I declare Monday nights to be sleepless nights. Probably because we have a hilarious game session of D&D on Sundays, and I spend the Sunday to Monday transition laughing madly at the chaos... and as a note, skinning a dead hydra to stuff all 6 party mates into the 6 heads... and then claiming to be the great and powerful Hydra God... it may fool idiotic troggs... it DOESN'T fool other humans (or liches). Stupid ideas never work twice... even if your DM just died laughing.
PS. Sovereign Glue... oh the shit I cause with that stuff and a bag of holding.
Sin of the Fallen– Stop reading ahead in the cheat guide! I'm working on that part next! Man, your precognition powers are impressive. Or I'm predictable. Either or.
Red Lilies- I'm sorry! I know, a chapter leading up to the previous cliff hanger is a PAIN, Shepard was busy doing stuff while Garrus was not-sleeping. And the Reapers were busy too (complaining mostly). I promise I won't have another lead-in repeat like that again!
Ica Rue– Ceph would probably be the oldest operating Reaper in the fleet. They did take quite a beating and had a few culled by the Victory Fleet. The youngest would be a Reaper constructed from one of the Protheans 'inducted' races. AND FFFFFFFF fruit baskets? *naked panic ensues* WREX~! Do something! *wail*
Thank you for your interest and comments. And now, a word from the story.
Limbo
Chapter 9
4/30/12
Starting a morning by getting dragged to the medbay was the definition of a 'bad morning' in Garrus' book. In Shepard's book, a trip to the hospital had been common sometime before lunch but after the massive ensuing gunfights that tended to break out when she took up a mission. Normally, by the time Karin Chakwas would finish her first mug of coffee, the amount of injuries she patched up usually meant she would spike her second mug of coffee with a generous splash of brandy.
At the start of Garrus' shift, Chakwas had already discharged Allers from the makeshift medbay, stating her concussion was healed to the point the reporter could move about safely; she had patched up Cortez and allowed the shuttle pilot to join the duty roster on half-shifts if he didn't overdo it and kept on his crutches, and Joker had received his regular treatment to knit bones. Garrus entered the curtained area to find Kaidan sleeping on an uncomfortable looking medical table and Joker keenly awaiting his arrival.
"Hey, what was that whole scrum just now? EDI said it sounded like you got in a fight with a bee hive." Joker glanced over his shoulder at the other side of his bed, where EDI was sitting next to him sedately.
Garrus blinked owlishly, still not awake enough to comprehend what had happened earlier or to deal with Joker's odd phrases. "Nightmare," was his only explanation, his left hand still numb from the prothean sphere. Chakwas gave the turian a gentle push towards one of the heavy machines and he slid his broken hand under the sensors of device.
"What's Alenko doing in here?" Garrus glanced over at the CO as the machine made several sharp clicks, examining the bone and plates.
Chakwas gave him a disapproving look that normally came from someone meddling in her patient's business, but sighed and relented. "When the Major works a double shift, he's usually prone to migraines. The most effective treatment for them, even in this day and age, is sleep. He took a simple sedative, and should be recovered when he wakes up."
Alenko had a wrinkle in his brow, even in his sleep, as if his dreams were plagued by things unseen.
…things unseen in the darkness... heavy pressure...
Garrus shuddered violently, his plates scraping across plates in a rattling noise. The dream had been visually empty, nothing frightening at all. It was the things he didn't see but knew that were there... that was terrifying. It was like being on Palaven again during the initial attack, being on Thessia, being on Earth – his dream was full of Reapers. And Shepard too, or whatever ethereal memory of Shepard without actually seeing her. Being unable to see her or touch her but knowing she was there, it was like being unable to watch her six as she walked right into danger.
"Hey... Garrus?" Joker tried calling his name again, and probably had been for a while now based on the concerned look on his face. EDI's mouth was drawn into a pursed 'O' of confusion, and Chakwas was frowning.
"What?" The dream was dusted away into his mind so he could concentrate.
"You aren't looking so hot." Joker said hesitantly, looking to EDI and then Chakwas for reassurance. Garrus knew Joker wasn't just stating the obvious, the pilot could see that he was being worn down and was trying to get him to notice as well. Plates were losing their high gloss for a dull matte, the blue colony tattoos were unkempt, and there was a slump to his shoulders that suggested defeat as he tried to alleviate the pain in his arm.
