(Definition of terms at the end of the chapter)

August 24th, 2183

SSV Normandy SR-1 | High Orbit over Maji | Vamshi System

Dr. Liara T'Soni | Associate Professor of Xenocultural Studies at the University of Serrice

Dr. Chakwas hasn't held still since the Normandy's marines deployed against the geth outpost six hours ago. The doctor feels that these fresh-faced, oft-inexperienced humans are her children, Liara has realized. She knows Karin Chakwas better than she knows anyone but Shiala, Sarei, and her long-suffering team captain on the Serrice Storms who refuses to let Liara fade from her life. She doubts she knows Benezia this well and if she ever did, she certainly does not know the matriarch as she is now.

Inhabiting the same space-a space unlike any other aboard-has led to a sort of camaraderie between them. Chief Williams and Garrus have formed a jocular bond over a mutual affinity for weapons as they while away their time in the hangar deck amid the black sparkle of electro-sensitive lubricant powder and the lung-searing ozone of weapon power cores and the tips of repair and welding tools.

Liara and Chakwas share their own little ecosystem defined by the smell of linens blasted to sterility by unscented detergents-unscented to human noses-a tang of antiseptic always on the air, and swapping academic articles they find either interesting or hilariously sloppy.

Two weeks spent with a fellow academic in a space smaller than her quarters at Serrice in her undergrad years has made the memories of her university years feel solitary and sad. Liara wonders if she should have lobbied to be allowed a roommate, no matter who her mother was.

Compared to any other part of the ship, the medbay is quiet owing to several layers of seals against contagio. Rather than the cutting, frigid light of the decks, lights are tuned to bathe the space in a warm glow at much lower intensity. When the ship is in self-propelled FTL or using the stealth drive, the pressure hull flexes as hot metal meets frigid vacuum; the semi-molten spars leading to the inner hull transfer the force across a wider area and the medbay rocks back and forth like a small boat on lazy seas. It's serene; almost womblike.

Given the general humanness of the ship as a whole, Liara doubts she could sleep in any other space aboard. Humans have much to learn, but she wonders if they have much to teach, as well. They live fast and reckless like salarians despite living longer by far; they stick to their principles stubbornly as any turian-albeit often less sensibly-and for all their cleverness that led them to prominence so quickly, they tangle and collide with each other like a pack of varren around a scrap of meat whenever over two or three are working on one task.

Like her makers, the Normandy is untamed, with so few finished spaces they could be counted on one hand, and bare plating everywhere else. She is restless in the way her overpowered frame moves, turns, and tries to outdo the inertial dampeners, and her crew strides the decks as if their honor and pride could protect the tiny ship from a dreadnought. The way gunnery stations and sleeping pods and access panels are crammed together only encourages human habits of overwork.

"Is there some way I can help, Doctor?" Liara asks, realizing halfway through the sentence that her voice is sticky and hoarse from lack of use.

"Not unless your religion involves praying for favors, no."

"I see. That is...not how I would categorize the purpose of prayer in Athamism."

"The Commander's the best the Alliance has. She's the best we've had since they founded the Alliance military. I'll spare you the grisly mess of human history and our uncountable savageries against each other. I'll just say that not every war produces a single soldier like the Commander. Most often, we only recognize the great warriors afterward, when those they died for tell their tale for them. We have a term: Living legend. The longer I serve, the more I think that 'living' is operative and that we say it with a whiff of disbelief that they managed it."

"Humans use idioms that they themselves do not understand?"

Do they not use caution in any facet of their lives?

Chakwas laughs, quick and throaty. A smile spreads, deepening the lines around her eyes.

"Oh, you poor dear. My native language, English, might best be described as what happened when barbarians cornered Latin, German, and French at knife-point and stole words and tenses from each at random. I can look at one of your articles translated to English and tell you that something's wrong with a sentence, but I don't know what exactly and couldn't explain it to you to save my life. What I do know is that with Shepard in charge, Alenko at her back and Tucks and Williams leading the other teams, I don't think those kids could ask for better."

