Author's Note: My lovely beta reader was on vacation this week so mssticha kindly offered to step in and review this chapter. Thank you! Also, thank you to the new followers. I hope you're enjoying the story so far. :)
When they returned to the ship, Shepard ordered Joker to immediately depart from the colony. She wanted to put light years between herself and Zhu's Hope. After the shore party had each taken a shower—one that was by no means long enough to make Shepard feel clean again—she gathered the crew for their customary debrief.
"Commander? You look…pale." Liara fixed her big, blue eyes on Shepard from across the room. It was all she could do not to shudder under the gaze of another asari. "Are you suffering any ill effects from the Cipher?"
Shepard rubbed at her temples. "I just need some time to let this Cipher do its thing."
"I might be able to help you. After all, I am an expert on the Protheans. If I join my consciousness to yours, maybe we can make some sense of it."
"No! No!" Shepard said with a vigorous shake of her head. "Absolutely not!"
"But, Commander—"
"I'd rather face down an army of geth than go through the melding experience again." Shepard sucked in a sudden breath and her eyes went wide. "Fuck! She's not…she's not going to have a little asari baby now, right?"
Liara flushed a deep shade of violet. "N-n-no! That's not something any asari would ever do without consent from their partner!"
"Yeah, well. Everyone said Reapers didn't exist either, but the evidence all points to the contrary. I should've just shot her," Shepard muttered under her breath.
"I understand your reluctance, Commander." Liara had the good grace to ignore Shepard's 'doubtful' comment and continued. "I only want to help you make sense of the visions you already have. It may be the only way to stop Saren."
The room went quiet as everyone waited for Shepard to make a decision. It's not like they could force her to meld with Liara. Unfortunately, they had no other leads and Saren had managed to stay two steps ahead of them. Melding with Liara might be the only way to get any information that might give them an advantage, or at the very least put them on equal footing with the rogue Spectre.
"Fine." Shepard pushed herself from her seat and crossed to the center of the room.
Liara, for all her shy mannerisms, seemed perfectly confident as she uttered the two words that made Shepard's skin crawl. "Embrace eternity!"
The vision danced in her mind, the same as when Shiala had melded with her, the same as she'd seen on Eden Prime. Nothing was any clearer. Just flashes in crimson of death and destruction and a squid-like machine silhouetted in the dying light of a planet. Liara, however, looked absolutely entranced as she took a step back from Shepard.
"That was incredible! All this time! All my research! Yet I…I never dreamed…" She faltered as she finally noticed Shepard's glare. "I am sorry. The images were so vivid. I never imagined the experience would be so…intense. You are remarkably strong-willed, Commander. What you have been through—what you have seen—would have destroyed a lesser mind."
Shepard fidgeted where she stood and tried not to focus on what Liara might have seen while rooting around in her head; her past with the Reds, the truth about Akuze, her attraction to Alenko? All of those things were personal and none of them were things she wanted to share, not with anyone and especially not with someone who could read her fucking mind. Some things were meant to stay private.
"Did you see anything?" Kaidan made an attempt to get the excitable asari back on track. For that, Shepard was grateful.
Liara shook her head. "The beacon on Eden Prime must have been badly damaged. Large parts of the vision are…are missing. The data transferred into the commander's mind is incomplete."
"Well, fuck me sideways." Shepard dropped back into her seat with a groan. "That was pointless."
Liara took a timid step forward and wrung her hands in front of her. "I think my knowledge of the Protheans will prove useful before this is over."
Shepard tuned Liara out as she continued to prattle on about how "useful" she could be. So far, her Prothean expertise had been useless every time they'd needed it. It was only as Liara swayed on her feet and stumbled forward a step that Shepard turned her attention back to the asari.
"I'm sorry. The joining is…exhausting. I should go to the medical bay and lie down for a moment."
"I feel fine," Shepard narrowed her eyes at the asari. Technically, that was a lie. After having her brain probed twice over the span of a few hours following a battle through geth, asari clones, and those thorian corpse-things, it was a miracle she was still on her feet. Still, Liara had done very little fighting and a single meld. What had she been doing in Shepard's brain that would have exhausted her so much?
"Your role in our communion is passive," Liara explained with barely restrained patience. "I am the one who must submerge myself in your mind. Drown myself in your thoughts. It is more difficult than it looks. The human subconscious instinctively resists the joining, Commander. A strong personality such as yours makes it even harder." Damn straight I resisted that shit.
"Head down to the medbay," Shepard said. "Our shore party found some things in ExoGeni headquarters that we still need to discuss. You can be briefed later."
Liara's usually wide eyes narrowed with the dismissal and her mouth opened, but she swayed on her feet again before she could voice her protest. She turned and walked with slow, deliberate steps towards the door, pausing to glance over her shoulder at the meeting still in progress before she slipped through the opening.
