At fifty-two years of age, Arasthaes Sparatus had considered himself, for the most part, well beyond needing to actually run around. Given his time on the Council on top of that, one could be forgiven for presuming that somebody like him would have grown soft and fat, so acclimated to working behind a desk that he'd forgotten what it felt like when his calves burned for effort. However, that hypothetical one, holding such an opinion, didn't know much about turians.
While there was legitimacy to the statement 'there are no fat asari', that was something stemming from asari biology. Biotics burn fat, and every asari – bar a small number of genetic mutants – was a biotic. Turians, on the other hand, kept themselves in shape out of social stigma. Fat was seen as a sign of laziness, and a lazy turian was a turian that was draining the Hierarchy itself of vitality and life. Allotments were made for those of a husky frame, so long as the effort was obvious, but once a turian man didn't pinch in at the waist as they were supposed to, everybody started looking at them sideways.
Shame was a powerful motivator for physical fitness.
"I've read the same reports you have," Sparatus said as he kept pace with Doctus, his liaison with the THAAT. "If there's no movement from that thing, then I'm not going to stand by and hide while it looms over my planet."
"The capabilities of the object are still for the most part unknown," Doctus cautioned. "And the amount of firepower that it took to cripple it even to the state it now is in was staggering. We can't be sure that it isn't simply playing dead."
"Playing dead or actually dead, I'm not getting back on that ship. Now assign whatever security detail you feel requisite, and let me do my job," Sparatus said sternly. Doctus was a hard nut, and given that it was a turian saying that of another turian, it certainly meant something. But even one who was in charge of some of the best trained and armed soldiers this side of the Armiger Legion couldn't hope to hold his own in a glaring contest with a man who dictated interspecies policy with the entire galaxy.
"Very well. Let it be on record that I consider this a poor idea and the risks too high," Doctus said.
"Your opinion will be noted," Sparatus said, then moved toward the airlocks. They hissed open, and the Council runabout that he'd commandeered as soon as somebody bothered to wake him gave way to the plain lines and precise angles of the flagship 'Glorious Stands The Dawn'. As turian ships went, it was young. Unlike most, it didn't have a corps spirit housed in it that could be tracked all the way back to the age of sail, if not even earlier than that. No, this one was built during that two-year spree that the other Councillors permitted, not thinking about the economic downsides to pumping that much of the industrial output of a planet into making warships. It was young, having no spirit of its own. Or at least, not yet.
"Which way?" Sparatus asked, even as he returned the salute that the Admiral before him snapped into.
"You weren't informed?" Admiral Vitor said, dropping the salute and turning down one of the long, straight hallways that marked a ship of turian make. The halls were something of an illusion. The instant that a boarding party was detected, bulkheads slammed into place, turning these spacious, simple passages into a maze. And that was a krogan invention, actually, though one that the turians refined to an art.
"Informed and aware are two different things, Admiral," Sparatus said. "And given the way she acts at the best of times..."
"She is waiting in one of the outer deck rooms," Vitor said. "This way..."
"Sparatus?" he caught himself mid stride, turning to look down a side path, leading to a different airlock. There stood his fellow Councillor, Ophala Tevos. She looked quite concerned, as she found her cadre of commandos being blocked by the heavily armored forms of the warriors of THAAT.
"Why are you standing in her way?" Sparatus demanded as he stormed up behind the soldiers. "She's a member of the Citadel Council, not some reporter angling for embedding. Let her through."
"Sir, THAAT does not take orders from you," one of the soldiers said. Sparatus, though, didn't like his tone. So he leaned in on the man.
"That may be the case in your particular instance," he said, his voice pitched low. "However, it does take orders from Primarch Fedorian. And regarding Council relations, Fedorian takes orders from me," he said, letting the soldier stew for a few grindingly long seconds. "Now, are you going to invoke a chain of command weighting about as much as this dreadnaught falling down on your head, or are you going to allow the Councillor for your race to do his job?"
"...no, sir," he said, then shook his head. "I mean yes, sir... I mean..." he turned to Tevos. "You're clear to enter, ma'am, but I can't clear your squad..."
"I'm certain that I'll be equally safe in my fellow Councillor's hands," Tevos said. She whispered something to the leader of the commandos, who in turn nodded and motioned for the others to return through their airlock and back into Tevos' ship. She joined Tevos' side as they returned to where Vitor had allowed Sparatus to part, then followed with him as he picked their path. "I'm relieved to find you here. I had concerns that it would be only myself, Udina, and Valern."
"I almost wasn't. If I could have slept like a normal person, I'd probably still be on the Citadel," Sparatus muttered. Then he turned to her. "Are Valern and Udina already here?"
"Yes. They arrived more than an hour ago," Vitor answered for her. "With your approach, we decided that the best course would be for all to be present, preventing redundant explanations."
"You decided?" Sparatus asked, dryly.
"Not all decisions need be made by the top of the chain," Vitor said. That was a good way to set the chain to rattling, though. Sparatus rolled his eyes with a shake of his head. Then, he turned to Tevos once more.
"What have you heard?"
"I doubt any more than you have," Tevos answered. "Still, this is potentially catastrophic news."
"Potentially?" Sparatus asked. "There's no potentially about this. One geth superdreadnaught is a nightmare to think about. If they're producing more..."
"Geth?" Tevos asked, wan. "We're not talking in front of cameras, Arasthaes. We both know what that thing really was."
Sparatus didn't answer that, but neither did he deny it. Comparing the geth cruisers to Sovereign was like trying to compare apples to torpedoes.
"There's something about this I don't like, though," Sparatus did say. Tevos turned a querulous expression in his direction. "How did Udina and Valern get here so fast?"
"I was in the Traverse. Udina and Valern were on Earth and Sur'Kesh, respectively. It stands to reason they'd arrive before we did," she said.
"That isn't what I meant," Sparatus said. "I literally jumped onto the first shuttle when the news hit. Not even that we won, but that a fight was happening. They would have had to..."
"Councilors Udina and Valern?" Vitor cut Sparatus off, and he ceased in his words, but gave the asari Councillor a look that spoke of how he was fully intending on completing it later. The door opened to reveal the dour-faced human and the inscrutable salarian, neither one looking any different than they most often did. That had Sparatus beat; he'd been wearing his nightclothes until he found fitting fatigues to be at least half-way presentable.
"Sparatus," Udina said. "Tevos. I was wondering when you two would arrive."
"We've been waiting here for entirely too long as it is," Valern said. "We could have completed the debrief by now if we hadn't been ushered into this... cell."
"This is military jurisdiction in the wake of a military action," Vitor said diplomatically. He then motioned for all to follow him. "She's waiting through here."
Udina followed the Admiral with a hard eyed glare, but turned it to Sparatus as soon as the far door opened and the path was made available. "I presume you know what to expect?" he asked.
"She's involved. Nobody can be certain what to expect," Tevos pointed out. Sparatus crushed a chuckle at that. It wasn't polite, nor politic, but damned if she wasn't dead on with that one. Doors hissed open before them, hissing closed in their wake. Valern didn't offer any opinion, and Udina kept his at the level of angry grumbles. Angry for what reason? Sparatus couldn't even begin to guess. He was the farthest thing from an expert on the mental gymnastics of humanity.
The last door opened to reveal a wide viewing port, displaying space proudly. It was oriented toward the prow of the ship, well outside of any line-of-effect to the CIC, and showed what the Glorious was currently pointed at. Before that port was a human woman, with coppery red hair. She was dressed in a Systems Alliance dress uniform, one that looked fairly out-of-place on her. Again, not surprising to Sparatus. Shepard turned, facing them all, hands clasped behind her back. She had a look of barely recovered exhaustion to her.
She didn't say a word. She simply looked at the four Councillors, then turned to look past her shoulder, to the floating, dead wreck of the object which had been identified as 'Leviathan'. She looked forward, to the Councillors, once more.
Then, she raised both hands up, about shoulder-width apart, two fingers crooked.
And then, air-quotes. Sparatus could only sigh.
Avatar of Victory
Ah yes, 'Reapers'.
Typing one-handed was a chore.
The bed that they had, for the moment, as much as chained him to, had at least mercifully been given a computer, so that he could do his work. If it hadn't, he would have simply waged an escape, one legged or not. It was strange that even with his partial dismemberment, he still wasn't the most debilitated of the survivors. Still, salarians either died or bounced back fast. It was simply a question of which Mordin would select.
He paused from his task – a simulation of protein transcription based on the Weyrloc retrovirus – and rubbed his one remaining hand at his chin. The other 'limb' was a clunky prosthetic, a tube of plastic with hook-like manipulators at its end. Hardly the top-of-the-line. Not surprising; Mordin Solus was ancient, by his people's standards. Save the good machinery to people who were going to use it for more than a few months. But Mordin had no intention of dying in a scant few months, not with his renewed purpose and new goal.
There was a chime at the door that distracted his attention from the progressing simulation. He turned, and tapped the button on the frame of the bed which unlocked his door. His eyes narrowed, though, when he beheld, not a doctor as he'd expected, but instead a stocky salarian with orange eyes. "Mordin Solus," he said, slowly. Not a question.
"Not doctor, no identifying markers, no livery of Deletrasses. Agency?"
He stared at Mordin for a moment, as though very carefully picking his words. "We can discuss that later," he said. He gestured casually forward. "Do you mind if I come in?"
Rhetorical question. Mordin was in no position to stop him if he did mind. "Name?"
"Verskaft," he said. Mordin cocked a brow at him. "Just Verskaft."
"God of Industry, invention, development. Fell out of favor with Atlan worship. Clear alias," he took a moment to ponder, a stern intake of breath. "Purpose here, unclear."
Slowly, 'Verskaft' nodded. He continued choosing his words carefully as he came in. "You are in an odd position, Doctor Solus. Few operate in the theatres you do with the name that they were born to. It's... often a poor decision. In this context, and in this meeting, you can call me Verskaft. We are interested in expediting your recovery."
"Recuperating well enough. Best resources, considering," Mordin said, also carefully. Verskaft chuckled at that, and gestured to the plastic arm.
"We may be children playing with sticks compared to the quarians, but we still have far better to offer than that," he said. He gave a shrug. "The Special Tasks Group may have... magnanimously... offered to cover your hospital costs. That doesn't interest us. We want you active, not lying in bed with forth-rate hooks and peg-legs."
"Hm," Mordin said, eyes narrowing. "Not corporate. Bearing military. Not mercenary," he set his jaw. "Purpose here obviously recruitment. To whom?"
"Not recruitment," Verskaft said with a slow shake of his head. "We don't need you carrying a card. Just an offer."
"With strings," Mordin finished.
"Some strings are easier to bear than others," he said. He looked to the computer. "We know of your recent interest with the Genophage."
"New resources conditional upon ceasing work," Mordin said with a harsh tone.
Verskaft gave a chuckle at that. "Quite the opposite," he said. "Making you stop is as easy as pulling a trigger. Keeping you going... that's trickier."
Mordin stared at this strange salarian for a few seconds more, running through the list of people who knew about his discoveries on Tuchanka, his involvement in Tuchanka in the first place, and his current task. One by one, they were eliminated, until the law of parsimony declared that it could only be one group. Mordin's hand fell utterly still, his eyes bugging wide, as he turned to look at Verskaft once more.
