Chapter Nine - Embers

It felt like every word was a punch to my gut, the force travelling up and splintering my ribcage, sending the shards into my heart and ripping it into pieces. The verbal hammers were sent from a face, teeth bared in a snarl, and eyes that gleamed like black marbles with hate and disgust.

"...and I will NEVER help you.'

The call clicked off and I was left, shaking, to bury my head in the pillow and try to forget how one of my oldest friends had just called me a murderer to my face and blamed me for the deaths of almost everyone we knew. For the second time. And it hurt just as much as it had all those months ago. I couldn't stop the tears that soaked into my pillow.

I don't know how long I lay there, the deactivated Prothean device forgotten on the floor. I'd stopped crying, but I still wasn't feeling very well when my door slid open. I couldn't bring myself to move and see who it was. The audible footsteps meant it was probably Irina, anyway. Mena and Nia were almost silent whenever they moved, but I'd spent enough time with the Asari to know her armor wasn't really quiet.

"Uh, Selos?" She sounded hesitant. "Can I come in?"

"You already did."

"Then can I stay?" she went on. Her voice was timid, not something you'd expect from a mercenary on Omega. The cynical side of my mind, which had listened to what Bern had said when I'd told him I was with the Corsairs, brought up that it could be an act. I tried to ignore that thought, though. I trusted her.

"I don't know why you'd want to."

My bed creaked slightly, the mattress dipping down. "This is a star map isn't it?" The bed shifted and I assumed she had picked it up. "I've never seen anything like it before."

I grunted. "I'm not surprised. It's Prothean."

She seemed to be waiting for me to say more, but I didn't really feel like it. So there was just awkward silence until she asked, "Is that what you were speaking when you turned it on?"

"Yes."

She didn't seem to know what to do. Eventually I felt a hand on my back, fingers cooler than a human's just resting between my shoulder blades. She didn't move it or anything, just left it there.

"What happened?" There was a pause. "If you're alright with talking to me about it, I mean. You don't have to. You just seemed so excited before you came in here, and it's nice to see you smile. Not enough people do that on this station."

"I called a friend. She works with someone who could have gotten us a ship." I sighed. "It didn't go well."

"A ship? Why?"

"These maps aren't just starcharts. They have detailed data on every planet, accurate to the last survey or when their communications grid failed. That includes precise locations of every facility they maintained, and descriptions of the purpose of those places." I lifted my head up just to pound it down into the pillow. "It would be a gold mine. Unspoiled Prothean ruins, plenty of artifacts to sell. Anything truly revolutionary we could sell to the Council. And Prothean weapons tech... if we could just get to it we'd be rich."

Those weren't my real reasons, of course. Not all of them, anyway. I mostly just wanted to get a Prothean fabricator or a reliable source of their materials. The galaxy wasn't really ready for some of the technology I'd seen in the memories, even if it could give everyone a chance to prepare for the Reapers, which was what the mass-murdering machines had been called. I still had no clue what to do about them; it wasn't like anyone would have believed me if I'd gone out ranting about death machines from deep space.

"Are you sure that's a good idea?" Her hand clenched my shirt. "The Terminus is even more chaotic than usual. It's barely even been a day and apparently all of the major merc and pirate groups are crashing against each other like waves on the shore."

I shrugged. "It doesn't matter anyway. Cessa would be the only one I'd trust not to turn on us, and Lilush was the only way I had to get in touch with her."

Her hand relaxed on my back, patting awkwardly. "Hey, that's ok. We'll find a way once things calm down, alright?"

"It's just... Lilush was one of my only friends growing up, along with her brother. After what happened, I don't think either of them will ever talk to me again." She didn't ask the why. Just like when we first met, neither of us asked about the past or why we had to go to Omega. I still wasn't really in high-spirits, but I felt a little bit better. Except, as I just realized with a big rumble in my stomach, I was hungry.

"Was that you?"

