questioned the state of the filtration system. She also hoped that Elsai, Hann, and Jin were not terribly hungry, for there was absolutely no food safe for them to eat. Even the food stores safe for humans and batarians were limited. Dahlia realized that the pirates must have stopped at Omega to resupply, which she and the others had interrupted. Once they reached Horizon, they'd have to bargain with the colonists to get essentials. Hopefully, when Dahlia resumed inventorying the ship's contents, she'd discover some credit chits stashed away. For now, Dahlia and Elsai filled some field bottles with water and scrounged up what food rations they could to bring to the prisoners below.
The smell...was something that Dahlia would never speak of again, even though she feared it would haunt her nostrils for the rest of her life. Men, women, and children had been chained down by manacles welded to the floor and walls of the cargo hold. For untold days, they'd been forced to wallow in their own waste.
"Who're you?" chirped a little girl, her eyes brightening in her dirty face.
"My name's Dahlia," she squeaked, unsure why it was suddenly so hard to find her words. "What's your name?"
"Sofia. Are you taking us home?"
"Yeah. We'll get you home, you'll get cleaned up, you'll get some nice food, and you can sleep in a real bed."
Sofia greedily drank down the water Dahlia offered. As they passed the rest of the water around, Dahlia had to admit that Elsai was right: seeing another human brought the prisoners out of the shadowy corners of the dark cargo hold. The small lights along the ceiling were poorly maintained, and only perhaps every third actually provided any illumination.
"Why're you working with that four-eye?" one of the men asked, spitting the question at Dahlia's feet.
"His name's Dave," she said, feeling her brow furrow itself in annoyance. "He was the one who organized this rescue mission."
"I told you," a gray-haired man of Chinese descent spoke up, "He's my nephew. He's a good man."
"He's a batarian," growled the belligerent man. "If you forgot, they're the ones who did this to us."
"My brother and his wife adopted and raised him after his batarian parents abandoned him as a baby. He's good colony stock, like any of us. Thank you, Ms. Dahlia," Mr. Zhang said. "You can't imagine how much we appreciate what you've done for us."
"My friends helped just as much as I did. They deserve your thanks, too."
Mr. Zhang gently touched a hand to Dahlia's elbow, but he sharply withdrew it when she recoiled from the contact.
"I do appreciate what you've all done," he whispered, gesturing her aside. "But colony folks...even at the best of times, they can be suspicious of outsiders, especially aliens. Many of them still remember the turians as invading monsters from the stars, and even now our children are learning to fear batarians and others as pirates and killers. David is a good boy. He wants to break these old prejudices, but it's an uphill battle. At least he has help now."
Dahlia lingered in that dark place beneath the ship no longer than necessary. Once the supplies were passed around and she'd reassured the colonists as best as she could, Dahlia bolted out of the cargo hold. She didn't feel the usual anxiety creeping on, but still her skin crawled and she felt terribly unclean. Not even aboard the Flotilla, and certainly not during her childhood on glitzy and glamorous Bekenstein, had Dahlia confronted such misery and misfortune. She retreated back into the comfort of sorting through the ship's contents and planning her next mechanical project.
In addition to the six armor sets stored in crew lockers, Dahlia also counted one assault rifle, one shotgun, and the submachine gun forced from the drell woman's hands. With Hann and Jin's help scouring every nook and cranny on the ship, she found chits containing a grand total of 982 credits.
"That's not even enough for fuel to get the ship back to the fleet, is it?" Hann asked ruefully.
"You'll have to wait for your hero's return home, Hann. We might be stuck on Horizon for a while," Dahlia shook her head. "At least it can't be as bad as Omega."
"Wait," Jin interrupted. "Dahlia, couldn't you just...build a bigger version of that reactor...to power the ship?"
"Even if I had the parts to do that, it wouldn't work. An arc reactor could power the ship's internal systems and kinetic barriers, but not the thrusters. This ship uses fusion torches, which run on helium-3. That's not even getting into the eezo needed for the drive core to sustain the mass effect field to enable faster than light travel."
"Wow, I never really thought about what it cost to operate even a small ship," Hann sighed. "It sure makes me appreciate how much coordination is needed to keep the whole Flotilla going."
"I think you just hit upon your first real Pilgrimage lesson," Dahlia smirked. "Won't Elsai be proud of you?"
Dahlia's smile widened as she detected a subtle shift in Hann's shoulders, neck, and breathing pattern that, according to her experience, meant this quarian was blushing. She wanted to keep his spirits up. Depressed Hann was far less tolerable than happy-go-lucky Hann. Still, Dahlia wished she was better suited to lifting her own spirits. If she was honest with herself, she really had hoped for a greater payoff than a handful of credits, a couple slaver weapons, and a tiny, filthy ship.
Nevertheless, she did not regret helping David. The thought crossed her mind that Sofia's beaming face was enough of a reward, but then Dahlia wanted to punch herself for being so corny. She could never let Pepper hear about that; the A.I. would never let her forget about it.
"Ma'am," Pepper called over the ship's speakers. "We are closing on the planet Horizon. We will soon be within sensor range."
"Hmm, do you guys suppose the colonists will be happy to see an unidentified batarian ship approaching?" Dahlia asked sarcastically.
"Keelah, what if they try to shoot us down?" Hann cried.
"Mr. David Zhang already has the comms open," Pepper reassured the panicking quarian. "Once within range, we can request permission to land."
"It just occurred to me," Jin said, "If we're going to introduce ourselves….we should come up with a name for the ship."
"How about we call it Freedom," David shouted from the helm.
"That's too cheesy," Dahlia shouted back. "Geez, those colonists were afraid of him? Anyhow, why don't we call it Buckethead. That way, you can become Hann'Koto vas Buckethead."
"You'd have my vote," Elsai said jokingly as she emerged from the cargo hold.
"No way! Come on, be nice, you guys," Hann begged.
"Umm, if it's okay….I had a name I wanted to suggest," Jin offered meekly.
Some ten minutes later, a comm tower operator on the planet's surface demanded identification from the approaching vessel.
"This is the independent space vessel Ryxera, requesting permission to land," David announced.