"But you had already lost someone on this mission. Private Jenkins, was it?"

Karin stops worrying at her lower lip with her teeth and nods. One sharp, quick motion. Perhaps it's a human trait or perhaps Liara is so inept she's overestimating her skill reading them, but given the brightness of human emotion and the way every inch of their skin and every tiny muscle in their faces expresses, she often feels like she doesn't need the meld.

Back home with Matron Tulisin, she would struggle to read the cues, second-guessing each tic for concealment or outright deception, wondering at whether her conversation partner was unhappy, or irritated with her, or worried, or anxious. She doesn't need to wonder aboard the Normandy.

A human's emotions blaze like a flare, revealed in their faces, their body language, and the widespread inability to not move their hands and fingers for more than a few moments.

"Get some rest, perhaps? I will wake yo-"

"They might need me," Karin protests.

"Opening the hangar doors in a dangerous atmosphere like this takes two minutes. Probably more. If you are needed, you will be awake in time."

"Mmm. Perhaps you're right, dear. I really should listen to my elders," she jokes.

"I'm flattered that you think that my life experience is anywhere close to yours, Karin."

Liara pulled the latest journals in her field, hoping to distract herself while Shepard was ashore, and now she wonders if she'd rather be trudging through Maji's toxic mud with her.

One thing she's certain of: Professor Minatus should be banned from using devices capable of composing text.

She is nearly half a day into her latest paper and the pompous turian has yet to reach anything resembling a point about the metallurgic composition of the plating of a pristine pillar at a dig-site that might have been a graveyard, a farm, a bank, or office building's lawn, or anything where plants grew in stone basins.

Not a word on the construction of the pillar and the paper is titled "Review of Prothean Crystallo-Metallurgical Techniques via Electron-Microscopy Analysis of the Evaska Spar" but Sixty thousand words in and she's not seen a single electron microscope scan. The goddess-damned paper is supposed to deal exclusively with the peculiarities in material compared to the half-dozen undamaged Prothean artifacts known in the galaxy and what it indicates about Prothean building techniques in the sixth age.

What Minatus thinks is the sixth age.

Third age, or fourth age at most. Not that anyone listens to her, but Liara has long known that something started between 51,000 to 48,000 years Pre-Council that put the Protheans on edge. Others call it brutalism, and treat it as mere architecture while they fling about hypotheses ranging from disruption in the transportation of exotic building materials to a triumphal artistic movement celebrating the reconquest of possible rebels on what might have been colonies in what is now the Traverse, assuming some wild leaps of translation.

Two decades ago, she came to recognize it as desperation and fear. Fear so pervasive, they built their cities on the assumption that they would have to face a siege.

Perhaps the greatest breakthrough she's made thus far in her studies came two days ago. The women aboard crowded into the showers for their narrow window of opportunity to scrub away the strange and distasteful film that forms on the skin in the sterile air and chemical-treated humidity aboard starships even before one gets dirty. Chief Williams rapped her knuckles on the divider between their cubicles and asked her if she knew why the podium for the controls on the elevator was built like a 'motherfucking pillbox'. Reflexively falling into the mindset of a professor, she demurred on an answer, said she'd look into it, and praised Ashley for asking an insightful question.

Once Liara parsed the expletive out, she researched the archaic type of bunker in question and the war it was used during and sat in numb shock that Ashley could joke about anything from that century, let alone that war. What did not shock her was the pre-Alliance section of the Chief's file showed that Philip Williams, John Williams, and a man who had accidentally impregnated and hastily married Annabelle Williams were all killed in action during World War II. She's begun to wonder if the Williamses are the descendants of krogan the salarians misplaced during the Rachni War.

As the Song of Solace and the Edict of Grace commands, she prayed in pitch-black for a people that have suffered at their own hands like the humans have. Somehow they still produce individuals like Shepard who offer an open palm to an enemy's daughter while biotically crushing a geth with the other hand.

Then she wondered about her old digs. If the Protheans were afraid, what were they afraid of, and were their fears ever realized?

