"Commander, I, uh… I think you'll want to see this."
The ship was huge.
Shepard leaned over Cortez's head, trying to get a better look through the narrow window. The turian ship hung suspended against the backdrop of stars and planet, a vast, unnatural darkness. If she'd been an ocean-faring vessel, Shepard would have said the ship was listing. Not quite alive. Not quite dead, either.
Entirely out of place. Like waking up to find an elephant in the living room when you'd been anticipating a house cat.
She didn't quite know what she'd been expecting. A frigate, maybe. Something small and fast that got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. But the turian craft was enormous.
Also, it had the distinct look of something that had been dragged through hell, and hadn't quite made it all back in one piece. She imagined bits of ceramic and metal and polymer sprinkled throughout every circle from first to ninth, testament to a desperate passage.
Then again, maybe a turian ship passed through a turian hell. She didn't know how many circles it had.
She wondered how many lives had been lost navigating that flight, the headlong retreat into the middle of nowhere at the edge of the galaxy. She wondered if any had survived. She didn't want to consider what the complement of such a vessel might be.
Too many.
"Damn." She felt Garrus step close to her shoulder; the cockpit was small, and already overcrowded. When she glanced back at him, she found his unblinking gaze fixed firmly on the tableau before them. Even if the subharmonics of his voice hadn't revealed his shock, the strained, breathy quality of the expletive would have betrayed his distress. "Damn, Shepard, that's not just a ship. That's the Valiant."
"The Vali—" She gaped up at him, not quite able to fathom what he was saying. "You're not serious. What the hell is a turian dreadnought doing out here of all places? Where are the support ships?"
He shook his head, mandibles twitching in confused agitation. "I read the report. The Valiant was presumed lost weeks ago. No one's been looking. Hell, they didn't know there was anything to look for. We thought the Reapers took out that whole corner of the fleet."
"Maybe it managed to hit a relay." She sighed, peering at the damaged ship. Even a distance, she could see how wounded it was, scored and broken and bruised with all the evidence of an intense battle. One wing was hemorrhaging sparks. Still, it was flying. And sparks meant some kind of power was fueling some kind of internal system. "I guess we're definitely investigating. If the Reapers fried their comms, it means someone's alive to have gotten them back up again."
"You sure about that, Commander?" Cortez asked, clearly hesitant about questioning her, but raising the concern all the same. "Anyone could've kickstarted that distress call. If the ship's been compromised—"
"I need to take a look, Lieutenant. If she's salvageable—and if there are survivors still aboard—I'd rather lay the claim for our side. God knows I don't want to leave this for Reaper scavengers."
"Or Cerberus ones," Garrus added, finally pulling his gaze away from the foundering craft. Shepard nodded her agreement. She was good at reading Garrus; she'd made a point of learning to be good at reading Garrus. She couldn't read him now.
When he spoke, however, it was all weary resignation, and those emotions she recognized easily enough, much as they pained her. "Shepard, I think we have to assume this is a trap."
She frowned, but nodded again. "It's all a little convenient, yes. The abandoned planet, the mysterious intel Hackett only just now found out about, the ship presumed lost suddenly reappearing complete with distress signal. All of it screams set-up."
In the cramped confines of the cockpit, they were forced to stand nose to nose—eyes to mandibles, anyway—and she felt the subtle shift of his body language, caught somewhere between disbelief and dismay. "And you still want to spring it."
She scraped a hand through her hair, but smashed her elbow against the back of Cortez's chair as she lowered her arm to rub the back of her neck. The Kodiak swerved a little, and the pilot muttered an apology.
Wincing, Shepard breathed a curse under her breath. Cost. Benefit. Risk. Reward. Probabilities and statistics ran circles in her brain. "You'd better believe I'd want to disarm a bomb if I found one lying around, too. You and I both know I'm not one to run, hoping to avoid the blast radius."
He tilted his head. "Right. You're the one at the center of the action, hoping the pin you just pulled wasn't the auto-destruct."
She huffed a brief laugh, but her heart wasn't in it. "Come on, Vakarian. We both know I'm better than that."
That he didn't reply in kind spoke volumes.
With one final glance out toward the looming spacecraft, Shepard squeezed past him and back into the hold. Tali was working furiously, and though Shepard didn't have facial cues to go off of, every line of her body—curved shoulders, bent head, elbows tucked close, fingers moving with sharp precision over the display—spoke of determination. She didn't so much as look up when Shepard and Garrus returned.
"Find anything useful, Tali?"
"It's an omni-tool. There's only so much I can do from here. But I—I've followed the distress signal back, and I can tell the ship's life support is… functioning. Not sure how well."
"Enough to support life? Survivors?"
Tali made an unhappy noise. "I think so, Shepard, but…"
"But you can't be sure. I understand."
"If we use the on-board scanners—"
Shepard shook her head and Tali faded into silence. "Can't risk it. Piggy-backing a signal via omni-tool's about as much of a risk as I'm prepared to take. The Reapers won't need much coaxing to come out of the woodwork again."
"They never do," Garrus said.
"Okay." Shepard ignored him, already running plans through her head and discarding them as rapidly as they formed. "So it's a trap. Maybe even a trap meant for us—or for the Normandy, rather. Honestly, I think Joker might've done us a favor by luring the Reapers away. Chances are the intel was a plant—something to tempt us out here—but they're expecting the SR-2, not a small boarding party on a Kodiak. I hope."
