Author's Note: Mass Effect and all its glorious properties belong to Bioware. I will bid on the quarians should they come up for sale.
The majority of the characters in this Fic are of my own creation. I created them for an entirely different project, Galaxy At War by iBayne, which if you enjoy just the Mass Effect universe and aren't only attached to the canon characters, you really need to read. Seriously, go read it. No? Fine, enjoy this instead.
Adam Zivas had never really gotten used to there being more or less than twenty four hours in a day. Time was relative, he certainly understood that - a planet's life adapted to its environment, whether to short night and day cycles, or long stretches of harsh sun then chilled into subzero nights. But to him, he always operated on the assumption that there was twenty four hours, regardless of where he was. It was how all Alliance posts kept time, back when he was in the service. Didn't matter where you were - a colony, a space station, or even just situated on the surface of an asteroid, peering through a set of binoculars at the target set a few hundred kilometers away.
"Six targets - two mobile, four stationary," He murmured to his shooter, set up on the ground just on top of the ridge. "Distant from nearest target, 238 meters. Farthest is 356 meters," He advised, watching the two in the middle moving back and forth in a zigzag pattern, starting to come closer. "Remember, exhale before you shoot - fire between heart beats. Ten seconds until we're hot."
He waited as the seconds counted down - it occurred to him just briefly that a second was based on the beat of a human heart. He wondered if it was the same in other alien cultures. There were times he wished he'd managed to even take a single class in xeno-anthropology to learn something about that. He crushed the errant thought for now, speaking the command word. "Fire."
There was no air outside here, so he didn't hear the retort of the Viper's shot, but felt it in his feet - a short tremor, and then the farthest target erupted into a messy spray of hard light. Going for the hardest target before sweeping towards the next in line - smart, if a bit optimistic of her to do so. The second shot hit its mark at well, taking another one down, the third also getting swept into non-existence, as her aim came to the runners - a hushed curse in a language he was only starting to get familiar with was heard over his comm as the shot missed, the follow up managing to clip its edge, the last one bursting it into glittering dust.
"Reload," He spoke evenly, hearing her eject the thermal clip from the gun, before smoothly replacing it with a fresh one that wasn't glowing with sizzling heat. Once in place, she reaimed, tracking the last moving target before shooting, a confirmed hit - the last one standing was easy, comparatively close compared to the other ones.
"Time, twenty two seconds," Adam spoke, looking at his omnitool and checking the program. "That's a new record, even with the two second deduction for missing twice." He looked over the vast field where the combat drones had been set up for her target practice - hard to believe that a little over two months ago, she'd never even fired a gun before. Part of him swelled with pride at that thought - he'd taken a complete rookie and given them the training necessary to become a crack shot. Though looking down at her, he had to remind himself that her rapid advancement was part of who she was as well.
The quarian folded up the Viper into safe mode for the moment, her grey hood almost perfect camouflage for the barren surface of the asteroid, excepting the streaks of navy blue that added some well needed color. She stood up, shoulders drooped slightly - that meant she was disappointed. He'd gotten better at identifying her body language - it wasn't as if he could tell by her face. "You didn't miss," she told him glumly, her words coming smoother over the comm than when she spoke through her suit's filters inside, tinged with an accent he only described as Mediterranean, even if she'd never stepped on Earth before.
"You shouldn't try to compare yourself to me, Klara. I've trained and been in the battlefield for years before you even first left your Flotilla - trust me, you did great," Adam told her as he stood with her, careful to plant his right foot first. The new knee worked well enough, but he still got a twinge of pain out of it if he stepped on it at the wrong angle, or put all of his body weight plus the weight of his armor onto it. He looked down at her as she straightened her shoulders out, nodding to him.
"You're right. You make it look much easier than it is, though." She carefully stowed the rifle on her back, letting it 'lock' into place. "I know I'm much better than I was when we started, but I often think that I'm never going to catch up with you," she almost pouted. "It's stupid of me, I know. You can't expect a Pilgrim to become a soldier in a couple of months."
"The point of me teaching you all of this isn't about turning you into a soldier," he replied to her, frowning in his helmet. "It's about giving you the training necessary to survive. You wanted to learn how to take care of yourself if you found yourself in a situation like...that," he finished a bit lamely. It was hard talking about the terrorist attack - even now, over two months later, they were still trying to recover completely. Shepard's arrival had saved them, certainly, but the attack had set the project back a few months - he was honestly surprised that he'd still been able to keep his job after having done a piss poor effort at being security, but it seemed that there weren't many clamoring to come on board to replace all the people they had lost - he'd heard a huge number of colonists had actually left and gone elsewhere by the scare of planetary annihilation.
