After nearly two weeks aboard the Normandy, the only thing Solana could be certain of was that she was never going to understand it, not really. It wasn't a matter of layout—even with the changes, she still saw the bones of the SR-1 underneath the larger, flashier skin Cerberus had built for it. Nor was it a matter of technical design: she'd read every available bit of text, and had let herself learn hands-on as much as her strained detente with Tali'Zorah allowed.
Beneath all that, though, was something different, the kind of thing turians called a Spirit, and that was the piece she couldn't quite make sense of. Perhaps because she wasn't part of it. The Normandy crew couldn't be more different each from the other if they tried, and yet they moved as a unit. The tattooed woman who swore often enough to give Solana's translator a workout trying to keep up was prickly and angry, but she still made enough coffee in the morning to go around, and, if she thought no one was watching, might even prepare a second cup to deliver to the doctor or the pilot or Zaeed. The Prothean—and Solana was still having trouble wrapping her mind around that—sometimes joined them for meals, though he rarely ate and seemed mostly to enjoy insulting everyone at the table. Some flung insults back. Once she even heard him laugh. Things that would have ended in altercations at the very least on a turian ship were shrugged off. Or laughed off. Under the heavy weight of ever-present tension even the most opposite of the opposites shared a certain kind of camaraderie. They'd gone to hell and back together. They'd fought and bled and lost comrades, and yet the only thing they all had in common was the ship, and Shepard.
Even the most gifted officers she'd ever served with hadn't commanded that kind of loyalty, or acted as that kind of adhesive. Solana thought of the woman she'd so briefly met, compared her to the overblown images she'd caught on the vids, ran both pictures alongside the little she knew from her brother's stories, and still came up baffled and drawing blanks. The longer she remained aboard, the more she wanted to meet the Shepard they all knew, wanted to see for herself the woman behind the legend. And the more she dreaded what it would mean if she never got the chance.
The crew had been even more subdued since abandoning the Empire and setting a course back to Mars. Not that she blamed them. Even the little she'd managed to overhear (fine, eavesdrop; a tactical cloak came in handy when you were the outsider no one kept in the loop) had been awful enough to make her glad she'd been ship-bound. She wasn't often grateful for her injury, but the looks on the faces and the haunted, brief exchanges—"There were fucking kids down there, fuck. Just… left." and "Didn't look too close. Some of those bones… don't want to think about what they resorted to."—were enough to paint pictures her mind couldn't simply shake off.
Even eavesdropping hadn't enlightened her as to the reason they were back at the dead planet. Garrus hadn't offered the information, and she knew better than to press, especially given how unstable he'd been since Shepard's regression. On a turian ship, any commander as obviously biased—and compromised—as her brother would immediately have been stripped of his office. Hell, she had a hard time stopping herself from reeling off the dozen regulations and rules he was in breach of and relieving him herself. Here, though, on this ship, his emotion seemed to act instead as a binding force, a rallying point. She found herself wondering if this, too, was some legacy of Shepard's.
She found herself wondering if her brother would ever really recover. That thought was harder to bear.
Solana was sitting alone in the mess, listlessly picking at one of the dextro ration bars—abominably bad even by military standards—when her brother returned from his planetside mission. She blinked as he strode past her, frustration and the barely-controlled, seething rage she was beginning to fear was permanent making him seem twice as menacing. She didn't think he even saw her. She'd never have admitted it—not to him, not to anyone—but she almost preferred his sadness. The anger was potent fuel, but it scraped away at the things she loved best about him—his gentleness, his kindness, his humor—leaving only a scarred and bitter weapon, too used to the taste of blood and always seeking more.
The tableau was made stranger still by the women who followed on Garrus' heels. She recognized neither. One was human, wearing a hideous orange jumpsuit, hands bound in front of her. The other, an asari, was dressed in skin-tight red and black armor and moved like a dancer, if a dancer could kill with a thought. The asari scanned the room, her gaze briefly resting on Solana. Her expression remained eerily serene, but Solana felt in her bones that if the asari wished it, she would be dead before her heart finished its next beat. Evidently, she wasn't determined to be a threat: the asari and her charge disappeared behind Garrus into the medbay. Solana wanted to follow, but couldn't bring herself to move. All the curiosity in the galaxy wasn't quite enough to shake the feeling of unease the asari's gaze had left in its wake.
A few moments later, the Spectre, Alenko, slid into the seat opposite her. They'd shared only a few words before this, generally restricted to pleasantries. He did not look as though he wanted to discuss pleasantries now. She didn't need to be familiar with human expressions to recognize exhaustion in his, and resignation. He didn't complain, though, and waited only for a nod of greeting before saying, "Hey. I—sorry, you're probably going to need a refresher course. Don't imagine Garrus had any reason to bring up this flavor of crazy. Uh, it's not something any of us wanted to dwell on, really, but I think it was worse for him. You know. All things considered."
Solana pushed away the rations and folded her hands in her lap, turning words over in an attempt to find the right ones. Small talk aside, she didn't know how to address him. It was another thing she didn't understand about the way the Normandy worked. On a turian ship, protocol dictated nearly everything, and she'd have known exactly where she stood in any given situation based on rank and tier. She'd have known proper forms of address, and appropriate parameters of conversation. None of those rules translated here. Garrus was in command, but even he wasn't safe from the friendly jibes and needling. Alenko was a Spectre, but that rank didn't automatically translate into respect; he was, she noted, nearly as much an outsider as she. His tone seemed friendly, but she didn't want to offend him by replying in kind and appearing rude or overly familiar. In the end, she settled on, "Do you mean the asari and her prisoner?"