"You represent th–," Mordin began, but Verskaft hissed through his teeth, cutting him off.
"You know as well as most that Sur'Kesh is made out of prying ears. Yes, though," he nodded. "So. Your decision. Our resources, your Genophage work. What will it be?"
It wasn't even a decision, really.
Garrus was wearing his armor again, but this time, it was a new suit that had been given to him out of the goodness of THIS's heart. With Tali back on the fleet, he had no reason to doff it. Given the group he was coming to meet, it wouldn't be entirely out of place. Simply rather odd. Garrus could live with being 'rather odd'. The chamber itself was expansive, a three-quarters circle of a room, lined with benches that ascended toward the back of the room. An amphitheatre, thought for no comedies or tragedies – unless you were talking about politicians, at least.
"This session of the Primarch's Circle stands open," the ancient, robed turian with a stave declared from the center of the room, near where Garrus found himself standing. That made him the center of attention, and a lot of high-ranking turians were looking down on him. Literally, in many cases. "Garrus Vakarian, of the Magnus cadet branch of House Ixias, stands before the Primarch."
Spirits, they did love their pomp and circumstances. While that sounded like a seat of nobility, pretty much every turian on Palaven or beyond could trace their lineage to a cadet branch of some thousand-years-dead House or Great Family. Pomp for pomp's sake, really. He cleared his throat, trying to set aside the theatrics, and do what he'd come here to do.
"The state of Palaven is unacceptable," Garrus led off, which immediately started angry grumblings in the crowd. Well, he hadn't come her to sugar-coat things. "I'm not here to built a cushy seat for myself in the back rows, so I don't plan on being either eloquent nor tactful. The fact is, the entire Hierarchy is not ready for another major conflict."
"Treasonous words of a bald-faced coward!" somebody shouted from the back rows.
Garrus forcefully ignored him, doubly so since his own mark was clear to anybody with working eyes. "Palaven Prime; the Nine Portals are utterly unsecured. The bureaucracy is a farce. Law enforcement is more interested in salvaging its own reputation than it is with solving crimes."
"Silence this low-born fool!"
Garrus turned a glare in that turian's direction, but continued. "Cipritine; our shelters might as well be made of cardboard, and we've only got food for two weeks in each of them. The militias haven't trained in months. Crime is rampant!"
"None could stand before turian might!" another voice called out.
"Humanity almost did, with one one thousandth of your numbers!" Garrus shouted back. "The army is floundering and the navy is stocked with political admirals! When the Reapers arrive, they will blow through us like the rachni did to the asari!"
"How dare this no-one defame our Hierarchy!"
"ENOUGH!" Fedorian finally shouted, arms spread wide. "This is a report which was mandated by our membership. We will listen to its findings."
"He's a paranoid coward! A criminal and a prodigal!" another voice called out. That set Garrus' teeth to a steady grind. First he's given the task of finding the holes in their defenses and infrastructure. And then, when he finds so spirits-damned many that he hadn't even cleared page one of his forty page report, they refuse to hear it. Typical politicians. Garrus took a step forward, pointing out the last who shouted a disruption at him.
"At least I'm not a who–" Garrus shouted.
And was interrupted when a crash of iron filled the room. Verdant light filled the space, flaring out from the dead-center of the room, causing Garrus to shrink back and shield his eyes. Then, with a groaning sound of tested metal, the newest figure in the room rose from its kneel.
"Shame," Iacobus declared, its voice bouncing through the room and silencing everybody in its wake. "The state of your world should fill you with shame. Everything that was great about you has curdled. Your pride has become vanity. Your honor has become narrowmindedness and folly. Your duty has become a chain of masters whipping their lessers!"
"This is..." Fedorian said, too shocked to even return to his seat. Everybody else, Garrus included, had fell into utter silence.
"Not two words from you, Priarchii," Iacobus declared, pointing him out. "Not yet," and then, he turned to the others. "Your traditions have begun to mock themselves. This is not the People which I swore to nurture and uplift," it took a hard step forward, its four iron wings spreading from its back. "In the streets of this city, freemen walk past the desperate and dying without so much as a glance. Where is your Caritas, your alms to those in need? I see it sitting in the pockets of turians consumed by Avaritia. Shame!"
Garrus took a step back, and completely allowed the Wayward Son the floor. The steel-fleshed archspirit now began to pace, its feet falling with thuds that began to crack the marble under them as they went. "Industria has become Acedia, as you let your world crumble under your feet. Where once the People shone one and all with the Virtu of Turinitas, now they have become envious, petty, and base. You stare down at your own, as you stare down at others. You think yourselves above. You are not the People. You have turned the Turi into a cancer upon this planet. In the heavens, They Who Are draw nearer with every passing day. I can feel that in my heart. And you do NOTHING!" the shout literally knocked the politicians back out of their seats. Fedorian only landed softly because it was on top of two idiots. "I will not fight for a world which sickens me. My attentions are better spent where they may bear a useful fruit, instead of holding up the bloated corpse of something which deserves to rot."
Iacobus spun on its metal heel, grinding the floor one final time with its robe flaring out behind it. It gave Garrus a look, a gauging one, with that featureless face. Then, the faintest of nods as it stormed toward the doors of the chamber. "Do not call for me until your voices deserve to be heard!" the Wayward Son shouted as it departed. When the door slammed shut of its own device behind the spirit, there was a long silence in its wake.
Garrus was the first to recover from that spell of silence, though. Even that slightest approval from the jade-and-gold eyes of the Wayward Son settled into his stomach like a warm fire after a cold day. He faced the others who had mocked and belittled him, and with a clear voice, he began anew.
"The Turian Hierarchy is not ready for another war," he said, and he flipped to page two. "Lesser Leventine; the barracks are unfortified and the highways for ground-traffic are crumbling and in disrepair. Only one groundline for communications exists, and it's neither hardened nor well hidden. One kinetic warhead could silence the entire region."
This time, when Garrus continued spelling out his findings in precise detail, there were no mocking words nor sneering comments from above. Instead, rapt silence.
At least one turian in this room remembered what it was like to strive for Virtu.
"All for?" the Joint Chief of Staff asked from his place on that podium. It was fucking weird to be wearing a dress uniform. Pretty much since the first day that she'd signed up, she'd never had to put one on save for that asshole Drill Sergeant who couldn't get off until he'd screamed at a recruit for not having his lapels straighter than a laser. And considering the career she'd had after that, no big surprise that it hadn't seen much use. It certainly looked more in place on the Si Wongi than it did on Jack.
Behind, an array of eleven admirals took a moment, then raised their hands. Well, six of them did. The Joint Chief gave a nod. "All opposed?" he called. Two fuckwits raised their hands in opposition. Both men, both old, both fucking idiots. The Joint Chief nodded once more. "The motion passes. Category Six dismissal from the Systems Alliance Navy has been rescinded from Jacqueline Nilsdottir. The reinstatement of servicewoman Asha al'Wahim will take place as soon as the relevant documentation is put in place. That is all for this session, we are adjourned."
Shepard puffed out a breath, rolling her eyes as she turned. "What? Did you really think they weren't gonna go for it?" Jack asked.
"Honestly? I kinda did," Shepard said. She turned to Asha. "Well, it's not much, but it's a start..."
Asha shook her head slowly. "For so many years, I presumed my name had damned me to mediocrity. The only thing which barred my way, was indeed myself. You've done more than enough," she said.
"You'd be about the first person to actually admit it," Shepard grumbled, before turning and leaving the chamber. Arcturus Station was humanity's crowning jewel, its stab at trying to build something as great as the vaunted Citadel. It fell short by a couple orders of magnitude, but damned if those little Earthlings didn't try. When they finally made it into the halls, no longer under direct scrutiny, Shepard gave a deep exhale, slumping for a moment, before resuming her pace. "How's that hand coming along?" she asked, a glance cast toward Jack herself.
"Well, I guess I'm a lefty, now," she said.
"That bad, huh?" Shepard asked.
"Stupid thing is, I can use it just fine. It's just that I can't feel anything with it anymore. Might as well be somebody else's arm or something," Jack pointed out, flexing her essentially numb extremity as she did. She'd actually managed to scare herself one night when she woke up with a hand down her pants, and took a bedframe and a near-heart attack to figure out that the hand in question was attached to her.
"There's got to be some treatment or something to help with that," Shepard said.
Jack shrugged. "I can still throw a punch with it. And probably better, now that it won't hurt like a bitch when I do it."
"Still better than Samara," Shepard said with a sad note. Jack had to agree with that. The human biotic wasn't one to keep up on the shit the others were doing, so she wasn't up-to-date on the Justicar's status. But considering the coma she was in when she got offloaded onto Thessia, and the silence that surrounded her since, Jack's notion of Samara's condition was 'not very goddamned good'. "And what about you? You're still missing a pretty big chunk of your lung..." Shepard turned to Asha.
"That, unlike the biotic, was much more amenable to treatments," Asha said. "Now I lack but a tenth of it, rather than a half. I take what improvements may come as they come."
"So where are you going to go now?" Shepard asked.
Asha turned to her as though she didn't understand the question. "Where will I go?" she asked. "I am where I wish to be. When the Reapers come, they will not find me languishing in some colonial garrison. That much I can swear."
"I'm asking because Udina's been asking after you for the last week or so," Shepard said. Asha raised a brow. "Hey, I don't have the first clue. But from the sound of it, it was pretty important."
"You will have me back when the time comes for the great conflict, I presume?" Asha asked.
"I'm well aware I couldn't beat you away with a stick," Shepard said.
"Then I will see what Udina wishes," Asha said with a shrug. She then turned a corner away from the path that the others were taking. "But for now, I have nieces which I am due to be mauled by. Latifah was quite pointed that I not miss the appointment."
"And you were afraid of talking to your sisters," Shepard teased. Asha turned a flat look to her, then turned on her heel and strode away. That left Shepard rolling her eyes and shaking her head. She finally turned to Jack. "And what about you? You did come home with about half a face. I figure if anybody's earned a long stay on Ember Island, she'd be you."
"It doesn't count if it doesn't leave a scar," Jack said. One of the perks of waterbending and skin-grafts; they always merged in so closely they might as well be invisible.
"Jack. You had your eyes blown out," Shepard said.
"And now I got plastic ones that work just as well. Big fuckin' whoop," Jack said. That had been a bit of a shock to Nils when he visited her in the wake of that throw-down. Having eyes like that fuck-head Weaver could give any person pause. Of course, it wouldn't have happened if she'd been wearing a helmet when that Oni blew up Mordin – and everybody standing anywhere near him.
Which made it essentially inevitable, since Jack never wore a helmet if she could make do without.
"Jack..." Shepard said.
"I'm shocked as shit that something like this didn't happen earlier," she said, tapping her eyeball when she did. It was so weird being able to do that. And weirder because she often found herself forgetting to blink. "You see the way I fight, you know that sooner or later some bit of metal's gonna come flying at me and I'm not going to get out of its way in time. Just so happened that I caught an explosion instead of shrapnel."