The doctor was pulling a latex glove onto her hand which meant one of two things... fingers were going in uncomfortable places, or she was going to come into contact with turian blood.
Garrus honestly prayed it was the latter...
Chakwas removed the bandage on his injured hand, revealing medigel plaster and dried blood caked along the groove of his plates. She carefully probed the area to see if the swelling had gone down enough to apply a modified bone weave onto his buckled plates. "Spending your entire shift in a suit seems to have aggravated your injury. Or maybe it was trying to hold that oversized rifle..."
Chakwas didn't seem to miss anything and Garrus kept a stony face if only to keep plausible deniability.
"There isn't much I can do other than have you take some anti-inflammatory treatment and hope the swelling goes down enough tomorrow to apply the weave." Chakwas turned Garrus' hand over with palm facing up, testing if he still had range of motion on his uninjured finger. While stiff and suffering from a radiating pain, Garrus could still curl his second finger enough to give him some degree of usefulness.
"I'll release you to duty if you can promise you will not be carrying that 90 pound monster with... or using any firearms until permitted." The wrinkles around Chakwas eyes deepened as she fixed him with a firm stare.
The Widow was an unforgiving weapon... even when not in combat. During that last push on Earth, he had tried shooting left-handed instead and found his aim suffered greatly. Even using a pistol with his injured hand was beyond him. If he dared to fire the Widow while injured, it would probably shatter the already broken bones.
"I can promise, I won't be carrying a sniper rifle to fix the battery." Garrus lifted his left hand in a turian salute, and this seemed to pacify the doctor as she watched his arm raise in the gesture.
"Lets see your other hand." The doctor ordered swiftly, releasing his injured hand and holding an open palm out to him and waiting for him to comply.
"Why? I only had that one-," Garrus tried to protest.
He really should have remembered you don't protest against Karin Chakwas. "Because you were handling an unidentified prothean mysterious object that did God-knows what, but I could hear it from in here!" There was a look in the doctor's eye that promised there would be no pain killers if he didn't comply.
Garrus reluctantly held out his other hand as well. There was no injury – of course – and aside from feeling a little numb from the jarring vibrations of the sphere, there wasn't anything unusual about it either. Still, the doctor hadn't been on board the Normandy as long as she had without being suspicious of the strange battery of injuries the crew limped back to the ship with.
"Shouldn't you be examining the sphere instead?" Garrus asked.
Chakwas smiled slightly, the slight gesture almost hidden under her completely serious 'I am a professional' expression. "Would you like me to take it's pulse? I'm a doctor, Garrus, not an anthropologist."
Joker tried to muffle a laugh with a loud cough. Even EDI seemed quite suddenly amused.
Weird humans and their equally as weird humor.
"Ok, I had that coming. I get it. I'll ask Javik about the sphere." Garrus pulled his hand back as the doctor finished her examination. The sphere was currently in the hardsuit pocket. After Chakwas had ended the dog pile and the sphere stopped vibrating and humming, no one had wanted to touch it. Leaving it on the ground wasn't an option though, and Garrus had picked up the metal sphere and jammed it quickly back into the pocket before it could do anything else.
"Javik was cleared to go on a double roster shift, exploring to the south. He wished to see how far it was possible to get on foot in this terrain." EDI spoke quickly, her normal clipped toned unchanged, but it was still evident the AI was expecting Garrus to be angry.
Garrus didn't even know if he had the energy to feel angry at the AI any more. Everything felt... empty. Or the rage moved to somewhere else. Perhaps it was just the strangeness of the dream compacted with waking up to be slammed to the ground by Vega, but Garrus felt … off. It was like trying to remember something before going to bed, only to wake up with the knowledge that you had been tryingto remember something and with no actual memory of what that could be.
"Thanks... EDI." Garrus said dully, though he did mean it. It saved him time of wandering around the base camp on this spirit-forsaken planet. Instead, he could get back to work on the battery and double check Harmony's progress while he slept.