She has poured over disk after disk of scans and omnitool drone photographs of her previous digs. Over and over, the same pattern. What had been exultation, grandiosity and delicacy in civic construction gave way to angular outlines, large windowless expanses of metal or stonework, wide spaces between the structures, and, for the first time, a rapid sprawling of urban areas.

She's an asari, a race that has no existential war in its history. They have never had to fight for survival with scant hope. No planet-gripping butchery to unseat one genocidal maniac. No nations living under the shadow of fusion weapons aimed at another nation, promising destruction far beyond what the planet might survive. Perhaps the privileged daughter of a matriarch who'd never been shot at before Therum shouldn't be surprised that she mistook the crystallization on those benches and walls in the Evaska spar for discoloration or paint, not the atom-by-atom shred of something much like warpfire.

But it amazes Liara that an educated turian like Minatus could look at stonework and see the older half of it in delicate curls of local stone and half of it in saw-toothed, waist high walls of poured concrete that mimics the stone with a core of depleted uranium and scorched grooves that probably slotted shield generators and not see a culture fighting a protracted war. Instead, Minatus harps on the particular improvements to the honeycomb structure, and the details of the attachment mechanism, focusing on the pillar found untouched amid a garden that became a battlefield four thousand years later...and not on the battle.

All of this groundbreaking work has been commented on by others since before Liara was born.

This isn't caution about making assumptions, it's disrespect for her audience by way of verbosity and qualifiers like 'perhaps', 'based on', and the phrase 'assuming the following' and a half-dozen other ways of concealing the fact that the only ones benefiting from her work are volus communications firms that charge a ten-thousandth of a credit off a comm relay for a data packet this large. Perhaps that's the entire point. A rich volus soon becomes a taxed volus, which becomes a well-armed turian.

Minatus' commanders must have hated her field reports during her naval service.

Perhaps she's an agent for Blackwatch placed in a professorship to drive others out of the field of Prothean studies via weaponized boredom.

(INCOMING TRANSMISSION FROM SYSTEMS ALLIANCE INTELLIGENCE SERVICES, CULTURAL DIRECTORATE, ASARI BUREAU: "Athamist Pantheon")

Klaxons ring out, shaking Liara from sleep. The in-wall lighting has switched to a sour orange and beside the medbay door, a panel has slid up to reveal a small armory with three pistols, six shield disks, and row after row of synthblood injectors and medigel bottles. In the mess hall, the ship's nameplate has slid out of the way to reveal a larger locker with snap-on plate armor, breather helmets, pistols, and the Avenger rifles that the Alliance has sworn by since the First Contact War.

"Close quarters battle lighting," Chakwas mutters. "And we're at stations to repel boarding. What is Shepard playing at?"

Two crew members abandon their lunch and start fitting the armor's plates onto the magnetic catches on their fatigues. They suit up with practiced motions before each soldier turns to the other who pats them down, rapping knuckles on the latches and smoothing the fabric of the seals between them.

Rifles up, they approach the stairs leading from the elevator to the hangar deck. Chakwas taps something on her omnitool and the curving stairway flattens into a ramp and high-traction plastic plates rise to form two broad tracks.

"A fancy collapsible stairway rather than putting medical on the same deck as the hangar or a dedicated lift. A hundred-twenty-billion credit stealth drive, but no one spends anything on a way to bring in a patient in shock without elevating their head. If I ever find out who was in charge of the boarding-to-medbay paths on this ship, I will butcher them," Chakwas mutters. "Hippocratic Oath be damned."

She bumps her hip into the intercom while holding her hands under the decon emitter.

"This is medical. Report."

For the first time since she met the irreverent human, it seems hard for Joker to speak. Usually, he won't shut up.

"The Commander gave me an LZ at twenty clicks and behind a ridge from where we dropped her. Bravo and Charlie teams are bugging out and she's sending Alpha to cover their retreat. Says to be ready for a hot pickup, stealth on, fangs out, and hold fire until we get the wounded aboard..."

"My God," Chakwas whispers.

