Kypran sat in one corner of the pod, pulling his legs up close to conserve heat. Was it just his imagination, or was the escape pod colder than before, the life support systems already beginning to fail? The krogan – Wrex – seemed content to peer out the slitted window, eyes roaming for ships. Kypran occasionally found himself interested enough to crawl over and pull himself up the wall to watch, too; whether that interest was from anxious curiosity or mind-numbing boredom, he himself wasn't sure.
"So you can at least stand," Wrex had remarked. Kypran nodded.
"I'm not paralyzed," he said. "But movement comes and goes."
The escape pod had practically stopped moving. With no ships in sight, and no planets near them, the stars sat constant and maddeningly unmoving. After returning to his seat, Kypran could feel the heat fading from him, and began to shiver. To his surprise, the krogan ripped up the fibrous padding from the pod's chairs, and passed some shreds of it to him as a sort of blanket.
"Thank you."
Wrex huffed.
"You won't thank me when we run out of breathable air," he said, and dropped down to sit beside Kypran. They stared in silence for a few moments. The stars were as still as a painting.
"Is there anything we can do?" Kypran asked.
"Probably not," Wrex said. "The signal's out there, but we'll be lucky if there are any ships close enough to hear it. We could be near enough to some shuttle traffic. Chances are we're not."
A deep breath started in Kypran's throat. He cut it short.
"So if we run out of air…"
"I've killed my share of your ancestors. I don't mind putting you out of your misery."
Kypran eyed Wrex with a sideways stare.
"If you're ready, that is. As for me," Wrex said. "I'm a biotic. Shouldn't take much to warp a hole in this flimsy pod and make things quick for myself. If not a little exciting."
Wrex laughed a low, dry laugh. Kypran rubbed his cold hands together.
"I've never met a krogan biotic."
"You never spent much time in the interesting parts of the galaxy, did you?"
"I went to Illium once," Kypran said, almost indignant.
"Hah! Illium? You call that interesting?"
"We were following up on a dangerous shipment to Palaven. This was during my mandatory service – I was fresh out of training. As it turns out, a krogan gang known as the Blood Pack had been establishing themselves outside the Terminus Systems." Kypran gave the krogan a pointed look.
"So in short, I've had to kill plenty of your kind as well. Not that it was easy."
"That the reason why you walk about as badly as most turians swim?"
Kypran grated a laugh in spite of himself.
"You could say it's a design flaw," he said. "Much harder to crush the spine of anything with a thick waist. So I'm not the only turian with this problem. It's just…not often you're left without a charge for the cybernetics."
"Well – it's a good thing for you that we've got nothing to do but sit."
It wasn't a good thing at all, of course, but Kypran didn't mention it. He found himself too tired to continue speaking.
Wrex left Kip asleep in the corner as he continued checking his omni-tool. In the increasingly bitter cold of the escape pod, its orange glow was the only pleasant thing he had. Finding no signals, he shut the omni-tool off and strained to look out the window from every manageable angle. The stars were all so pitifully small – so far away.
Wrex had always struggled with chaos. Calculated evil was far more comfortable to face. People were pyjaks. He'd take a conscious force ruining his life every day over this sort of random helplessness – this impossible reality that he had no way of fighting. A millennia of life and countless trials in battle couldn't prepare him for being lost in the wrong part of space.
He looked back at the turian, who was beginning to shiver in his sleep. Wrex sat next to him again, and spared a hand on Kip's shoulder to warm him up marginally. Wrex visualized snapping Kip's neck in the near future – once they began to suffocate. Hopefully Kip wouldn't panic; the moment Wrex knew he wasn't Taltik, he'd found no reason to dislike the turian, and that would make killing him a bit tougher.
Or maybe they would freeze before it came to that. Turians were sensitive to cold; Kip might not even wake up again if the pod began to cool down quickly. Wrex wasn't exactly resistant to frigid temperatures either.
Wrex was adjusting a strip of padding over Kip's side when a pale light washed over his hand. He looked to the window. There it was: a ship.
Wrex's jaw fell half-open in silent awe. All of his present struggles – facing his own arbitrary death, and the death of a relative innocent – he could put them away, give them up, because they were saved.
Like cogs slotting into place, old problems were swapped with new. Wrex had almost chanced a closer look from the window, but hesitated. Anyone could be waiting in that ship, and many might object to taking in a unknown krogan. Cerberus or the salarian military, to name just a couple. Instead, he chanced a wave, only revealing a gloved hand through the window.
Something shifted under Wrex's feet. The pod had been snared and was being pulled onboard.
"Kip," Wrex called. "We've been found."
The turian jerked awake and sat up. His mandibles flared in what seemed to be joy as he stared up at the window.
Then he said, "No."
Wrex realized that Kip's expression was not as joyful as he'd interpreted. Following the turian's gaze, he could see the wall of the hold they'd been pulled to. Painted on it was a red, misshapen skull, or rather a skull with a fist beneath it.
"Blood Pack."