Earlier, Harmony's quick scan of the sphere revealed only that it was made of kamacite, an iron-nickle alloy found commonly in meteorites. Unfortunately, that was about all the scan revealed. The sphere was solid, with no mechanical parts, and whatever had caused it to be the size of a Mako when Shepard had discovered it and also made it vibrate was a complete mystery. Liara's own little VI drone, Glyph, had taken extreme interest in the sphere, and followed Garrus like a balloon on a string until he had shooed it away. Wherever Liara was, she probably wasn't aware she was missing her little glowing helper bot.
And speaking of..., "Wait... where is Liara?" Garrus hesitated, the privacy curtain surrounding the medbay lifted back by his wrist.
"She's off doing her favorite activity... lurking. And stalking. Javik has a little blue shadow now." Joker spoke with a feigned boredom, but before he had even fully explained it had transformed into an excited grin. Across the room, Kaidan began to wake up, the sedatives long since worn off and the migraine appeared to be gone. Chakwas quickly made her way over to check over the CO before she could release him from medbay.
EDI clarified immediately. "Doctor T'soni is traveling with Javik to set up a way-point communicator for surface wide comm signals. Any stalking of the prothean that she does is completely coincidental." This last bit was mostly addressed to Joker.
The pilot gave EDI a smug look, "It's might be a coincidence when our little book-worm asari decides to go on a hike normally, but when she's with Javik... oo-oh, you can smell the ulterior motives."
The AI gave Joker a flat look. "What you are smelling is likely prothean hormones."
Garrus had carefully donned a look of horror at that last part.
Joker quickly made sure that Dr. Chakwas was out of hearing range before whisper quickly back, "If Mordin were here, he'd tell Liara the dangers of-,"
And that was when Garrus held up his hand to stop Joker. "Do you WANT me to never be able to talk to Liara without being morbidly curious or awkward ever again?"
"Vega and I have a pool going. We're betting when Javik finally snaps and drags Liara into the bushes somewhere." Joker was leering, both hands clapped together in what probably would have looked diabolical if he wasn't sporting almost a weeks worth of stubble and was now far too beardy to pull off a slick villain.
Garrus interrupted with a flat stare at the AI, "EDI, just how must stress is Joker under?"
"ALL OF IT." The pilot said, his voice sudden hoarse and pitched quiet a bit lower.
"He's getting better." EDI answered, her voice still smoothed and melodic. The synthetic pat the top of his leg.
"Says you." Joker shivered, casting a glance over at Chakwas before he went to bat away EDI's hand. However he never got that far, and instead curled his fingers around her wrist. The doctor was almost never out of the medlab, and Joker was forbidden to leave with his spine fractures still recovering. That was all Garrus needed to understand.
Mostly he understood humans were horny little bastards who could give krogan a run for their credits. But he, above the rest of the crew, knew what it was like to want to blow off steam.
Kaidan was now sitting on the medical table, his eyes a bit puffy from sleep but otherwise he seemed fine. The proxy-Commander raised a hand in greeting towards Garrus, a little muddled still but the doctor seemed pleased with his results after a good night's sleep.
"Dr Chakwas." Garrus raised his voice, calling out to her. "If you have some time to spare, mind if we hold an intervention of sorts for Tali? She was a mess the other day, and despite what Harmony says... I'd like a second opinion. One with a medical degree and a treatment plan preferably."
The doctor had found her mobile medical kit even before Garrus had finished speaking. Either the doctor had been looking for an excuse to examine quarian and her new geth counterpart, or more likely the older human could almost sense the frustration in the room from Joker. "I'm ready when you are. Joker... I fully expect you to be in medbay when I get back." She directed a scolding look towards the pilot.
"Don't do anything I wouldn't do, you two." Garrus' tones were low and harmonic, the conspiratorial turian message probably went unheeded but the implications didn't.
Both pilot and AI wore matching expressions of shock. EDI recovered first, a slight smile on her synthetic lips as she leaned against Joker, causing him to startle from his shock.
"Well that doesn't narrow much down, now does it?" Alenko muttered in tow, groggy and stumbling, yet surprisingly coherent to the situation. Garrus found he was surprised that Alenko was aware of the tension between pilot and AI.