"...and we dust off. Without her. Gave me lat-long for some high ground. Says she's going radio silent and to watch for a signal. She'll report back in for exfil."

Liara can feel the blood drain from her crests. The commander is down there, alone, in a situation so terrible she has called a retreat for everyone else. Sixteen soldiers who would die for her in a heartbeat, who would be honored to die under her command-Liara can see it in their eyes-but she is going alone.

Chakwas sucks in an uneven breath.

"Numbers, Joker?"

"Said three black, six pink, three red."

Fifteen marines aboard, Liara thinks, recalling the all-crew gathering where Shepard ordered them to keep their feelings about aliens to themselves. Plus the commander, Kaidan and Chief Williams. Twelve are injured or worse.

"Understood, flight lieutenant."

Chakwas leans away from the panel.

"Christ."

"Doctor?"

"Marine slang, Liara. Black means dead. The tags Alliance soldiers wear around their necks so bodies can be identified by morgue teams are a special, high-durability alloy with-high visibility paint. It's black. Pink means minor or moderate injuries. Those that can wait. Imagine a minor wound with some blood coming out and staining the skin. Red..."

"...means more blood. Critical cases. I understand, Doctor Chakwas. I have..."

Liara swallows hard.

"Some training."

"Liara," Chakwas replies, her voice stiff enough to etch glass. "How much training?"

"Dig sites require at least class three first aid training taught by Council Medical Association instructors. I took class five, but let it lapse. And I was only certified for asari, drell, and turian above three. That course was before humans were discovered."

"So medigel use, stabilizer cage insertion for large bones, stopping bleeds on surface or shallow wounds, cautery, foreign object isolation, spinal stabilization. That sort of thing?"

"Precisely. In case of a fall or a cave in. Besides class three, I took elective modules for following auto-surgical pod instructions and the module for poison treatment and allergic, electrolytic, septic or mineral shock, as well."

Chakwas huffs.

"If anyone's worst problem today is that they're thirsty, they're in luck."

She turns to face Liara.

"Doctor T'Soni, I know that some marines on this ship have been unkind to you. At any moment, one of them might end up on a gurney in front of you with their life in your hands."

"I would ne-"

She holds up her fist.

"I know. That's not what I mean. I haven't known you for long, but I can tell you're kinder than that. What I mean, dear, is don't hesitate. Don't let them hurt your feelings, or if they do, don't let it stop you. They might refuse you. They might spit on you, call you names, thrash around. Injuries do strange things to the human mind. Keep them alive. I will kick their ass myself if they don't show appropriate gratitude after."

"Understood."

The deck lurches slightly as the pads touch down on the surface. Alarms blare from the speakers to join the lights in a cacophony that makes her wince but seems to leave the humans unaffected.

"This planet's atmo is a no-go. I repeat, atmo is toxic. CIC crew, seal up. All other decks, masks on!" Joker orders. "Doors open in ten, nine, eight..."

The first five minutes determine everything, her first aid instructor told Liara. Perhaps that's true in civilian injuries. In this medbay, it's a matter of seconds.

Corporal Grecio is carried in, his abdomen sliced open from one side to the other, the left half of his face burnt and half a dozen wounds in his chest, abdomen, and groin pumping blood into ever-swelling medigel bubbles. Chakwas squeezes her eyes shut and blinks away a tear.

"Liara..." she murmurs, jerking her head towards the dying man. In her panic, Liara can't fix her mind on the Witness' Mantra, but her duty is simple: Meld with him and walk with his mind until it goes where she cannot. She smooths his hair off his sweaty forehead and cups her hands around his bare bicep. He smiles up at her.

"Blue angel..."

He's either so delirious or so weak that his subconscious barely fights the meld at all. She grinds her teeth against borrowed pain and dives in, feeling quite foolish when she realizes he was not flirting. He genuinely mistook her hovering over him with a bright light behind her as the appearance of a beautiful creature that visits the dying in his religion. She struggles to veer him towards happier memories. Deeper ones. Remind him of all the good he's done so that his soul may remember it across the horizon and until he is taken into the Dawn and Athame, Janiris, Tevura and Kurinth reforge his light to enliven some future soul.