I blushed. "Yeah. It means I'm hungry."

"Oh!" She actually sounded excited. I remembered from while we were setting up that she'd always gotten excited around mealtimes. "Well, come with me. We can fix that easily enough!"

Apparently, she liked to cook. That became clear as she complained about what we had stocked in the fridge but she laid out a pile of ingredients anyway and started fiddling with the stove.

"You don't have to cook for me, you know."

She chuckled. "Nonsense. You look like a stick already, and it's only been a few weeks. You're obviously not eating right, so you deserve at least one decent meal!"

"It's a shame I didn't know you guys were so lonely around here; you never really messaged me or I could have tried to come around and help out a lot. I'm not really essential to the Cabal, and most of the time we're not doing much anyway." She smiled. "It's really bad out there now, but sometime I'm going to take you out to eat down in Doru. There's this one human place that does dextro too, and it keeps the place clean so you two could even come."

The last part was, of course, directed at the two Quarians behind us in the living room. The elder was teaching her daughter something, at the moment, so neither was paying very much attention to us. They'd given a polite greeting about how they were glad I was ok when we came back in, but that was it.

"You probably know more about human food than I do."

"Why do you think that?" She had some type of cured meat that Sal'Ris had bought in a pan on the stove, and was cutting up some slightly-aged fruit into a bowel. She shooed me away every time I got too close to the food, slapping my hand away with her biotics and telling me to be patient.

"Because there were only a few human families on my planet, and none of them cooked much. I grew up on Batarian food after the first few reactions when I tried eating something dextro." I shrugged. "I still can't cook it, but I know a lot of the dishes the low and middle caste eat."

Mena looked up and chimed in, "Except he can't take Batarian Ale. He nearly hit the far wall with the spray when Sal'Ris gave him some." I grumbled a few oaths under my breath, but her comment didn't really make me mad. It was true, after all.

Irina just laughed, the sound like bubbling water, and wriggled her entire body in a gesture I'd learned to equate to a human headshake. "Sounds like quite an event. Reminds me why I never drink."

The Quarian shrugged, her daughter apparently done with the lesson for today. "It helps me forget some of the things I've seen, so I do it when I can."

I grunted. "I can understand that, but I never intend to do it again. That headache was worse than my migraines." Irina had seen me suffering from one of them before, so the wince was obvious.

It took almost half an hour for the food to finish, but I could actually relax and feel like things would work out as the two of us sat, ate, and just... talked.

It was with a big sigh of relief that I greeted Mena as she finally stepped in through the airlock, practically dragging a huge bin of... something in tow. I'd woken up two days after the first meal with Irina to find her gone, no sign whatsoever to show where she'd gone. That was unusual by itself, since she never went out alone. When the airlock registered that she'd left just after I went to sleep, I'd gotten more worried. It had been over a shift and she still wasn't back.

I couldn't handle something happening to her after what happened with Sal'Ris, who was still in that medically induced coma. She hadn't been answering my calls or messages, an automated response saying that her account was currently set not to receive anything and to try again later. She'd left Nia behind, and knowing the woman she had to be planning to come back, but as the hours dragged on I was about to call the Asari so we could go out and search. Omega was bad enough normally, but the war with the Blue Suns and Aria's constant press to smash their main base meant the smaller gangs were running rampant.

Then she came in. I was standing staring at her, my arms crossed and my posture as stiff as any angry Batarian's. This was the first time she'd ever really upset me, and it was still more worry than anything else. "Mena. Just what do you think you're doing?"

She froze, her hand dropping from its rim and the bin thudding to the ground with a clank. I just stared, unblinking until she started wringing her hands and looked away from me. There was still no answer from her.

"You've been gone for over ten hours now, and you haven't been answering any calls." I sighed and my arms slowly dropped down to my side slowly. "Do you have any idea how worried I've been?"