Neither Tali nor Garrus echoed her sentiment, but they watched her, waiting. She was struck, in that moment, by the strangeness of their alien regard. Garrus' predator gaze followed her every move, sharp and steady and perturbed. He looked poised to strike at the merest hint of a threat. Tali tilted her head, revealing the faint light of her eyes behind the purple glass of her mask. There weren't two other people in the universe she considered closer friends than these, and here she stood, about to throw them into unknown danger on a hunch. And they'd let her. They'd follow her. Just like always.
The weight of responsibility made her pause, considering alternatives she mightn't have considered otherwise.
"The way I see it, we've got a couple of options. Joker's on his way; we could wait. I think that might blow the element of surprise, though. And I do appreciate a good element of surprise. I could drop in by myself—rely on my tactical cloak, get the lay of the land—"
"Not going to happen, Shepard," Garrus retorted, with just enough resolve in his voice to keep the words supportive and not entirely insubordinate.
She nodded, letting his objection stand. "Or we all go."
"We all go," Tali insisted. "Of course we all go, Shepard."
Shepard hid her gratitude—her gratitude and a touch of relief—behind a brisk nod. "I don't know for certain if it's a trap meant for us, but we're going to treat it like it is. Cortez, there's got to be some gaping wound large enough to let us sneak in. I'd like to avoid the obvious boarding points. Chances are anyone waiting to ambush us would be waiting there."
"No docking bays. No cargo holds. Got it."
"Don't scan. Visuals only. Garrus? I'm not sure turian-human relations have improved to the point of sharing dreadnought schematics. Ideas?"
He closed his eyes, and she could practically see him running access points and cross-referencing with what they'd been able to determine from the visual survey of the ship. After a moment, he called up his omni-tool interface and began typing. "Cortez? Did I see a hull breach on the starboard side?"
"Yes, sir."
"I think access there might work. It'll be a mess hall, near crew quarters. Should be evacuated, and is likely to be empty no matter who—or what—has control of the ship."
The or what hung in the air like a warning, a premonition, but Shepard only tucked her ponytail into the neck of her hardsuit, reached for her helmet, and rechecked the weapons strapped to her back. "Slow and steady, Cortez," she said. "And quiet as you can."
"Like a mouse," Cortez replied.
Shepard hoped they wouldn't be as easy to kill. No one liked the odds when it was mouse versus mousetrap.
#
It was unsettling seeing the inside of a turian ship again, Garrus thought, as the cargo door opened and he surveyed their surroundings through the detachment of his scope. Familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. He'd done one tour on a dreadnought during his years with the military—not the Valiant but the Resolute, one of the dreadnoughts the fleet had sacrificed during the Battle of Palaven—but that service was years ago now, in a different life. Before the Reapers. Before Archangel. Before Saren. Before Shepard.
Familiar and unfamiliar.
Old memories fought their way up, reminding him the ruins of the mess hall they'd landed in had several hallways leading in and out. His visor picked up no life signs, no heat signatures or heartbeats except those of his squad-mates.
For all his experience on turian ships, he'd never been able to see the stars through a gaping gash in a mess hall wall before. That wasn't familiar at all. Disconcerting as hell, though.
"Tali," said Shepard, her voice strange and distant through the comm device in his helmet even though she was standing just behind him. "Take a look at that terminal. See what you can pull up. And…" Shepard paused here, the silence weighty. "I know you won't like it, but I want you to stay with the shuttle. I want your gun protecting Cortez, so he can be focused on extraction. If something happens—if anything happens—you get on the Kodiak and you go."
"Shepard—"
"If this goes pear-shaped, you retreat to the Normandy. Contact Hackett. They'll need to know if this is some new tactic they need to prepare for." Tali's shoulders stiffened, and Garrus could tell she was about to protest, but Shepard slashed at the air with her hand and snapped, "This isn't a request, Tali. It's an order. Understood?"
After a tense moment, Tali bowed her head. "I understand."
"Cortez?"
"Understood, ma'am."
"Be ready to flee at a moment's notice. No more snacks on the job."
"Yes, ma'am. Wouldn't dream of it."
"Garrus?"
He cocked his head toward one of the exit doors and hoped it looked enough like agreement that she wouldn't call him on it. "This way, I think, if the plans in my head are right."
She tapped the side of her helmet, same side as his visor. "You picking something up?"
"Nothing. But that means nothing out of the ordinary, either, and its range isn't infinite."
"Where do we start?"
"Med bay. Crew quarters. From there to escape pods—at least the presence or lack thereof will give us some clues."
Her sigh crackled over the comm. "Like finding a needle in a haystack."
"What?"
She shrugged off his question. Some human expression, then. He'd ask later. Or look it up.
She nodded, hand already moving in a series of the silent gestures they'd honed so well on the battlefield—moving out; follow at range; I'll take low, you take high—and began moving in the direction he'd indicated. She didn't look back.
Trust, he thought, shifting from sniper to assault rifle. The back of Shepard's head was all the proof of trust he needed. He'd never known anything quite so absolute. I've got your six, he assured her. Silently. I've always got your six.
Into hell, if she was bound and determined to go. And back, if he had any say in the matter.
Before heading to the terminal, Tali gestured at Shepard's retreating back, and he knew exactly what she meant.
Be careful.
Watch her.
Keep her safe.
But all that, too, went without saying.
Where Shepard was concerned, failure wasn't an option.