He has a wife, Sofia. Daughter from a previous marriage. Troublesome, rebellious, too smart for her own good. Used to be called Mark, but she understood herself as female and changed it to Josefina. Difficult for her father, but Sofia straightened him out before it was too late and they lost each other. She filled his skycar with whipped cream. Twice. Once when she was twelve and once at twenty-one, to celebrate their renewed bond. Twin girls. A son. So tiny...

A gentle sigh and the dimming of her entire universe leave Liara alone, the sole occupant of two bodies. She has borne witness to a man who soldiered, fought, and died, who was a father and a husband and struggled to better himself at both every day of his life. She smoothed the path to the Dawn as High Healer Ilune did for those she guided in ages past. Yet when she looks at her shaking, blood-slicked hands, she feels only guilt.

Laflamme's left leg is gone past mid-thigh and where his knee should be is a rubbery bulb of blood-saturated medigel that should be purple but has turned a garish yellow as more and more blood saturates it and activates the warning pigment. Chakwas snaps her fingers and points at one of the beds. The young man rouses when he's lowered down. Williams glances at the doctor and some unspeakable thought passes between them in a language that only humans know. They both turn their gaze to the marine's uninjured leg.

"Dose him," Chakwas demands, nodding the marines carrying him, then at one of the hypos.

"No. No! Doc, wai-"

The sedative works nearly instantly.

"Tucks."

The burly, grizzled marine snaps to attention in the doorway.

"Ma'am?"

"Striptease detail, working your way from here," she orders, waving around at the critical cases which now occupy all four beds. "Outwards. Armor off. Check the indicators on every plate before you lift it and check every undersuit. I don't want it coming off if it's going to bleed."

"Aye-aye."

"Alenko, hang a blood transfusion plus antibiotics, and dermal and muscular regens for Laflamme. As many paralytics as he can take. Check that he's plugged up everywhere else, replace that shit 'gel from the canister in the safe under my desk, and then run prep decon, starting with the other leg. With that shrapnel infiltration, I'll have to take more of the leg than I'd like."

Liara glances back to the unconscious marine and sees that his intact leg is peppered with slivers of ceramic and metal from the explosion that ruined his armor. It's still attached, but some of the longer shards have skewered straight through.

"Oh, Goddess."

"What's princess doing here?" Williams snarls.

"Her job, marine. She's got more training in triage than anyone here but me. Just for that remark, she'll be dealing with your wound," Chakwas snaps, gesturing to the crusted gel plugging a gap in the once-gleaming steel of the chief's armor.

"It's nothing."

"It's a gut wound," Alenko says, trying to keep his voice soothing. "From a high-caliber round coated in fuck only knows but it pinged my radiation alarm two meters away."

"I scanned myself and ran the self-check," Williams protests, opening a pouch on her armor's thigh panel, removing a small hypo stamped with the symbol humans use for radiation and putting it into a vein in her neck. It injects automatically with a hiss. "It didn't puncture my intestines and I'm not glowing in the dark yet. I'll leave my tool on med-scan mode and monitor it. Put me at the back of the line."

"Help them, not me. Please."

"Isotope round?" Chakwas asks. Williams merely nods. "God save me from marines and their egos..."

"Left lung," Chakwas mutters from the bedside of Corporal Rahman. She thumps the other side of her torso with three fingertips. The svelte woman's golden skin is torn open in three places across her stomach, bearing muscle and organs. She's also wounded just below her ear, and it must have hit an artery because her whole left side is red. The broken-off injectors for field-transfusion bottles feather the veins of her arm where her comrades cut her armor open with their omnitools.

Her gurgling breaths bring up saliva flecked with dribbles of blood.

Chakwas jabs her fingers at the surgery pod's computer, loading a routine and tilting the screen into her field of view. ""Liara! I want you to follow that procedure on Rahman. Lung first, then neck. Keep talking to her, make sure she's lucid. When it flashes white, stop and call me over."