The Quarian kept wringing her hands. "I-I didn't think it would take this long. The encryptions were better than I thought and it took forever to find what I was looking for. The inventory system was worse than even the 91st's, and then the parts were almost rusted together and..."

She was rambling. I sighed. "Mena, what did you do?"

My employee and friend still didn't look at me. "I might have hacked the Blue Suns' omnitools and found out they'd been guarding a storage cache here in Fumi."

"You stole something from one of the biggest merc groups in existence."

She flinched at the words, but nodded. Then she started rationalizing, "Aria said that the Blue Suns were fair game. The building had been looted already but I found these," she gestured at the box, "inside. They're parts to an old combat mech. I-I thought we could use something like that to help protect the store if we could fix it up. I've worked with them before, I know..." I waved a hand and cut her off, in the same motion stepping forward and embracing her in a stiff and awkward hug.

"Mena, I'm not mad that you did it. I'm mad that you did it by yourself when you could've gotten hurt and we'd never find out. You shouldn't scare me like that; just imagine how Nia would feel if she lost you."

The next fifteen minutes were mostly silent after Mena agreed not to pull something like that without telling us again. She was mostly relaxing, the box of miscellaneous parts abandoned by the door. Mena would move it when she was ready, since it was her idea and her project.

The bandages unwound from my fingers and I let out a sigh of relief. There were still marks from the burns, but they didn't hurt. And according to Dr. Solus, the Salarian in charge of where Sal'Ris was being treated, it was past the risk of infection. Our Batarian friend hadn't woken up, yet, but that was apparently because she was in a medically induced coma while everything regenerated. Two more days and she'd be woken up, another one following that and he'd release her back into our care. Free of charge, which was something I really hadn't expected from Omega.

Irina giggled at the sound I made as I could finally wriggle my fingers again. The rude gesture I flipped her just earned another giggle, and a snort from Mena. She was on the other couch, messing with two VI cores. She'd been complaining for days about both the quality and the disorganization of the parts she'd taken, since apparently it had scraps from almost a dozen different kinds of mechs and not just the old model she'd been looking for. So everything had to be sorted, and repurposed to fit into what she was working on. Right now she was trying to figure out which of the two cores it had contained worked better.

That meant she'd co-opted the main projector for a simulator program that I didn't even pretend to understand. According to her it basically ran the VI, with a simulated body and pre-set scenario packs to measure what it would do without risking getting shot, tackled, or otherwise attacked by a glitchy machine. It looked like a video game, kind of, like something Nia would play. Except, you know, it was violent enough that we kept her out of the room during this.

I winced as the mech blasted the enemy-designated units and kept going, not listening to the IFF functions. Mena cursed and reset the simulation, her fingers hacking out changes into the coding.

"You've been working on that thing for awhile. Maybe try taking a break?"

She sighed and the simulation shut off, a standby screen replacing it. That screen vanished as we flipped onto another broadcast. The Citadel news station I'd flipped it onto didn't show up, though, instead a reedy Salarian voice overlaying a projection of a ship painted with Aria's markings on it. As I watched the entire ship shuddered, flashes of light cascading down its side and tilting it slightly before the maneuvering thrusters flared. The camera zoomed out and showed a delayed picture of a ship in Blue Suns colors shaking itself apart as spurts of flame and debris clouded the space around it.

I didn't have my translator attached, but subtitles along the bottom of the screen supplied that this was some Blue Suns Captain's command ship, a headline scrolling at the bottom identifying this as Aria's personal broadcasting station. It explained how the Blue Suns had jumped into the system, engaging both the Eclipse and Aria's own Black Fleet, before a mess of slips had started fleeing from Omega itself, the defensive fleet and the station's own guns blasting dozens of freighters out of the void before they jumped to the relay and out of the system.

The destruction of the battlecruiser basically marked the end of the battle as I checked the data on my omnitool. Nothing was confirmed, but apparently the ships that had fled the station marked the last of the Blue Suns holdings that weren't encircled or dragged down in the fighting. Captain Dougal's personal ship had been sighted fleeing, so that meant he'd jumped ship. Tarak would die the moment Aria found him, which meant the Blue Suns were done for on Omega.

