03: Lumbar
The Admiral's message arrives. Wreckage wrapped like a gift, equal parts condolence and command. The bones of the SR-1 have washed up on some distant, icy shore. Briefly, Shepard considers making the pilgrimage. The thought lives in her for a few vulnerable hours, but it can't survive the night.
During her sleepless staring match with the stars, Shepard's skin crawls, then begins to itch so insistently that she has to leave the bed. Has to leave the room.
She paces through the desolate third shift corridors. Stalks the empty crew deck. Stares at the locked door of the forward battery and finally decides against Alchera entirely. Too direct, too much like spitting in God's eye. If she goes back, whatever delicate paradox fills her with breath will collapse like a punctured lung.
Thanks to Miranda and the Illusive Man, Shepard has walked out of her own grave - but she knows that plot of earth is far from empty. No, her would-be resting place is full to bursting. The iced-over bones of twenty comrades, lying there in wait.
She's staring at the floor, counting tiles so that she doesn't have to count names.
He's staring at a datapad, reviewing a chemical analysis while making a quick shower run.
They collide head-on. A clatter of kneecaps, then the bruising wham of two intersecting torsos. The chest guard of his armor strikes her collarbones with xylophone precision, buckling her in half. She stumbles, her face installs neatly into his neck.
One offended inhalation of wrinkled skin. She realizes two things. First: he's the tallest person she's ever met. Second: his skin has an herbaceous aftertaste. It takes her a moment, then the scent memory arrives. Eucalyptus. Mint, maybe. Something cut from a tree with a sharp knife, milky green sap protected by years of heavy bark.
"Shepard! Must apologize. Corridor typically less crowded at three hundred hours."
She shakes herself, going red, but embarrassment is a lost cause. Instantly, a doctor's unsentimental hands are on her. Checking for bruises, lacerations, mortal wounds. He shoves his datapad into her arms and puts both hands to her temples, bending her neck experimentally from side to side. No spinal injuries.
"I'm fine, Professor. Skip the exam."
His squint, aimed like an x-ray. So intensely not convinced that she feels warm radiation penetrating her bones. Huge armored hands, spanning both sides of her head, covering her ears. Big enough to block out the noise of the ship and substitute a clean ceramic echo, the purr within a seashell.
"Not CMO. Can't give you orders," he says, nearly to himself.
His long fingers have drifted into her hair. A glitter of sea foam trickles down her scalp. She tries to hide a startled inhale, but his eyes are too big to be fooled.
He adds: "Can offer professional advice."
He releases her slowly, letting his left hand drag to her shoulder. No question that his eyes see the gooseflesh, the shiver, all the evidence that collects in the wake of his cool, armored fingers.
"Let's hear it, then," she grunts.
"Rest, Shepard. Please."
Her shoulder receives a squeeze. A firm grip that could be accused of becoming a caress if left unattended.
With nothing more to add, he takes back his datapad and finishes his walk to the showers.
Shepard returns to her cabin, tries to follow his advice. For the first time since being remade, her mind is not fixated on the hole in the ceiling. She's trapped in a mirror image, dwelling on the solidity of the floor.
Two decks below, Mordin Solus is naked.
Until now, it had never occurred to Shepard that Mordin Solus had a body beneath his armor at all.
Four hours later, Korlus lurks outside the otherwise serene laboratory window. Calling it a habitable world requires a lie of optimism. When it is surrounded by pure black vacuum, viewed from a distance of thousands of kilometers, the planet appears trampled. Mud gray and pale with smog, a congealed mass that has endured too many aeons beneath the boil of a heat lamp.
Out here in the Terminus, they call this undignified rock the Starcraft Cemetery. It's a grandiose title that can't erase the planet's mercenary holdings and shameful murder rate - second only to Omega. Shepard can almost smell the metal slag and toxic fumes from here.
It's just like a krogan warlord to have a taste for wreckage.
