Chapter Twenty-One

In Which Crewmembers Reevaluate Their Opinions of Our Hero

Ashley sat in the cockpit with Joker and Kaidan, lamenting whatever genetic shortcomings in her heritage had combined to make her so unbearably stupid. "—and then I just started laughing! I couldn't stop myself. Oh God, you should have seen the commander's face…and now he's taking Garrus and Wrex with him for every single ground mission in Artemis Tau? That's not a coincidence. Why, why can't I keep my mouth shut?" She buried her face in her hands, moaning quietly.

Joker laughed, and Kaidan shot him a look, trying to shut him up. "What?" Joker refused to be reined in. "C'mon, Kaidan, you gotta admit that the chief really put her foot in her mouth with that one. I can just imagine Shepard's email home: Dear Mom, Thanks again for being the one that named me. I let it slip to that smart-ass marine I told you about that Dad wanted to name me Virgil, and she—"

Ashley lifted her head from her hands to stare at Joker. "Well, I'm glad I'm not the only one that didn't know," she interrupted.

"Didn't know what?" Ashley had gone back into hiding, so Joker turned to Kaidan. "Didn't know what?" he asked again.

"The commander's entire family was killed on Mindoir. In the batarian slaver attack," Kaidan told him.

"Oh, man, no. Really?" Joker's face fell as Ashley and Kaidan nodded. "Shit. You shouldn'tve knocked his dad. Too bad, too. I really liked you, Ash. I'm gonna miss you when you get transferred groundside."

"Don't be ridiculous, Joker." The level of melodrama in the cockpit was starting to irritate Kaidan. "The commander's not going to transfer her—"

"Says you," Ashley mumbled. "You didn't see him, LT. He just…one minute we're chatting, and the next…"

"Don't beat yourself up. Shepard's under a lot of stress with this mission, but he's not dumb. You're a good soldier, and the fact that you crossed the line for a minute isn't going to change that fact. He might be mad—annoyed," he corrected himself, "but he's not gonna transfer you groundside."

A thought occurred to Kaidan, and he quieted. He remembered the way the commander had frozen for a moment when Jenkins was gunned down, how he had lost control of his biotics in Chora's Den, the way he'd smile at Tali's questions, his jokes on Feros, the time he'd spend talking with Garrus, his willingness to sit next to Wrex in the mess. He compared it with the way Shepard had secluded himself in his cabin for the past week. "Ashley, what did you say Shepard said to you again?"

She looked at him curiously. "Uh, he said he was sorry for keeping me and asked how far we were from Artemis Tau. And then he left. All of a sudden."

Kaidan couldn't keep the amusement from his voice. "Well, this ought to make you feel better. The last time I talked with the commander, we got sidetracked, talking about our old—ah, personal stuff, you know. I made a joke about it, trying to apologize for taking up so much of his time, I guess. He said almost the exact same thing to me that he said to you.

"You said he just walked out all of a sudden?" Ashley nodded, and Kaidan let out a short bark of laughter. "I think Shepard's worried we're all going to think he's being overly familiar with us."

That made Joker laugh. "Like any of us would complain to the brass about the commander: first human Spectre, hero of Elysium, incapable of doing any wrong? Hell, if we tried to have him written up for fraternization, the Admiralty Board would probably have us charged with treason!"

"Treason?" Ashley asked dryly, with the ghost of a smile.

"Hell, yeah, treason!" Joker's voice dropped an octave, taking on what he clearly thought was an authoritative tone. "How dare you impugn the honor of the Alliance's finest officer! Your accusations are groundless! Commander Shepard represents the pinnacle of human evolution! It's soldiers like you that give the Council reason to bar humanity from joining it! I'd challenge you to a duel myself if you weren't about to be shot by a firing squad!"

"It doesn't matter what we think though," Kaidan reminded him. "Just what Shepard thinks."

"Well, he ought to lighten up," Ashley replied.

"He does, sometimes. Remember the creepers on Feros? And in the wards when he was talking about old vids and you said—"

"Okay! Yes!" Ashley glared at Kaidan. "I get the point, thank you!" She sighed. "I think Shepard is an idiot for acting like that, but I'm glad he's not mad at me. I like serving on the Normandy. I don't want to go back to groundside garrisons."

"Yeah, I don't believe you when you say this is your first shipside posting," Joker told her. "No way. Sure, you come in here, bat your eyelashes and say you're new to all this ship stuff, and would I mind helping you learn the ropes, but I see through you, Williams. And I'm sorry, but unlike you, I do take the regs against fraternization seriously. So, no, I'm not going to ask you out. You might as well stop pining away."

Kaidan and Ashley started laughing. Ashley laughed so hard she ended up doubled over and gasping for breath.

"All right, all right, cut it out, it wasn't that funny," Joker muttered.

It wasn't that Garrus didn't like going out on groundside missions with Commander Shepard. But he suspected that Shepard was keeping him close because he was worried that Garrus was too hot-headed to be left alone with the human crew of the Normandy. As though Garrus would snap and start visiting his personal sense of vigilante justice on every crewmember that looked at him cross-eyed. The thought made his mandibles flare. Garrus admitted that he was sometimes willing to…bend the law to get the job done. But he respected the law. He wasn't going to—

"Vakarian!" Wrex's irritated voice interrupted Garrus' introspection. "You mind giving me a hand with this? Or are you just gonna sit there like a volus with a hangnail?" The disgusted krogan leaned forward from the rear seat of the Mako. "I told you we should have taken the female," he told the commander.