A quick report was typed up on my omnitool, summarizing the events and linking the more reliable news reports and video footage I could find. It was off after a few minutes, and we ended up just gossiping with Irina about what this meant. Hooked into the Cresting Wave's network, she knew what was happening better than us. I was selective about including anything she told me in reports, though, not wanting her to be punished if anyone found out about the leaks. So basically I just passed on that, in the wake of the death of the Talons' leadership, somebody had already stepped in and started organizing the group into something else. They were currently cooped up in their enclaves in upper Fumi, only attacking if someone threatened them. The Shadows were barely alive at this point, most of their members having defected. The Batarians had been executed by the White Tigers, apparently, and that had a large portion of the district's population up in arms against them. I'd told everyone that it didn't seem like they'd be able to hold everything they'd taken, but that they would definitely still have the strength to provide hangers for any vessels that wanted to dock.

They'd also been fighting the Brotherhood of the Fallen, something I'd made clear I didn't approve of. But there was nothing I could do. They didn't need to know who all I associated with, and since my business could conceivably take me all over the station I had a free pass to get by without questions as long as I supplied them.

I wasn't sure what else to do after the report was done except just talking to Mena and Irina. It was a big change to just be able to spend time with them, but that wouldn't last. The simple fact was that I had to open the shop again now that this district at least was peaceful and I was healed. It would raise suspicion if I didn't act like I was trying to at least make money.

"What are you doing Mr. Selos?" The high voice came out of nowhere and made me jolt, the diagnostic wire ripping out of the port on the gun and shutting down the command prompt I'd been working on. I had to bite back a curse since that undid fifteen minutes of work.

I took a breath to calm myself. I'd been having anger issues ever since the starmap had opened and that last flashback had come through. I couldn't blame Nia for being curious; I understood how torturous it was to be stuck inside with nowhere to go, since that had happened during blizzards back home. Especially when you were a kid with as much energy as she had. "I'm trying to fix the coding in this. I'm really bad at it though."

"Can I try?"

I blinked. Mena had enough on her hands with the half-built mech in the other side of the room and her insistence to work parts of my shifts, so I hadn't asked her to help. But I knew that Nia spent a lot of time working on a terminal, and Mena had said that the girl coded with her free time. It was hard to forget the screaming face that had resulted when they were still new to the store. "Maybe. Do you think you can code it to alternate between heatsinks? Like, it diverts all the heat to one side until that one starts to vent and then uses the other while that one cools down?"

She made a little purring, whining sound and I scooted over so she could hop up onto the bench. She almost had to kneel on it to comfortably reach the console that was part of the table with the hardwired connection to link up to guns that couldn't be serviced wirelessly. That also meant they couldn't be hacked, though, so that was why I made sure that my custom guns needed the wired connection.

I had a hard time keeping up with the lines of code as she swapped the keypad into a Khellish script. She stopped once or twice during it to look something up on her omnitool before hammering away at the tablet again. Five minutes passed before she used the scan function on the code and started reaching for the gun. She paused then, though, and looked at me.

I smiled at the tacit way of asking for permission. "I took out the ammo block; it's perfectly safe to test. It's set to build up the heat as though it's firing, though."

Permission granted, she picked it up. I was glad to see her hold it carefully away from herself, but it was a bit saddening to see someone so young knowing how to use a gun. Her finger fit well enough into the trigger guard, and then she started squeezing the trigger. Six times, and then the right side of the barrel was glowing, an actuator that was a recent modification to the design pushing it out and revealing the casing around the actual firing tube and accelerators. The extra space meant the sink would cool faster. Not fast enough for continuous firing, not by a longshot, but with only a second or two gap with proper fire management. The test matched up, mostly with the sinks extending and retracting in a practice rhythm. The girl's coding actually worked, a lot better than mine would have.

