One

He had traveled 634 years from home, but Andromeda was no different.

New galaxy, same shit.

The main contrast was here there was some kind of web of electric tentacles stretching across most of the cluster that enjoyed molesting planets. Nothing like that in the Milky Way. That was all Andromeda.

Golden Worlds? Yeah, that part of the promotional materials turned out to be far less than advertised. No doubt there was an asterisk somewhere and some fine print stating that "The Andromeda Initiative is not responsible for actual condition of habitats upon arrival in the Heleus Cluster."

He drummed his fingers across the holstered pistol at his right hip as he slouched back in the functional metal chair seated at the functional metal table. The Turian security officer standing in the corner by the door of the interview room stood silently with a functional M-8 Avenger held in his hands.

Nexus Security had wanted him to give up his weapon. When they asked him to surrender his pistol, he had not-so-politely declined. He had traded one of the research station's power cells for the rather genius cobble-job whipped up by the Nexus exiles. He wasn't going to just hand it over.

There were a couple aliens who he left on the moon who he was pretty sure regretted walking in front of the six-shooter. That was, if they were still alive to regret things.

The asshole Turian security guards decided it wasn't worth pushing the issue before they were the next ones to end up on the wrong end of his gun. No doubt they just watched to get their claws on it so they could examine what the exiles had constructed and how. Tough luck.

The door opened and in walked another damned Turian. White carapace. Blue streaks on his face. His power armor glowed in a painful green like some gaudy-ass cactus on a cheap Mexican food neon sign.

"I'm Tiran Kandros, director of Nexus Security," he said as he sat down on the opposite side of the table. He wasn't wearing a weapon, at least not that could be seen. "And you're… Caelus Wolf?"

"Wolf," he answered nearly as quickly as the Turian could mention his name. He took his hand off the pistol and crossed his arms over his chest.

"Sounds almost Turian," the security director said.

"It's definitely not."

He was born a year before first contact with the Turians. A year before the violent first contact with the Turians.

If his parents had known if Turian naming conventions all sounded slightly Roman, maybe they would have thought twice before naming him after some stupid sky god with a soft-sounding name. Academics. Couldn't just be normal people. Always looking back at ancient history with a hard-on made of nostalgia.

"Right, well," the Turian said as he flipped through the information on the datapad. "Born and raised on the Citadel. Degree from Citadel University in exoplanetary science. Approved for the Initiative in 2183. Assigned to a Nexus science team, secondary planet evaluation division. Third batch out of cryo. Assigned to a near-system survey team."

The director stopped reading aloud, flipped a little more through the datapad, then placed it down on the table, off. The Turian placed his elbows on the table and folded his hands together.

"What I don't see in your file is any military service," Kandros said.

"Don't have any," Wolf said.

Alliance had certainly come calling, early and often, in his younger days. During his teen years, he couldn't seem to go a single day without some kind of email from this recruiter or that recruiter. About once a week he would just "happen" to cross paths with someone on campus who could tell him more about opportunities in the officer training program and how it was never too late to enlist. Hell, he even had a general take him out for a steak dinner once.

They stopped calling in '76 after he finally - and emphatically - told them how they could take their goddamned Alliance flag, hoist it, and then shove up their own asses until they were flying half-mast.

The Alliance had done enough to mess up his life without him actually having to join it.

"I find that hard to believe," the Turian said, "considering you left a group of dead Kett back on that moon."

Wolf shrugged. "You can believe whatever you want."

When the olive-colored ship landed on the dusty moon's surface outside the research station, Wolf had warned them that nothing good was about to happen. The other three were hesitant, but Simmons was technically in charge and he read the Initiative primers like they were religious texts. They were supposed to follow "first contact protocol."

While he was out there trying to talk to the aliens, Wolf had instead quietly pulled the Sidewinder out from under his bunk, then grabbed a power cell from the storage cabinet and plugged it into his omni to run a personal shield system. By the time he got the shield booted up, he heard the first gunshot outside.

No one ever listened to him.

When the aliens forced open the door of the station to get the rest of them, he greeted them with the barrel of the six-shooter. He blew the heads off the first two before they even realized he had the drop on them. The other three others didn't go down quite as easily. But in the end, they were dead and he wasn't. All that mattered.

For maybe the first time ever, he appreciated that his parents had volunteered him to get his head cracked open so they could jam metal into his brain back when he was a kid.

Whoever those aliens were, they clearly didn't seem to know what biotics were. Or at least, they didn't seem like they had even seen it before. That was just the impression he got when that nova slammed the one into the side of the research station so hard the dented the metal in.

