Disclaimer: Mass Effect and its characters belong to BioWare & EA Games.
Reviews are more than welcome. Author's notes at the end of this chapter.
Four days ago…
…Gunnery Chief Ashley Williams did her best effort at berating herself. She was playing with fire. Again. And what was new, really?
Well, something was. Escalation.
She had been humming some catchy Citadel Top Forty pop crap while raiding the galley for provisions. Looking forward to a long day of tinkering with her new shiny toys, she crossed paths with Commander Shepard, on his way to his quarters. datapad in hand bursting with mindnumbing Alliance Navy paperwork, a grim dead-man-walking expression on his face, the poor guy.
It was a well-oiled routine: salutes gave way to small talk, which grew into bolder talk, which led to subtle dare talk, which quickly slid into open flirtation, then a close call, a screeching halt, and a sheepish silence. And a salute and good-bye, so brimming with understated warmth that they had very nearly drown in it.
She wouldn't have minded some mouth to mouth resuscitation.
Yeah, of course you wouldn't.
Her self-deprecating sneer gave way to a questing half-frown, which eventually relaxed into a faraway expression. Leaning on the mess table, elbow resting on her crossed arm, fingers stroking her chin, her mind a blur, the stirrings of a smile growing on her lips, she stood a whole seven seconds looking at nothing at all. Then, suddenly scrunching her face in self-disgust, she hit herself in the head with finality. God, Ash! What are you, sixteen?
Bad enough that her practiced teasing, just your basic Marine-grade 'let's talk goats and your sex life' oneupmanship game, inevitably skyrocketed from unusually mild nudge-nudge wink-winking to shameless open flirting whenever Shepard was involved. It could be argued that it was just her self-defense mechanism—and the best defense was a good offense, as far as she was concerned—going into overdrive against the commander's charms. She had never known a superior officer that didn't reveal himself a superior asshole in less than five minutes tops, so this brilliant guy—this brilliant crew—was utterly unknown territory for her. Ashley felt like a Marine Cinderella at the palace ball, her usually reliable instincts ever a bit off-target.
So understandable. So justifiable. So far kinda so good.
Now, her reverie? Another thing, entirely. Here be city-stomping nukebreathing dragons. She never, ever daydreamed about the hunkies around, above or below her rank. Never. Too girlish, too idiotically unprofessional and, ultimately, too un-Williamish.
So, was she cultivating a… a—say it, dammit!—a fucking honest to God crush on Shepard? Seriously?
And, even worse, was it mutual?
Ashley was smart: she saw what this could lead her into, or rather out of, away from. She had fought all her life for this opportunity to serve in space, and she had won it through random chance and a catastrophe of blood and flame, by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Then again by being ready and able, alive and quicking, last woman standing on the bones of her dead comrades and the civilians they failed to protect. There was an implicit debt there, so a sacred duty. Also a vital mission, a heavy responsability and an exceptional man bearing it on his shoulders. With so much at stake—everything, she feared—she couldn't allow herself to compromise it all for trivial self-gratification.
She had to keep it simple, for their sakes. So behave already! Don't you dare ruin this!
Not that she was the only guilty party. For someone so En-Sevenly badass, that man could be so damned puppy-eyed at times… The way he sought their opinions and feelings about the mission, tried to get to know them better, Ash guessed Shepard felt far more out of his depth than he would ever care to admit. As far as she understood it, the commander was meant to become both the ship's executive officer—under Captain Anderson's tutelage—and the Marine fire team leader whenever Anderson would care to defer that role to him. In hardly a couple of days Shepard had seen his world turned upside down: inducted into Spectredom, assaulted by alien visions of doom, given the keys of the Normandy, put in charge of an impossible task with hardly any resources but this experimental ship, her crew and a disparate bunch of untrustworthy aliens; and, adding insult to injury, snowed under with utterly irrelevant PR-friendly jobs. So, weeks had passed by, the Normandy's men and women and their leader learning the true implications of this mission, Shepard starting to feel the pressure.
It showed: insomnia, or rather the fear he had all but confessed to her of going through the Prothean genocide every night, that visceral reenacting with him playing not a witness but a victim; mood swings, no longer that subtle; a certain decline in his happy-go-lucky-meter; and, well, a certain increase in his… hardassiness? Ash couldn't fail to see how overly serious the commander became when dealing with shipwide and higher-level decisions, and she sympathized: the guy's real forte was SpecOps soloing or microteaming, while she had far more nominal experience leading larger teams. Then again, there was something to be said about his charisma and ability to impromptu-lead entire masses of troops and civilians alike, as the Skyllian Blitz proved.
This tour was supposed to provide him with a smooth transition to the bigger leagues. Instead, he had got thrown into this sharkfest of a swim-or-sink topsy-turvy nutty version: no net, no training wheels, no real backup, no father figure, no guidance. Shepard was having to grow a bit too stupidly fast, and he resented it, rebeled against it. There was something a little desperate in the way he tried to keep his inner grunt afloat and alive, maintaining this level of informality and closeness in his relationship with the crew. It was smart of him, using them as a sounding board, even simply as a means to relieve all that stress, the way he consulted with Joker, Pressly and Alenko. With her. It was quite sweet, too.
She smiled, replaying in her head his last nocturnal visit to her post downbelow, this meeting of sleep-deprived, dangerously caffeinated minds, crossing confidences and really, really bad jokes. She caught herself four seconds later—progress?—and despaired. I'm worse than Abby: at least she half-knows her thing is a fetish. This? This calls for a Williams Intervention Brigade's full one-eighty reprioritizing.
Yeah, well: no comm relay slot until tomorrow, and what was she going to tell her sisters and the Alliance comms censors that wouldn't put her even deeper in hot water, really?
Mmm…
Better to concentrate on her inmediate tasks. Happy tasks: Last night, brand new weapons license in hand, she and Emerson from Requisitions had hooked up to a comm buoy and downloaded the fabbing templates for a few samples of Rosenkov Materials' range of firearms. Having validated their fabricator and omni-gel provisions, and gone through the usual config settings hiccups, they had left the fabby doing its cooking. Today she was to check the resulting articles' finishing, solve some integration issues she had discussed previously with Emerson and Alenko, and set up the portable test range for the team players and herself to see what the Rosenkovs were about. She hoped the forty eight hours demo period would suffice to get a feel for them, although she suspected Shepard would use some of the pending ops to do a field test.