Her chatter in Khellish explained what she'd done, but I couldn't understand all of it. Most of it was as clear as the water during an algal bloom back home, but I gathered that she'd overwritten the entire firing sequence and worked out a bridge between her coding and the other systems inbuilt into the gun. She seemed excited, talking about how she was glad to be able to actually do something.

How fast and well she'd done it made me feel a little bit inadequate. But as the part of my mind that thought in Prothean now was quick to go to, nobody could be a master of everything. Nia wouldn't have a chance at designing a gun, which I was starting to feel more confident about doing even without pulling the designs from my memories. Everyone had to specialize; that was a basic part of Prothean civilization even during their fall. While the dead Prothean inside my head had been a gunsmith, and to an extent an armorer and a mechanic, he would have been just one of those things if it hadn't been for the Reapers.

I made sure that all the coding for the gun was backlogged into the system under three layers of password protection before unplugging the diagnostic cord and slipping the covers back into place, leaving the modified model on the table. I'd start making more of them later, probably after more testing and improvements and once Sal'Ris was back so I'd have more time between shifts.

"Thanks so much for your help Nia! I couldn't have done this without it." I gave the girl a hug and she squeaked. It was something that she always did in a hug, which I found adorable. I'd never been around a kid like her before. It was a really nice change.

"It's good to see you awake, Reyja'Krem." The woman was propped up in her bed, a datapad in her hands.

The Batarian just barely inclined her head at me. Her expression was schooled and neutral, but there seemed to be a hint of happiness in her eyes. "It's good to be awake. The doctor already explained what's happened."

I winced in sympathy and there was a bit of awkward silence between the two of us. "I'm sorry we weren't here when you woke up. Aria had locked down this level while she went after Tarak. She broadcasted his execution live and then offered a pardon to any Blue Suns willing to join her, and this was the first chance we could get to safely get down here with all the rioting."

"I know; I watched the feeds, and I don't blame you." Her tone was as unassuming as she could make it, but I thought she sounded a little disappointed as she asked, "Where are Mena and Nia?"

I smiled. "They're currently adjusting to being out of their suits."

She blinked. "Really?"

I nodded and offered a hand to help her up from the bed. "Yes. The system we had put in cleared out the leftover germs. They'll be safe, except for maybe a cough or a few allergic reactions to our germs. They're adjusting and spending some time with each other now; they deserved some alone time after so long."

She tried to stand on her own, but winced. Even with the regenerators she wasn't even close to full strength now, but I understood why she was reluctant to accept my offer of help. It was a Batarian ideal, believing that to do such was to surrender power to another. And that was a big no-no.

"I don't think I'd have survived a hit like that. You really are something else, Reyja'Krem."

She grunted in acknowledgment and shuffled next to me on the way out the door. The pace was more set by me, since I didn't have my cane. But I could tell that she wouldn't have been able to go much faster even if I hadn't been holding her back. Irina was waiting, my cane strapped to the back of her armor, in the lobby for us, smiling through her clear faceplate. Her nod wasn't exactly what was due to a highborn like Sal'Ris, but the fact that she tried showed she really did want to get along with the Batarian. So she was polite in return, though nothing verbal was said.

We were almost out onto the street when the door slid open and four figures in off-white armor came in. I didn't recognize their colors, but it seemed like some kind of professional group. Two of them were on either side of a third, the one being supported with several finger-sized holes in the plating oozing blue blood. The sight made me wince, especially since I could see the floor through one of them.

"This clinic has full surgery wards, correct?" the one standing in front, a woman from their voice, asked.

The receptionist nodded. "Yes, though Dr. Solus will need a moment to prepare it."

We continued out the door once they were out of the way. Just before it closed, however, the words that drifted out cleared up who they worked for.

"The Lady Warlord remembers those who..."

It clicked shut, and I knew I had another report to make.