"Aye-aye."

Liara slips between a private with a crushed foot, a man with a wound in his shoulder that shows the deck plating behind him, and a soldier with so many cuts and punctures that they've become dangerous by quantity alone.

"Flashlight-heads blow right through armor," Williams grumbles. "Impact shards, glancing hits, ricochets. Everything gets through. Mandy shouldn't have a bruise."

"Hey squid!" she snarls. "Think the Council might spring for better armor?"

Liara stretches her fingers out across Rahman's ribcage and lifts her palm while she struggles with her biotics. She can't transmit her anger into an innocent.

"Out...of...line," Alenko growls, his timbre so rough and low it makes Liara's aurals shiver. "Stow the chatter, chief."

"Sir, yes, sir," she replies in a tight tone.

It seems bizarre, puncturing Rahman's already damaged lung to relieve the pressure. In a Thessian hospital, a doctor would be dragged before ethics boards for something so primitive. But she trusts Chakwas gave her the right instructions, so she follows them. A gentle press of the fingers finds a gap in the ribs and her omnitool projects an overlay of the organs beneath to warn her away from dangerous spots. She pushes. The scalpel makes quick work of skin and membrane and with a single sputtering heave that brings bloody froth past her lips, Rahman takes her first full breath.

"Great bedside manner," she grumbles. "Don't mind me."

Chakwas said to talk to her, make sure she's lucid.

"Perhaps I should add one of those umbrellas humans put in drinks?" Liara suggests.

Williams snickers.

"Think I'd be cute with cocktail umbrellas sticking out of my tit, Gunny?"

Williams rolls her eyes.

"You pick up too many drunk girls as it is."

Chakwas shakes her head.

"I am surrounded by children."

Liara hadn't expected Mandira Rahman to be the one calming her as she kept the soldier chatting while she carefully slid the spent injectors of no fewer than six portable blood bottles out of her veins and fed a laparoscopic probe into her ragged carotid to examine the artery from within. The flowing text on the surgery pod warns her over and over that no blood vessel is more important to feeding the human brain.

While she twirls and tilts the haptic controls on her omnitool to angle the drone's camera this way and that, occasionally cauterizing or spraying down a layer of gel that will seed new cells, Mandira talks to Liara about celebrating Holi on Earth two years ago, tells Liara the names of three places she simply has to eat, two in Los Angeles and one in Mumbai, and waxes at great length about her personal life. Apparently unconventional by human standards, it seems to involve two female partners she lives with on a colony near the Krogan DMZ when she's not deployed, and occasional lovers they take in their wanderings. A joke about the psychedelic side effects of oral sex on female drell being more dangerous than males has everyone still conscious fighting a smile. A likely delirious Williams actually coos in a painkiller-thickened tone when Mandira talks about her turian partner and her kittens from a failed marriage.

"Your daughters will be proud. Their mother might want to show appreciation," Liara teases. "The districts in the Masek Desert pride themselves on self-reliance, even from the rest of Palaven. This is what makes a desirable wife there. She'll want to paint your scar, I'm sure."

"How d'you know?" Rahman asks, trying to turn her head. Liara slaps a stasis field around her neck and jaw so she can't move.

"You said Aulis's face paint was one red ink stripe straight down the forehead, two silver stripes of glitter-paste at an angle past the nose, and shiny black along the mandible rims. Those are Masek markings for homeworld-native citizen who's completed military service in her Tenth of Life."

"Oh...right. I told you about Halloween and making up a mask that looked like her."

Liara smiles.

"And I read every work in my field. Including nineteen-volume histories of the Turian Colonies, the separation, and the Reunification War. Cured my insomnia for a year."

Chakwas slams her fist into the wall beside her desk, cracking the spray-on glove with the force of it.

"Alenko," she mumbles, looking back at Cam Fredricks. "Bag and tag."