So, in a word: fun! Laborious work, nevertheless, so there she was, abusing the mess' Autochef rations dispenser, amassing enough fuel to survive the day. Humming again without realizing, she punched the thing's energy bars menu—she liked to put a few light stim snacks among the plain protein ones, a welcome kick in days like this—and saw the old 'I'm feeling lucky!' button trailing the list of available types and flavors.
She usually ignored it, knowing better than that—she had heard a few rather hyperbolic stories… This time, however…
Do you feel lucky, punk?
She smiled at herself. Actually…
And so she sealed Lieutenant Kaidan Alenko's fate, securing his descent into biotic hell.
Flan Service
Kaidan stood on his self-assigned circle—the smiley chalked on the deck, cartoon-simple mouth and eyes once again redrawn by some misterious hand—naked from the waist up, his modded emergency medical vest now tied to his belt, weighting it down. A flat bundle of cables snaked up his skin marker-graffitied and sensor pads-studded spine until meeting the brain-mapper headband, half-occluded by the cap he wore backwards to guide the wires out of his neck's nape. Hands on his hips, eyes unfocused, he was considering his next move. A dozen meters beyond, a crate rested on the central loading track, scintillating in glowing blue-black refraction, washing the storage deck in subtle underwater-like light.
Two days at it, and he hadn't been able to produce a biotic vertical lift yet.
He was at a loss at how to further proceed. A direct force approach was out of the question: practical for small masses and short distances, as an effective battlefield weapon it required Krogan-like levels of Eezo node density, an amp to match and a nervous system able to handle it without frying. His only options were static and dynamic patterning. The former was the easiest one to apply. That is, easy once you learned which combination of nodes, charge strengths and sequencing produced the desired result, of course.
He had yet to find it.
The latter involved simpler patterns projected in a fast alternating fashion. He hoped he wouldn't need to follow that route: it required a fairly high degree of atention and control, and was quite tiring if done too repeatedly in a single session. Not too useful in combat.
A flicker of flashlight reflecting on the bay's surfaces caught his attention. An ancient-style photochemical camera click he recognized from the soundset of his own omni-tool's Camera VI broke through the pervasive hum of the ship systems. There was an "ooops!"—a male one, this time—followed by an obvious and quite unsuccessful attempt at walking away unnoticed: the guy's boots squeaked with abandon; the slower and lighter he tried to move, the more obtrusive it became. A few derisive snorts and irate though defensive whispers showed there was more than a single peeping Tom on deck.
Well, so there's that… Kaidan drooped his head and shoulders, and smiled, quietly, tiredly. He wouldn't deign to turn and see who the guilty party were—familiar with the deck's acoustics, he knew they were doing their furtive exit through the corridor to Engineering next to Requisitions. That narrowed things down considerably. He couldn't help noticing Garrus' amusement, though: The Turian, perched on a partially open-paneled Mako, pointed a talon at the reprobates and chortled a little basso laugh that Kaidan answered in kind, shaking his head at the ridiculousness of it all. Then, a Krogan grunt behind him: Wrex doing his 'bah, stupid noisy humans' oh-so-uninterested act. Which didn't fool anyone, but… Garrus shrugged, and he nodded, agreeing.
The Dark Energy basefield enveloping the crate decayed and died. Rather than replenish it, Kaidan took stock of himself.
He needed a break after nearly an hour and a half experimenting with his biotics: he could feel the first stirrings of a plain ordinary headache, and a mild sugar low—he really ought to have packed more provisions, and didn't look forward to parading through Deck Two in such fashion, validating Chakwas' tongue-in-cheek accusations and making an even bigger fool of himself. Out of habit, his fingers flew to his forehead, eager to knead the tension off, meeting the SQUID band instead. Careful not to disturb it, his hand backtracked. Sighing, he attended the knot creasing his nose bridge, thumb and index finger rubbing it out, then massaging his itchy eyes.
Kaidan left the circle of chalk, absurdly careful to not smudge off the happy mouth and eyes with his boots, and leant against the crate holding the assortment of gadgets he and Chakwas had improvised for the occasion, resting his left arm on his hip and bringing his omni-tool to life. Forcing the limits of its little imager, he maxed the holo, sorting through thirty recordings of his attempts. There had been a few that had shown hints of off-axis ME vectoring, and he wanted to check on the commonalities.
The elevator whirred and clunked and opened its heavy door, attracting his attention to the new crewmates deposited on the deck: Chief Williams was among them, carrying a duffel and a small plastic basket, nodding to him in salute on her way to Requisitions—a hint of a frown coloring her smile, surely wondering what his guise was about this time, what with yesterday's spectacle. He reciprocated but was quickly distracted by the crew's discreetly oblique looks, pokerface fails, supressed giggles, and was that a bit of overt leering? Unbuckling his omni-tool and leaving it active on top of the crate, he crossed his arms and furrowed his eyebrows a little bit, in sort of a serenely defiant 'what?'. Dammit if the youngest in the group weren't acting like teenage schoolgirls. Well, dammit if he wasn't blatantly strutting his stuff around, either, to be fair. If all that succeeding in his task took was showing a bit of skin, so be it.
Yeah, well, careful with that. Remember that couple of weeks in Copernicus' drydock? Talk about playing with fire. That brought a bit of a painful smile to his eyes.
Williams had just stopped chatting with the chief requisitions officer—some signs of frustration in her attitude, surely concerning those fabbing slowdowns Emerson told him about—and was turning to face her way to her station. She did a mighty double take on his posturing, on their clowning around, and started laughing in near complete silence, head and shoulders shaking, her lips and eyes so full of delightful mirth that Kaidan couldn't help but surrender a big grin and shake his head in disbelief at his demonstration of who knew what. Big bad biotic boy Alenko?
She crossed the distance rapidly, detouring to his little makeshift lab and dropping the basket on his lap.
"You… Are… Shameless, LT!" she said, turning, magic-wanding a twirly index finger at him while bustling backwards toward the locker row.
And you are… uh… unapologetically happy? Either the Rosenkovs that Emerson was cooking for her in that fabricator of his were beyond astoundingly brilliant, or she'd had her daily tête-à-tête with the commander already. He knew the signs, he could tell the tale. Once upon a time there was this ship, there was this amazing woman, this fearless leader, this sparkle in their eyes…He fervently hoped that she—that they would be able to handle it, or it would be his duty to boot her off the Normandy, the idea of which he hated to contemplate.