Shepard could only shake her head. "You're never going to change," she said.
"Fuck no!" Jack declared.
"Seriously, Jack. I know you're going to put your head through walls if you stick with me, because I've got nothing but a year's worth of boring ahead of me. And that's if we don't get swamped under Reapers before then," Jack rolled her eyes. "So are you going to take Lawson's offer?"
"Hey, the cheerleader can hang with Goto all she wants until she gets her sisters out of that bastard's hands. But I ain't gonna be with her when she does," Jack said.
"Why not?" Shepard asked.
Jack gave an uncomfortable shift. "Well... ya remember Grissom Academy?" she asked.
"Fairly vividly," Shepard said.
"Yeah... they called me up a week or so back. Need somebody to teach their Ascension Program kids how to use their biotics properly. Pretty much every biotic capable of the old 'Annihilation Field' is either a Justicar or so buried in the Alliance Spec Ops Division that they never so much as see the sunrise. I figure, shit, why not?"
Shepard chortled at that. "Really. You, a teacher?" she asked.
"Weirder things have happened," Jack said. Then she puffed out a breath. "And besides; I owe those guys. They looked after me when I was ten kinds of broken. I figure this is the least I can do to square that off."
Shepard nodded. "Well, your students literally couldn't be in better hands."
"In my left hand, sure," Jack said, and flexed her right. "'Cause this one's still pretty useless."
"Seriously? Nothing helps?" Shepard asked.
"Stop getting on my nerves about my nerves, Shepard," Jack said.
"You've been waiting to use that one, haven't you?" Shepard asked.
"Fuck you," Jack said around a chuckle.
"Ahem?" Shepard raised a brow.
"Right. Fuck you, sir."
"There you go," Shepard said.
"Our boards are green. No signals on LIDAR or BPP. I'm making a run for the Relay," Uola'Gaar said.
"Radio silence," Tali said. There was a crackle, and then silence. She was the only one in her ship, now. It was a tiny thing, a salarian shuttle which had been stripped of everything to put in more fuel and a bigger drive-core. This thing was the very pride of the Migrant Fleet these days. Another thing which people lauded her for. Bringing stealth-ships into the Flotilla.
Honestly, she should have kept her mouth shut about how the old Normandy's engines worked. She'd had enough to deal with teaching waterbending in that hectic first year. She never actually thought that some engineer in the fleet would actually take her napkin-sketch level design and make something tangible out of it. That something tangible, she now sat in. It had seating for three, no weapons, and no amenities whatsoever. Pride of the Special Fleet, indeed. Just being here made her itch over every square inch of her body.
Stupid quarian physiology.
They should have put that drive-core into a water-tanker. Then it'd be useful for more than bragging and stroking ego. Tali pulled the ship clear of Haestrom's orbit, unable to see the shuttle that had borne her onto that world in the first place pulling free of the surly bonds of gravity and darting away into space. The geth that were patrolling this system would find her wake, but by the time they did, she'd be through the Relay and long gone. Tali, on the other hand, was in a stealth-ship. And she had something of her own that she had to do.
She set the Relay jump, and let the autopilot take her through. Not out of the Far Rim, as Uola was doing, but instead, clear into the Perseus Veil. When her course was set, she moved back into the paltry cabin, and took her spanner to the wall panelling. After loosening a few bolts, she pulled the plate out of place, and reached in and down. She fished until she closed her hand on something uneven and heavy. It took a bit of a heave, and a lot of maneuvering, to get it out of the hiding spot that she'd dropped it before the mission began.
When she finally brought it into the dim light of the 'cockpit', she felt another sigh in the back of her throat. It was almost the size of her head, but entirely built out of plastic and metal. Clearly, large parts of it were burned or blasted off, but there was one thing which still, despite everything else, remained visible. The scarlet N7 at its corner.
Adahn was dead. And, more shockingly than Tali could have ever predicted, she found herself thinking about what it'd done in that last moment. Shoving her aside, out of the path of the rocket that would have hit her square in the face. Airbender Adahn. Not a leader, a guide. Now, scrap metal and plastic.
She'd had no chance to run diagnostics on the thing's inner workings, because she didn't have Daro'Xen's resources and any attempt to hook geth up to the Neema's computer systems would have seen every member of the crew pointing guns at her for 'fomenting catastrophe'. The slaughter of the Alarai was still very fresh in people's memories. It didn't matter anyway. This thing was cold, silent, and gaussless.
She had a lot of time to think, holding that scrap of Adahn. She knew what was coming; when the Conclave selected its replacement for the all-but-exiled Caylan'Zorah, it chose Mirsid'Jarva. Tali had thought him a good and decent replacement... for all of about ten seconds. The first thing out of his mouth when he accepted the position was a call for the Admiralty to hold a referendum on an immediate assault on Rannoch. Uncle Han had to be quite pleased with that, at least. More and more, she found herself in the company of Zaal'Koris and his family, instead of Auntie Raan. Shala had Han over too often for Tali's liking, nowadays.
Little did Tali realize, she was starting to dread every time that Han walked into a room.
"Things are in motion and I'm no longer in any position to stop them," Admiral Koris had admitted one quiet evening.
"You're an Admiral. You can veto Han easily," she'd pointed out. Koris just shook his head.
"With the backing of Jarva in the Conclave... The people will speak, and Han will listen to them. There was a time, so long ago, when we were trying to strike back at the geth... in the very beginning. We called all of our wayward brothers and sisters to join us, to fight, to win back our homeworld. Do you know what they said?"
"...I didn't even know that there was dissent," Tali said.
"'We would rather survive in the darkness, than die for a dream'," Zaal said quietly. "And now... Well. Things have changed."
The powerlessness she felt as she watched her people turn toward hopeless and insane war was maddening. Couldn't they see that if they fought on Rannoch, it'd be a slaughter? They didn't have the numbers for war, or the logistics for it. Tali had checked. It was deeply upsetting, deeply discouraging, and deeply grim.
There was a shift in the field that the engines threw as she dropped out of the Relay Network, and immediately set course across the open space of the Veil toward the Tikkun system. People would probably ask why she'd come home a day and a half later than the people she'd been dispatched to deliver. Let them ask. It was reaching the point where Tali'Zorah just didn't care anymore.
A crackling on the sensors pulled her attention away from inevitable suicide on a species-scale, to the machinery of the ship she was in. She pulled herself back into the command seat as her ship zipped past machinery left in the depths of space. Radio scrammers. The geth put them in the Oort cloud of Tikkun to keep people from spying on them. There had to be millions of them, each about the size of Tali's brain. No amount of work could break their function; they formed a veritable wall of radio distortion, at the outskirts of the system.
She listened, and the crackling of the radio formed into something... haunting.
She could hear whispers, voices in those words. Long faded and distorted, no doubt due to being bounced between these machines for centuries. She heard the dead words of old Rannoch. As she pushed deeper, she heard its music, faint and tinny. She sighed, pressing her eyes shut as she listened to a version of a song that had been sung to her in her childhood. She shouldn't be despondent, hearing such an upbeat take on 'Mother, I'm Here', but the fact that she was hearing the voice of a dead culture... stung.
She was deep enough, now. She sidled past the seats, and grabbed the last thing in the toolbox before she stopped before the airlock. It was a signal transmitter. Just a beacon, nothing fancy. One she'd set to activate an hour after she left. A spot-weld later, and it was fused to the last chunk of Adahn. She purged the air from the shuttle, then opened the gates to the black. It was the strangest of sensations, being back in the presence of her mother sun. It twinkled in the distance, to her perspective simply a large star in the night. She pushed the geth's corpse out of the ship, and it drifted away from the shuttle, rotating slowly into the dark.
With that done, she pulled herself back into her seat. No detection. She was getting passive pings on geth almost everywhere deep into the system, but out here? Silence and stillness. She set the course back to the Fleet. Back to the madness, and politics of desperation and despair. But before she did, she took one final moment for herself.
She brought up the sensors, and sought Rannoch in the heavens. She breathed a sigh of relief when she saw that it was not tucked behind Haza or something. Rannoch. The Homeworld. She zoomed closer with that telescope, to get a picture of it. The terminator was pretty much pointing straight at her, so she could only see half of the planet under the sunlight. Great deserts and dry wastelands, stretching between the seas and massive rivers that bore culture to the world. But there was something that she didn't expect.
She leaned forward, looking not at the dayside, but the dark side of Rannoch.
Why could she see city-lights on the Homeworld?
There was a light splat as the eggshell crumpled and dumped its slimy contents over her fingers. Samara stared at the egg, her jaw tight. "It's alright if you can't get the fine control down. You've already made remarkable progress already," the doctor said to her. She was an asari only half of Samara's age, one specialized in these kinds of injuries.
"Remarkable progress is not sufficient," Samara answered. Her words came out slower than they used to, for they now felt harder to properly pronounce.
"Miss Yeldechiyv, I've never seen an asari of your age recover from a brain injury as severe as the one you suffered. I've never seen an asari a tenth of your age recover so well!" the doctor pointed out. Samara turned a cold look to her.
"I have not been Samara Yeldechiyv for four hundred years. Please cease calling me that," she said. And then, she turned to the next egg on its little stand. Her hands didn't shake anymore, but when she reached for it, it was like trying to operate a machine that one had never seen before. Her movements felt clunky and experimental, directions shifting and changing as she tried to will her limb in a particular direction for a particular distance. It was harder than anything she'd had to do in a century. Finally, she had the smooth surface of the egg in the web between her thumb and index finger. Slowly, she tightened her grip.
And ruptured the egg just as she had the ones before it.
Samara almost growled in frustration at the latest in a long line of failures. Almost, but she'd dedicated herself to stoicism long, long ago, and she wasn't going to let mere aggravation break that oath. "You should take a break. Try this again tomorrow," the doctor said, her tones intended to be soothing.
"No, I shall not," Samara said. "I will continue until I am regularly successful."
"You've been doing this for ten hours," the doctor felt compelled to point out.
"And I will do so for another ten if I must," Samara said. She moved her hand to the next egg, and slowly put it into the reach of her grasp. Slowly, she willed her fingers close. She was trying to relearn how her limbs worked; due to the way asari brains were structured, any damage tended to be either fatal at worst, or an irrecoverable loss of function at best. When she had finally aroused from her coma, she could swallow, blink, and move two fingers of her left hand. They had already chosen the exoskeleton that they claimed would bear her until her dying day.
As of last week, she was walking almost as well as she had before getting that depressed skull fracture in battle. Her balance was fine. Her vision, fine...ish. She'd lost all hearing in her left ear, and one eye didn't seem able to see colors other than red anymore. They said she'd be blind, deaf, and paralyzed. She'd proven them wrong on each count.
"Samara, please..." the doctor said gently.
"If you wish to be of help," Samara said slowly, turning that icy gaze that she still possessed upon the woman who was mistaken in her method of helping her, "then bring me more by which I can test myself. I will cease when I wish to, and not before."
Again, she closed her fingers, and this time, there was no crack nor splat. Slowly, she raised her hand, the egg grasped somewhat awkwardly between her thumb and middle-finger. The doctor looked between the egg and the woman grasping it, then sighed, nodded, and moved for the door.