"That's true," Klara told him, looking down at the spent thermal clip, kneeling and checking to see if it was safe enough for her to pick up, wrapping it a spare piece of thermal blanket and stowing it away - Adam was always amused at how she never wasted anything if she could help it. "Though, I've been bugged by something for a while now." She admitted, looking back up at him. "Why a rifle? If I only want to defend myself, you should have just stuck me with learning how to fire a machine pistol without dropping it from the recoil..." She asked him curiously, standing once again on legs that reminded the man she was not human.
He crossed his arms, contemplating how to tell her this, before deciding to be direct. "Being able to defend yourself might be good enough, certainly - but that's not all I wanted to teach you."
"So what did you want to teach me?" She asked.
"To survive." Adam could tell his response confused her by the slight tilt of her helmet as she kept looking at him. "A handgun or machine pistol are both relatively easy to use, yeah - but they don't have the best range on them, either. If you're finding yourself in a situation where you're forced to use either of them, that means whomever you're fighting against is practically on top of you. You've got some pretty strong shields-" Something that he wanted her to teach him about maximizing his own when she had the chance, "-but shields won't protect you forever, and, well, any puncture to your suit can end up with your death - especially here or here," he added, tapping his head and his chest in example.
"That still doesn't explain why you're giving me sniper training," Klara commented, but allowed him to get to his point.
"The point is to give you an option to eliminate threats to yourself while taking the least amount of risk - compared to regular infantry, the survival rate for scout snipers throughout military history is far higher, even when they're deployed twice as often. The key components are finding the best cover while eliminating your enemy from outside of their own range before they can get close to you." He gestured to the mostly flat expanse that was her training field.
"I still don't think I understand," the quarian replied, looking down - Adam could imagine her furrowing her brow or biting her lip underneath that faceplate. "If it's all about survival, wouldn't it just be better to flee? Find a good place to hide and wait for them to go away?"
"If that's the better option, then take it. There's nothing wrong with running away if you have the choice - if all you have to worry about is your own life," He lectured back to her. "There's something my people call the 'fight or flight' instinct, when you're exposed to danger - those are usually the two options geared towards your continued existence. But some people will fight when they should run...and others run when they should fight." He knew that better than most. "The best way to survive is to understand which option is best given the circumstances. Though it helps if you have the skills to back it up - that's why I'm teaching you sniping."
Klara seemed to mull over his words for a while, looking up at the stars, and the half-shaded planet of Terra Nova taking up a big majority of the view. "You have a strange way of thinking about things, Adam," She finally commented. "But I understand. I still think you should teach me how to use other guns, though."
"Fine, fine," he spoke back to her, trying and failing to run his fingers through his hair - habits were hard to get rid of, even when he should know better. He settled for checking the oxygen tube was firmly secured instead, checking the reserves on his omnitool - Carbon dioxide scrubbers could only recycle oxygen for so long, after all. "Next time, though. I still need to chow down before bunk time, if I'm going to be useful for my next shift." Klara nodded at that, heading for the light framework of the buggy - a quick, efficient vehicle for getting around between all of the different facilities on X57.
"You can drive us back if you want," He offered her, the quarian perking up a bit at that, slipping into the driver's seat while Adam sat in shotgun. He strapped in, before they started zooming across the landscape, heading towards the main facility - he noted that Klara really enjoyed taking the little jumps off ridges, taking advantage of the low gravity to do some stunts. There was little danger of any damage to them or their vehicle, so he put up with it, taking the time to check his messages. One caught his eye, and he hit the playback for the vidmail, a young woman with auburn hair in a messy bun and slightly tired eyes appearing.
"Adam, I'm just checking up on you. We haven't heard anything back from you since you told us you'd gotten discharged from the hospital," she spoke, the voice straight in his ear from his helmet. "Seriously, sometimes you worry us all - especially after the attack. Try to make time to tell us how things are going for you, okay? It would be nice to know you're still alive, for one!" She practically shouted that out, making him cringe a bit as the message ended. It was true, lately, he'd been busy enough working the jobs of two men, along with Klara's training.
He noted that they'd slowed down a bit, Klara's visor pointed at Adam's omnitool, looking up at him. "Who was that? Your girlfriend?" She asked curiously - she wouldn't have gotten the audio, he realized, as he shook his head to her.
"No, that was my sister, Karen. Second oldest in the family. She's a nurse back on Earth," he explained to her as the quarian sped back up. "Since I left home, she's pretty much taken care of the family there. Got another sister, Maya, third eldest, who's a shop clerk, and my youngest sister, Rebecca, is going to school to learn engineering - you'd probably like her. She was bright even when she was just a kid - still is, when I think about it. Barely the age I was when I first enlisted," He spoke easily to her, though this was the first time that he'd really talked about his family with her.