Fredricks came in as one of the 'moderate' injuries after being thrown into a rock by the swing of a geth armature's leg. He was in the makeshift clinic in the mess hall when he collapsed. In the course of the surgery, Chakwas discovered dozens of internal wounds, each of them just below the size an omnitool scanner could detect. He bled to death inside his own skin, without a single hole or tear. He must have been in excruciating pain for most of that time, but disregarded it because others looked worse.

Chakwas draws herself up, takes a steadying breath, and taps the intercom control.

"Computer, log that Private Cameron John Fredricks was killed in action. Time of death is April 25th, 2183 at 0412 shipboard. Recommend him for the Gibraltar Cluster, First Class, for perseverance in the face of suffering and sacrifice in service to his comrades in arms. Nominating officer Chakwas, Karin Elizabeth, MD. Forward nomination to Lieutenant Alenko and Commander Shepard for review."

"Logged," the VI drones.

The most senior surviving soldier in his fireteam is a dark-skinned woman named Monica Negulesco with a shaved head and a physique so long and thin it seems the air vents might blow hard enough to tip her over. She runs plum-dark fingers down his face and closes his eyes before stepping back and nodding to Alenko.

"Save me a seat, Cam. I'll catch you flipside. Thank you, doctor."

"He deserved better," Chakwas grits out.

"They always do," Monica replies and Liara is hit with the realization that a woman so young has already faced this before.

Why does a species already so short-lived fling themselves at death?

Those who simply needed bleeding stopped, or actual bandages or shunts in place of medigel recovered rapidly and Chakwas sent them out to tend to the smaller scrapes and cuts that everyone on the ground team except Alenko seems to have suffered.

This leaves only Chakwas, Liara, three sedated patients, and an angry-looking Ashley Williams holding some sort of mesh tube that spreads her abdomen open around the wound and the bullet that caused it but doesn't let her bleed.

Chakwas snaps her fingers and points at Williams.

"Chief, you're up. If you would be so kind, Doctor T'Soni."

Liara burns her current pair of gloves off with her omnitool and puts her hands back under the dispenser. To her credit, Williams seems uncomfortable as Liara points her to the just-stripped bed that Rahman vacated.

"Lie back, please."

"Look..."

"Lie back."

"I shouldn't hav-"

"Ashley," Liara begins, putting all the sternness and anger of the day into her tone to cover up her exhaustion.

"Lie back. My understanding of humans might be limited." She waves her hand at the dark skin exposed by the bunched-up compression shirt. "My understanding is that some humans have a very hurtful word that they might use to refer to a woman with your skin tone. I have never, nor will I ever refer to you that way. There is..."

She sighs.

"...there is a slur some asari would use on me based on my parentage. Calling me that would have been far more offensive than what you did. Equally offensive to the word I'm referring to. Calling me that would make me angry, rather than frustrated. Am I understood?"

Ashley's throat bobs, and she gives a small nod. Liara slides the magnifier over the mesh that's spreading the wound.

"Let me concentrate on these scans."

Liara has spent entirely too much time today with her hands buried in human bodies, her fingertips spreading blood vessels apart so the damaged one can be burnt shut or lifting this trembling red, yellow, or orange thing from atop that one so Chakwas can examine it. She feels like she's Lucen, shaping the beach sand that will be fired into living things under Athame's tutelage.

Perhaps she's just as traitorous as the all-too-mortal, all-too-fallible priestess. Perhaps she would have noticed Fredricks' internal bleeding if she'd had the sense to use her biotics to check beneath his skin, despite the crew's unease about her abilities.

Here, the whitish fat between the upper layers of the skin and the clenched weave of sinew is thicker-even on the warrior's physique of Ashley Williams-because evolution dictates it must be thus, so that her body could carry a child. Here, what must have been a knife wound is healed to the thinness of human hair, because it must be thus. Her skin must be readier to heal than a male's. Twice, the surgical computer overrode her flagging of a female soldier's white blood cell count as elevated. In most species, that disparity between genders would mean the female had a deadly infection. But for the daughters of Earth, it must be thus. Women are the backbones and beasts of burden of human families and societies. They cannot suffer as long under an illness as men do, lest their children and their community suffer.