She had made an oath to herself and to her sisters-in-arms so long ago that she would not die in bed, mindless and crippled. She fully intended to hold herself to that oath, no matter the other cost. And if the Avatar was correct, they would be needing her very, very soon. From the moment she awakened, she drove herself mercilessly. All knew that asari brain-injuries were permanent and irrecoverable. One by one, she was putting a stern test to all of that 'knowledge'
She moved to set the egg down, and found herself dropping it. It broke on the table, spreading its faintly-green yolk on the table for a moment, before the surface vibrated and it was swept into the trough that led toward a drain. She clenched her fist, feeling how the skin pressed and warped, how her knuckles shifted and popped. Today, she would grasp an egg. Tomorrow, she would turn that into fine motor control. Next week, she would be sewing. The month after that, she would be sniping.
Samara opened her hand, and shifted it to what was, at the moment, the last egg on the table. She closed her fingers around it, and grimaced ever-so-slightly when she ruptured it, as she had so many others before. She wasn't going to give up, though. Not as long as she still had days left to live.
"Junny? Are you alright out here?" Greyson asked, peeking around the corner into the room. The formerly hanar ship was built on the strangest angles that the human had ever seen. He doubted there was a single right-angle to be found on the entire damned thing. So, when the quarians got their hands on it, the Qwib-Qwib ended up having remarkably spacious accommodations, comparable to the rest of the Migrant Fleet. There was enough room that Junny got to have her own little nook, what used to be a closet. When he saw her, he couldn't help but smile a little.
She was still wearing her environment suit, as she did every day. She had a little smile on her face as the hammock she was asleep in shifted ever so slightly underneath her. That'd probably been the best thing that anybody'd ever done for her. Give her a way to divorce herself from the world outside of her, that hectic hell of sensation and stimulus that her particular mind couldn't handle. Greyson reached in, patting at her booted foot for just a moment, then returned whence he'd come.
He'd never expected that he'd be a father. Now, he actually felt like one. Gods, how long had it even been since he'd had a drink, let alone a blast of red-sand? You'd almost think he was being responsible. Well, the contents of the room that he entered put that to bed in a hell of a hurry. The smile on his face shifted meaning when he entered, and beheld the naked quarian, face down on the bed.
"I can't feel my legs," Leiz said into the mattress. He ran his fingers from her backside to the point where one of the long grey legs seamlessly transitioned to glossy black plastic.
"Well, all things considered, that shouldn't be surprising," Greyson answered her. And seriously; what was it with alien women these days? There was a time when he took that anthropocentric bullshit of Phoenix seriously. Now, it seemed like he couldn't turn around but to find himself shacked up with a woman who evolved on a different planet.
"Stop that. I'm still ticklish," she said. He noted that he was gliding his fingers along her prosthetic leg when he did so.
"I still don't know how you can feel that," he said. Leiz turned to him, shaking her head. For all she was the vaunted 'healthiest quarian in the Fleet', she was remarkably ordinary looking. Narrow nosed, thin lipped, and eyes not quite set on the same plane, it still felt in a strange way comforting. When Greyson first popped the old mask off, he'd half expected some sort of either inhuman beauty or inhuman ugliness. Finding ordinary... that was something 'humanizing', he figured.
"We're very good at what we do," she said. She then stretched, toes of both flesh and plastic curling, before she pulled herself up and hugged his back. "And so, it seems, are you."
"I still don't know how this happened," Greyson admitted. His bed was on the other side of the room, a curtain separating them. He hadn't used it in about a month. He turned a look to her, noting the look in her faintly glowing eyes. "I mean... I've heard a few things about... your past."
She sighed, butting her head against his shoulder. "I had to know that'd come up," she said. "Can we not talk about it?"
"What you did doesn't bother me. I know how things go," Greyson said, with utter honesty. If she was a prostitute, well, she could scarcely find a safer place to do it. Greyson figured the likelihood of catching a sexually transmitted disease on the Fleet had to be just a tiny bit above zero. "I want to know why."
"Why I picked whoring instead of a decent job?" she asked. He shook his head.
"No. You flinch every time you hear a deep voice, one of your shoulder blades has a weird bump in it, and you can't turn your head as far left as you can right," Greyson pointed out what he'd seen of her. And the only reason he bothered to look, was because he'd had a hunch right from the outset. "I mean, it's obvious somebody broke your nose a long time ago. You were an abused kid, weren't you?"
"I said, I don't want to talk about it," Leiz repeated, but more faintly this time. Greyson turned and faced her. Her lips writhed for a moment as he stared at her. He was about to point out that his old man broke more bottles on Greyson's face than he did on the wall, and he'd made a sport of hurling bottles at the wall. She cut him off before he could. "I don't want to ever have a family."
"W..why?" he asked.
"Dad... he was always angry," she said, eyes pressing shut and tears starting to leak from them. "There was nothing you could do to calm him down. But he was important to the ship. Practically the only person who could keep it running. So when he came home and started beating on Mom, on me... people looked the other way."
"That's horrible," Greyson said with a wince of sympathy.
"It got worse and worse as time went on," she said, tears spilling freely now. "Eventually... Dad fucking killed her. He killed Mom with his bare hands. And they were going to let him off... until I finally dared to say that he was doing the same thing to me. Population control. You can't lose people without replacement. Kill a mother? Sure, as long as the kid's fine. Kill a kid...?"
"Son of a bitch..." he muttered. What the fuck was wrong with these people?
She opened her eyes again, and there was anger there. "They banished him from the Fleet, since nobody wanted to deal with him. He was dead in a month without people constantly accounting for his rage. I didn't want to go through that ever again... so I figured... make myself utterly unmarriageable... and I never would."
"But didn't you think that maybe there might be a pregnancy from y–" Greyson began, and she sat back, glaring at the bed between them.
"You think I don't know how insane that is? You think I don't realize how stupid and irrational a plan it is? But I couldn't... think of any other way. No matter what my brain says, in my stomach I just... This was the only one that'd keep me... I don't know, safe."
"Hey, come here," he beckoned. She turned a look at him that said that she was trying very hard not to go back to old habits. He first took her three-fingered hand in his, before facing her squarely, his legs tucked under him. "I swear that I will never lay an unkind hand on you. I know, it ain't much, but I can promise you that."
"What?" she asked, a quirk of a smirk returning to her face. "Think I'm going to keep inviting you across the room, do you?"
Greyson shrugged. "Every place I've tried to set down roots so far ended up either blowing up or getting a knife-wielding psychopath wreck everything. Like I said, I don't know if it means anything, 'cause I don't know if I'll still be h–" he said, before being cut off.
By her kissing him.
"I think you can stick around," she whispered into his chin. "At least for a while."
He pressed his own kiss into her short brown hair. He resolved himself to just hold her and comfort her for the rest of the night. Needless to say, it wasn't too long before he paralyzed her again.
That seemed to be the way things went with Greyson these days.
"Elli!"
Part of Elli's soul died just hearing that voice. With a shudder, she turned to behold the insane asari grinning at the top of the catwalks that surrounded this... well, Elli didn't know what it was, but it absolutely wasn't Prothean in origin. "Oh god help me," she said, four eyes pressing shut.
"I was told you were on Okina Oni!" T'Soni said, as she began to navigate the paths that would lead her to where the Prothean stood. "I thought it might be a good idea to collaborate on the Crucible project considering that we're both experts in Prothean technology – you for obvious reasons and me because of my near-century of study – so the Alliance could be hard-pressed to find a more skilled set of eyes to find their top-secret superweapon why isn't this elevator working?"
Because Elli disabled it.
"It must be malfunctioning," Elli said. The entirely-too-excited grin on Liara's face only then started to fade, before she spotted a ladder which Elli hadn't, and moved toward that instead. The Prothean rubbed her inner eyes in frustration. T'Soni wasn't a bad person, really. It was just that she was so... excitable. "For the record, having a Prothean expert here does us little good. This site is definitely not Prothean."
"That's odd," T'Soni said from the ladder as she came. "The Alliance claimed that it was. It has all of the ordinary signatures, the eezo-infused concrete and metal, the memetic scripture..."
"This is Inusannon, not our own," Elli said. T'Soni stopped her descent, and turned a look over her shoulder.
"Really?" T'Soni asked.
"Yes," Elli said. "I would know Inusannnon technology anywhere."
"I'd like to see what has you so conv– by the Anthropologist you're pregnant!" T'Soni said, a slightly ear-ringing squee of fresh excitement bubbling out of her.
"No, I was pregnant several months ago. Now I'm nursing. Placentocentric primitives..." Elli rolled her eyes. "Please stop making that noise. It hurts in my skull."
"Oh, right," she blushed a slightly darker blue. "Sorry. I... um... get carried away."
"You? Noooo," Elli muttered. T'Soni finally rounded the edge of the Divination Pit – as she'd taken to calling it – and stopped abruptly as she looked down onto what no Prothean had ever built. "Much as the Prothean race evolved to communicate ideas through touch, and to pass them along through our technology, the Inusannon had their own gifts. They were a telepathic race, able to share their minds at great distances without a technological bridge at all. To record such things, they used these."
"That doesn't seem possible," T'Soni said. "I mean... that would be restricted by the speed of light unless they had some means of generating quantum tangle through a biological means. And as far as I know, that is impossible."
"Impossible only by our technologies," Elli said. "Need I remind you of those... things, and what the Leviathan did to control them?"
T'Soni paused, and pondered. "If they had some sort of technology on par with the Reapers..." she began.
"They should have been able to meaningfully resist," Elli agreed. "But instead, they fell with pathetic swiftness. Almost no shots were fired in their Harvest, because the Reapers needed only Indoctrinate one of the strongest of the Inusannon, and have that one Indoctrinate all others of its race, before having its race Indoctrinate everybody else in their cycle."
"That's a horrifying hypothesis," T'Soni said.
"Not a hypothesis, it is history," Elli said. "This technology is not intended for my mind as much as it is not for yours, but I have been able to piece things together with my own interest and expertise. The creators of this place? They were rebels against their kind, a sort of 'standing opposition' to all of the customs, doctrines, and policies of their era. When developed, it was to try to prevent stagnation, I think. I imagine that for most of the Inusannon's dominance of the galaxy, they were seen as no more than a joke."
"But when the Reapers came and began to Indoctrinate..." T'Soni began. Elli nodded.
"They alone were free of the network of death. They retreat to this place," she motioned around them. "Notice, asari, how the facility appears to be a distorted sphere? I believe it was built as a perfect one, a hundred thousand years ago, and tidal forces caused its distortion."
"Why would they need a..." she trailed off, and eyes widened. "They dropped this facility into the planet's mantle! To hide it! Until the flow of the molten planetary material drove it back up into a volcanic vent, as it has right now! That's genius!"
"...yes, actually," Elli said, a little shocked that she'd managed to jump to the conclusion that took Elli the better part of a month to figure out. One of her young picked that moment to pick her in the bladder, which was uncomfortable and distracting, but no more than she'd come to expect. She'd never actually expected to be a mother. Now, she was, and she was going to have to deal with it. "But they claim that they enacted one further layer of security before they did. Hiding a facility of this scale on a planet simply cannot be done without leaving a wasteland of indicators. The planet would be forever marked by the attempt, and the Reapers have forever to wait for this to resurface..."