"Yes," he said. "And no. The asari—I don't know her well. She's another from the Cerberus cre—from the crew who took down the Collector base. Her name's Samara. She's a Justicar."
Solana couldn't help it. She laughed. "You're kidding, right?"
He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. She'd seen him do it just enough times to realize it was some kind of coping mechanism, like the way she tapped code patterns against her thigh or Garrus shifted from foot to foot when he was nervous. "Yeah, no. I've read the reports and most of… well, everything this crew has ever done just sounds nuts. I can't imagine what it's like for someone… new to it all."
Solana shook her head. "I guess the whole 'sentient machines from dark space coming to kill us all' warning coming to pass set a pretty high bar for acceptable levels of insane things being true when you lot are involved."
He looked like he was going to run his hands through his hair again, but stopped himself at the last moment, frowning. "Right. The thing is, it's not Samara who's the strange part of this particular story."
"Of course not," Solana agreed, disbelief lending her words an air of informality she'd have avoided otherwise. "An asari from a practically mythological order of warrior-monks is nothing compared to a tank-bred perfect krogan or a Prothean woken up from a fifty thousand year sleep or—"
"Or the woman who was responsible for unleashing Shepard's clone, nearly killing Shepard and taking out the rest of us as collateral being allowed back on this ship after she very nearly succeeded in stealing it right out from under us not two months ago."
Solana didn't even attempt to school her features. Her mandibles flared wide and she made a startled sound deep in her throat before choking out, "Clone? You're not—you are. Really. A clone."
"And here you thought the sentient race of killer machines was as strange as it got." He managed a lopsided smile and rubbed at the bridge of his nose. "In all seriousness? Saying the word 'clone' out loud never gets easier." Alenko was evidently familiar enough with turian expressions to recognize utter disbelief in hers. "I guess when Cerberus was bringing Shepard back, they wanted, I don't know, insurance. Or extra parts, though I don't know why they'd bother making their organ harvest capable of thinking and feeling. It's all pretty damned murky, but—"
"I'm sorry," Solana interrupted. "'Bringing Shepard back'? From…?"
"Dammit, Garrus," Alenko muttered. "I'm probably the wrong person to ask about this, since I didn't exactly believe it, either, but Shepard was… dead. Cerberus wasn't content to leave her that way. So they… rebuilt her. The woman Garrus was hoping to find on Mars, Miranda Lawson? She was the head of that project. Brooks—whatever her real name is—worked on it too, but later went rogue, stole the clone, and then waited until the damned war was in full-swing before unleashing it. Her."
"To what purpose?"
Alenko shrugged, hands held wide. "Power? Prestige? Some weird brand of vengeance? Hell if I know. She wanted a Shepard of her own, and she wanted the Normandy, but I have no idea what her reasoning was. It's not like the Reapers were going anywhere. I—"
He stopped so abruptly Solana knew at once it was because he wanted to say something and didn't know if he should. Probably, she thought, because it had something to do with Garrus. Or because he didn't agree with Garrus. Taking a slight risk, she asked, "You don't approve of her being here?"
She counted to ten before Alenko replied, "The woman's a sociopath. Garrus thinks she might be able to tell what's going on with Shepard, but—" Here he stopped again, pulling his bottom lip between his teeth. She heard his long inhale.
"But if she's as bad as you think, you're not sure why she'd help."
"Or if her help will be help at all," he said. "She showed no qualms about lying before, to get what she wanted. She could make things worse. She might make things worse just because she can. She's poison."
Solana thought about the careful balance of power aboard the Normandy, all built on trust. How much poison would it take to upset that balance? How much to destroy it?
"Sorry," Alenko said, when she didn't immediately answer. "I shouldn't have—"
Solana chuckled, silencing him. "It's better to know. Can I ask you something?"
Alenko blinked at her, and then gave a reluctant little nod.
"What would she do?"
"Shepard?" he asked, the word like a prayer on his lips. "I wish I knew. I don't think she'd be happy about Brooks, but she didn't kill the woman when she had the chance and, then again… then again, she worked with Cerberus when she needed their resources, and there was a time I'd never have imagined her doing that, either."
"And… and Garrus?" Solana asked, hating the way her subvocals trembled on her brother's name. "Is he…" She didn't know how to finish the question. Is he okay? Is he sane? Is he always like this? Is this who he is now?
Alenko's shoulders rounded and he stared at the table as though he expected it to give him answers. Finally, he sighed, and raised his gaze to meet hers. His smooth human skin was furrowed, and the lines at the corners of his eyes made him look old. She didn't think she was imagining more of the silvery hair at his temples than even had been present a fortnight earlier. "He's your brother," Alenko said softly. "What do you think?"
She looked for words, but found only more questions, more doubts. More fears. All weighted with the certainty that she couldn't speak any of them aloud without stepping over the very fine line between conversation and insubordination.
She wasn't there yet. Until now, until this Brooks woman, Garrus hadn't put them in danger. Now, though, if what Alenko said was true… she shuddered, and couldn't even blame it on the perfectly-controlled temperature.
When she said nothing, Alenko bent his head again, and put his face in his hands. "Yeah," he said, the word muffled by his palms. "That's what I think, too."