Shepard pushed the disturbing vision and the creepy feeling of having her mind violated to the side and focused on the debrief session. She sat back in her chair and went over the reports that were found on the terminals. ExoGeni had shipped some of their 'test samples' to another colony, but the company cut ties when contact was lost with both the colony and the cargo vessel that had transported them, confident that no one would be able to trace the events back to them. Additionally, one of their scientists cut a deal with Cerberus which explained how those creeper things had ended up on Binthu. Samples of the thorian creepers had also been delivered to an additional system at Cerberus' behest.
Kaidan took up where she left off. "I was able to hack into one of the geth terminals that they'd set up. It appears that the geth are amassing a large amount of forces in the Armstrong Nebula in preparation for an offensive into Citadel space."
Tali gasped and sat up straighter in her seat and the room broke into a jumbled dissonance of six voices speaking over one another. Shepard wasn't surprised that they all had different suggestions, but she didn't remember asking any of the others for their opinions either. Just as she was about to shout over them to order silence, Garrus' voice rose above the rest.
"Saren needs to be our top priority. Though I'm starting to wonder whether we'll ever find him."
"We'll find him, Garrus," Shepard said with a conviction she didn't really believe. She needed them to believe it though. Garrus flapped his mandibles, but otherwise remained silent. "But until we have a new lead, there are other things we can be doing instead of just sitting around, twiddling our thumbs. I'll warn the Council about the geth attack when I file my report. We're done here. Dismissed."
When he'd exited the comm room, Kaidan had made his way to one of the terminals on the CIC. He had no reason to be up here, other than waiting for Shepard to finish her report with the Council. When she'd dismissed the group, she'd still been pale and her temper right at its boiling point. I just want to make sure she's okay, he told himself as he absently stared down at the screen of the console he'd commandeered. Kaidan's eyes kept drifting to the door as the minutes sped by, but Shepard still had not emerged.
A throat cleared from across the room. Kaidan looked up to see Pressly watching him out of the corner of his eye with tight lips. Kaidan gave the older man a smile before turning back to the screen. He randomly entered a few keystrokes and nodded to himself, as though the task he'd been intent on completing was now done. Not wanting to arouse any further suspicion, he made his way back down below deck.
The elevator door slid open just as he reached the bottom of the stairs. Ashley grinned at him. "Hey, LT."
"Hey Ash. Where are you headed?"
"I was actually coming to find you. And Shepard, if she's done with the Council."
Kaidan shook his head. "I just came from the CIC. She's still in there."
"Guess it's just you and me then," Ashley said with a shrug.
The two of them made their way to the table by the lockers. Taking a seat where he could see the stairs out of the corner of his eye, Kaidan leaned onto the smooth surface, resting his upper body weight on his forearms. Ash drew a set of cards out of one of her cargo pockets and began shuffling the deck absently.
"Hearing about the Protheans makes me wonder if some distant civilization is going to find our artifacts someday and study us," Kaidan said. Liara had taken to sharing her research on the Protheans with anyone who would listen. It was one of the times she was most animated and confident in conversation with the alien (to her) crew.
"Nah," Ashley said with a shake of her head. "When some distant civilization finds our artifacts, we'll be right there to explain what they are.
"I hope so, but I'll bet the Protheans thought the same thing."
She looked up from her cards and smirked at him. "Now who's being a pessimist?" The cards arched smoothly from one hand to the other while she spoke. "You know, if anyone was ever an optimist, it had to be those colonists. I can't believe they stayed there. I'd have gotten the hell out of Dodge the minute I saw the place."
"It's not like they could leave. The Thorian was controlling them."
"Not at first." Ashley's mouth to screwed into a grimace when Kaidan frowned at her. "It's not like I'm saying they deserved what happened to them or anything. It's just…that's about the worst place for a colony I've ever seen. And I've seen my share of colonies. That place was so damn dismal I can't imagine staying long enough to get infected."
"You two playing cards alone?" Kaidan looked up to see Shepard standing at the foot of the table. Somehow, despite his carefully picked vantage point, she'd managed to sneak up on the two of them. "Well, c'mon. Deal me in."
Ashley tucked her cards back into her cargo pocket. "Actually, Skipper, I was hoping the three of us could have a small drink. Bit of a celebration, if you're interested."
"I think we're technically still on duty, Chief," Kaidan pointed out with a shrug.
Ashley rolled her eyes with a fond smile. "You two are always on duty."
"With all we've been through lately?" Shepard's hand clapped on his shoulder for a second and Kaidan turned his gaze up to her. Despite the dark circles that seemed to plague her every day, a small twinkle of cheer sparkled in the depths of her eyes. "Hell yes we'll have a drink."
"Well, if the Commander says we're drinking, I guess we're drinking." Kaidan grinned back at her.
Shepard dropped into the seat next to him and fixed her attention on Ashley. "What exactly are we celebrating?"
"It's Armistice Day, when the First Contact War ended," Ashley said as she made her way over to the lockers and pulled out a bottle of amber liquid. "My family always marks it."
"You have family that fought in the war?" Shepard asked as Ashley rejoined them and poured a finger of the liquor into three cups.
