Chapter 3
"So, the drivecore is shooting spark," Adams said. "I'm thinking, 'Damn. A tantalus core with heatsinks this size and an overclocked dispersion matrix like this. This isn't going to be good.'" A couple of Balmoral's NCO's passed by the open hallway door and glanced in before continuing on. Adams stretched forward and pushed an emphatic finger down on the table. "I knew there was only one way …"
"You rerouted the diffusion system?" Kaidan leaned his chair onto the back legs and bumped against one of the bunks.
"No," Adams said slowly and slowly leaned back. "I overloaded the propriety Tantalus feat shield."
"But that—"
"I know! I know! I thought of that too."
"Then the sink system …"
"Completely offline. Absolutely dead in the water. So, I'm panicking …"
"Damn."
"Exactly what I'm thinking. 'Damn. What now?' If that tantalus core for one second even—"
"This story again?" Cortez sat up in his bunk.
"Thought you were napping," Adams said.
"Napping?" Cortez twisted around and put his feet on the floor. "Say 'sleeping,' Adams. You're making me sound lazy in front of the major."
"He saw you napping."
Cortez rubbed his eye and stifled a yawn. "Why aren't you in the mess hall or something? When you tell that story, Cortez, your voice gets louder and louder. I swear each retelling—"
"Then you entertain us," Adams said. "Give us a good shuttle story."
Cortez smiled. "How about the time this bastard XO was messing around in the side panel of my raise drive?"
"Heard that one." Kaidan clapped the front of his chair back onto the floor and stood.
"Wait," Adams said. "Don't you want to know what happened when the tantalus core went down?"
"Uh, yeah. What happened?" Kaidan said.
"Well, it …"
"What did it do, Adams?" Cortez asked stretching and ducked under the corner of the upper bunk as he stood. He plodded to the table and pulled a chair out beside Adams.
"Well, uh …"
"Yeah? Finish it out." Cortez motioned.
"Well," Adams frowned at him. "It, uh … it came back online."
Kaidan waited. "And?"
"And that fixed it. We got the system back up again," Adams said.
"That's how he ends it every time," Cortez shook his head. "Major, we were stuck on the same ship for ten plus months, and you never heard this one? So many retellings, you think it would get better."
Adams chuckled. "You know, Cortez, at least my stories are consistent. The fish I caught doesn't get bigger each time."
"If you caught a minnow though, you have to ask yourself: does the story really deserve to be told?"
Adams hunched forward over the table with a grin and shook a finger at him. "The thing you never get about this story is that the tantalus core's heat vents—"
"I'll see you guys around." Kaidan went to the door.
"Where you going?" Adams frowned.
"Walk around."
"Where? This ship's a minnow," Adams said.
Kaidan grinned. "I'm not the only Normandy-made ship snob?"
Cortez laughed. "Anyone that's been on the Normandy SV2 longer than a week has got to be an Alliance ship snob. We had over a year. No coming back now. Cerberus really knew their stuff. Hate them, don't get me wrong."
Adams sighed. "When we lost the first one, went down in the explosion, never thought I'd see her like again. But Cerberus, what they rebuilt and now seeing her soar again … There isn't anything finer out there."
Adams laughed as he grinned at Cortez. He looked over at Kaidan.
"What's wrong with you?" Adams said.
"What?" Kaidan blinked.
"Your face …" Adams frowned.
Cortez cleared his throat and caught Adam's eye meaningfully. He shook his head. Adams frowned for a moment, then his eyebrows rose. Damn, now it was awkward. Definitely time for a walk.
"Hey," Kaidan said to Cortez. "Where's that …"
"Threw it on your bunk, Major," Cortez said.
Kaidan snatched the Omni-Tool off a top bunk and slipped it on. That felt right. Not his. Not a good one, but it would work for now. Another lease from the Alliance. He couldn't really complain.
"Don't get lost," Adams chuckled a little tightly.
"I'll stay in one place if I do," Kaidan said and passed out the door.
XXX
It was a minnow of a ship. Adams was right. But it had been a commercial passenger vessel before being recommissioned by the Alliance and now ping ponging between Earth, the relay, and Jump Zero. The only thing it did was carry Alliance officers, building materials, and boring run of the mill cargo. Hopefully, nothing too enticing to a merc ship. It was Alliance though, that alone probably soured the appeal as a target.
The ship only had three levels. Navigation and officers on duty were on top. Off limits to Kaidan though. This level with beds and mess hall. Then the lower deck, cargo, and engineering. Kaidan stepped into the elevator and punched the button for the lower deck. Maybe it was also off limits to him, but no one had explicitly said that.
The elevator slowed to a stop. An NCO looked up from sorting through a workbench of heat clips and rifle parts. She gave Kaidan a smile and nod before picking up a cleaning rod for the barrel in her other hand. Not a salute. Not that Kaidan was so pompous he needed a salute, but it was just another reminder. He returned the nod and moved past her into the cargo bay.