He heard that some of the Andromeda soldiers had flashy, new fifth-generation gear. Might have been nice to get one, if it wouldn't require some surgeon digging around in his head with an ice cream scoop to get the L3 out of his grey matter.

Wolf would have blown the alien shuttle to hell, too, if he had been able to figure out any of the foreign symbols and letters within the small landing craft. He didn't exactly want to sit there poking at buttons without knowing what they did. It was still sitting there, he guessed, if the Initiative wanted to go poke around it.

And so he puttered back into the Nexus in their little white shuttle with Szewczyk and Choy sitting in the back probably cleaning the shit out of their civies as they pondered how they were still alive at all. Neither of them could ever shut the hell up. By the time he got out of here, word would probably have already spread across the Nexus about their little alien encounter. Or maybe they were locked up somewhere getting their own interrogation, too.

"You have a problem, Wolf?" the Turian asked, obviously picking up on his demeanor.

"Aside from the Golden Worlds being a bust, drilling on some frosty-ass moon for three months looking for water that I told them wasn't there to begin with and being stuck here getting probed by a couple Turians?" Wolf shook his head. "Nope. No problems at all. I'm great. How are you?"

Kandros looked at him blankly for a moment, then waved his hand to the guard watching the door. The door whooshed quietly as it glided open, then click-clacked as it shut with the security officer on the other side of it.

"Were you aware the human ark came in?" Kandros asked.

Wolf snorted. "How could I miss it? They turned on the lights on the Nexus for the first time ever." He cocked his head to the side a little. "Well, at least since the dustup over who's in charge around here."

"And you chose the Nexus."

"I didn't get to choose," Wolf corrected. "I was out circling Korvath taking scans when everything went down, even though I remotely remember telling people that you can't colonize a planet that doesn't have an atmosphere. But nobody ever seems to listen to me around here."

Science, hell, even basic science had gone right out the airlock when everyone got desperate. When Eos turned out to be a downright disaster, the Initiative small wigs started throwing everything at the wall in hopes something stuck. What about this clearly non-viable planet!? What about this moon that we never bothered looking at before because it's too small and too distant from the star? Maybe we could shoot off and look at this system even though we have no idea where that Scourge shit is between here and where we're trying to go?

Meanwhile everyone kept glancing out the windows hoping an ark would show up so they'd have a Pathfinder and a SAM to throw all their hope at.

If situations were different, maybe the Turian would have invited to give him a chauffeured ride to wherever the Nexus exiles were hold up now. But he wouldn't, Wolf knew, because the Nexus couldn't afford to lose anyone else, even if it wanted to. Not that he wanted to go, anyway. This wasn't exactly paradise, but last he had heard most of them landed out on Habitat 4, which, of course, had all the water that was promised in the recruitment vids, only that all of it was toxic.

The Turian didn't seem at all impressed with his attitude. He picked up the datapad again and began tapping through a few screens until he came to the page he was looking for. Kandros placed the pad down on the table and spun it so it was facing Wolf, then slid it across to him.

"Well here's a choice you can make," the director of security said as Wolf picked up the pad and looked over the form on it. "That's an order that you're to be returned to cryo. An ark may have come in, but the Superintendent doesn't want us using up any more supplies than are necessary. Considering that the survey teams haven't found anything worthwhile, she's pulling the plug."

Wolf scanned over the order on the datapad. It was brief. There was his name. There was the order to return to cryo. And there was the signature of the Superintendent. He tossed the datapad back across the table, letting it bounce twice before it slid back in front of Kandros.

Typical Andromeda.

Hey, wake up! No, wait, nevermind, go back to sleep!

Everyone around here had their heads stuck halfway up their asses.

"Super," Wolf said, pushing his chair back from the table so the legs screeched across the floor. "Can I go now? I suppose they've got my pod chilled and ready for me?"

"You can," Kandros said as he scooped up the datapad. "Or, I can override this order and reassign you."

No one did favors around here without expecting something in return, Wolf knew.

"What do you want?"

"As you know first hand, Heleus isn't as friendly as we hoped it would be," the Turian said. "In response, I've been authorized to form several small strike teams to deal with particular threats. The program is called APEX."

Wolf might have snorted again, if he didn't hold it in to not piss off the Turian any more. APEX? What a joke. The Initiative wasn't at the top of anything. And, from the murmurs he heard on his walk through the station about a rapid increase in alien attacks, humanity and its Milky Way colleagues weren't remotely close to being on the top of the food chain. Hell, they couldn't even put their feet down on dry land without the land killing them, too.