The biotic leaned slightly, his voice a whisper. "I was awake for a lot longer than you probably thought. Playing dead... saves me the headache of waking up." There was only the briefest of smiles that flitted across the Major's face before he quickly donned the mask of groggy and incoherent.
"You, sir, are a tactical genius."
Tali had been indignant at the request to examine her, but relented in the end. The engineer wasn't running a fever, but she still was congested and there was a deep rattle in her chest that was clearing up. Chakwas had put on a full motherly rage of 'you should have known better' and turned it on Harmony, of all things.
The geth was the very model of repentant. However even feeling regret at their decision, Harmony still defended their choice. "Normandy is in a state of decline. If repairs are not completed and the core brought back to operation quickly, it is possible we will not have the ability to bring the vessel into space-worthy status again."
Tali nodded quietly at this, having taken one of Chakwas' tirades already.
Harmony's warning set Garrus into a state of alarm. Kaidan seemed to have dropped the charade of exhaustion and was suddenly wide awake and he hissed, "Wait... as in if we don't fix the ship now, we will never leave?"
The geth hesitated. Geth do not 'candy-coat' their answers, but she seemed to not want to give bad news. So when Harmony answered "Yes," Garrus felt the final pangs of anxiety set in. "The battery cannot sustain much more strain, and if the ship cools off before patching the breaches then condensation damage will destroy the equipment."
Making a direct path for his helmet to suit up, Garrus could only peripherally hear Alenko asking Chakwas to make a round and check if all crew were in any sort of condition to pull double shifts. Even the non-engineering crew were now being gang-pressed into double shifts, anything that could be done to take the pressure off the overworking Tantalus core was going to be attempted.
By the time the last latch was closed on his hardsuit, the entire clearing was buzzing with motion. Cortez was hobbling around with his leg in some sort of plastic brace as he and some of the other crew set mass effect field jacks on the ground to lift the Normandy up. The ship's belly was hidden among rubble and pulverized rocks, there was no way to fix the hanger bay without lifting the ship first.
"Heads up, Vakarian! In ten, the ship is going to start floating. Might be a little turbulence. Try not to be near anything that looks unstable." Steve waved as Garrus climbed the gangplank.
Harmony had taken over Chiktikka's shell again and purred pasted Garrus. "That would be the entire ship." The geth remarked.
"Wise ass, geth." Cortez chuckled, lowering himself to one knee to wrestle with the ME jack.
"I wonder where she gets it." Garrus had a feeling that Harmony was emulating a lot more than just Tali's gender.
The inside of the ship was still a steam room, and Kaidan's makeshift venting system seemed to still be functioning but couldn't even make a dent in the temperature. "Harmony, how much progress did you make on the battery?"
The drone rolled sideways to look up at him. "All holes have been patched. All severed conduits redone. Warning: Contents of battery core low on liquid lithium and element zero. Warning: battery power draw insufficient. Danger: Battery reaching peak temperature levels." Harmony synced to the system remotely and began firing off the system errors.
Two 'warning' errors and a 'danger'? … that was a feat in itself... and not a good one.
Garrus grit his teeth, mandibles flat against his jaw. "Tell me at least something is still in the green."
There was a slightly pause again from the geth. "System calibrations within acceptable parameters."
"Well. There is that." Garrus pushed past a tangle of cords and descended the ladder quickly to the crew deck. "Thank you, Harmony."
"You are welcome, Vakarian-Officer. This unit is going to monitor the drive core until Creator-Zorah arrives." The little combat drone, made for putting rockets into reapers troops, had a small magnetic tool kit fused to it's shell and had been converted from combat to repairs.
Harmony seemed to be comfortable stepping from Tali's suit to the robot shell now. For the first time, Chiktikka wasn't triggering doors to open and subsequently getting jammed in the mechanism, dumping an entire load of live rockets on the floor for no apparent reason, or making that Spirits-damned clicking noise – it was a vast improvement to have a geth inside the drone.
A little curious on how the combat drone got up and down the steep ladder, Garrus paused to watch the geth powered-drone go. Harmony simply drove the drone over the lip of the elevator and vanished. The thud that sounded at the bottom of the elevator shaft told Garrus that Harmony had overshot her destination by one floor.