"Major."
Kaidan turned. Briggs and Oreille sat just to the side of the elevator playing cards on a crate. Kaidan knew little more than their names and faces. Shepard had handpicked them though for the Normandy, so Kaidan suspected he already knew their quality.
"Lieutenant, Chief." Kaidan strolled over. "How's the neck?"
"Still keeping the head on, sir," Oreille said. "Can't say the docs don't know their stuff."
"Might have put it on backward. Hard telling sometimes," Briggs grinned.
Oreille tapped his cards. "Hope they left you some of your guts, Briggs. I have a good hand."
"Up for a game, sir?" Briggs asked.
"Another time," Kaidan said. "Thanks."
"Too bad, but then Oreille'd just try to hustle you anyway."
"Better than trying to sit all your opponents in front of a reflective surface," Oreille said.
Briggs raised his shoulders. "I didn't tell you to sit there."
Oreille gave him a dull stare. "I've seen you bluff."
Briggs looked up at Kaidan. "Sir, you really head that strike in Cesky Krumlov? Heard the bastards about leveled the place when they realized the dextran mill wasn't gonna blow."
"Musta been helluv a biotics show," Oreille said. "All those heavy arms they lifted off the Shields thrown at you. Civilians probably outta their minds."
"It was touch and go there for a bit," Kaidan said. "But we didn't lose anyone and the town was saved. Some of the important cell members slipped away though."
"But you got 'em in Plzen," Oreille said. "Now that I would have seen. Those biotic explosions more controlled than our incendiary stuff?"
"If done right," Kaidan said.
"Damn, that woulda been cool to see," Oreille said. "Preserving all that historic crap."
"Middle of the city, daytime, all those civilians round, that salarian pow wow going down." Briggs grimaced. "Tough one."
"My teams knew what they were doing," Kaidan said.
"Had to have, sir." Briggs shook his head. "Woulda been a front-page slaughter otherwise."
Kaidan gave a thoughtful nod and looked out around the cluttered bay. He turned back to them.
"I'll check in with you both later."
He paused. Wait, he wasn't their commanding officer. He wasn't supervising or commanding anyone. They didn't seem to notice though and both rose and gave him a crisp salute.
"Yes, sir."
Kaidan was a little delayed but returned it. They sat back down picking up their cards as Kaidan wandered off skirting the cargo bay's cluttered storage.
XXX
For an instant as he wandered the carbo bay's maze of shipping crates, a silhouette flashed through his mind - the glowing form of an asari charging him between crates. Crushing him against the wall with that crate trick - she was good, Kaidan had to admit. Inventive. He probably wouldn't have thought of that. Then again, even if he had, did he really want his Alliance report to include smearing his adversary into wall with a shipping container. Kaidan cringed. Better to go out with a bang than a crunch.
He leaned against a crate facing the cargo bay's back wall. The datachip Liara had given him was in his pocket. He plugged it into his loaner Omni-Tool. Numbers and letter lit up the screen, more than could fit on one page. He scrolled through it. It seemed the right length. Now if it worked … He slid a datapad from another pocket and expanded it open. He pulled up Anchor's messages and networked it with his Omni-Tool. He initiated the decode. Words started to appear. Liara had done it. The first message bled away into a few sentences.
Langley likely entry point. Team assembling for drop off. Rendezvous on return. Will signal with station's distress call.
Kaidan released a long breath. Anchor's marching orders were here then and the code worked. He brought up the messages he'd copied from the QEC back and forth. It wasn't embedded in readable camouflage, but it would be messy for Anchor to be using more than one code. Long as everything was complete on the datachip, it should work like it did on the Normandy when he'd first tried it. It decoded in a number of seconds.
Recover target. Work with entry team to neutralize and secure vessel. Take Shepard alive, if possible.
It was unbelievable. A part of him had still been skeptical he'd ever decode the messages.
First target: Blue Sons, Alcatraz SV1. Signature likely hidden in Neptune's gravity field.
Return: Vancouver, First Day of the Restoration, transfer vessel to the Scorpion for permanent departure. Shepard, if prisoner, must remain aboard.
Kaidan read through all the messages. It was all right here, the whole debacle. Anchor's replies were mostly just acknowledgements, but it was clear he'd been meant to head the operation after the take over and command the ship. He must have worked himself up the ladder to be so trusted.
Kaidan browsed through all of his emails again. His finger hesitated over an email offering credit-free payment for the first ten months on your own Kodiak-type pedestrian shuttlecraft. The model number was all wrong for the picture being advertised. It was an email Kaidan had restored with the other deleted junk on Anchor's datapad drive.