Putting the basket next to his omni-tool, Kaidan took a look inside: a bunch of snacks and energy bars, a couple of thermos full of hot coffee… Flan! There was flan! Grabbing one, snapping the plastic teaspoon off and unsealing the tin cup, he sniffed it. Felt genuinely fake enough, for Citadel-originated supplies, so he tried it. Its passable flavor brought memories back, of the genuine article, of its appareances at home, of family. When Williams came back, he was about to finish it, despite his intention to go slow and really enjoy it, already eyeing a second one.
"A flan person, huh?"
"Yeah. I didn't know we carried these. I missed them… well, the homemade sort, that is."
"Your mom's?"
"More like mine, my brother's or my sister's. It's a family vice. Have you tried it? The caramel," and he waved the nearly already gone exhibit at her, "is suprisingly well done." He got a last spoonful and, feeling a bit naughty, made a little show of dipping a finger into the cup and scooping up the remains into his mouth, childlike. She shook her head, smiling at the act with pretend disapproval. Then her eyes shone with the hint of an idea, which raised his internal alarms.
Too late: Williams activated her omni-tool and landed a burst of flash exposures on him. Blinded by the laserscan, he tried to stop her, "Widdiamphs—", only managing to splutter a cloud of flan particles.
He threw his arms up in protest. "Williams, what the—!
"Don't fret. It's for a good cause, LT," she said, satisfied. Her left arm glowed a virtual roll of holos, which she deftly navigated with her agile fingers, highlighting a few here and there.
"Hunh?"
"My sis, Abby," she explained, concentrated on her task. "We are trying to broaden her horizons, get her back to the twenty-second century, squeeze-wise."
Uh-oh. "And my pics help her there… how?"
"It shows her there's life beyond the languid ideals of yesteryear. Don't worry, LT, you won't be alone: she's nearly got the fire team's full set already. By the way, I thought Momo would steal the show, but it's a tie between Fredo and Stearn. You sort of had taken the back seat all this time…" She reviewed her final selection of thumbnails, seemingly doubtful.
"Oh…" Well, he could always count on her to bring him down, couldn't he? Suddenly, he felt rather silly and this bit vulnerable. "And that's… because…", he dared ask.
"…Of my deep respect for you, LT?" she said, jovially businesslike.
Yeah, of course. He executed a perfect eyebrow raise. She frowned, her smile adquiring a patient martyr-like tinge.
"And because, thank God, you are yet to do our little Semper Teen guys' oh-so-innocent-walk-in-front-of-the-camera routine during my family calls," she added, and promptly did a fairly unreasonable impression of the thing, all faux masculine sing-song voice and posh armwaving: "'Oh, hi, Chief, is this your sister? hello, Miss Williams, ma'am, how do you do? I'm Private Hunk McStudmuffin, so glad to finally get to know you. You see, your tyranical tomboy from hell of a sister—hee-heehee-heee! It's a joke, we all love her, reaaaally—has told us sooo much about you. Please, you can call me Hunk. Oh, look, I so without really meaning it pulled my gut in, hardened my washboard abs and contracted my pecs and arms, how fortuitous. Ah, thank you for your kiiiind words, although beauty is from within, wouldn't you agree? Tee-hee!'"
Kaidan tried his best to stay poker-faced at her pantomime. He guessed his highly convulsive poker-faced snort wasn't too credible.
"An easy bunch of freakin' peacocks, that lot," she sneered.
That was familiar. Grinning, he mocked her, smugly putting his hands on his hips, "You've been talking to Chakwas, haven't you?"
She eyed him, unreadable—which began to worry him—then suddenly flash-lasered him again with a quick swipe of her 'tool…
Augh! "Williams, dammit!"
…And she checked the results. "A-ha! That's better. Now, with this one, and this one, things get interesting!"
Nonononono, I don't want interesting, interesting is bad! Flattering, of course, yeah, but bad. "Williams—Ash, please…!"
"Thou dost protest too much, LT," she said, patiently, eyes still on her prize.
"Well, I protest, nonetheless! I'm not—"
She lifted her palm, stopping him in his tracks.
"Sir, let's be completely clear here. Are you seriously saying you don't want my nubile retrofencing corset-punk of a sister to take advantage of your pic to dream humid dreams of bodice-ripping… rippingness?"
Retro-what? And truth be told, that was quite an image, straight out of Stearn's collection of—Uh, what's she doing with her fingers? Three? Three what?—Two—Oh, no, you don't—! "Wait!"
"Bzzz! Time is up," she said, triumphant, "Aaand that's a wrap for Operation Back to the Future with You, Abigail Williams' Stage Four. I knew you wouldn't let me down, you dog, Sir!" The chief gestured a couple commands, switched her omni-tool off and crossed her arms. "That said, you ever touch my sister, I kill you dead," she pointed out the smallprint clause.
He was two steps from pulling rank on her and stopping that nonsense. Out of self-preservation. Stage Four what?
"Williams. I don't know your sister. I don't get half of what you are talking about, and the other half I don't even want to. I don't do candids. Not for the Alliance's beefcake calendars, not for the Fleet's NetChan, not for the… the… the 'Let's Save the Dolphins Naked' Fornax Annual, so certainly I don't do it for… ah… softcore commissions?"
He felt himself slightly starting to lose it.
"Yeah, I understand, Sir…"
She does, she does thank God, Buddha, the dancing chick with lots of arms, the Asari Goddess, the spirit of Palaven and the whole pantheon of—
"…I get it completely: just too bland for you, too tame…"
Somewhere there had to exist a God of Lieutenants he hadn't sacrificed enough virgin—or slightly used—vestals to, and this woman was his revenge made flesh.
Aaaand now it's when I strangle her and get carted away to the biotic funny farm. Costly? Certainly. Worth it? Completely!
But she relented, and changed tone. "LT, is just a picture. For my sister. For fun. And it's not like half the crew haven't got you holo'd already. Look, if you really don't want to…"
He opened his mouth, ready to firmly though not ungently state his final decision. But…
Ah, well.
"You've got a point, chief." She was right, and at least she was giving him the courtesy of asking—'courtesy' was probably too kind a way to describe her siege technique, but in the end it was what it amounted to. Deflated, he unfocused his eyes and let them drift.
"Are we okay with this, then, Sir?"
"Yeah, chief, we're okay." He was, actually. God, she's a natural born brainwasher. We are so wasting her talents.