"So they would have to alter the structure of the planet itself to hide it," T'Soni said. She frowned, and turned away from Elli, her Omni opening up. In truth, this was far less taxing than Elli had expected the 'reunion' of the two of them to be, but that was mostly because Elli was managing to keep the asari's mind on something other than fangirl giggling.
"There is no record of what they did to conceal their tracks," Elli said. "Obviously, it occurred after creating this place, so there could be no record of what they did to hide it. I have to ponder what it could have been, though; this planet is a baked and lifeless hell already. Hiding such a thing would be simple, in most circumstances."
"But it wasn't!" T'Soni cut in. "This planet should be inhabitable. The only reason it isn't was because of a very recent planetary impact. They threw the moon at it," T'Soni said proudly. Elli fell silent, and leveled the flattest look that four eyes could give to two. T'Soni turned, nodded with a look of gravitas on her face, and flicked open a page on her Omni. "See?"
"See what?" she asked. "And what do you mean, 'threw a moon at it'?" she asked.
"No, not 'a' moon," she said, and then brought up a picture of the orbital partner of Earth. "'The' moon. HAH! I knew that all of this Element Zero was part of drive cores! I could never prove it, but if what you're saying is true, then they must have used the satellite of Earth to annihilate the superficial structures of this planet to hide what they did!"
"They certainly did a good job, considering they split the planet into chunks," Elli could only agree. The 'little demon' which now co-orbited with Okina Oni was about a third the size of its partner, which made it monumentally massive, and entirely too close by lunar standards. Clearly castoff from a massive collision. She thumbed her chin, though, looking down into that pool. "If that is the case, though, that means that they were desperate indeed to hide something from the eyes of the Reapers."
"That sounds very much like the Crucible that Shepard spoke about," T'Soni said. Elli nodded. Then, she looked back up to the door. It stood open and empty.
"And where is the Commander? I had presumed she would be twelve steps behind you, her face in her palm the whole way," Elli said.
T'Soni was silent for a moment at that. When she turned, the grin she'd been sporting had disappeared. "Things are..." she began. "Well, we knew that there were going to be differences."
Elli narrowed her eyes at the asari. For all she claimed to be a good liar, when it came to things like this, Elli could have seen through her with a blindfold on. "I see," was all she actually said.
"Can we not talk about that?" she asked.
"I suppose we could not," Elli said. A shadow had fallen over T'Soni, though. Elli wasn't above being relieved, though, that it meant that the asari's otherwise boundless enthusiasm would, for the moment at least, find a different means of venting.
Grothan tipped back the water, chasing down the painkillers that now more or less were the only thing making his life bearable. Stage three is curable, they said. Ninety five percent recovery for people in your age cohort, they said. Well, if this was the cure, he could only imagine how much worse dying of it would be. He puffed out a breath, his four eyes pressing shut and the headache which followed his every waking moment dimmed just a little with the dying of the light. He stepped away from the windows, ignoring for the moment the botanical gardens that were in easy eyeshot from his 'manor'. He had other things on his mind.
He moved to the stuffed, supple leather chair that was turned toward a fireplace built into the wall. Purely ornamental, it didn't have any actual piping, and the flames were no more than hard-light. He flicked it off even as he sat. When he did, he felt that weight in his bones, that quaking in his stomach as he tried to keep a meal down for a change. He reached over, picking up the pad that he'd left there. His fingers played across its surface, swiping from picture to picture. Elfur, his wife. Brightest blue eyes you'd ever see. Their children, still young. He doubted they even understood what their father was going through. He wasn't going to tell them, if he could help it. He wouldn't have told Elfur if he could have gotten away with it.
Governor Pazness knew he was being unfair to his family, but they deserved him at his best, not at his worst.
There was a creak from a corner of the room. He turned, a stab of pain hitting his head as he did. Don't turn fast, you cancer-riddled fool, you'll make yourself sick. "Who's there?" he demanded, forcing strength into his voice that his body otherwise lacked.
"A ghost," a familiar voice answered. "Just an old world ghost."
Grothan pushed himself to a stand, steadying himself for a moment until he no longer felt like he was going to vomit. When he did, his eyes had finally adjusted enough to see that there was another batarian in the room with him. He blinked a few times, trying to figure it out.
"Figured you'd have something to say. Or else call immediately for my head. Glad to see the latter wasn't true; it makes my coming here something of worth," he said. Only then, hearing his voice, did Grothan figure it out.
"Balak," he said. The figure that was almost a part of the shadows nodded, and when what little light there was hit him, the Governor couldn't help but flinch. His upper right eye had been burned right out of his head, burns bubbling back along his pate. The only good that the injury did was that it utterly erased the partial Untouchables brand which had been levied against him. "What are you doing here?"
"Came to talk. Discuss the why of things with somebody who might actually have the heart to hear it," Balak said. He shifted back, and even then, Grothan could see the melancholy on the other man's face, settled into his features like dirt into an infected wound. "Of all those petty men, you had the shame to see the wrong in what you were doing. That's a unique trait, it seems. I have to ask, have you asked the most important question?"
"What question is that?" Grothan asked.
"...'who are you, that does not know your history'?" Balak answered.
Honestly, that had been on Grothan's mind more and more the last few years. Ever since the diagnosis, ever since the treatments began, he found himself trying to find meaning, to find purpose in the things he did. And the more he looked, the harder it was to find any.
It started making him almost as sick as the treatments that were trying to save his life.
"Blind," Grothan answered. Balak nodded slowly, as though that was the answer that he'd expected to hear. And maybe, just maybe, he actually had.
"A blind man who knows that he is blind has a sight that the oblivious lack," Balak said, rising to his feet. "A conviction, a humility, and a drive which is no longer crippled by hubris. You've seen what we were. You know that that road continues only to our extinction, unmourned and unremembered but for the brutality which we spawned. You've seen that our past holds no answers."
"What do you want from me, Balak?" Grothan asked.
Balak stepped into the pale light that snuck into the study. "I want you to save the batarian race."
There was something comforting about laundry that Bei-Li couldn't really explain. Perhaps it was the rote that he could work through, perhaps the ritual that it engendered. Perhaps he just enjoyed ironing things. But whatever the case, he certainly had a lot more time to do it now that he was essentially under house arrest. Considering that he outright killed Citadel Security's Executor, he figured he should be pretty happy that he'd gotten off with only that.
Beyond the little chores of day-to-day living, Bei-Li found himself more-and-more training his old martial arts techniques, both police and military, if only to fill the time. Months passed slowly when you couldn't work, and didn't have a hobby. The drills he put himself through probably brought him back to a point where he could kick the ever-living-hell out of a prime fighter half his age. And that still left him with hours unspent in a day.
Bei-Li was pretty certain that the brass had decided that this would be his punishment. Slowly losing his mind in his apartment. And he wasn't entirely sure that they weren't justified in that.
He'd just unfolded a pair of slacks when there came a chime at the door. He turned, brow raising, and tipped the iron onto its back. No use burning his house down when he wasn't legally allowed to leave it. Who could that be, he pondered on his way to the door. Food got delivered every three days, mail every two. His lawyer hadn't darkened his doorstep in weeks. He opened the door.
"Captain Bei-Li of Citadel Security?" Councillor Udina asked. Bei-Li's eyes could scarcely be wider.
"I wouldn't know about the 'captain' part, but the rest is correct," Bei-Li answered. The Councillor for the human race gave a nod to the bodyguards flanking him, and they remained at the door. He took a step forward, into Bei-Li's domain.
"I suppose you don't mind if I come in," Udina said.
"Don't think I'd have the right to even if I did," Bei-Li answered.
"I also suppose that you are aware of Pallin's case making its way through the bureaucracy," Udina said. "It is under remarkable amount of scrutiny from the turian governments. They don't want to admit that one of their 'finest men' could be so deeply in the pocket of the Batarian Hegemony."
"Didn't they say that al'Jalani's evidence was inadmissible?" Bei-Li countered.
"What people say and what is, typically are two very different things," Udina said. "You acted in good conscience and good faith despite having your entire support structure actively undermined and turned against you. You were resourceful, thorough, and in the end, collected a confession from a corrupt bureaucrat, and resorted to lethal force only in defense of your own life."
"That's a very liberal interpretation of what happened," Bei-Li said. But he had an idea where this was going. Udina had a definite yen for un-defaming humans in rough spots. "But if that's what the evidence points to, I'm not going to disagree with it."
Udina nodded. "I'm having the suspension of your service lifted," he said. Bei-Li let out a small, but deeply ingrained, sigh of relief out at that pronouncement. "But there is a reason that you and I are talking face to face, rather than having your reprieve appear from on high. Pallin's corruption is a worrying thing, but more worrying is the precedent it sets. If people in such high levels of power can be bought from powers outside the Citadel Council, whom can we afford to place our trust in?" Bei-Li opened his mouth, but Udina's glare closed it again. "A rhetorical question, officer. While Pallin was obviously not the culprit, there have also been a rash of infiltrations into the Special Tactics and Reconnaissance databases in recent months. Few have that capability."
"So you want me to find out who's been tampering with Spectre files?" Bei-Li asked. "I'm sorry, but that's so far above my pay-grade that it could break the pavement at my feet with a ball of spit. I have no legs to stand on when it comes to them."
If Udina was annoyed by Bei-Li's colorful choice of words, he didn't chose to show it. "The very heart of why I'm here," Udina said. "The task that I give you is exactly that, but I'm well aware you can't pursue it meaningfully with your current resources. So I believe it is in our shared best interests to expand your available resources."
"You're... transferring me to a task-force?" Bei-Li asked.
"No. A lateral move won't serve your purpose. I am appointing you as the new Executor of Citadel Security."
Bei-Li stared at humanity's Councillor, one of the most powerful human beings in the galaxy, agog.
"I'm sorry, I'm not sure I heard that correctly," Bei-Li said. "Because if you just said what I think you said, my 'reward' for killing the last Executor is getting to be the next one."
"It is not anything so coarse," Udina said, eyes drilling into Bei-Li's "There are enemies on high in the administration of the Citadel. I don't know how high they are. They might even be in the offices of the Councillors, possibly even within my own. If what I believe is coming is indeed coming, then we need to not be undermined the first moment by traitors and agents against our interests."
"Why aren't you getting a Spectre to look into this?" Bei-Li asked. "I'm sure they have a lot more freedom and authority in this..."
"Spectres have duties throughout the galaxy. I need someone with his ear to the ground, here," Udina took a step away from the door, leaning slightly on the pillar which officially demarkated the divide between his kitchen and his vid-room. "And more than that, you are one of the most recommended and reliable men that I know of. A Spectre, be she one like Shepard, would tip our hand and drive any agents into hiding until the worst possible moment. You, on the other hand, are a political known. I wish to surreptitiously change that."
"So, this was an offer for a promotion?" Bei-Li asked. "Honestly, I was pretty sure I was going to get fired."
