The sand storm came from nothingness.
Before the sand there was nothing. Now it obscured everything. The brown grains of sand blotted out the sun. There was only the sand.
The woman pressed forward, blindly, through the storm.
She knew nothing but the blinding, and stinging sand.
Once, she had a name. But the sand had taken it from her.
All she had was her skin, but the sand even threatened to erode that from her bones.
The wind swept away footprints as they were left behind. The woman has no idea which direction she was headed, the only thing she knew for sure was that she had to keep pushing forward.
Her entire body was being rubbed raw by the grains of sand. That was when the whispers started.
It was the same whispers she had heard for the last several months.
The whispers of dead comrades and fallen generals whispered in her mind, through the sands. They grew louder with each aimless step.
Finally after what felt like an age, a word parted the sands and calmed the storm, "Submit."
The storm died, and the woman found herself in a featureless desert. She had no choice but to press onwards. But it was only a few steps before she found herself at the precipice of a cliff. Below her stretch and entire sea of people. Fellow wanderers who had found each other in the desert and congregated in the valley below her.
"Come." Another word in that same deep, resonate tone. That pierced the desert and the woman's very being. It also shocked her awake.
Her bed was small and uncomfortable. Like it always was. But this time the displeasure had doubled with the added sand that followed her from the desert.
The woman sighed, and pulled herself up out of bed. The sand burn from the storm was still present, on top of her already numerous scars and more than a few tattoos.
The tiny metal room was cold and rusty, a far cry from the hot, dry desert. She wiped the sand from her bed where it joined the small collections from the previous nights. She sighed and stood up.
Perhaps a shower will relieve her feelings of dryness and irritability these nights caused.
But even amongst the warm, filtered water the words echoed inside her bones. Amidst the steam she was nervous that she would listen.
She diligently cleaned the sand out of her new wounds, and cleaned around the almost two hundred separate scars. On days when the dreams were particularly bad she would try to remember herself by counting each individual scar. It varied, but the average number was in the mid 180's.
After a long while she finally exited the shower after drying herself off and wrapping the towel around her. Her right arm still felt stiff, despite the relaxing hot water. Her stringy, dirty blonde hair gripped to her head while still damp.
"Took you long enough," the commando on the other side of the bathroom door said.
"I didn't know you were waiting. And there is another bathroom."
"That our distinguished pilots are using. Thanks, but no," the grey skinned turian walked into the bathroom.
The women noticed each other's raw skin, rubbed bloody by the sand.
"You too?" the avian alien asked.
The human nodded.
"What do you think?"
"The shower helped clean the sand out," she said before walking away to find fresh clothes.
Back in her room the woman contemplated both the recent events and the fact that someone else was experiencing what she did. It was an intriguing coincidence, but one that would cause the woman to disembark the ship at the next stop and find other transport.
It would be a hassle, but it would be safer than traveling with someone else… someone like her.
Their breed was inherently untrustworthy, and as deadly as they as are unstable.
It would be better for everyone if she changed ships.
And if the crew found out… they would probably execute both of them on principle.
It wasn't easy being on the wrong side of a galaxy spanning war. But it wasn't like she made the choice willingly. Or at least she wouldn't have made it if she knew exactly what she was getting into.
But that didn't matter to most people. All they cared about was she had fought for the bad guys, she had fought with the Reapers instead of against them.
No one would care that she didn't fight with them by choice or even willingly. Every second a small part of her brain had rebelled, but the voice that had called to her before was too strong then.
Now she felt like she could ignore the voice for now. But she couldn't tell for how long she could resist.
Once she changed into fresh, clean, sand free clothes, the woman went to the small mess hall in attempt to get some food to calm her frayed nerves and possibly drink away her past.
The food was standard cargo ship crap, but she did find a bottle of human whiskey. Part of her wondered what her pilots would say to her taking their expensive alcohol. Probably nothing good.
Before she could make a decision regarding the whiskey it was pulled out her hand by small singularity field controlled by the grey woman. She had changed but she hadn't dried off, beads of water clung to her mandibles.
"What have we here? Whiskey? Never heard of it. What is it?" she asked.
"Human alcohol," the other woman answered.
"Well, I'm not dead yet," the turian said.
The woman was about to open the bottle when the ship rocked violently, flinging both women to the ground.
Alarms blared and bulk heads sealed.
The women picked themselves up off the floor.
"What the shit was that?" asked the turian.
The human said nothing. She used a table to steady herself. She reached underneath the table and pulled out the pistol she had taped under the table when she boarded.
Instead of responding the human ran over to the console on the wall. She started typing away at it, linking it to her omni-tool.
"What happened?" asked the turian again.
"The bridge is gone," the human responded.
"What do you mean gone?"
"Like it was ripped off."
"Shit. So we are dead."
"I don't think so, we haven't been directly attacked yet. If they wanted to we would have been blasted into space already. But we're not."
"That terrifies me."
The human just nodded.
"Would you happen to have another gun like that for me?" the turian asked. "Or maybe a nice shotgun?"
The human shook her head.
"Of course not."
One of the bulk heads started to be pried apart. The sparks erupting the other side told them that someone was cutting their way in.
"What kind of combat skills do you have?" the human asked.
"I've got biotics, vanguard training," the turian told her.
"Shit."