"I came on a bit too strong, didn't I?"
"Nah, perish the thought." And she was so cute, playing the concerned card.
She clapped his shoulder. "Thank you, LT. Really!". He was grateful for the lack of irony in her words, a rare show of compassion for the defeated, too aware of her being more of a dancing-in-your-grave kind of woman.
Kaidan rubbed his neck, absently. He should get back to work: it had been difficult enough making room in his schedule for these experiments to waste any more time in idle conver—
"They really asked you, didn't they?"
"Ah… sorry?"
"The beefcake calendar."
I'm in hell, I really am. There was no release, no escape. Don't lie to her. You'll make it worse, she'll know, somehow. Just Zen through it.
"Once. They didn't know I was… 'that L2-class biotic'," he air-quoted. "My CO quickly put an end to that. All quite silly, really. I was a corporal, part of a tech-oriented fire team, learning the ropes in the Traverse. It happened during a conversion course test at Pinnacle Station: some Alliance PR suits were monkeying around, looking for fresh good-looking meat, and fell on us like vultures."
A little wave of nostalgia washed upon him, reflecting on his eyes. Selective memory, of course, but he missed those times. "I was still pretty buff back then, I guess. Nowadays…" He extended an arm and gyrated his hand and elbow, watching the interplay of the muscles involved, then flexing it for an instant, curious. His biotic metabolism was mostly a hindrance, as far as he was concerned, but he could appreciate the way it ate any surplus fat from his skin. "Ship life wastes your body, despite the standard Med package and the prescribed exercise regime and diet," he mused. Shrugging it off, he went on: "Anyway, that was the only time—What…?"
Williams eyes had strayed to her left a moment ago, going open wide, then squinty. Now they were fixed on his, a perilous smile twitching in her mouth.
"Do that again."
"What—?" Oh! Heh, really! "Mmm-nah, I don't think so," he answered, smirking, feeling the rare pleasure of being able to deny her something.
"Aww, c'mon, LT, don't be an ass!"
She very nearly stomped on the deck while saying it, laughing, a mix of fun and frustration that Kaidan found pretty adorable. He would let slide that last remark of hers just to enjoy her show and his opportunity for a well-placed retort or two. "A month ago you were chastising me at Chora's, and now you are asking for private sessions. Serious turnaround, Williams."
"Ha! As if. Look—I mean, don't, don't look: the Dravens and Pakti are practically drooling at—NO, DON'T LOOK BACK, what are you, retarded?"
Oookay, Ash, that went a bit too far. He impressed some danger in his gaze. Williams realized her misstep.
"…Metaphorically speaking? …Or something? Ah… lieutenant, Sir?"
Kaidan nodded, satisfied—up to a point—and tried a not-too-obvious peek behind his back. As he feared, the constantly renewed bunch of six or so men and women at Emerson's were at their silliest, a quite familiar spectacle he had hoped wouldn't repeat itself ever. But then, this time it was his fault entirely. Well, his and Joker's ScuttleBot, if he knew his 'with-friends-like-these': the way the crew was rotating their visits down there, at such precise intervals, it smacked of a certain ScuttleSched 'microliberties' organizer program he remembered all too well. Because, God help him, he had lent a hand with devising it, he was that naive Jeff Moreau-wise back then.
Ogling the staff lieutenant? 'There's a VI for that'.
He pressed his lips together and closed his eyes, remembering those last three months before shakedown day, reliving the Normandy's convoluted road to operational readiness: this too-close-knitting-for-comfort of the ship's personnel, isolated and stressed and going slightly mad living in this series of high security drydocks and stations, surrounded by colorful Turians, overzealous guards, xenophobic and xenophyllic and mostly equally nuts support staff. It's 'the love boat' all over again.
The best and brightest. And antsiest, and just this little bit unhinged. 'You don't screw with this crew', Anderson dixit. The first time, he thought that one was the usual macho stance one-liner. Later, he discovered it was both an order and a warning.
Sensing that promise of a headache circle him, showing him teeth, he brought his finger to his brows, intent on rubbing it away. "My hair is turning gray. I can feel it."
"Some chicks dig that," and she frowned. "'The picture of Kaidan Gray'. Don't worry, Sir: you'll stay forever young while that holo bit-rots in the Williams' vault of arcane matriarchal knowledge, poetry, corseting and sundry girly stuff."
"A good tradeoff, I guess," he said, unconvinced.
Now that he thought about it… "Has the commander done it?"
Williams smirked. "What, posing half-naked in a beefcake—?"
That made him chuckle. "Yours is pretty much a one-track mind, isn't it? No. That one we would know, 'the hero of the Skyllian Blitz shows it all'. No: your tee-hee thing?"
"Ah. No—Yeah… Kinda, backwards, once." She seemed a little sheepish there. Interesting.
"'Backwards'?"
"My other sister the magnificent tee-heerista herself."
"I see. 'Oops'?"
"'Oops' indeed."
"And…?"
Williams smiled at the memory. "He laughed it off. Anyway, he's too roguish for Lynn and Sarah. Abby digs roguish, though… Well, as long as it is languid roguish. Trying to wean her off that."
"Mmm-hmm." And so you dig him, too. He wouldn't ever ask her, openly.
"Yeah…" she dropped, a bit absently, answering at nothing in particular.
Ha! So we biotics really are telepaths, after all. Handy.
And that was it, this whole train of thought, thoroughly well assaulted, derrailed, pillaged, the passengers' bodies hanging from the burning wagons' windows, covered in arrows.
Both of them leaning on the crates, Kaidan was first to rummage again in Williams' foods basket, she doing likewise upon noticing him, choosing a vanilla-flavored protein bar while he went for a coconut one—the flan was mightily tempting, but he'd rather space those small pleasures. Absently, they watched CRO Emerson go through his usual assess-negociate-purchase-resell routine, that worker bee of a man keeping an eye on his fabbing setup, and attending the suspiciously fluid rate of visits from the rest of the crew. With surprise, they discovered themselves doing their munching in perfect unison. He frowned, amused. She snorted, and waited for his next chomp to re-sync.
Finally, Kaidan fastened his omni-tool back to his wrist and minimized its projection down to a thumbnails gallery. Williams watched, recognizing some elements from yesterday's session.
"So, how's things? And why are you doing the sexy, anyway?"