"I'm not a soldier," Wolf reminded him, as he had been forced to repeatedly remind the Alliance for all of those years.

"And my soldiers aren't scientists," Kandros countered. "I can't send the average tech onto a battlefield and expect them to come back. But you're not the average lab coat, are you?"

Wolf shrugged. What else could he do?

Either he signed up to go blasting through Heleus with the Turian's gun jockeys or he went back into the box for another deep freeze. With the way things had been going, there was a good chance they'd never thaw him out again. More likely that, at some point, the batteries on the Nexus would run out of juice for good and he and everyone else in the freezer would warm up the slow way until the entire station smelled of rotten meat.

That, or go exile. If, and a big if, he was able to figure a way to break out of Nexus security and get to a shuttle to even get off the damn Nexus. But again, flying out there with even fewer resources than the Initiative to a world filled with poison water didn't sound particularly endearing, either. That was a dog eat dog mess to get into and, frankly, he didn't want to have to constantly be glancing around waiting to see who was going to try to clock him upside the jaw or, predictably, shoot him in the back.

Kandros continued, despite Wolf's indifference. "Pathfinder Ryder has managed to stabilize the environment on Eos. How, I'm not exactly sure, but radiation levels are down and the violent sandstorms have abated. But that's also allowed the Kett to gain a foothold."

Of course it had, Wolf thought.

"They have several power stations feeding energy up to a main base in the cliffs, but it's too fortified for us to move on," Kandros said. He pulled up a map on his omni, displaying the holo into the air between them.

"But there are a series of outposts here in the Presson Dunes," he said as he pointed to the flat area on the west side of his map. "We've been tracking ships coming in and out of a big installment here, but we don't know why. As far as we can tell, there's nothing of interest out there."

"And what do you need me for, exactly?" Wolf asked, trying to cut to the point.

"Clear out the Kett. Recover any data we can find. Figure out what they're doing," Kandros said.

That didn't exactly answer his question as to why they needed him, but considering the options laid before him, getting shot to death by aliens the middle of the desert probably was still the best of the choices he had available. That, in itself, painted a pretty depressing picture of how his life had turned out to this point.

Andromeda was turning out just to be another shade of "kill or be killed."

Exactly the opposite of what he was hoping for.

"Fine," he answered, not making any effort to mask his frustration at being used.

If Kandros was bothered by that last bit of attitude, he didn't make any indication of it. "We'll get you fitted for a combat suit before takeoff tomorrow. Just show up back here at Security at O-eight-hundred."

Wolf shoved his chair out from under the table and headed for the door.

"I can't wait to see you tomorrow. Miss you. Love you."

"Love you too, babe," Wolf said, then tapped the button on his omni to shut it down.

When the orange light from the omni dimmed, he sat alone in the dark for a moment on the edge of the rigid mattress. He scratched his fingers across the left side of his head, across the narrow band of skin just above his left ear where the hair didn't grow, along the fault line where they had made the incision into his head as a teenager. There wasn't a noticeable scar there any more, only the narrow missing patch of hair to alert people that something wasn't quite right.

The tiny Nexus apartment was pitch black without the omni. There were no windows. No furnishings beyond what was bolted to the floor. There was a light, but he hadn't bothered to turn it on.

Wolf sighed.

He was in a whole new galaxy.

He couldn't shake the familiar feeling of the Milky Way.

Wolf cracked open the cases of lab equipment, recalling each of the locations where he had placed components.

He wished he could have figured out a way to hide a bottle of whiskey in there too without raising any flags on the scanners. A handle filled with liquid never would have made it past the docks managers doing inventory of everything going aboard the nexus.

A rifle, however, broken down into individual components and separated across a handful of cargo containers filled with science equipment the average clipboard commando wouldn't know what to do with even if he did know what they were, made it through without a question.

Call it paranoia, but the expectation that something like this was bound to happen coming true made him look pretty goddamn smart. No doubt the Nexus soldiers would want to give him one of those flimsy-ass Avenger rifles. The thing could barely chip the paint off a car, much less kill something.

In contrast, his M-13 had the range of a long gun and carried some of the pop, but handled and fired like a rifle. He had only ever shot the thing at the range, but he didn't have to be some Alliance jarhead to know a good firearm when he saw it.