"We all must make sacrifices in times such as these," Udina said, somewhat cryptically. He turned hard eyes to Bei-Li once more. "Fortunately, some are much more palatable than others. Will you accept the responsibilities?"
It wasn't even a decision, really.
"What's a good word for smell?"
Grunt had to turn a look back to the krogan at his side. "What?" he asked.
"You know, one that isn't crude," the older man answered.
Grunt just rolled his eyes, ducking under the choking plantlife of the scrub-jungle that dominated much of Tuchanka's surface these days. "What about 'stink'?" Grunt asked. He didn't mind being sent on missions like this. There was always a glut of wildlife that wanted to eat him, no few spirits which wanted to do worse, and usually a few idiots from the clans that still opposed Urdnot who took potshots at him. In a word, a perfect solution to any boredom he might have felt.
"Stink doesn't work at all. That's even cruder than smell!" the other krogan complained. Then, he stopped. "What's that smell?"
"You mean, what's that stink?" Grunt asked. The other krogan rolled an eye at him. Grunt chuckled, then took in a breath. He wasn't wrong. There was a whiff of corruption here, the stink of a bad wound. "Hm. Stay close, keep your gun out."
Urdnot Charr gave a nod, and pulled out his own rifle. Unlike most krogan, Charr seemed to like his fights at arm's length. And not 'arms length as in how far it took to punch somebody', but rather, 'arm's length as in preferably at the other side of a room if not farther'. Grunt, on the other hand, loved his shotgun. And his shotgun, in turn, loved him. It was a begrudging and angry love, the kind that typically formed between two married people who were only more miserable without each other than they were with each other.
The plants were alive with noise, creatures that Grunt had described to him from the Tank. Klixen in the streams, varren anywhere they could hide. Queens in the air when they weren't driven off by flights of shrikes or dens of javelin-scorpions. But there was a different sound as well. It sounded like... suffering.
He pushed through the brush, and paused, as he started to see it changing around him. At first, even he'd almost missed it. But more and more it became clear in the sallow pallor of the leaves, the bloated, galled wood, the runny colors of flowers both poisonous and very poisonous – there was no such thing as a non-poisonous flower on Tuchanka. The only meaningful difference was between the poisonous ones krogan could eat, and the poisonous ones they couldn't. He entered a new clearing, the trees having seemed to rot away and collapsed under their own weight, letting the angry eye of Aralakh fall upon ferns and low scrub that seemed... greasy.
"Scent," Grunt said over his shoulder, as Charr's hands gripped tighter on the rifle.
"What?" Charr asked.
"Another word for smell," Grunt said. He then grasped his shotgun. A groan began to sound, as tumorous bodies began to push themselves out of the muck. Dead krogan, animated by spirits of rot and decay, bloated and horrifying, and the source of an illness in the nearby valley that nobody could at the moment cure. One of them began to lurch toward him, but Grunt blasted its legs off from a dozen meters away. It nevertheless tried to crawl toward the two krogan at the edge of the clearing, as others rose from the murk.
"Yeah, I think that'll work," Charr said. Then, he let out a shot, one that burst the rotting head of one which was even larger than the first. It'd be a dirty job, but Grunt wasn't squeamish. And besides, this was a lot more fun than playing politics.
With a roar and a war-cry, he launched himself into the fray, his muscles bashing the foul miscreations of mad spirits aside as he went, blowing to pieces those that he could.
A shaman's work was never done.
"You know, it's lucky you're wearing a helmet and they don't know you're staring," Zek said. Merren, still wearing his suit, turned a nervous glance toward him, before tucking his legs up to his chest again. He honestly couldn't blame Merren for looking, though. This beach was a fine place, and given the time of year, there were more than a fair share of lovely women sunbathing on it. Some of them even did it naked, to prevent tanlines.
Now there was something that Zek stopped having to worry about a long time ago.
"I'm sorry, it's just... I still don't know what to do with myself..." he answered. Zek could only nod.
"I think you should talk to them," Amily said to him. Merren looked from Zek's stepmother, to Zek himself. "Come on, I'm sure they'd love to talk to you."
"B...but they're naked!"
"Every quarian comes into the world naked," Amily said sagely, a grin on her face. "And I dare say that some of the best parts of quarian life are spent naked, so..."
"Ugh, Mooom," Zek interrupted, turning a disgusted look at her. She just laughed at their discomfort, and headed back toward the house. Zek himself was out here wearing nothing but a pair of shorts. If he never had to wear another environment suit, with another Ancestors-damned catheter, it'd be too soon. "And you wonder why I have six brothers and sisters," Zek muttered, sipping at his slightly salty drink.
"She reminds me of Leiz'Qour," Merren said quietly. He flopped back on the sands, letting the rays of Tikkun wash over his suit, if nothing else. "I still... There were nights, back when I was on the Alarai, that I'd dream that one-day, I might live long enough to set foot on the Homeworld," he shook his head slowly. "I mean, I thought I'd be ancient when I did. But instead... here I am. And here you are. I just don't understand how this happened."
"Quarians adapt," Zek said with a shrug, looking out over the beaches. This had been the first time in a long time that he'd actually had some time to himself. Before this, he spent countless hours and days and weeks talking with the Elders and what constituted the military on Rannoch. They had certainly made a show of his first debriefing. He still remembered it yet.
He stood before them, a solid dozen of the leaders of the more militant clans beyond Alarai, and the commander of Alarai's forces herself. "They are coming," he said to them all. "The Migrant quarians will come back to the Homeworld. And when they do, they will come in war."
"Zek Eluus, that is a very bold statement," Alizbeth Morton said from her seat at the center of the arc. Her hair had gone white some time before, but beyond lines of age at her eyes, she still had the same physique of any Migrant Fleet Marine that Zek had come across. This sovereign daughter of Rannoch had aged very well.
"You don't understand the way that they think," Zek said simply. "They are so far beyond desperate that they can't even see where they've left desperate behind. If they knew that we had less than two million combat-capable geth platforms on Rannoch right now, they'd be invading this week. Their hatred of the geth is greater than any sense of self-preservation. They'd rather die for a dream, then live another generation in the darkness," he gave a shrug. "And who could blame them? They know nothing about Rannoch's real history, about how the geth saved us. They've been fed lies their entire life, and the lives of their parents, their grandparents, all the way to when the Reegar and 'Zorah clans fled into space."
"You would do well to not defame the Reegar clan, Eluus," Alun Barka of Tebresh said, his voice a practical thunder-roll through the room.
"Your reverence of their dead won't prevent the ones that live in the Fleet from attacking," Zek countered.
"Then we contact them," Alizbeth said, leaning forward. "There must be a way that this can be resolved without needless slaughter. Surely they can be reasonable?"
"They, as a culture, see themselves as wronged," Zek said. "If you contact them, what do you think they'll do? Drop centuries of seething hatred of the geth? No. This is a fight that they've wanted far too long to just set aside. Our only options are to abandon the geth..."
"Impossible!" Alun shouted.
"Heresy!" the Primator of the Ykrit Clan screamed. It took both of his daughters dragging him back into his seat to keep him from vaulting the table behind which he sat.
"...or we meet them in open warfare," Zek said. "Those are our options. Unless a miracle happens, there will not be peace in our time. And the last three years have told me very clearly that you can't depend on miracles."
It was telling how cynical he'd become in the last three years that he expected them to hardheadedly and idiotically dismiss his warning out of hand. Instead, they listened. They listened, and they prepared. The Migrant Fleet had Rannoch outnumbered, its soldiers tempered by decades of combat against the geth, if not worse, though. The Homeworld was now something of a backwater, somewhere where the biggest fight that any given soldier could be expected to have faced was a piracy attempt in the Straits of Dalmat. They were outgunned, outnumbered, and outmatched.
But, they did have two things that their wayward counterparts did not: Geth, biotics, and a whole lot of both. In the distance, Zek could see a signal blocking tower which was going up, right off of the cliffs only a couple of kilometers away. The geth hard at work, making up for in industry what they couldn't pull off in battle. That was the great irony of them. Everybody assumed that all geth had a means of killing somebody. The overwhelming majority, though, absolutely did not.
He took another sip, curling his toes in the sands. "You still think about them, don't you?" Zek asked. Merren turned to him, then nodded, eyes returned once more to the horizon where sky met sea.
"When I was on the Alarai, I had purpose," Merren said. "I had a job, something that I was good at. Here, though, nobody needs a geth-scrapper. I think they'd be insulted if I even offered," he shook his head once more. "I miss... having something to do."
"You could go into music," Zek offered. Merren turned a flat look at him. "What?"
"I'm not a musician," Merren said.
"Merren, on your first day on the Homeworld, you took up a guitar in our Garden Plaza and sang a song that made the entire street come to a halt," Zek pointed out. "Need I remind you that less than five hours after you did, the band that was taking a break when you did that came up with their own version, which is now playing over all the radio stations."
Merren looked a bit embarrassed about that. When they were just barely back to the Homeworld, the public tended to look at Merren like he was some sort of living psychological illness wrapped in an environment suit. But in the wake of his performance – one that ended when Merren literally broke down into weeping – he suddenly found himself a target of widespread sympathy. What did it say, that Zek warned the people of a coming war, and at the same time, Merren made the people want to welcome his kind back? A clusterfuck, that was what this was, Zek decided.
"I... I just don't feel like I belong here," Merren said.
"You will," Zek said. "Quarians adapt."
Merren just gave a nod, then turned to the beach once more, before emitting a strangled noise. Zek first gave a concerned look that he might have pinched a tube or something, then saw what prompted that reaction. Grey, gorgeous, naked, and waving happily to the pair of them above a beaming smile. Merren gave Zek a confounded glance, while Zek merely puffed out a sigh and a shake of his head.
Weirdest thing of all about this misadventure he'd survived? Zek Eluus now found himself one of the most lionized quarians on Rannoch. And he was starting to get a bit sick of the attention.
Talitha Shepard took in a deep breath, smelling the air. They always said that scent was the sense most strongly tied to memory in humans. She could definitely understand that, standing here. There were a hundred little notes in the air. The crushed earth where they prepared for the second planting. Cut grass, baking under the sun. The pollen of the golden grasses that even now waved down the hillside like a natural field of grain. And just a hint of industrial grease under it all, that tiniest sign that human beings had stepped here, and were making it their own.
"Welcome home..." Talitha said. Her big sister just shook her head.
"This isn't home anymore," Aimei said, but otherwise remained silent, looking out over the colonial capital of Mindoir. "They can rebuild the prefabs. Retill the fields... it still won't be home."
"We've got to take what we can get," Tali asserted. Aimei sighed, which turned into a wince. It shouldn't have come as any surprise to Tali, though; Aimei looked at least half dead. Her pallor was more grey than pale and freckly, her eyes sunken, and she always looked like she had a sheen of cold sweat on her. "I'm surprised you came at all, really."
"I had to get out of there," Aimei said, a bitter tone in her words. "When you fuck up like that... I just needed to get away from it."
"It'll still be there when you go back," Tali said gently.
Shepard shook her head, and almost looked like she was going to cry. "No, no it won't. After what I did, it won't ever come back."