She wonders with an acidic hiccup of nostalgia if any chunks of the SR-1 have somehow ended up down there. Scavengers, traders, a Cerberus flunky with old debts to pay. Scant possibilities, thin spider threads trailing down from alternate universes. Some small battered scrap of her past might be rescued from this dung heap. The idea is romantic, and far more appealing than Alchera.
Shepard stares at the Cemetary without seeing it. The translucent, filmy overlay of Professor Solus flickers in the glass. Where his image reflects above the planet, that is where her eyes rest. Haloed by the eclipse of a trash heap, he inputs mundane experimental data into his console, ignoring her.
The lab has been unusually quiet this morning. Tense and silent.
The awkwardness has nothing to do with their late-night meeting on the crew deck. Nothing to do with her. The Professor exists outside her world of stirred breaths and fluttering heartbeats. Probably incapable of noticing.
He's mad about the krogan.
Not a word since Shepard had ordered the ex-STG agent to accompany her planet-side. Solus is a tactical gimme: krogan redundancies gobbled up in the heat of his incendiaries. Their regenerating limbs and organs stunted by the lick of hungry flames. If this krogan decides to be difficult, Shepard wants the Professor around. Just like she wants a backup biotic. Keep the warp fields coming. Jack will get a chance to stretch her twitchy, bloodthirsty legs.
Shepard is disappointed. Instead of the logical unflappability she has come to expect from the Professor, he is throwing a salarian hissy-fit. Politics and bullshit, all of it ancient history.
She takes a forceful sip of coffee. Cold already. Bitter with aluminum aftertaste.
Enough.
Scowling, she fills the unwelcome silence with her own rough voice.
"What kind of research did you do with STG?"
Her interruption is sudden and tactless, but he doesn't flinch. Almost as if he'd expected this, he turns his head. Enough to show he is listening, not enough to meet her eye. He keeps picking at his work.
"Studied krogan genophage."
A quick answer, even by his standards. He follows it up with a glance at his omni-tool's haptic interface. But the look is a little too long, the screen a little too empty of data. He seems hesitant to say more. Perhaps he assumes she wouldn't be interested.
Or perhaps he's hiding something.
She pushes.
"Why would the STG study a bio-weapon that was deployed hundreds of years ago?"
She annunciates every word carefully, laying her homework at his feet. His alien body language is harder to read than the countless human beings she gamed for the Reds. So she watches carefully. Catches a rigid pulse in the winding length of his spine. A nerve, struck.
"All species evolve, adapt, mutate." He finally says, with a masking shrug. "If genophage weakens, need to be prepared."
Almost a decade spent shaking down saps for money and drugs, eyes roving for undercover cops. Even from behind, across a tangle of incompatible genetic queues, she knows how to spot a liar.
"Prepared," she says, unimpressed. "Prepared how?"
He still won't turn and look at her, but in the stifling quiet she can hear his heavy eyelids close. Open. Close again. Cautious seconds, buying time. She recognizes a last-ditch defense mechanism when she sees one.
He tries overloading her with information, hurling a tech attack from behind thin cover.
"Military schematics for likely krogan population growth. Political scenarios for attack points. Genophage reduced krogan numbers. Species aggression unchecked. Population explosion would be disastrous."
His decoy babble floats through her head, then she hears the tell; that forceful intake of breath.
"Simple recon. Nothing to worry about."
"Never said I was worried," she says, voice packed thick with warning.
In mirror-dark reflection, she watches the suspicious tightening of the Professor's flexible salarian backbone. How many vertebrae he must have. So many spongy layers of delicate cartilage, weak and exposed. His back to her, propped up like a stack of cards. All that strategy and care, just to keep himself standing. She wonders how he does it.
She hopes her investment in the mission excuses her stare. Her eyes haven't left him since she entered the lab.
That, she knows, is another lie of optimism. Her fascination has nothing to do with fragile galactic politics. It begins and ends in the Professor's lab. A shared twinge of the spine. One-to-one symmetry, following a path of flaring nerves and niggling doubts.
For secret weaknesses, the two of them appear evenly matched.