"What about you?"
"Tech and sniping. Sabotage and stealth."
"Well shit."
"Just get down if I tell you that I'm shooting someone."
"What do you expect me to do? I've only got my biotics! I've got no weapons and no armor!" the turian complained.
"Fine, I'll handle this. Just stay out of the way."
The door finally opened and the words "Sisters! Calm!" greeted them.
"We've come to take you home! We've come to take you to the Controller. You'll be home amongst your fellow indoctrinated brethren!" the voice said. It belonged to a masked man who entered the dining hall.
"Fuck that," the turian said.
The truian charged at the man from across the room. Her talons ripped out his throat and she grabbed his weapon from his hip and let him fall.
"What the shit is this about?" the turian asked.
"I don't know, but I think they want to bring us to that desert. Look at his armor. It looks like it is covered in sand," the human pointed out.
"Fuck. I am not going back there."
"Then are you ready to kill anyone on that ship?"
It was the turian's turn to not say anything. She just popped in a new heat sink.
Two guards saw the pair kill their spokesman and started firing at the women. The pair returned fire, and their enemies fell quickly.
"You got a name?" the turian asked.
The human went quiet while she peaked around the door to make sure the coast was clear before she moved into the attacking ship.
"Clara," she muttered.
"Kurana," the turian said. "Shall we kill some indoctrinated assholes?"
Clara, for that was what she decided her name was, couldn't think of a response to that sentence.
"They're resisting!" yelled a pirate. "Go! Go! Go!"
The first person entered through the door way at the far end of the cargo hold. Apparently they thought this raid was going to go a lot smoother than it did. The armored man was carrying a shotgun.
Kurana smiled, as much as a turian could, and yelled, "Mine!"
She biotically charged at the enemy, but to Clara it looked… different than a normal charge. There was less blue biotic fire than normal. But the turian grabbed the shotgun from the surprised clutches of the trooper and shot him with it.
Clara was more careful than her vanguard counterpart. She threw out a tech-mine that disabled the enemy's weapons before carefully picking off the soldiers.
Each time a raider died, each time their life slipped away Clara felt it. She felt them die. And not in the usual way when she took a life. This was like she felt the light snuffed out. The feeling was there, but it was dull and muted, almost not real. It was like a part of her died, a numb part, but she felt it all the same.
The raiding party was small. Only six people. And now they were all dead. The ship was theirs.
"I need to dethatch the ship, it isn't space worthy and the last thing we want is to be brought down by that wreckage," Clara explained as she tried to get her commercial grade omni-tool to hack the systems and dethatch the boarding bridge.
"Good idea," Kurana said. "I'll head to the bridge and see if there is anything I can do from there."
The turian ran off, but not before systematically checking each room to make sure they were empty of hostiles.
Clara heard the bridge starting to groan. The raiders had done this job sloppily. The ships were moving at different speeds. The ship Clara was on had started to peel off to the right slowly, but steadily. If she didn't retract the bridge the new ship would have a massive hole ripped in its side and Clara would be flung into space.
She managed to get the bridge to decouple as one bolt ripped itself free. The ships were separated. Clara secured the bridged and headed towards the cockpit with her pistol raised. She didn't trust her sudden turian partner.
Kurana was in the pilot's chair frustratingly pounding away at the console.
"They locked the controls, I can't do anything," she said angrily.
"I could try, but with this piece of shit it could take months," Clara muttered, motioning with her omni-tool.
"Yeah, I didn't bring any of my military stuff. My cabal gear would have been useful, but I just wanted to leave it all behind."
The turian turned around to look at the human.
They stared at each other for a long moment. Each looking at the other's eyes. The faint blue outlines, the marks of the Reaper indoctrination. The tell tale sign that they were the enemies of the living at one point. Two years later and they still hadn't faded for either. The brightness might have lessened, but the eerie glow was still there.
"You too?" the Kurana asked.
Clara nodded.
"I was stuck behind enemy lines on Palaven, wounded, and unable to fight. I shouldn't have surrender, but I did. I thought the Reapers would kill me, but they didn't. They turned me instead. I was a thrall for almost a year. You?"
Clara honestly considered not telling her. She rubbed her right shoulder with her left hand. She couldn't think of a scenario that would allow her to not tell her new comrade, but telling her didn't sound any better.
Eventually she sighed and pulled aside the collar of her shirt so that the tattoo above her heart could be clearly seen.
The broken diamond of Cerberus. The pro-humanity black operations splinter group that had been so far indoctrinated they sided with the Reapers the moment they entered the galaxy.
The turian's mood instantly soured. Her mandibles twitched uncomfortably. They both knew the other had been indoctrinated, turned, at some point. But now Kurana feared that she had to share a lonely and quiet ship with a xenophobic killer. Cerberus had no honor. The indoctrinated Cerberus agents had even less.
She kept a hand on her shotgun.
"Looks like we are heading for Omega. The landing coordinates are already punched in," Clara remarked.
"Yeah, I expect our dead friends' partners will be waiting for them."
"We'll have another fight," Clara said.
"I think our best option is to fight anyone at the landing pad and then part ways," Kurana said.
"A good plan," Clara remarked.
The blue glow of four indoctrinated eyes were the only lights in the cockpit as the tiny ship approached the space station Omega in silence.