"These sensor patchs," and he clapped his back, "all of a sudden won't transmit when covered with my undersuit, or with anything else, like my t-shirts or my tank top, which doesn't make any sense, really. I think the slightest pressure shortcircuits their antennas or something, but I don't have that much time to debug the design and refab them, hence the burlesque."
She plucked one of his spares from a box and twirled the flat hexagonal pad with her fingers, studying the thing with vague interest.
"Well. For the girls, and a few of the guys, it's been a definite improvement on Hyper Ranger Black," she pointed out.
Kaidan half-grimaced at that. "Heh! Don't remind me. I can't believe I didn't see that one coming, I was such a fan when I was a kid."
Actually, it had been a liitle bit of great fun, getting to reminisce childhood memories of fandom and geekiness. With Garrus, of all people.
"So, any progress?"
"No, not really. Just hints of possible approaches." His fingers danced over his omni-tool's display, selecting and grouping the most promising samples. "If I don't get anything remotely solid between today and tomorrow, I'll simply have to drop it for now and concentrate on getting stronger in my current forms," and he furrowed his brow, lowering his voice, nearly talking to himself. "Which isn't that easier, either, but at least I know how to go at it."
She tilted her head, frowning a little, herself. "I didn't figure all this could be so difficult."
"Yeah, well, I've been too optimistic, thinking I could build upon what I can do already. It doesn't seem to work that way. It ought to, on paper: I mean, I have enough control over my Eezo nodes to recreate my basic moves from scratch and introduce small variations." He demonstrated, extending his arms, doing small gestures—'minimonics'—that translated into distinctly different kinds of halos rippling alongside them, liquid-like light and darkness distorting his 'tool's holos. "I'd hoped that by just changing the strength, vectoring or the timing of one or two of the node clusters at most, I'd be able to alter my basefield-imprinter interference pattern to produce a Mass Effect field perpendicular to the grav-plane, and… ah… that your eyes wouldn't glaze over listening to my buzzword-rich talk?"
She wasn't one to fear admiting being guilty. "Sorry, LT: blue glowy pretty lights, I'm an easily distracted cat. But go on, please: I love it when you geeks talk dirty."
"Oh, do you, really?"
"Yeah. It's the subtext, all those naughty 'perpendicular' double entendres…"
Kaidan snorted at that. "Damn, I'm boring you silly, ain't I?"
She clapped on his shoulder, sisterly.
"Nah, not really. I do follow you, believe it or not: you don't get to be a Gunny without understanding a few of the fundamentals… although your biotics are rather too into deep freaky territory, no offense, Sir."
"None taken, chief." Eyes back on the row of amber light panes floating over his left forearm, he expanded the selected items while listening to her.
"One question: what did you mean by 'recreating your basic moves'? When you explained them yesterday I kind of understood that's how you build your Mass Effects, piece by piece—I mean, selecting specific node combos—"
He pursed his lips. One excellent question, that one was: perspicacious, and a potential can-of-worms opener. So, evasive maneuvers. "Hey, 'node combos'! We'll make a technobabbler out of you yet, chief."
"Over your dead bodies, LT. None of that techno-posh geektalk for me, I plan on keeping on being a foul-mouthed ignorant—uh, Stearn here already? Damn! As it is, he's a bit early."
He saw their service chief, Lance Stearn, stride out of the elevator carrying his tool bag. The tall, whitish-blonde crewcut, rugged-looking veteran scanned the Storage Deck, searching for Williams at her weapons maintenance station, then among Emerson's strangely acting small circle of petitioners. Kaidan smiled to himself when Stearn did that mildly amused eyebrow raise of his upon finding them aside: he could imagine the man making the connection between his lieutenant's guise and the CRO's crowd's antics. He had been aboard during Copernicus, too, after all.
Lance wouldn't comment any further: he liked to flaunt this veneer of British impassiveness he was so fond of. A true scholar, a real badass, it was an interesting affectation. He approached them.
"Lieutenant, Sir. Ma'am." They saluted. Williams gave him the news.
"I'm afraid the fabby is still cooking the goods, chief. It ought to finish any minute now."
"Hmm. Any explanation why?"
"A misconfiguration in the license card. The samples' microframe modules are particularly finicky, and the license's fab-controller goes far over the top with the rez and the antialias, which brings the machine's STM lithographer head into play, and the whole thing nearly to a halt." Williams, disdainful, made a half-shrug. "When we became aware of that, Emerson had engaged the fabricator already, so… Once this first batch is done, he'll raise the tolerances. Luckily, we were still in comm buoy range when we discovered the slowdown and could check the forums, so we managed to cancel and divert all the off-frame base mods to my station's mini-fab. Just a bit of a—" She noticed Kaidan looking at her with an intense smirk. "What?"
"That doesn't bode that well for the new toys, wouldn't you say?" Stearn noted.
"Their point-oh releases have a good solid rep. It's the updates one has to take with a grain of salt, you know, let a few early adopters explode for the cause. Don't worry, we made sure there won't be any nasties: these versions have had half a year in the field—what? What! Aw, LT, stop it!"
"'Techno-posh geek-talk', hunh?" Kaidan couldn't believe she was that capable of infodumping on them. I'm so going to ask her to marry me, and we will have lots of little geekie babies, and they'll inherit the earth, and Mars too, why not.
Why not? Well, because if looks could kill, the possibility that he wouldn't survive the next ten seconds was pretty stratospheric. Still, he couldn't help the smugness.
"Sir?" Stearn eyes shined too, well-humored. His was an entirely rhetorical question, he clearly guessed what that was about.
"She's a closeted boomstick nnnerrrrd!"
"My, is she, really?" Stearn feigned horror. Williams feigned Jack the Ripper.
"She won't admit it, but she can spit buzzwords like a champ."
She seemed to have had enough, and counterattacked, just as he hoped.
"Oh, really! Excuse me, Sir?" Sassy, she lifted a hand. "Saturday morning cartoon-nerd?" Then lifted the other one. "Weapon maintenance and fabbing techniques-nerd? There's a difference."
"Yyyep, of course," Kaidan condescended.
"Also, I've had to eat my share of Requisitions duty every time a superior asshole happened to sniff my lineage and think how much fun being an utterly unimaginative bastard could be, so I got to learn the lingo, and you two better be grateful for that."
"So we are, Ma'am", curtsied Stearn.
"You are so our hero, chief," Kaidan added, nodding humbly. Williams glared an intensely suspectful look at him.
