Virmire

"We could still go back," I practically shouted at him.

"And go where?" His voice remained calm and low, making me a little bit crazier.

"I don't care. Anywhere," I waved my hands in the air, knowing what an idiot I looked like. "Earth, The Citadel, even Eden Prime. Just away from this place."

He rose from his seat in the regal manor that used to make me feel so… so proud to be his wife. Now it only felt patronizing. He crossed the room and placed his large hands on my shoulders, making me feel more trapped than this stone carved palace ever could.

"Snow," he said with a deep sigh. "I've made a commitment here on Virmire. I can't leave."

"You committed you money, Ben. Not our lives." I lowered my voice to reduce the chances I might hear the word hysteria, but I didn't stop. "I had no idea what I was getting into when you moved us here. I saw the pictures taken to show the public. I didn't know about the storms and the toxic winds."

"And if you had known?" he interrupted, daring me to say it.

My answer should have been 'I wouldn't have come'. I should have stood up to him. But I loved him. We'd been together since I was sixteen. Twenty-seven years. And there was quite easily another hundred years to come. So I made peace with it. Or at least I tried.

"I would have asked for shore leave," I joked, teasing his military background, hoping to lighten the mood.

He chuckled and kissed the top of my head, wrapping his arms around me. His bare chest was warm through the arasilk of my dress and I could feel the rough calluses of his palms against my back. I rested my head on his shoulder and tried to find it in me not to be angry.

Ben was a good man. Honest and caring. He ran his lucrative empire with morals and ethics. Something most other businessmen in Citadel Space could not claim. He was a paragon of his kind and I could never hope to find a better husband. He deserved my support.

"I'm sorry, Ben," I said in a quiet voice. "It's just so hard here."

He stepped out of my embrace and looked down at me with an eyebrow raised. "What, my love, is difficult? You've got the best home that money can buy. All the creature comforts that anyone on a developed planet could ask for. What else do you need?"

"How about friends for starters?" This I could argue with him. He was never around, and the men and women were hired to serve and guard us. They were paid well, but friendship was not included in that fee. Of course I was friendly with all of them, they were good people, but we weren't friends. They couldn't serve by day and play confident by night.

"I'm alone most of the time, Ben. I'd be happier living on a bungalow on Earth." I was close to tears, most of them from guilt. I felt so rotten laying this all on him.

"Snowy, I'm sorry. I had no idea you were so unhappy." He returned to his seat on the edge of the bed. His shoulders sagged over his broad chest. "What can I do to make things better for you?"

"You could be around more often for starters." I joined him on the bed, leaning into him and looping an arm through the crook of his elbow. "I've always been happy with just you for company."

He didn't answer me right away. Had I been another woman and he another man, I might have thought he was having an affair, but we were better than that. The standards he stuck to in business were an extension of those he held in his personal life. A contract was a contract. Besides, our love for each had not dimmed over the years. If anything it was more comfortable, more solid.

When he rose, he took me by the hand and led me towards the doors.

"Where are we going?" I asked.

"I want to show you something."

I followed him out the doors onto the terrace. Every time I walked out, I tried to think of something else to call it other than a terrace because that really wasn't what it was.

Our house was built into one of the many basalt pillars dotting the tropical coastline. It was set back in a cove, far enough away from the breakwater that the violent waves caused by so many storms didn't touch it, but close enough that we could still enjoy the sights and sounds of the ocean. A boardwalk made of native, rot resistant wood lead up to our main entrance at the base of the pillar. The door there was nothing elegant. It was build to withstand massive amount of force, both kinetic and biotic, though we'd never had to put its strength to the test.

Once through the door you followed a tunnel carved around the outside of the pillar. It was functional only until you reached the second floor, or what would have been the second floor if our home had not been a spiral. When you reached that point the whole outside wall of the tunnel disappeared and was open to the elements. There were permaglass windows and blasts shields that would roll down out of the rock at the push of a button, but the rest of the time it was a beautiful walk through greenery and fresh air.

The various rooms of our homes branched off from this spiraling walkway into the centre of the pillar. Our kitchens and formal (completely unused) dining room were on the first floor. The great room above, built into a natural bubble in the cooled magma, was where we did most of our living. Unlike other rooms, it had a large window on the far wall opposite the terrace. The view was unparalleled. When one of the many vicious thunderstorms rolled in off the ocean, this was where I liked to be. Snuggled up on my plush couch with a good holobook. If I was going to live on a planet where 75% of the weather was thunderstorms, I might as well enjoy it.