"You ok down there?" Garrus leaned over the lip of the elevator shaft, hoping the geth was still tuned into his suits comm signals.
"This unit regrets the lack of hands." Harmony sounded a few notes off-pitch. "And steering. Functionality is still optimal, returning to duty." There was the high hum of the drone's mass effect fields as it bobbled out of the elevator and back into the engineering level.
The Normandy had not much improved its current situation over the night. A heat haze caused the ground to appear wobbly and uneven, and the battery housing was full of the same misty haze as the engineering floor. The heat was actually increasing in temperature, probably due to the heat dispersal system not getting enough power to function.
Garrus' mandibles fluttered a few times, the human equivalent of grinding teeth, and he quickly set about pulling a rather limited supply of the battery's reserve fluid from the under-deck storage. There would not be enough to completely refill the battery, not by a longshot. Garrus dumped all the remaining lithium and eezo slurry into the emergency hatch.
The computer gave a slightly blip. The orange warning alerts for low fluid were still firmly in place, adding a metaphorical drop in the ocean to the contents of the battery. However it did increase the output by 2%. Raising a hand to his helmet and flipping on his omni-tool, Garrus reviewed yesterday's request on what Kaidan needed the battery output to be to send a message back to Earth.
Taking a sharp hiss of air, Garrus winced at the glowing '43%' that the omni-tool illuminated. That...well, crap. Currently, battery output was at 6%, with most of that being eaten by the overheating drive core. It was going to take some kind of voodoo magic to squeeze that kind of power from the battery.
Normandy suddenly groaned, the ship listing at an angle. There was the sound of durasteel squealing in protest and the vessel began to tip sideways. Objects seemed to decide gravity could go fuck off and started indiscriminately floating or slamming against the wall as the weak mass effect fields tried to kick in. Garrus stumbled, slamming into the wall and reflexively reaching up to grasp one of the conduits that traversed the ceiling. Then the ship lurched in the opposite direction, trying to compensate for the sideways angle.
Activating his comm, Garrus cried out, "Cortez, this is not a LITTLE turbulence! It's like being in that damned Mako again! Level it out!" Normandy shuddered, the tilt becoming more extreme as the ME jacks overcompensated on the left side.
There was only swearing in response over the comm, but the ship slowly began to correct. By the time the heavy vibrations had stopped and Normandy was still, the whole ship now listed backwards at a slight angle so that a dropped object would roll to the rear of the battery. In fact, most of the tools that hadn't made it back into the toolkit were now flat against the door threatening to escape the moment it opened.
Whoever was on the opposite side of that door was going to be witness to the great wrench migration when they opened it up.
"What's the damage like out there, Cortez?" Garrus stooped to pick up the fallen tools.
Static for a few seconds, like an angry ocean. "Well... Joker is having some kind of fit when he saw it."
Garrus found a box of thermal clips tumbled into the corner with his magnetic hex set. Huh... he'd been looking for those at one point. "That doesn't mean much. Joker went into a fit when Grunt cracked the window in the cargo bay. Is he coherent? If he's just making soundsrather than words..."
"Seems like mostly swearing." Cortez had to fairly yell over what was probably Joker's profanity laced shock. "I didn't know Joker could swear in quarian."
"Not too bad then if all we've got is swearing. Pulled a miracle from somewhere, I guess." Garrus found a piece of his old armor, the one that had taken missile damage back on Omega. He stared at it hawkishly, wondering when it had splintered off from the rest of his gear.
There was static over the comm, signaling Steve was holding the line open for some reason. "Message from Joker. He says... and I quote... 'Lacking the pole, it appears Garrus now stores miracles up his ass as well. Next galactic threat, we're launching him as an advance strike team.'End quote." Cortez only barely managed to say all that without bursting out laughing.
"Wise ass." Garrus grumbled.
Something clinked against the ground and the rolled past his toes. Looking down quickly, there sat that strange silvery prothean sphere. Garrus' hand jerked back, reaching to his pocket. During the jarring the Normandy had received, the storage pocket had snapped open and the sphere escaped.