"Humph! Okay," satisfied, she practically threw the food basket at Stearn, who grabbed it without a hitch. "Pick your poison, Lance. Those are for Fredo and Momo, too. You've seen them?"
The man started sorting through the goods. "Boudiaf is at the CIC with the Intel team, doing his tech sorcery on that last batch of Saren-related data traffic, and Fredricks is meant to do a few rounds with the commander. He said he'd taught him a few tricks he played during the Blitz." He stopped and considered. "Mmm, If the articles are that late, perhaps I could take part in the fun, too."
Williams was all too quick to agree.
"You do that, Lance. I can take care of most everything here, anyway"
"Thank you, Ma'am."
And Kaidan felt a weight lift from his shoulders. Shepard made good of his word! He noticed Williams' brief hopeful smile at him, knowing she felt particularly embarrassed by how her arrival had meant her takeover of Stearn's authority, plus the commander's disregarding of the Normandy's Marine team in favor of his ad hoc human/alien mix'n'matches.
So that last conversation with him was fruitful, after all: Shepard would throw a few bones to his men every now and then.
Then he noticed Stearn still toying with the foodstuff, undecided, or perhaps simply not that hungry.
"There's flan too, chief. It's pretty… good?" suggested Kaidan, his words decaying upon seeing Stearn's jovial expression dissolve into… well… "'Pretty good' being Stearnese for 'I killed your puppy dog', surely?"
"Ah… thanks but no, thanks, Sir. Flan and I have… history."
Um, what?
Kaidan and Williams stared dumbfounded at Stearn, then at each other. The man kept on rummaging through the food, clearly unenthusiastic. Silence stretched until Williams couldn't bear it anymore.
"Oh, for the love of—Stearn. History lesson. STAT!"
He shrugged, eyes still on the stuff. "It's not that important, and I rather don't air it around."
"Ah-ah, no way, you can't leave us hanging like that after dropping that bomb on us."
He was oh-so-slightly smiling, the bastard. Kaidan couldn't wait to see Williams chew him alive. Stop the NetChan, ScuttleBot News at ten: chief eats chief.
"Sorry, Ma'am, it's all part of my sordid past."
That made her laugh. "C'mon, Lance, we all have a sordid past."
"Um, do we?" Kaidan interjected, trying to keep the fooling around sort of more rounded. He discovered himself once again admitting that, ultimately, it was fun to have Williams around, even if he always ended up at the center of her crosshairs, one way or another.
She ran with it. "Yeah, it's just a matter of colorfulness, LT. Yours' freaky glowy sordid, mine's ostracism and shotguns sordid, and here Chief Stearn's is… misterious-British flan-sordid!"
"'Misterious-British'. I like that."
"Yeah, so lets exchange sordidly closeted skeletons. It'll be fun!"
But Stearn wouldn't budge. "I must sordidly decline."
"This is no ancient Rome, no declensions allowed, Stearn. Aw, come oooon!"
Now Stearn was openly smiling, which was a feat in itself. Kaidan ought to congratulate her later.
"Nnnope, Ma'am. It's for your own good. You don't want the gray hairs."
Kaidan chimed in again: "I'm sort of inmunized in that department, thanks to her—ow, stop that!" Williams' elbowing actually hurted a little.
And then Stearn grabbed a bar tagged in furious pink, examining it with uncertain eyes that, suddenly, turned wide open—smile gone rictus—then began to narrow down to a pair of quite dangerous-looking slits. Kaidan didn't recognize that color code. The service chief certainly did, and it clearly bothered him. Lots, judging from his change of attitude
"What's this… thing… doing in here?" He wielded the snack against them like proof of some terrible crime. "Is this some kind of—"
Williams snatched it from his finger in a feline swipe. "Hey, leave my lucky bar alone, chief, It's mine mine mine," and brought it to her bosom, protecting it with her whole arms while pouting. "You poor little thing, come to momma…" Despite this strange growing sense of weirdness out of nowhere, it made Kaidan laugh.
"C'mon, Williams, don't be like—" Then it suddenly dawned on him. "Wait, what? Your lucky—?"
Stearn interrupted him, addressing Williams. "So that bar—You… didn't know?"
She glanced at both of them, an uncertain laugh in her voice. "Huh? Didn't know what? The rumors? No. I mean, sorta, yeah but, c'mon, Lance…"
Kaidan wanted to confirm. "Williams, are we talking 'I'm feeling lucky' here? You don't realize—"
"She was warned, wasn't she?" Stearn's eyes had gone from irritated to serious and concerned, devoid of any comedy, which triggered Kaidan's alarm bells. Was she, ever? Oh, no, please… Both men crossed worried looks, then their eyes fell on hers and her somewhat disconcerted smile.
"Ash, tell me you haven't eaten any of those yet. You didn't, did you?"
"Mmm… And what if I did?" Still playful, although not by much, perplexity and annoyance beginning to gain ground.
"Ash, I'm serious: you could quite literally—"
She flaunted her I'm-so-two-miles-ahead-of-you sneery smile. Not quite as solid as usual, though. "You guys are sooo bullshitting me, aren't you?"
"No, we are not, Ma'am!"
Note to self: amend that 'she is so much fun' line of yours. And no geeky progeny, alas. Because, decidedly, Ashley Madeline Williams was the most exasperating woman Kaidan had met ever. He tried again. "Ashley, is not what you think, please let me explain—"
She let out a tentative last nervous laughter. "LT, chief, honestly, what the—"
"Ma'am, with all due respect, will you please shut the fuck up and listen to him!"
That did it, the wrong way. As mercurial as ever, Williams' eyes steeled instantly, and her tone adquired a definite edge.
"I think I can imagine what that respect amounts to right now, can't I?"
"Well… Well then, yes, Ma'am!" Stearn blurted, looking a little desperate there. He had gone too far already, although Kaidan knew he had beyond good reason to do so.
He tried to intercede. "Ash, please. He knows what he's—"
She ignored him completely, her cryonic stare on Stearn. "Is that your supposed British education in action, chief?"
"That's me trying to save your skin, Ma'am. And your gustatives, and your stomach lining, and, I daresay, your shitting machinery's plumbing!"
"I'm no damsel in distress, Chief Stearn."
He knew that line. Uh, oh. And Stearn's was losing patience fast, too. And, daresayings-wise, there was more to this than simply trying to get across the danger she was in. A certain wounded pride that, ultimately, was always meant to manifest itself in some form or another.