He couldn't remember exactly what caused the premonition that led him to breaking it down to components and stowing it for travel to Andromeda. Maybe it was him - the him in the moment he walked out of Nexus Security - sending a telepathic warning into the past to himself that, guess what?, the shit that you didn't want to happen is going to happen to you in 634 years.

The gun had showed up at his apartment one day in a large, nondescript white box. When he had opened the box and then opened the hard case inside, the rifle was sitting inside a mold along with four loaded magazines.

There was a simple note accompanying it.

Mr. Wolf,

Please accept this rifle as a thank you for your contributions to the cause.

It wasn't signed. There was no address on the package. At the time, he couldn't even find any public information about what type of rifle it was. When he had taken it out to the range to test it out, he attracted a lot of lurid gazes and a lot of questions about where he had gotten such a purty gun that he didn't have adequate answers to. He didn't go back, after that.

He couldn't say precisely where it had come from, but he had a pretty good idea. After the shuttle crash that killed his parents, he had received a request for a full copy of their research on immediate and ongoing effects of the eezo disaster on Yandoa. He would have discounted it as some kind of email scan and trashed it if it had not also come with a sizable - and real - deposit into his personal bank account with a promise of more.

After compiling the volumes and volumes of patients files, audio recordings and journal articles and selling them, he had received another simple enough offer, requesting some planetary scans of little-charted worlds on the edges of the galaxy. Again, they came with promises of almost obscene compensation.

When he had completed those, he had finally received an invitation to sit down over drinks with Dr. Alex Montagne, who had made him another job offer, a more permanent position working in a research facility. It continued sounding too-good-to-be-true. Help advance humanity's progress across the galaxy. Neuter Batarian power in Terminus and the Traverse. Dampen the influence and financial power of the Asari. Produce technological breakthroughs ahead of the Salarians. And lessen the military dominance of the Turians.

Wolf might have shook his hand and agreed to all of it.

And then the doctor said the word "paramilitary."

Wolf drained the rest of his glass of expensive, smokey scotch, slid the empty glass across the table and promptly told the doctor he could take his offer and promptly shove it up his ass.

The rifle showed up at his apartment three days later.

Wolf couldn't decide whether its appearance was meant as an insult. Probably not. For it to be an insult, some bullets-for-brains so-and-so would have had to have a novel thought that guns weren't the answer to every problem in the galaxy.

And yet, here he was now, having smuggled the rifle across two-and-a-half million light years as he snapped the last components together. He hoisted the gun to his shoulder and peered down the scope as he calibrated the sights after a long, long sleep in storage.

Wolf pointed it at the wall, pressing his finger lightly onto the trigger until the red dot from the laser sight appeared as he tested the tension. He continued to press until the empty firing mechanisms clicked in action and the rifle gently moved against his shoulder.

"Kelly," he said to activate the VI installed in his omni. "Play saved audio message, April 12, 2186, 10:53 p.m."

"Yes, Wolf," the feminine voice responded, "Playing."

"Hi Cae. I miss you. Hope you're having fun with your friends tonight. But not too much fun. I got a text from my brother that I can't even read. Tell him he better not still be drunk at the wedding tomorrow."

There's a short pause for a quiet, short, beautiful chuckle that dumps ice water through his veins every time he hears it.

"I can't believe it's finally here. I just want you to know that-"

She stops talking as she's interrupted by feminine shouting from behind her. He can hear Alison clearly yell to "Let the guy live a little!"

"Sorry, I've got to go," she apologizes.

Isabelle shouts in the background, "Hang up!"

"I can't wait to see you tomorrow. Miss you. Love you."

The audio file ends with the sound of fingers touching buttons before it crackles off.

Wolf lowered the rifle, resting it across his lap as he leans backward, sitting on top of the desk in the dim science lab. Aside from the company of a half-dozen open crates scattered around the room, the lab is empty.

He opened his hands letting the rifle clatter to the floor. He glanced down into his lap as he reached over, twisting the black brushed tungsten ring on his left hand with the fingertips of his right.

He had a few still pictures saved in storage on his omni from the few days that followed, but the call was the last bit of audio.

It was the last remnant of her voice he had left.

Maybe his plan to run away from the Milky Way would have worked if he hadn't been unable to purge the data and bury the memories. When his finger had hovered above the delete button, looking at the 45 photos, video clips and saved voice messages that remained, his pulse raced and he felt like he was going to throw up. In the end, he couldn't bring himself to erase them.

He couldn't erase her.

"Kelly," he said, addressing the VI he had named after her.

That was yet another decision that made forgetting all but impossible.

"Play it again, please."