Further up the tower was a guest suite, also unused, our spa-like bathroom, our bedroom, my library, and at the very top just below the small landing pad, Ben's office. I sometimes argued with him that our bedroom should be at the top, but he had so many satellite uplinks and comm arrays that the top was really the only place.

This was we were headed now. I didn't go to his office very often. Not because he didn't want me there, but because it bored me. I didn't understand the vid screens with their streams of continuously flowing data, or the charts projected holographically above his desk. This was his domain. I was only Snowdonia March, renowned writer and philanthropist, now disappeared from society.

When we entered Ben waved me over to a round wooden table. At its centre was a small, metal dome. I stood at the edge and waited while Ben went around to the complicated bank of controls behind his main desk. First he lowered the blackout panels over the terrace doors and the few small windows. The room was lit now by only the suffused glow of red lights meant to help the eyes adjust to the dark. What appeared next was something I did recognize.

A holographic map of the planet appeared above the table in vivid blues and lush greens. It rotated slowly on its axis showing us the vast polar oceans and main continents at the equator surrounded by many atolls and islets. Several key points were marked on the map. Our home was one of them, as well the space port further to the east and the staging ground for the regeneration project my Ben was spearheading.

Species across the galaxy had had their sights set on Virmire for colonization, but so far only humanity had been brave enough to attempt it. Of course that was long after the Battle of Hoc, where Alliance Commander and Spectre, Shepherd, detonated a nuclear device, stopping the rogue Spectre, Saren, from creating an army of Krogan. Undoing the damage caused by that action was the main reason for Ben's presence on the planet.

Though the war had taken place over a century ago, the fallout from that detonation still plagued the planet, but not as much as it could have. The flora and fauna of Virmire proved to be some of the most resilient and aggressive in known space. It resisted the effects of the fallout and suffered virtually no mutation. The only area that still hurt was a space of roughly 100km around the centre of the explosion. This was the source of the toxic storms that spun around the planet making colonization nearly impossible.

After the borders of the Terminus systems were pushed back by the conjoined efforts of Alliance and Turnian Navies, Virmire became the next Eden Prime. It was to be the third major colonization effort by humanity. But the toxic storms made it impossible. People were just not as tough as the life on Virmire.

"What are we looking at?" I asked as a red blur appeared on the opposite side of the planet to our home.

"That," Ben said as he walked back around his desk to stand at my side, "is a toxin read out of the last storm to circle the planet. He aimed a pen-like remote at the hologram and I watched as the red blossomed and headed east, like a plume of ash from a volcano. It swept over islands and around the globe in mere minutes.

"Of course, that's sped up significantly," he explained. "You know how long those storms can last.

Indeed, they could last days. Days that I was trapped in my tower with no sunlight or fresh air because the blast shields all had to be lowered to prevent toxins from seeping through the permaglass.

"But you get the idea," he continued. "The storm goes around until tires itself out, roughly around the same place it started, and then we wait for the residue of it to dissipate. Now, remembering what you saw, I want you to watch this one from about a month ago. It blew around only weeks before the one that we just watched."

He clicked the remote again and a similar image appeared on the hologram. Only this time the red cloud blotted out nearly everything. The coastlines disappeared, the larger islands further out in the water were obscured and when it was gone, the residual toxins lingered far longer than the more recent storms had.

Ben leaned in close to me and kissed me on the cheek as I took in what this image meant.

"That, my lovely Snow, is why I have to be away. Why I have to be out there. We are making progress. The shield wall is working. The storms are weaker and the residue of them hardly lingers longer than a day now. We won't know for sure until we can measure another storm, but things are certainly looking up."

I spun around to face him, taking in the enormous grin on his face and the sparkle in his eyes. This was his baby. This is what he was doing in Virmire, spending all of his hard earned money on, and it was finally paying off. I swung my arms around his neck and kissed him repeatedly.

"That's wonderful, Ben. Just wonderful," I said between kisses.

"Do you understand now?" he asked.

I did understand. Although he might not have been doing the work himself, he was a source of inspiration to the scientists, technicians, and everyone else involved with this monumental project. Ben knew all of them personally. He conferred with all of them on a daily basis. He played sounding board when one of them needed to work through an idea. He was father to all these people. They needed him, and more was at stake through them than me.

"I understand, Ben. And I am proud of you."

He hugged me tighter and let the smile drift from my face. I understood, but that didn't mean I'd miss him any less. I'd have to find a way to be happy here.