A high pitched tone resonated from the sphere, much like a tuning fork after striking a surface. The silvery object came to a halt along the door and the high frequency sound cut off.
"I'm not picking you up." Garrus told the sphere.
Not surprisingly, the sphere said nothing.
"I'm serious. I'm leaving you there. Whoever opens the door can deal with you."
For a moment, Garrus felt if the sphere could talk, it would tell him conversing with shapes was generally a sign of mental instability. There was a defiant moment in which he could picture himself throwing it across the room, and then Garrus felt his resolve crumble and surrender set in. It was just a sphere. Shepard's random trinket, a paperweight for the past year and a half. It didn't cause his nightmare... truthfully he had been having enough of those on his own. And turians didn't have the touch-memory ability, so whatever it did beside vibrate and hum would have no effect on him.
"I have no clue what I'm doing in here. Spirits... we could all use a little help right now." Reaching down, Garrus plucked the sphere off the floor and rolled it with his thumb. Just a sphere.
Then, quite suddenly, Garrus felt an expected wave of emotion. Triumph, relief, elation, and to top it all off he had a plan now. It was possible to create more of the eezo-lithium slurry for the battery. It was possible to boost power to the venting system using a makeshift solar grid and leave the battery for the drive core and quantum comm system. Each of these ideas weren't just sudden inspiration, it was a fully designed blueprint to show step-by-step how to repair this mess.
A gasp caught in his throat and came out as a choke. "What the... hell was that?" He blinked, and then blinked again as if clearing cobwebs of sleep from his eyes.
The sphere didn't answer. But the longer Garrus held it in his palm, the more this strange...pressure seemed to be building.
The only disturbance Garrus had during his sixteen hour double shift was Alenko coming in halfway through and insisting he take a break. Failing to convince him, the biotic dragged him out of the battery in an aura of blue energy. There was simply no arguing with biotics... so he had been forced to relent and took an hour break to eat and escape from his sweltering suit. The second an hour had elapsed, he was back in the suit and lodged firmly in the battery again, much to Alenko's dismay. Harmony had set up a link between Garrus and Tali, allowing them to keep track of their progress.
"Garrus... what kind of turian savant are you? Output is at 23%, and I saw that mess we're calling a battery." Tali voice came over the comm, causing Garrus to almost lose his grip on the magnetic screwdriver.
"Only at 23?" Garrus tried to flip his omni-tool on to review the calibrations, but he was coated with a slick layer of powered lithium and element zero. There was a liquifying mess of powdered metals and volatile acid in a crucible in front of him, a bubble of a mass effect field keeping the caustic liquid from splattering as it homogenized together.
In his right hand, the sphere hummed on occasion but remained still as he worked. When he needed both hands to work, he found he would put the sphere on the floor and curl his foot over it, pinning it down rather than returning it to his pocket. The belief that it was some sort of 'inspiration sphere' or somehow was transferring solutions to fixing the battery had worked itself into his head and now Garrus was loathe to put it down at all. His eyepiece visor was quickly in peril of being replaced as his favorite belonging with this silvery sphere.
"'Only'? Overachieving turian-," Tali lapsed into a few choice quarian curses, "Not that I'm not happy we're working through this, but you are making me look bad by comparison." There was more of a tease than fury behind Tali's words.
Passing his omni-tool over the crucible of liquid metal, Garrus paused only long enough to check the composite was high enough yield to match the battery's current quality. "Then I apologize in advance." Garrus set a conduit to drain from the crucible into the battery's tanks and flipped on the pump.
"For what?" Tali asked, suspicious.
"For raising the bar." Garrus felt his mandibles widen in a grin as he watched the flickering numbers of the power output suddenly raise.
Tali noticed the change too over her linked system. "What on – but that's- Keelah! Garrus, what did you do?" The power output was now hovering around 40%.
It still wasn't enough.
Slumping against the wall, the little silvery sphere hummed in a high frequency in his gloved hand. He was completely out of ideas again. Within the double shift had spent down here, Garrus had even thought to check the grounding system and found it was sucking power from the batteries in an superfluous attempt to prevent any shorts. Any repairs the Normandy needed now for the battery simply couldn't be done while crashed on this planet with the routine tools he had. Normandy needed a full overhaul, not a patch job. All he could do at this point was toy with the calibrations and perhaps coax 1% at best out of the systems. They still didn't have the power output to send a message back to Earth.
