twenty
"Is it dead?"
Uncertain.
Well, that was reassuring. Kat fiddled with the handle of her disrupter and then pointed it toward the dark shaft in the ceiling, the only exit to her rock prison. She understood that one weapon, a disrupter Jormangund considered so insignificant, it handed them out to contractors like party favours, would not stop the black shit from swooping down the chimney of rock and swallowing her. If Shepard's containment field collapsed. But she hated to feel powerless or irrelevant. Outside, Shepard fought a battle against the unknown. Buried deep beneath the surface of the asteroid, Kat did somewhat the same.
Lowering her arm so the disrupter grazed her thigh, Kat paced back and forth, the light of her suit illuminating the floor of the cavern in ghostly blue. She had discovered she could not kick at the small rocks littering the ground. The skin of Shepard's bubble held them as fast as it did her. In a sense. She wondered if she could ask him to move the rocks away from her feet, so she could gain the sense of kicking them, the sense of moving something, of not being inert, but figured he was probably busy, you know, killing the octopus thing.
Growling under her breath, she kicked at the floor, heedless of whether her action might cause him discomfort. He couldn't feel, right?
I don't know. He probably doesn't, either.
What would it be like to be a ghost? An all-powerful one? To be made of the substance of the universe, to be able to go anywhere, see anything, do whatever at a thought? It would be like the ultimate dust up, a metaphorical trip through the centre of the galaxy. A high shouldn't last for two hundred years, though. Must get kinda lonely out there with only himself to play with, unless he had a cadre of ghostly friends. Or, fuck, did he chat with the Reapers? They were his, right?
"Are you alone out there, wherever it is you are? Like, do you have anyone to talk to?"
Alone, came the answer. Talk to myself, sometimes. Then: Argue with myself, I can be an ass.
Kat chuckled quietly, and then shook her head, the unreality of her situation, of the identity of the entity behind the glowing orange letters, striking her all over again.
"I'm going to wake up soon," she murmured.
Thankfully, he did not answer the comment with a string of logic.
"Is it dead yet?" Are we there yet?
No answer.
"Shepard?"
Move against a wall, put your arms over your head. Contracting. Hold tight.
The orange letters pulsed with urgency.
Oh, fuck.
Kat dove for the nearest corner. As she rolled into a ball, she felt the first quake rumbling through the asteroid, then the containment field contracted, pressing air against her so that she was trapped in a proper bubble. She opted to squeeze her eyes shut. A braver woman might look death in the eye, but Kat figured she'd be dead either way, so it didn't really matter how she went.
A small flicker of hope beat inside her chest. Shepard would save her. Might be a juvenile thought, but he'd done an all right job so far.
The world—no, the universe shook. Curling tighter, Kat rode out the storm, which was exactly what she supposed it was, a solar storm. Backlash from the thing Shepard had thrown into the sun. The scariest part, she decided, was the fact she couldn't hear what she felt. She could imagine the rumble and groan of stone, the creak and crack, but no sound traveled through the skin of the field protecting her. In fact, but for the sound of her own voice, her coughs, grunts and farts, she'd heard nothing since just before the death of the Bataille.
She tipped sideways and rolled along the wall. The field cushioned her journey so that she bounced and glided, and then she became wedged under a shelf of rock. Cracking her eyes open, she looked out to see if the roof of the cavern had collapsed. A teeth-rattling shockwave pulsed through the asteroid and dust danced away from the skin of her bubble. A boulder the size of Finch glanced off the overhang. The ground jerked up and down. Her world danced in silent symphony.
Kat angled her thumb backwards and activated her helmet. It felt like a futile sort of gesture, but it was an action. She'd done something.
Eventually, something like two hundred and eleven fucking years after the quake had begun, the world-tipping motion subsided. The asteroid continued to tremble with aftershocks and atmosphere of the cavern was clogged with dust. Small handfuls of rock rained down across the floor at irregular intervals. Kat remained still until the floor stopped shaking.
She'd bit her tongue again. Her mouth tasted so foul, she didn't even notice the tang of blood until she sipped at the straw, driven by the need to cleanse her throat of imaginary dust. The fluid stung the side of her tongue, the pulse of pain so real and weird. Kat swallowed a whimper. She would not cry over a little cut. Shit, she didn't have enough moisture in her body to give in to tears again.
Dryly, she put a query to Shepard. "Is it over?"
In answer, the field around her expanded, pushing the dusty atmosphere back until she reclaimed half the cavern. Kat pushed up out of her huddle and approached the furthest wall of substance. She placed her hands against the skin and pushed.
"That's…" The haze beyond swirled and cleared to show a pile of grey-blue rock barring the exit. "That's just fucking terrific."