From: Kaidan Alenko (kaidan·alenko©fifthfleet·mil·sa)
Sent: January 2, 2185 17:23 UT
To: Jeff Moreau (jeff·moreau©fifthfleet·mil·sa)
Subject: Re: [No Subject]
Joker,
It's good to hear from you.I was beginning to think you'd found some exotic cruiser to pilot away from all us poor grunts.
But yeah, we should talk. Name a time and a place.
-Kaidan
Joker. The staff commander tipped the chair back and crossed his hands behind his head as he thought about what the pilot could want to talk about. The last time they had actually spoken was... Kaidan couldn't remember.
There had been little to talk about after... after the Alchera incident. That wasn't to say that there wasn't much talking. Oh, there had been long, long talks. Each of the remaining Normandy crew had sat with Admiral Hackett, Councilor Anderson, Ambassador Udina, and a slew of nearly identical suits weighed down with too many metals. And each had tried their own methods to get a word in edgewise, but still the final decision had come down. Without Shepard, they weren't a crew and they would all be re-assigned elsewhere or, in the case of the non-human members of the crew, not at all.
Kaidan had been lucky, initially. He and Ash had landed decent positions on the same ship, but Joker... he hadn't handled the mandated psychiatric appointments very well and they grounded him for it. Grounded. If the pilot hadn't been broken before, they'd certainly seen to it that he was afterward.
At the very least, Kaidan could find out how the past year had treated the man. It was almost as though he'd disappeared off the map entirely.
The commander sighed and sat upright. This thought process was a well-trod path that never lead anywhere positive. What he could really use right then was a hot tea and a moment completely without thoughts or anyone he had to talk to. The clock on the desk near his console read almost half past 18:00 hours. If he was lucky, that would be well past the time the students lingered in the cafeteria.
18:30. He shook his head as he stood and walked to the door. What had he been doing? There was something about the extranet that left it best avoided for those who valued their time.
The room wasn't quite as empty as Kaidan had hoped, but contained few enough students that he was able to spot a quiet place away from scrutiny. Before heading over, he approached the counter, where an older woman seemed to be presiding over tray after tray of monochromatic vegetable mush.
"What c'I getcha?" The brown-haired matron didn't look up from the giant spoonful of green paste she was peeling off into a large basin.
"A tea." Kaidan peered in past the counter discretely just to be sure this kitchen did, in fact, carry such things. "Please." Better to stay on the woman's good side.
"What kind of tea?" With a surprisingly gentle clatter, the woman set down her utensils and pulled several boxes out from the shelf below.
The staff commander's resolve withered just slightly. "Any kind of tea."
She held up a box with a stately name that did a fair impression of being made of actual wood. "Earl Grey?"
"Sure."
"Hot or c-"
"Just. A tea. Please." Kaidan gripped the counter edge until his knuckles turned white then slowly released it. "Hot." It wasn't the woman's fault that even such a simple process pushed him dangerously close to a complete collapse of the levee he'd constructed to hold back the last two years, but couldn't he just get a tea?
Immediate relief came as the cup, hot enough to be uncomfortable to touch, was pushed into his hands. He clutched it close, savoring the spikes of heat that ran along the worn callouses of his palms. Just as he turned toward his little corner of solitude, a woman's voice broke in from just over his shoulder. "Early Grey huh? I hear that's the best. Even better than that asari stuff."
Closing his eyes, Kaidan inhaled slowly then turned with a friendly smile pulling at the edges of his lips. He fumbled with keeping it going as he realized he had no idea who the woman was. She looked around the age of eighteen though the bobbed cut of her brown hair lent her an air of sophistication that lead suggested she might be a year or two older. Either way, she was certainly older than the average student here and she didn't look like any staff member he had met so far. "Ah... that's good to know. Pardon the question, but have we met?"
"No. I'm Oriana." The woman smiled warmly as she held up a hand. "No need to introduce yourself. Everyone on the station is abuzz about Commander Alenko."