"Aimei, you have to have more faith in people," Tali said. "And you need to have more faith in yourself."
Aimei shot to her feet, turning on Tali and gritting her teeth. Instantly, Tali felt herself recoiling inward, her hands cupping up before her face in an unconscious attempt to ward an incoming blow. The blow never came. There was flame dripping from her big-sister's fists, but they weren't being thrown in her direction. Tali knew in her mind that Aimei would never hurt her. Her gut had a different opinion on that.
"And what have I done that's made that a good idea?" Aimei demanded. "I fuck up everything I touch! I get friends killed, I get my ship destroyed TWICE, and it turns out I'm a fucking alcoholic! Who in their right mind would have faith in a piece of shit like me?"
Tali blinked up at her sister, then pushed herself to her feet. "I would," she said simply and with absolute confidence. Shepard swallowed hard, wavering slightly as she stood. The rage ebbed quickly, though, and she dropped to a sit on the hill, her face falling into her hands as she started to openly sob. Tali pulled her Big Sis into a hug that Aimei looked like she desperately needed. "You made a mistake and you lashed out. It happens. At least you're doing something about it instead of trying to ignore that it occurred."
"I loved her," Aimei said through her tears. "I loved her and I drove her away. What is wrong with me?"
"It's going to be alright," Tali said. "You always have tomorrow. You never know what the future is going to hold," Aimei took that moment to look absolutely miserable, though. "Big Sis, if I gave up hope that something better could happen in my future, I would have killed myself in a hospital room after actually being rescued. You can't give up hope. If you do, then you might as well be dying."
"I'm in a war I can't win," Shepard whispered, as her sobs died down somewhat. "Billions of people are going to die, and I won't be able to do anything to stop it. I wish someone else was the Avatar. Somebody better."
"I don't think anybody in the universe could do this better than you can," Tali said. "You never gave up, no matter what happened to you. You never stopped fighting. Maybe that war you say coming will be as bad as you say... but I know you're never going to stop fighting it. You're never going to let the universe be unfair on that scale. You promised me. You promised yourself."
Aimei didn't answer her, but didn't pull away, either. The two of them sat there on that hillside, watching as the sun went down over the hills of Mindoir. As the day turned to night, it became just as clear as Big Sis had said; the past was gone, and there could be no return to it. But that didn't mean that the future had to be worse.
Aimei had showed her the value of hope. It was only fair that Tali return the favor.
"Hey Jimi, we've got another broken bit on drill eight," Heng said with a frustrated scowl on his face.
"Another one?" Jimi asked. "That makes five in the last hour. What are we drilling through down there? Titanium?"
"You know I think this is time we actually call in the Big Tom," Heng said. Jimi looked a bit annoyed at that.
"I hate working with the Big Tom," Jimi groused.
"Hey, if you want to get paid working on the rigs, you've got to do shit that other people hate," Heng pointed out. Jimi didn't look impressed. "That's a subtle hint, boy-o, that you're supposed to do the thing that you hate doing, otherwise somebody like me doesn't pay you."
"Fine," Jimi muttered, rolling his eyes as he clomped away. Heng shook his head. If Jimi weren't as good a hand on the rig as he was, Heng would have canned his ass years ago. But the fact was, if you were looking for natural gas, you needed Jimi on your team. He could smell it through two kilometers of bedrock, it seemed like.
Heng pulled the hardhat from his bald pate and wiped the sweat away, as he flicked the controls over, removing the drill's body from the shaft dug down into the earth. The prospecting pipe was only about ten centimeters across, which made for a tiny hole that you could see absolutely nothing in, but the grinder head at the end of it was as bald as the person driving it. Those teeth were made of hardened tungsten carbide, able to chew through chert and flint with the ease of a bullet through talc. To see them stripped, and so quickly, made him more than confused.
He pulled himself out of the cab of his driller, and moved to where the drill head hung over the scaffolding. The entire driller was built underground, out of sight from the arcologies up top. Nobody wanted to actually see where their power was coming from, after all. Needlessly dangerous, Heng figured, and needlessly unpleasant. But then, the people who paid his paycheque could dictate whatever terms they liked, given the amount that each one offered. He reached up, spinning one of the teeth. There were great gouges in it. Not just through the tungsten carbide, but into the head itself. He pondered for a moment.
"No way it could be diamond," he said. "There's no kimberlite. And it can't be euclase; beryllium was a negative. That should be gabbro all the way down."
"Somebody called for me?" the booming voice of singularly the stinkiest human being that Heng had ever had the displeasure of being stuck in a mine with, said. Big Tom looked like a roll of fat had been inflated, and a vague impression of a head placed at its top. The guy had to weigh two hundred kilos if he was a gram. He stomped down toward the pilot hole, and Heng took in what would be the last decent breath he'd get for a while. Jimi was, of course, nowhere to be seen.
"We've got an obstruction a kilometer down. Tell me how far I have to drill to get through it," he said, then tried to give the sweating, obese man in a jumpsuit which could cover a car a wide berth. It still stung his eyes to be within three meters of him. Big Tom nodded, then spread his stance. He raised one foot high, then slammed it down. Everything in the cave shook under his earthbending strike, a vibration diving deep into the earth. He stood, then he got what Heng took to be a confused look on his face. "What?"
"That's odd," he said.
"I don't pay you by the minute, Big Tom," Heng said.
"There's a big diamond right in the way of your pilot," Big Tom said. Heng growled. "But it's not really a diamond... too hard. Something harder than diamond."
"Nothing's harder than diamond," Heng said. Big Tom just gave a confused shrug. Heng glared at that hole. So much for that spot. "Jimi was adamant that this was the place. We'll just have to dig it up and get it out of the way."
"Fair dues," Big Tom said. He clapped his massive hands together, then turned to Heng. "Might want to clear out for this. It'll take a while."
"Oh thank the gods," Heng whispered as he left Big Tom's presence as quickly as he could. There were a lot of compromises that Heng had to live with to make his money. One was smartasses like Jimi. The other was... well... Big Tom. But damn if he wasn't going to get his payday here.
Dull thuds of deep sound. Not a heartbeat. Something less regular. Something more alien and cthonic. Cold.
It wasn't a dream. It wasn't a nightmare. It wasn't really anything. But nevertheless, there he was.
The memories of his life were laid bare before him, a mind unable to pass into death seeking as it did with anybody else some way to escape the peril it found itself in. Often, people said that they found a solution to their problems in that terrified instant, and in ways that nobody could have seen coming in prediction or even retrospect. Remembering how to drive off a platypus bear from a documentary listened to in childhood returning when one of them was tearing the meat from your arm. A surge of superhuman strength to shift a burning beam off of a screaming loved-one. It was all the same, in its way. A mind trying not to die.
He'd been stuck like this for a while.
Again and again, it raced through memories so far back into his childhood that he couldn't believe that they were still in there. Especially after all the blows to the head and the heavy drinking. But no, there he was as a four year old, with his bastard of an old man bitching at him for stupid reasons. His uncle, taking him out of the house every chance he could. Trying to give him some sort of stability, and some sort of direction.
His dumb ass almost ruining that chance.
He saw that fateful decision, to join with the Alliance, to serve. The look of pride on Uncle's face.
He remembered Yue, and all those bullets whizzing by his head. He remembered the Avatar pulling his ass out of the fire. He remembered drinking himself stupid that night.
He remembered Fehl Prime. Hand to hand combat with a krogan, swarmed by vorcha. Teeth digging in to his arms, spitting blood past broken teeth. Fingers broken but grasping a knife even still. And he remembered that quarian kid. Thought he might be taller than he himself, if he ever stopped stooping, stopped slinking and hiding. He remembered the lonely blue woman at the bar...
He remembered Leviathan.
Again and again, the memories cycled through that torpor which he'd found himself trapped in. His brain, piss-poor though it was, was still grasping for straws which simply didn't exist. And due to his unique situation, there was no impending death to put that endless back-searching to a halt. Just a life, lived stupidly – if with a great deal of fun – repeating over and over and over and over and over.
"Kid, I like your style," a man said, of no memory that he had. He felt himself suddenly divorced from the endless repetition of every day of his life, his body once more his... but not really, because Jimmy Vega was pretty sure that he didn't glow faintly blue. He looked to the new arrival, that change in the monotony. He was leaning against a rock which was completely out of place, rising up out of an empyrean chaos.
"What's going on?" Vega asked.
"Got your soul ripped out by a 'Reaper'," the stranger answered. Vega leaned aside, and got a look at him. One of his hands was missing just above the wrist, and one of his legs below the knee. His face was burned and scarred, one eye covered by a sash in lieu of a patch. The only hair on his head was about half of a dark brown beard. "I hear that doesn't tend to end well for a man."
"Are you death or something?" Vega asked. The stranger turned his one good eye to him, and let out a laugh at that.
"I suppose I do look a bit grim, don't I?" he said, his grinning teeth only half present. "Didn't exactly have the best time looking after myself, with all that was going on. Trust me, I used to be prettier than this."
"Hey, I know all about bein' pretty," Vega boasted. He turned to the memories, but now found them laid out like a ribbon that stretched into and out of sight at the strange horizons that dominated this place. "But you? You're looking pretty jacked up."
"Try surviving the Generation of Death and coming out looking like a fashion model. Go ahead and try. I'll wait," he said with a tight lipped grin.
"Wait, are you some sort of ancestor of mine, then?"
"Well, considering the timeframe, it's likely I'm in the family tree of about a third of humanity at some point or another. Call me Ismaal."
"You don't look Whalesh," Vega noted.
"Whaleshmen didn't come in copper-topped when I was alive, kiddo," he said, tugging at his beard with his only hand. "Still, you seem more sane than not. That's good, I was a bit worried that you'd be off your nut after all this time."
"Uh-huh, and why exactly?" Vega asked.
"Right, I probably don't appear in any history books at this point," he said. He pressed his eye shut, and when he opened it again, it blazed white. "Avatar Ismaal, at your service."
"Holy crap," Vega said. "What are you doing here? Wherever the hell here is?"
Ismaal turned off the light show and leaned against that rock once more. "Let's just say that the Avatar in your time is a bit of a softy. When she heard about your run-in with Leviathan, she got an idea to try to help you. And there is one way to help, but it's a bit of a doozy."
"Wait, the Avatar's out there?" he asked. "How long have I been... like this?"
"Less than a year. Why?" Ismaal asked.
"I'm getting Avatar'd by an infant?"
"No, by a Whaleshwoman," Ismaal answered.
"Wait. Wait!" Vega said. "Shepard's alive?"
"Yeah, you're not the only one incredulous on that one," Ismaal gave a shrug. "Far as I'd heard, Avatars tend to stay dead when they're killed. Bet she's got some sort of lucky charm up her ass," he shook his head. "Look. There's a way to get you away from all of this... but it's not pretty."
Vega looked at the hell of his own life being played back to him ad infinitum, and then back to Ismaal. "Whatever it takes, man. I'll do it."