Klara listened quietly for a moment as they continued on their way, turning around a high outcropping of stone. "What's it like? Having siblings," she asked him.
"You don't have any?"
"The Flotilla has to maintain population controls. If we didn't, there would be no way for us to sustain ourselves," she explained to him. "We only have so much food and space for living. Not to mention that births are far more dangerous to us than for most other species." She left it off at that, Adam's head filling in the details. He could imagine that it would be problematic - though that train of thought lead quickly to others that he'd prefer not to think about in present company.
"...So?" She spoke up again, keeping her eyes to the front as she drove.
"So...oh, right. Well...I guess you could say that it was crowded, growing up," He responded as they drove past one of the fusion torches. "I lived in a place on Earth called Boston. A huge metropolis that's like a sister city now to New York City - they're dangerously close to overlapping each other now and making one big megacity," He joked. "Anyways, we lived in a residential block, a three bedroom apartment that my father could barely afford - he was a warehouse manager, didn't exactly roll in the dough. Being the only guy, I suppose I was lucky in that I had myself my own room - my sisters had to share the biggest one between them, and that caused a hell of a lot of arguments - my mother had to raise us all pretty much full time, and I think she worried over me more than my sisters."
"Why?" Klara asked him, turning around a ridge.
"Well, I was a young kid in a neighborhood that had its share of gangs and violence and drugs. I think it surprised her a lot I managed to keep my nose clean by the time I graduated high school - of course, right after that, I enlisted, which just made her worry I was going to get myself killed in action." He chuckled a bit. "My mother's the type of woman to worry about having nothing to worry about, if you get my meaning."
Klara nodded at that. "It's like seeing everything on a ship is working fine, and yet you can't help but keep looking for something that's not. That's usually an admirable quality for a person on the Flotilla."
"I suppose that you would like her...err, well, probably not," He backpedaled, feeling rather stupid. "She has this thing, about, well..."
"Quarians?"
"Aliens, in general. She's never left Earth before - hell, I'm not even sure if she's ever left Boston - so her viewpoint on other species is rather skewed. All she really knows is what she reads and hears on the news feeds." He really shouldn't have had to apologize for his mother when the woman wasn't even in the same star system, but Klara had got him talking and he was finding it hard to stop at this point.
"What about your father?" She inquired further, though he could tell there was hesitance in her voice - as if she might be intruding where she wasn't welcome. Adam did his best to dissuade that even as the main facility came into view.
"When he was alive, he didn't get to spend much time with the family - working his job to support us was his life. My impression of his opinion on other species though, was pretty much the same for anyone he'd meet in the city - reserve your opinions until they speak. You can tell what a person is by looking at them, sure - but until they've said something to you, there's nothing that you know about who they are." He leaned forward in his seat as they pulled up close to the airlock of the facility, parking the vehicle in place. He grabbed the roll cage bar and pulled himself out, Klara following suit as they headed in.
The conversation had died now, he realized, the air pressurizing inside and the decontamination precautions cycling over them - not that he expected they'd pick up any bugs in a near vacuum. Once it had finished, he thankfully popped off his helmet, brushing the hair at his temple - he'd found his first grey hair not too long after getting shot back then. It looked like he'd be looking more like his father sooner than later in that regard.
"Next time, we'll start you on assault rifles," He spoke up to Klara, breaking the silence as he reached into one of his belt compartments, taking out a small square packet and unwrapping a stick of gum. Chewing gum while out in a sealed suit wasn't exactly a good idea, as he'd learned. "When do you end your next shift?"
Klara brightened up a bit, seeming to bounce slightly on her toes at the prospect of firing a weapon like that. "I'm pulling a double shift next, so by your clock, I think the next time I'll be free is in two days, around...1700 hours." She told him, stepping through inside, pausing to turn around and look at him. "Thank you, by the way. For telling me about your family."
Adam was caught off guard by that, looking at her with one brow arched high. "That's not something you usually thank people for, you know."
She nodded, fidgeting with her tridactyl fingers at her waist. "I know. But you're the first person I've met on my Pilgrimage who's spoken about their personal life to me. I mean, I know we're trading skills and all, but that's just business," she explained further.
"Don't be stupid," Adam found himself retorting before his brain could catch up with his mouth, watching as Klara suddenly stiffened a bit at his harsh reply. Speaking in a gentler tone, he gave her a smile. "It's not just business. We're friends, aren't we?"
Klara just stared for a moment, but he could imagine the smile on her face when she finally replied. "Yes. You're the first human I can call a friend, you know," She commented as they entered into the main facility proper.
"Well, don't I feel honored. Get some food and rest easy, Klara. I'll see you later," Adam told her, letting her go off to her own quarters, as he headed to the guard barracks. Friends with a quarian - yeah, he definitely had something to call his sister about...
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