"Make that a damsel in a sickbay bed mattress, if you really intend to eat that… unutterable crap. It's your funeral, Ma'am, really!"
"Oh, yeah? Well, give me a Viking one, then, really!"
"Isn't that against your religion, or something?"
"We Williams are eclectic."
"And just how… eclectic?"
Kaidan felt like witnessing some spectacularly bad buddy action holo's climatic yelling scene. Their staring at each other was something out of… well, out of some episode of Hyper Rangers, or the ages-old morning cartoon traditions he was so snobbishly fond of during his childhood. This is ridiculous: just a minute ago we were—
Then Ash, with a ferocity in her eyes and a smile that wasn't really such, slowly and deliberately peeled the top of the bar's wrapping. Which exasperated Stearn no end.
"Oh, for Godsakes, you—Ma'am, are you fucking batshit nuts?"
Dammit, Lance, not again… Now he'd have to really take control of the situation before Williams crushed Stearn.
"You are so gonna gimme twenty, chief," she cackled, satisfied. Which was kinda good, or better than any alternative. "And you are so gonna back me up here, LT." Which was… ah… not so better.
"Whatever it takes for you to drop that shit! Ma'am!" Stearn was nearly snarling. Kaidan couldn't believe it.
Great! And 'my dad is bigger than yours' at the count of three, of course. Will these two—! He ought to be used to Williams' tauntings and flare-ups already, but then he should have anticipated Stearn's threshold being rather low after these long weeks of absolutely nothing to do at all. And Williams should know better than playing being an ass with a Torfan survivor veteran whose only perspective for this whole Saren mission thing was to stay stewing and twiddling his thumbs down here while she had all the fun, thanks to Shepard's penchant for… for unorthodox blingy mixed species team-ups, or whatever.
This was his fault, too. Hell, how did he not realize what a pressure cooker Marine Country had become of late?
Perhaps because you were oh-so-busy trying not to end up like him that you completely neglected your duties, you staff lieutenant of the staffy staffity staff you!
Shit, just great. Well… Anyway, he had to stop this. "Chief—Ash…"
She turned on to him, snarky. "WHAT?" And then, as usual, the afterthought. "…Sir!"
Which, suddenly, he wasn't in the mood for, anymore. You know? I can play this game too, and guess what, I'm guaranteed a win.
"Okay, enough with you two! You just calm down. Now! You too, Stearn! Ashley, that thing in your hand, it's actually dangerous, and the chief here knows it from experience, life-or-death experience, and nearly losing his posting in the process."
Williams cocked her irate head, clearly suspicious.
"What do you mean?"
Finally, he had her undivided atention.
"That bar could be literally poisonous. Lance was pranked into eating one a few months ago, and Chakwas had to ER him back to Earth: induced cryo-coma, two weeks of nanocleaning and tissue printing, rehab… the full rigmarole. He got back on his feet-certified hardly four days before shakedown day."
"Felt fairly Viking burial-like, if I might say so," added Stearn, no trace of humor in his voice.
Williams' irritation gave way to a last hint of incredulity before her plain raw astonishment.
"But… but this makes no sense at all. If it is that dangerous, why is that freakin' thing kept in the menu, then?"
"Why? Oh, I'll tell you why." Kaidan sort of snorted, bile in his throat. That had been the biggest of many protracted wars between the crew and the shipbuilding teams. 'The users are the losers' was the concluding Jokerism. "Because those cretins at Life Support Tech R&D decided… They just—Argh, because we won't dare mess with their Autochef's lunatic programming: it's a mishmash of Turian neuronal blackbox objects and Alliance functional modeling glue code, down to the freakin' user interface. And after Stearn's little adventure in… in practical schatology, we were meant to get a standard unit to replace it anyway, but Eden Prime fubared the whole schedule and we are stuck with it, so from the beginning we've had to endure the worst food flavor transcode ever, from levo to dextro to levo, in perceptual lossy, which is the biggest joke because the Turian-to-Human LUT and its symmetrical are so full of holes that the perceptual side of things is not so much lossy as a total loss, let's not talk about—"
"Lieutenant!"
He paused and realized the size of his tirade, the soreness in his throat, the nervous tic in his left temple, and the murmurs coming from Requisitions. Williams looked like being both a bit frightened and possibly a bit worried about him.
"I get it, LT: 'the coffee is bad'. Yeah, I noticed."
He exhaled and pressed a finger against the bridge of his nose. Stearn stood looking aside, perhaps a bit ashamed of him. Deflated, he lowered his voice.
"You just don't know half of it: that coffee is as good as it gets. After weeks of trial and error we managed to isolate the only preset worth the label, everything else being… Look, forget all that, let's get back to that bar of yours and let me explain—"
"Okay. Okay, LT." Williams seemed to acquiesce, deceptively raising his hands in a placating way. "You explain, Stearn pays his dues." And she grinned.
"Thank you. Well, then—what?"
"No good deed nor dubious due respect goes unpunished, LT. So, Lance?"
Stearn's versatile brow pulled an 'oh, really?' and the man dropped to the floor. "Ma'am, yes Ma'am!"
Before Kaidan could say anything else, the service chief began doing pushups. On one arm. Kaidan couldn't decide which of those two insufferable morons he wanted most to deck first. Well, technically speaking, one of them was already… Scrunching his face, he tried to stay on topic.
"Alright, Williams. Simplifying it: you'd think the Autochef's 'I'm feeling lucky' is your typical vendor machine's weighted randomizer flavor selector, or a personal trends-prediction oriented one, or a simpler 'most often chosen" one, the half Alliance-half Turian version, wouldn't you?"
Glaze over. Then a "…huh? Yes. Yeah. That."
God! Whatever. "Well, it's not. Nothing in the Normandy is typ—"
Distracted again. By Chief Stearn's whistling some old war movie song, 'the bridge on the river Kway" most likely. Also, the son of a bitch had switched to opposite arm-leg raise pushups, looking so much like a giant spastic toad in looped holo.
"…ical."
"Make that fifty, service chief," ordered Williams, tilting her head toward his subordinate while keeping her eyes on Kaidan's, still grinning, like a maniac.
"Gladly, gunnery chief," hissed Stearn, eyes upfront, grinning like another maniac.
Kaidan stood there, mouth agape, this short of going thermonuclear on them.