"It's not hard on your end. All you've got to do is make a decision," he said. He pushed off of the rock, and steadied himself on Vega's larger frame using his handless arm. "You see, even the Avatar can't make a soul out of nothing. Nobody has that power. Souls can be taken, they can be given, they can even be transplanted. Problem is, everybody's got one. Weeeell almost everybody."
"Well, yeah. I mean, that's kinda obvious," he said.
"Now, think for a second; who out there doesn't have one soul?"
"Me?" Vega asked. Ismaal palmed his face with a look of annoyance.
"The Avatar, you witless mountain," Ismaal said. "Got a thousand human souls tied to the Bequest. And who even knows how many others before that. I mean, damn, and I though the Avatar started with Humanity. Turns out I'm an idiot," he shrugged.
"What does that have to do with... well, anything?" Vega asked.
Ismaal puffed out a breath, then nodded. "Souls can be transplanted, if you're willing to give them away. Yours is gone, kiddo. No getting it back no matter what. But – and this is a big but – another would get you on your feet again. Get you fighting again. Only one downside."
"Which is?" Vega asked.
"If you do this, I give up my connection to the Avatar Bequest. I become your soul," Ismaal said. Vega blinked in confusion at that. Was he really saying...? "But that's going to permanently reduce the Bequest. Everything that I ever brought to Shepard, gone, forever. All of my knowledge, my strength, forever out of her grasp. And since you don't have the Bequest in you, when you die, that will disappear for all time. If you agree to this, you are agreeing to make the Avatar worse, forever, for a chance at your own life."
"Shit, that sounds really goddamned selfish when you put it like that," Vega said.
Ismaal shrugged. "You need to know the stakes, kiddo. With what's coming, maybe one generation won't make any difference. If it is, well, you can kick my ass for bringing it up to Shepard in the first place. But it's still your choice. And I'm pretty sure that Shepard doesn't know that you and I are even talking."
"Why not?" Vega asked.
"'Cause I didn't tell her. She just assumed that you're borderline brain-dead and this will miraculously heal you. Well, you'll still be borderline brain-dead, but that's just the way you operate."
"You're a smartass, you know that?" Vega laughed. Ismaal cracked a broken-toothed grin.
"Exactly why I volunteered," Ismaal said. "It's your choice. And for the record, it ain't selfish to want to live."
Vega did, to his credit, give it thought. Did he dare take this, knowing what it meant, how much was going to be lost, forever, if he did? But at the same time, how could he not, if the Collectors and worse were out there, and he still had a bitchin' body and a cold eye with a rifle?
It wasn't even a decision, really.
Shepard stirred in her seat, sleeping for the moment now that people had stopped paying attention to her. She'd done all she could. And it exhausted her. The chair in the lobby was like the sedan of the gods when she staggered out to it, collapsing into it and falling asleep in an instant, despite all the noise of the Armali hospital around her.
In her dream, she was watching Liara leave, so slowly. Like she could cross that distance with a few steps, past the broken glass and spilt whiskey, past the thoughtless words that still hung in the air. Running through setting concrete would have been easier. She still tried. Straining against hope, she reached out, her fingertips just barely reaching those of Liara's... and then, flame, driving her back, burning up the asari's arm and consuming her completely.
Shepard fell to the floor, amongst the mess that she'd made of everything, and found herself weeping again. In her dreams, she allowed herself what she couldn't awake. Why did she have to be such an idiot? Why couldn't she have just listened to her? Recrimination didn't help, it just drove the hurt in deeper. In a way, that was kind of the point. It'd taken that, beyond any other thing, to finally see what everybody had been telling her for years.
Avatar Aimei Shepard was an alcoholic.
She tried stopping, but that almost killed her and drove her right back to drinking out of misery and self-loathing. She was trapped in a cycle that she couldn't escape. Just like everybody else. It was just that Shepard's pitiful self-destruction was going on a lot faster than the fifty-millennium long culling of all cultures in space. A microcosm, one might call it.
When she finally vented the worst of her anguish, she looked up.
Blazing eyes in the darkness were glaring down at her. She found herself pushing back, ignoring broken glass which no longer mattered, as that monolithic presence loomed closer, as though picking Shepard out amongst the ruins of her own social life.
SOMETHING HAS CHANGED.
The words blasted Shepard flat on her back. Those eyes began to blaze harder, flames leaking out of them as it scrutinized her.
THE OLD PARADIGM HAS FALLEN. THE NEW PARADIGM HAS FALLEN.
THE LEVIATHAN IS DEAD.
THE SOVEREIGN IS DEAD.
SOMETHING. HAS. CHANGED.
Shepard found herself jerking awake, a gasp strangling her throat, kicking her way clear of the chair and dumping herself onto the floor. "Are you alright?" an asari asked, stooping down beside Shepard.
"Bad dreams," Shepard shook her head. "What time is it?"
"17:80," she answered, with a glance to her Omni. She wasn't wearing scrubs, so she probably wasn't a doctor. "Why?"
"Shorter than I thought," Shepard said. She accepted the blue hand and got to her feet. She leaned around the corner, to the room where one Jimmy Vega had been deposited so long ago, while people still tried to figure out what was wrong with him and what to do about it. The answer to that was shockingly simple to Shepard. She gave the asari a nod, then rounded the corner, entering the room. Vega looked... more alive, now. No longer was he a statue carved of muscle and skin and sinew. Now, he breathed normally, smacking his lips in his sleep. She could even hear him breathing, which was an improvement over before. "Vega? You alive in there?"
"Oh... shit..." Vega muttered. He winced as the light poured into eyes that hadn't seen for a very long time; they'd actually stitched them shut because they couldn't keep them closed any other way. That was literally the first thing that Shepard remedied when she found him. "I had the weirdest goddamned dream. I had sex with an Ardat Yakshi and almost stole pudding from a god."
"That does sound kinda weird," Shepard had to agree. "That's what they say about reality and fiction, though. Fiction has to make sense."
"Yeah, yeah..." he muttered, still knuckling at his eyes and trying to give himself shade from the fluorescent lights beaming down from on high. "You know, you sound hot. What say you and me get the hair of the polarbear-dog that bit me?"
"I don't know. I thought I was a bit too 'Feng Nu' for your taste," Shepard said with only a mildly lecherous smirk, crossing her arms before her chest. Vega went still as a statue once more, but this time, it wasn't the unnatural reaction to an earthbender having his soul ripped out. No, this was just an ordinary man having a very acute 'oh shit' reaction.
"...Shepard?" he asked. He blinked a few times, then when it finally seemed that he could see her, his jaw dropped. "...My god... You're really... alive..."
"And so are you. That makes this a good day," Shepard said. After all of the bullshit that she'd had to deal with over the last six months since Leviathan got blown to shit near Palaven, it finally felt good that she'd managed to make a difference in a way that she could actually reach out and touch.
The fact that she didn't want to right now was telling of how much she dearly missed having that bugnut crazy asari in her life.
"You gave me one of your souls..." Vega said, turning and kicking his legs over the edge of the bed. They were bare from the knees down, for that was where the hospital gown ended. "You saved my life..."
"Least I could do," Shepard said. Vega just gaped at her.
"I can't ever repay this..."
"Who said you needed to?" Shepard asked. "Rest up, and get a meal into you. As I hear it, it's been seven months since you ate. I've got a few other things to do but I figure you'll be happy getting back to Earth."
"You've got no idea, Feng Nu," Vega said with a confused laugh. Shepard shook her head and turned from the room. The hallways of this ward were very scarcely populated. Given that applied metaphysics was a new science and most of the people amongst the asari species who could benefit from its practice were already segregated away. Her own body felt taxed, and her mind, even more so. Nightmares were par for the course in her life by this point. She'd certainly done enough dumb shit to give herself fodder for plenty of them, and that was before the imminent invasion of manifested gods.
She rounded a corner, entering into a more populated wing of the hospital, this one stocked with asari in vegetative states. Mostly induced comas, because 'ordinary comas' were usually answered with immediately pulling the plug, since recovery was essentially impossible. "Avatar?" one of the black-armored women said, as she moved to Shepard's side. "You were in there for a while."
"Yeah, I had a lot to do," Shepard lied. The actual soul-transplant – oh gods, was Mordin going to have a field day with that one when he heard about it – had only taken minutes. But it wiped her out more than a fistfight with Sovereign. "Now, I heard there was a woman who had a bad reaction to a Paragon Device?"
"Yes, in Ward Two," she said. She raised a brow at Shepard when she nodded, and started walking. "May I speak freely?"
"I'm not your CO, I couldn't stop you if I wanted to," Shepard said.
"You look like you could use a break. I've seen matrons drop dead of exhaustion looking better than you are right now," she said.
"Uh huh," Shepard said. "I get that a lot."
"Just my opinion, ma'am," the commando said, and then left it at that. She had almost rounded a corner when she spotted a familiar face. Or rather, that familiar face spotted her, and missed a step, calling attention to herself. Shepard frowned, trying to call it up, and when she did, she almost rolled her eyes.
"Rana, don't tell me they're doing something with the krogan or the Genophage in here, please," Shepard said, with a placating motion with her hand. Rana Thanopolis, the unluckiest asari Shepard ever had the hilarity to meet, stared, then shook her head.
"N-no; no, I'm not here because of the k-krogan," she stammered, and then started moving toward Shepard and her guard. "I'm here because of you. They said you'd be here."
"Really?" Shepard asked. Rana reached into her pocket, and pulled out a detonator.
"Th-they tell me that y-you have to die," Rana said, terror on her features, as Shepard went from comedy to confusion, and then in to panic. "I want to be able to dream again!"
Her thumb stabbed down onto the button.
And then all of the bombs she'd smuggled into the hospital detonated.
"Wait, she got blown up?" the batarian girl asked, a scowl pulling at her eyes. "She just got killed by some terrorist?"
The Matriarch shook her head slowly. "No. That was just the beginning of the end. She wasn't a terrorist. She was just an unlucky woman who the Reapers sunk their claws into. It wasn't fair that she did what she did. It wasn't fair that she had to."
"But what about Shepard?" the human boy asked, moving closer to their storyteller. "She couldn't have died, right?"
"No. She survived that, but a lot of innocent people didn't," she looked up into the heavens, at the black band of darkness above them. It was bereft even of stars, an absolute darkness mandated by an unfeeling machine. "That, in a way, was the first attack of the Reaper War."
"But Shepard won, didn't she?" the turian amongst them asked. "I mean, she beat the Reaper over Palaven just like she did at the Citadel. She won."
"No, that wasn't a victory," the Matriarch said, slowly shaking her head. "Leviathan lived, in a different way, but still lived. And she would... leave her mark... on what was to come."
"Like the Geth War?" the batarian asked.
"Or the Genophage?" the turian prompted.
"It isn't so easy to explain," the Matriarch said. "There was so much that happened. A galaxy, for the first time, preparing for what was to come. Soldiers ready for the coming storm, prepared for whatever would stream out of dark space..."
She looked to the fire that flickered fitfully in the darkness. It was growing dimmer with every passing minute, its fuel spent. Soon, it would die into embers and cold. She let out a sigh, and pulled those close to her even closer, to share what little warmth there was left in this false-night.
"...and despite all that, it didn't help them in the slightest."