Ashley wrapped both hands around her glass and slumped into the back of the seat. Her eyes focused on the table in front of her, not turning up to meet either of her companions' curious stares. It was so unlike the normally outspoken chief that Kaidan stretched his leg under the table and knocked his boot into hers, sharing a smile with her when she snapped her gaze up to his.
She crossed her arms over her chest and narrowed her eyes at them. "Oh, c'mon. Don't tell me neither one of you know about my family. My commanders always find out." Kaidan and Shepard glanced at each other, Shepard's expression just as full of confusion as he imagined his to be. They both shrugged, then turned back to Ashley. With a sigh, she continued. "I'm General Williams' granddaughter; the commander of the Shanxi garrison in the War and the only human ever to surrender to an alien race."
"Well, that explains why your file is filled with high scores, but crap assignments," Shepard scoffed.
"Yeah. Comes with the territory," Ash said with a roll of her eyes. "Granddad got relieved from command as soon as Shanxi was liberated and threatened with a trial before he was finally demoted and tucked away behind a desk until he retired. Dad got passed over for promotion after promotion. It takes a special kind of thick headed to march into a job where your family's blacklisted. I did it anyway."
"That's bullshit."
"But the truth. I'll never be good enough for the Alliance, not with my name."
"Fuck that." Shepard slammed her drink to the table, some of the golden liquid sloshing over the side and pooling around the base of the glass. "You're a valuable part of this crew, Williams. You're tough and decisive and that's damn well good enough for me."
"I'll drink to that." Kaidan raised his glass and clinked it against Shepard's when she followed suit. Ashley's mouth hung slightly open, her eyes shining with a glimmer of wetness. Kaidan didn't have to imagine the impact that Shepard's words would have had on the younger marine. He had been on the receiving end of her praise before. Shepard didn't mince words and she never wasted her breath on empty platitudes, making any such praise mean all the more because it was certain to be genuine.
Ashley cleared her throat and added, "And I play a pretty mean game of pool."
"Maybe—" Kaidan's challenge dropped away as the sound of steady footsteps approached them.
"What's the occasion?" Garrus asked as he took a seat next to Ashley. Kaidan watched her face turn pink while she looked between both himself and Shepard for an assist. Shepard's lips were pressed together with amusement, obviously trying not to smile as Ashley squirmed in her seat. "Armistice Day," Ashley finally mumbled.
The mandibles on Garrus's jaw flapped back and forth. "That's what you humans refer to as the end of the Relay 314 Incident, correct?"
"It was more than just an "incident"!" Ashley's shoulders squared as she spat the words at him.
"Indeed," Garrus said, his dual-flanged voice unperturbed by her ire. "It certainly could have been handled better." Kaidan watched as all the anger seemed to dissipate from Ashley in a single second. It was probably the first—and only—time a turian might ever admit to their species being anything other than infallible. If Vyrnnus had been one of the worst the turians had to offer, this was further evidence that Garrus was one of the best. "Since I don't suppose you have any dextro-liquor handy, I'll just have to celebrate in spirit and sobriety," Garrus added as he took the seat beside Ashley.
The conversation shifted to less controversial topics that were more comfortable to discuss between their species. Ashley talked about some of the different colonies she'd lived in growing up and what it was like to move around all the time. His own father retired while Kaidan was still young, so he spoke instead about their home in Vancouver and the many summers he'd spent playing in the orchard his family owned further inland. Shepard eventually convinced Garrus to regale them with tales of being a C-Sec investigator on the Citadel. Just as he got to the part about krogan testicles going for ten thousand credits each—forty thousand credits a set—in his story about black markets on the Citadel, Shepard interrupted him with a squawk.
"Wait, four? They have four?" Kaidan gaped as well, having done the same math himself.
Wrex's heavy footsteps punctuated his words as he joined them at the table. "I told you, Shepard. We have redundant systems. That includes everything, heh-heh. Now, let me tell you whelps about a real fight."
Indeed, Wrex's tale of hunting down an asari commando, one who also happened to be a friend, for a merc contract was an exhilarating story; it was one that could easily have been the plot of any number of action movies that were always popular. Twist it just enough that Wrex and Aleena fell in love at the end and it would likely become an instant success.
"Sounds like you like being a merc," Ashley said when he'd finished.
"Killing for credits simplifies things," Wrex nodded.
Garrus leaned back in his chair and narrowed his bright eyes at the merc. "Killing for justice…that simplifies things."
"If it's easier to swallow that there's only savage and good and no in between, by all means, don't let my opinion stop you," Wrex said with a shrug and turned back to the others. "Besides, I fight best on my own. Or in very small groups. I don't like people relying on me, and I bloody well don't like relying on them." Subtle movement out of the corner of his eye caught Kaidan's attention. A slight tilt of his head revealed the barely visible nod of agreement from Shepard.
"Speaking of not relying on people," Shepard said, effectively changing the subject. "It seems that the Council has elected to ignore my warning about a geth offensive strike. Guess it's up to us to stop them."