Kaidan felt his cheeks burn as though they alone had sucked all the heat from the cup in his hands. "I'm sure that's an exaggeration."
"True." Oriana glanced to the side, seemingly self-conscious herself. "But um... you were a good enough reason for my parents to let me skip a few days of classes so I certainly know who you are!"
Her words made her appear younger than Kaidan had originally guessed. He tilted his head and adjusted his tone accordingly. "I didn't see you at the lecture."
"Oh, no. We didn't get in until after it was too late, but I am so looking forward to tomorrow's one." She tucked a bit of hair behind her ear. "I'm especially interested in inventive uses for simple biotics."
So am I, the commander thought to himself. He hadn't yet planned out the entirety of his speech to his satisfaction. "Was there something in particular you were hoping to hear about?" It couldn't hurt to have add a few focus points.
"Well," Oriana gushed, "there's this vid where you short-circuit a whole AI by killing its power source with dark energy. I'm very interested in how you were able to maneuver around the corner without having any visual reference points!"
Kaidan blinked. He remembered the incident. Some sort of rogue AI built into a mainframe of the Citadel Presidium had been funneling credits from a nearby casino. In attempting to find the source of the siphoning, he and Shepard had become locked in a stalemate as the machine threatened to commit an explosive form of suicide and take them with it. The question was, how did this woman know about it? He and Shepard had been the only one there and the report had been sealed.
Noting the quizzical expression on the commander's face, Oriana continued. "It's like... common knowledge. It's been all over the extranet since someone clipped the security feed and put it up on View-Too. It has over 5,000 hits - 2,500 from the Bio-Board alone." She beamed proudly.
"That was-" Whatever Kaidan had been about to say was lost as he caught a clear view of a familiar reporter on the vid screen behind Oriana's head.
"I'm here in Takera Ward on the Citadel where family members frustrated by the Alliance's lack of response to the communication outage on Cyrene have gathered to express their outrage until either the ambassadors and top ranking officers stationed here or The Council itself answer their cries."
"Similar gatherings have been reported on Earth where the growing sentiment is that the Alliance is not deaf to the pleas, but unable to restore communications to the remote colony. Some even suspect a large plot in play as many who attempt to travel to that destination have found their plans stymied by additional paperwork, restrictions, and unspecified delays."
As the reporter on the screen threaded through the throng of people to thrust a microphone before a particularly outraged man, Kaidan glanced back to Oriana. The woman was hardly concerned with the broadcast, but seemed amused by the commander's interest. "Friend of yours?"
Behind her, the report concluded. "I'm Khalisah al'Jilani, Westerlund News."
Kaidan grimaced. "Absolutely not. I'm surprised she's still on the air. Her reports are just tenuous facts surrounded by massive assumptions."
"That's the news for ya. Take any little thing and blow it up until it's a major crisis." Gesturing over her shoulder toward the screen that now displayed and advertisement for a krogan skin cream, Oriana shrugged. "I'll bet that whole gathering business was her idea. Probably after some local couldn't figure out how to configure his home console to access the long distance Citadel buoy stream or got fed up with the delay of transferring data across the galaxy."
He had to smile at that. "That seems likely." A cooler against Kaidan's palm reminded him that his neglected tea was now almost useless for its intended use as a stress-relief aid. He drank the bitter, room temperature concoction anyway then turned to his companion as he set his mug on the cafeteria server's counter. "Listen, Oriana. I still have a few things to prepare for tomorrow. I'll see you at the lecture?"
"Oh yeah, sure." The girl smiled half-heartedly and made her way to the table the commander had been eyeing.
Watching her pull out a datapad and begin studying, Kaidan was almost jealous. If only things like genetic theory were still all he had to be concerned about... But he had to get back to his quarters. There was still a lecture to write and now some research to do. Something about the Cyrene story didn't sit quite right with him.