Kaidan opened the full message. He might be sentencing himself to hours tweezing a virus out of his Alliance issued Omni-Tool. The description made Kaidan frown. Granted, he mostly kept to the automated skycars' route-points to get around town so he didn't have a breadth of experience with civilian-level shuttlecrafts, but this email description was nonsense. Embleius motor rotator IV series - what the hell was that? And you couldn't clock a 120 on a Tesla propulsion system with that sort of acceleration core. Laughable. The firewall had better be damned good on this Alliance loaner. It clearly wasn't an earnest solicitation. Though maybe …
Kaidan brought up the datachips's code and fed the junk message through the coding matrix. Instead of eye rolling gibberish coding out, words appeared. Kaidan's brows drew tight. It changed into a short message:
Scorpion's surprise package will be retrofitted on First Day.
Kaidan read over it again still frowning. Anchor had kept all his other email messages from Terra Firma. If he trashed it, even deleted it off the drive, either he didn't realize what it was or there was something sensitive about it. He hadn't deleted the other messages. He probably never thought the Alliance would be reading them. If that was true, then he hasn't deleting this message from Alliance investigators. Anchor had obviously been trusted and climbed his way up. If there was an inner circle, and there were always inner circles, maybe Anchor was in the known on something not generally circulated. Surprise package for the scorpion? Outside of a birthday part, surprise packages weren't generally a good thing, especially if the message needed hiding. Maybe whatever this 'First Day' was the Scorpion's Ides of March.
Kaidan's message comm flashed. A message from Diana Allers again. Kaidan didn't even read it and deleted it straight off. She could go through Alliance PR just like everyone else. Just repeating whatever the latest news release said was all he had to say about it.
He clicked off his Omni-Tool and removed Liara's datachip. He couldn't risk returning the Omni-Tool with the datachip still installed. He put everything away in his pockets and braced himself against a crate idly drumming his fingers in thought. This was an amazing breakthrough. The attack on the Summit was confirmed then, and there was finally something more than rumors to go off. It was good. It should be making him feel better.
He squeezed his eyes shut and touched his forehead lightly. The migraine was worsening. All this information, all the good that had happened, should be relieving stress not causing it. It had to be stress provoking this one. He'd eaten and slept. He hadn't used his biotics in days since straining himself during his fight with the assassin.
He had no reason to be stressed. Shepard was alive again. 'Alive again' because she had been dead. Dead, except for filling out the form and putting a time stamp. He stood there with the future rolling out before him. Every word between them had been spoken. Every touch, every look, every moment, anything that could have been or was had come to the end, a book closed and put back onto the shelf. He'd stood there before, and each time he lost her, he felt more certain, more desperate, more heartbroken. He tore apart. Miranda rebuilt Shepard, but he'd had to rebuilt himself over and over again.
Shepard was untouched by any of it. He stood there, his entire world reorienting and lifting from the ashes, and she acted as if it were nothing - nonchalant, unfazed, unflappable while he reeled inside. Her perseverance, ability to just stand right up again and charge ahead, he loved it. It was who she was, he wouldn't have it any other way.
Maybe it was more than just personality though that made her strong when he crumbled. It was his love for her drove him to his knees. The difference between them might not be in resilience but indifference. Not that she was truly indifferent to him, he knew better. She'd wanted to see him after all. He had not doubt she cared, but that could mean any things. Perhaps he'd only been projected his feelings onto her the whole time. Consciously or unconsciously, the Alliance regs could be a smokescreen. Maybe it wasn't the Alliance standing in their way, it was Shepard herself. Someone could care for someone, love even, and still not want more than what was.
Dropping some big sacrifice on her doorstep and throwing himself at her feet would only be guilting her into taking him. He'd never know if they were together, because she truly wanted it, or whether it was indebtedness, guilt, and obligation. Maybe she wouldn't even really know. If he posited any hypothetical sacrifice, he'd still not know the truth. Whether she wanted to be with him or wanted to move on, he'd get the same answer. She'd say whatever it took to prevent him doing it. He could live his whole life never knowing why they were really together wondering if he'd manipulated her, if unintentionally. He couldn't imagine anything worse than forcing himself on her and living in some fake reality. There was irony thinking that she could give up what she wanted to give him what she thought he wanted, not realizing what he wanted all along wasn't just to be with her, but to be with her because she wanted to be with him. He didn't want to just not be turned away. He wanted to be wanted back, and there was no way to get an honest answer to that question.
He pinched the bridge of his nose and sucked in a heavy breath. Here he was, Shepard was alive, and he was still making himself miserable. He'd told himself if she lived, that would be enough. He had to let it be, move on. If they weren't going to be together, it was time to accept it. If he could stop focusing on himself, there were bigger things he could be part of. There was a whole world left to rebuild, things to stand for and defend. Savoring all the good in the past was fine, but after a point, it was time to strip away the things holding you back and live in the present. Shepard believed that. He admired it, but maybe it was time to stop admiring and start applying.
He took a deep breath shoving away from the crate and started toward the elevator. He loved Shepard, maybe he always would, but it was time to move on. It was okay to feel, but there was a time to move forward and stop looking back. That time was now.