"And I told you not to question my decisions, Wrex." Sullenly, Garrus noticed that the commander didn't exactly disagree with Wrex. "Garrus, help him open the hatch. I'm picking up a bunker of some kind up ahead. If we're lucky, it'll be the doctor's base, but I don't want to take any chances."

Together, Garrus and Wrex climbed topside. "Dibs on the plasma cannon," the krogan immediately said.

"Fine by me." Garrus turned his attention to the machine gun. He'd spent a lot of his free time tinkering with the Mako, trying to improve on the design. The Turian Hierarchy believed the use of vehicles by infantry ground forces fostered weakness, so Garrus had never encountered a machine quite like the rover. Its flexibility was impressive, although he was frustrated at his inability to figure out a way to boost the regeneration rate of its kinetic barriers.

"Stop wasting oxygen, turian! Those are sniper towers up there!"

Garrus' mandibles flared in embarrassment. How could he have let his focus slide like that? And not once, but twice? He shook his head to clear it, and leveled his gun at the tower.

The Mako suddenly jumped six feet in the air, avoiding a rocket fired by a ground trooper. Although Garrus felt his stomach lurch, he managed not to fall down the hatch this time. He had thought Lieutenant Alenko and Chief Williams were exaggerating when they described the commander's erratic driving. But during the search for missing Alliance marines in the Sparta system, they'd been attacked by a Thresher Maw, and Shepard had jerked the rover in such unexpected maneuvers that Garrus hadn't been able to stay upright. He'd never felt so humiliated before. It was like he was a raw recruit instead of a mature turian who'd served in both the Hierarchy military and C-Sec.

"Ha-ha!" Wrex was a deceptively simple creature, fully content as long as he was able to get off the ship and destroy a few bad guys every so often. It had almost reached the point where Garrus wasn't overly nervous at being cooped up in the Mako with him.

A final burst from the plasma cannon burst the crates in front of the bunker entrance, reducing the guards that had been firing at them to cinders. "I had him, you know," Garrus told Wrex irritably.

"My way was faster."

"Hey!" Shepard shouted up to them. "I've got some comm traffic on here—I don't think this is where Dr. T'Soni is. Sounds like slavers. I hate slavers." The commander brought the vehicle to a halt.

"No one likes slavers, Shepard."

"Oh, I don't know," the sarcastic remark slipped out before Garrus could stop it. "I'm sure their mothers love them. And, you know, if their mothers don't, it certainly explains why they turned to a life of crime in the first place."

Shepard snorted, the corners of his mouth turning up slightly. "Maybe."

The inside of the bunker was nothing exciting, a typical prefab construction with a single large storeroom and a loft. Garrus wasn't sure whether to be grateful or upset that the slavers weren't storing any 'cargo' there at the moment. He didn't know how he would have reacted to a building full of slaves, but it would have been nice to help actual people rather than contenting himself with the abstract notion of 'the greater good.'

"Let's look around," Shepard ordered, stepping over the corpse of a particularly vicious fighter, an asari. "We might find something about their shipping lines or contacts that we can send back to the Alli—to the Council." For the first time, Garrus realized he understood how Shepard must feel, suddenly responsible to a new authority after being part of the same organization for so long.

They split up, searching the compound. Finding a back room—Garrus hesitated to say office—full of computer terminals, he synched up his omni-tool and looked for a way into the slavers' system. After a few minutes, he smiled in triumph. He might not be as good as Tali, but when it came to technology, Garrus was no slouch. Scanning through the files, he searched for any information that might prove useful.

"Commander!" This can't be right…. "Commander, I think I found something!"

Shepard and Wrex appeared in the entrance. "What do you have, Garrus?" the commander asked. "Hopefully something good." He looked at Wrex. "Some of us have just been raiding the unlocked crates for weapons mods."

"So what?" the krogan retorted. "Just because you didn't think to do it first—"

"Commander, I really think you should look at this." Garrus turned the screen towards Shepard. "See?" he asked without waiting for the commander to finish reading. "That asari slaver, Dalia, her sister is a diplomat on the Citadel—she was being blackmailed…Oh, this is not going to end well."

"Why not? Because we killed a diplomat's sister?"

Garrus shook his head. "That's not it. Although that's not good, no. But this," he checked the monitor, "Nassana Dantius, she should have reported her sister. She would have been placed on leave until the situation was dealt with. Instead, it looks like she was trying to cover it all up…This is a diplomatic incident waiting to happen. Why couldn't a non-Council species have found this?"

"Humans aren't part of the Council," Wrex pointed out.

"Not yet they're not." Garrus was surprised that neither the commander nor Wrex seemed to grasp the political implications of the situation. Maybe it was because neither of them had worked on the Citadel the way he had. They just didn't understand how things worked. "If Shepard brings this information forward—"

"It will look like humanity is making a power play at the expense of the asari," Shepard said thoughtfully. "So that's out. What if—what if we confronted Nassana directly?"

"That could work," Garrus spoke slowly, weighing the implications. "Yes, that might be the best solution. Talk to her, try to figure out a way to—But it's not entirely legal, Shepard."

The commander cocked an eyebrow. "It's not exactly illegal either, Garrus. And this way no one is going to get hurt. We don't know, Nassana could have been trying to protect her sister. You said it yourself, if she reported it, the Council would have made sure Dahlia was eliminated."

"I didn't think of that."

"Are you two just going to stand there talking or are we going to head back to the Normandy?" Wrex interjected. "There's nothing else to do here."

"Finally broke into the last crates, did you?" Garrus asked dryly. He left the computer room, but waited by the door for the commander. Maybe he'd read Shepard wrong. The man had just taken the time to seriously consider Garrus' explanation of Citadel politics. Regardless, Garrus realized he was feeling better about these ground missions.