This is not happening, they are not behaving like schoolchildren; I'm not half-naked, trying to level up as if I was a Galaxy of Fantasy PC; harassed by a xenoparanoid shotguns nut and an ancient romance novels hardcore collector; jockeying for fire team position against a Krogan jerk and a sainty Asari; dealing with a bored-horny crew and a crazy commander; and where the fuck is the big undo key in the sky because I need it like fucking right now. That, or these two I kill'em sport… with my mind!
"How's the view down there, chief?"
"Your dirty boots are in the way, chief."
"Guys…"
"Wanna lick them clean, chief?"
"So, far far beyond eclectic then, aren't we, chief?"
"Is that contempt or a compliment, chief?"
"Chiefs…"
"My misguided admiration, chief."
"I so knew it. Okay, chief, let's talk goats and your sex life."
"Sorry, chief: a true gentleman would never expose the identity of the concerned ladyfriend, no matter her quadrupedism."
Actually, it would be nice not to be nice for a while, considering. Kaidan sighed. He collected himself, reached that inner place that allowed him this certain distance, this certain contentment; calmly decided how he wanted to play this and drew a slow deep breath.
"Ten," he said.
"Haa-ha, chief! As if your… Um, LT? Excuse me, what?"
"Ten," he repeated, nodding in a sageish way. He almost felt ashamed for the theatrics, but then that much aggravation had earned him the right to a little bit of fun at their expense.
"Ten? Hey, chief, make that just ten."
"How generous of you, chief."
"No." Kaidan shook her head at Williams, gently, and insisted. "Ten."
"'Ten… Um, like, 'ten, nine, eight…'?" She flashed her fingers in a countdown. Another negative. "Ten laps around the deck? I do give you ten? Ten little indians?" Head shake again, tolerant expression. "No? Well, then, I… Damn, I just don't follow, LT. A little help?"
"Tennn…?" he singsonged, making a show of there being a follow-up to that, forwarding his hands at her in a demonstrative fashion, an encouraging smile.
"Uh oh…" That one came from below. As usual, Stearn was the sharpest guy in the room. Williams crossed looks with her chief, then with Kaidan—his smile fast turning from encouraging to something else entirely—and her eyes went wide, lips mouthing an inaudible 'oh crap'.
"Ah… Ten…?" Her voice was nearly just a resigned whisper. Kaidan nodded again, approvingly, grinning, like yet another maniac.
And he roared his mightiest 'TEN-HUTT!' ever. Spittle flew. Williams jumped. Stearn froze.
Mmm, this deck has a real good reverb.
Both chiefs managed to react and stand at attenton. Silent attention. Good.
And then Kaidan noticed the now silent chief requisitions officer and his silent crowd looking at them, at him, with sort of a confused blank look in their faces. The ones technically below his grade were standing at attention, training having kicked in nearly without conscious thought, not quite perfecting the requisite stare into infinity due to their bewilderment. A feeling shared across species, seemingly: Garrus, on the Mako's topside cannon, sat there, powertool in claw, slackjawed, mouthplates open. Silent. His toolbox began sliding back without his noticing. Crash noise in five seconds.
Kaidan, his cheeks' muscles rippling out of pure teeth-gnashing frustration, would have cared to warn the Turian if not for this itching distraction, this nagging feeling of there being something missing in this picture, a certain icing on the cake of his misery… Oh, yeah, of course. He turned his head toward Wrex' place. The Krogan, arms crossed, looked back, shaking his smug head. As expected, really.
"Wrex…" Kaidan said, frosty non-smile in his lips.
"Alenko…" Wrex riposted, a satisfied 'you are so beneath your Battlemaster' sneer in his.
Crash noise—scratch 'good', make that fabulous reverb—followed by something fierce-sounding in native Turian. Startled, Wrex actually dropped into a crouch and pointed his shotgun at the disturbance, his instincts overriding his composture. Kaidan crossed his arms, mouth twitching against the vindictive grin he was trying to contain.
There. Now this perfect storm of stupid was finally complete, as far as he was concerned.
And, just then, he noticed Commander Shepard and Private Fredricks inside the elevator. They had been there who knew for how long, watching it all. Kaidan groaned.
Shit. I should sell tickets…
Author's notes:
First fic. This is me on training wheels. Self-indulgent, overcomplicating things, and ultimately running on empty coasting down the slope. I have a passable idea of the kind of ME stories I want to tell, and I have to start somewhere, so, Gozer help me, this is it.
Kaidan Alenko is the kind of character I usually root for, so he's the central figure in all this sort of amplified, overthought, infantile, inflated and a little bit hysterical version of the Mass Effect universe. Not that I intend to violate canon, although I like to play with certain aspects of it, like the technology, the backstories, the Red Shirts, the dialogs—which won't feature the game's, mostly—and the details of the depicted events: in fact, a blatant example ought to happen a few chapters ahead. So, well… canon won't be broken. Much. I hope. What worries me most is the characters' voices: probably they'll get distorted in places, OOC'd. We'll see what happens.
This story does some real cheap tricks with its own timeline, so lots of small details here and there that will get clarified further along, or in later stories. Here is hoping that this will be more enticing than frustrating. It's not that I intend to be deliberately obscure: it's just that I think it gets to be more fun that way, at least in this case, even if it'll be difficult for you to make heads or tails of it right now.
I'm extremely slow. I've got whole chunks of story to glue yet, so Chapter Two will be real late. The following ones ought to proceed at a faster pace.
Now, a warning: English is not my native language, and I'm bound to have planted a few absolute howlers here and there, so please set your grammar fail EWS at DefCon 1. I'd be grateful for any corrections where needed.
Critique-wise, I'd really, really like to know what you think of this, despite being beyond terrified of that. The formal aspects I assume they are terrible, but here's hoping to being at least a bit entertaining and intriguing.
So this is it. I'd like to express my gratitude to Vshard, who dared read a few bits and pieces and encouraged me to, simply, give it a try and post it, see what happens. I admire her work, so her finding any single little thing of mine interesting or funny feels like gold.
(Yeah, I know, it's been eons since then, but look, here it is at last)
Also, my deepest appreciation for Sinvraal's oeuvre: her ME series was a real eye-opener. She was the real catalyst—shame about the results, I guess, but…—and I eagerly await her take on ME3.
Lots of heavy-hitters around to praise, too, but then this would become a parody of Robin Williams' parody of the Oscar ceremony. So, see ya soon—um, yep, right—at Episode Two: Fu Bar.