There was a long pause over the comm, Tali seeming to catch on to Garrus' sudden silence. "Well... ok, you've raised the bar pretty high. But I keep a few things held back for emergencies too." The little quarian said softly. The console gave a chirp and his omni-tool linked with Tali's beeped as well.
44% power output. The battery was just 2% over the required output needed to send a message to Earth now. "What did you do?" Garrus found his voice, the brittle feeling of despair shattering immediately.
"I cut some subroutines that EDI had automated. It means us engineers are going to have to get used to manually doing calibrations everyday and by hand again. The old fashioned way, as you prefer it. But it will save us some power." Tali's voice was fatigued, the congestion from the simulated bacteria exposure still plugging her sinuses and giving her a miserable nasally sound. But there was still the tone of pride in her voice.
"Old fashioned way?" Garrus rumbled in amusement.
"Just like the old times, yes? With all the times you've said that, I feel like I should apply for senior turian hierarchy rites for you. At the very least, you'd could tell those stories about the Mako climbing through five feet of snow... uphill... both ways... as we went to stop Saren."
"It was only uphill both ways because Shepard thought it was fun to drive off cliffs." Garrus recalled, a wistful double tone to his voice.
At the mention of Shepard, the comm fell silent. Tali was afraid of treading on toes with the subject, and it was still a taboo subject.
Schrodginer's cat. Until the the box was opened and the deadly outcome revealed, the cat was both alive and dead. But according to humans cats have nine lives... and humans had reincarnation... Garrus didn't quite understand what it meant, but it sounded like they were one of the most hopeful races in the galaxy.
"Garrus... I'm going to end my shift. You too, right?" The quarians voice was unsure, tentative.
"Yeah. Soon. Just have to clean up. Can't violate the Vakarian-Zorah treaty, or you might revoke my beachfront property rights." Garrus looked down at the silvery orb in his hand. There was a soft laugh over the comm, and then it clicked off as Tali left he station.
The sphere rumbled in his hand. The glove absorbed most of the vibrations, but his fingers very suddenly went numb. Relief.It was so thick it was like a soporific. Garrus sagged against the wall almost numb entirely with relief. His forearms ached and there was a terrible strain on his injured hand, the glove felt uncomfortably tight around swollen plates.
The comm signal cut as Tali began clean up at her workstation, ready to end the long shift. "Almost there... Shepard." Garrus murmured, eyes heavy and bleary. Lifting the sphere, he could see his helmet reflected in the glossy surface, reversed and upside down. "I hope you are watching. Wherever you are."
Pressure.
The sphere trembled from Garrus' fingers as he jerked back in alarm, bouncing off his knee and rolling into the corner.
"No! Don't do that. Go back to humming and doing odd prothean things.. but don't … don't do that." Garrus' voice was unsteady, his mind already revolted at the memory of the nightmare again. Pressure – whatever it was, seemed to represent Reapers in that dream.
The sphere was silent and still.
"Vakarian-Officer." Harmony popped into his comm signal, the geth's synthetic voice pitched at a questioning tone. "Your heart rate has accelerated and your hardsuit is detecting an adrenaline spike... are you functional?"
"I'm fine. Just tired." Garrus hesitated, his visor flicking over the sphere and a stream of figures feeding into his sensors. Kamacite sphere of perfect dimensions, no power source and no moving parts, and it was humming again. "I think this thing is taunting me."
There was an incoming transmission, and based on the frequency it was planet-wide. Liara got her comm-system in place, it seemed. "All Normandy crew, sending comm back to Earth and making an attempt to hail any nearby craft within within ten. Standby for response."
'Standby for response.' If Shepard was out there... Spirits... let her respond.
Garrus was out of the battery even before the prothean sphere stopped rocking gently on the ground. Alone in the dark and caustic smelling forward battery of the ship, the orb seemed only to be just an orb, but that didn't make Garrus any less wary of it.