Most of all, she marvels at how Ashley scarcely fidgets as she palpitates the wound, pushing the thinnest whisper of biotics to touch below the surface and assess mass and density. An otherwise brave young man she checked squirmed so much while Liara worked that she dropped a stasis field on his wrists.

It seems there's truth to the boast that both Ashley and Shepard enjoy about a woman's tolerance for pain.

"The wound is clean, both entrance and exit," Liara decides. "The shell did not fracture, it just stopped on the back-plate of your armor. Dr. Chakwas will be able to excise the liver and kidney tissue affected and place cellular regeneration stimulators, which should restore functionality. The bullet missed your left ovary by a few centimeters."

"Well, that's a relief! Where's Alenko?"

Liara shakes her head with a smile.

"However, given that the round was highly radioactive, and you insisted on waiting until last, the delay in inserting the spreader and isolating the round means it may not have insulated your tissue from radiation. Doctor Chakwas will need to perform exploratory surgery and possibly remove follicles that might be damaged."

"Makes sense. Pretty sure my sisters don't want any two-headed nieces or nephews."

"It would mean a week off duty."

"Aw, fuck. Never mind, then."

"According to this manual," Liara teases, biting her cheek to avoid smirking at the marine as she reads off her omnitool. "The Alliance requires this surgery based on past litigation by injured veterans."

"Double fuck."

Liara chuckles.

"Perhaps, if we are to be trapped in here together for several days, I could convince you not to refer to me by the sort words you would not want to be referred to yourself? Perhaps from there, we could learn to be pleasant to each other? Your God and my Goddess willing, perhaps we might learn to be friends?"

Ashley coughs, as if the peace offering surprised her.

"Yeah. Suppose we'll both need something to do."

"Get some rest, Ashley. I think we both need it."

Liara turns away, tapping on her omni to lower the lights and using a lift to pull a blanket from the shelf and cover the snoring form of Karin Chakwas where she lays sprawled over her desk with her head cushioned by her arm.

She reaches for the storeroom's scanner and just as she touches it, Ashley clears her throat.

"Doc, are you religious?"

"In a sense, yes. A smaller religion from Thessia. Likely not the one you're familiar with."

Ashley huffs.

"I think at this point, we can assume I'm just not familiar period with aliens. What I meant was..."

"We do not pray for favors," Liara replies. "Or we ought not to. But yes, I will be praying for Shepard's return."

"Yeah, me too. She talks about you, you know? During the downtime. We got so sick of it once that Alenko 'lost' the Mako's spare tire on the way back just so she'd switch topics from some Prothean shit you were telling her about the day before."

She thinks about me that much?

"I...I don't know what to say."

"Don't have to say anything, not to me. Look, I'm a grunt. As long as I stand up straight and salute right, people look right past me. But that means I can watch them without being caught. You and the skipper...all I know is she doesn't treat you like she treats Wrex, Tali, or Garrus. Whatever it is, it's not my circus, not my monkeys. But you should know she talks about you. Good night."

Liara presses her hand to the door control, steps inside, and sinks to the deck as the lights automatically drop to full darkness. She sobs and shakes while her biotics send everything that's not welded to something else flying into the air and circling like leaves in a storm.

"Athame, first teacher, universal mother, face of the Dawn. Please. Not her. Not now. Not like this," she croaks. "Protect the light of Kate Shepard and return it to me, I beg of you."

The door alarm blinks and chimes. Liara stands on cramped and aching limbs and fumbles for it.

"Yes?"

"Message for you, doc. Skipper scratched something into the dirt at the point we'd been monitoring. Your eyes only. We've got her on the optical scopes. Using some sort of...fast one-handed sign language?"

"Huntress hand-talk. It's a military sign language commandos use. I am rusty, to put it mildly."

"Well, you're all we've got. Pressley has the deck. He said 'conference room in ten'."

"Understood," she replies before cutting the intercom.

It takes most commandos years to become fluent through osmosis. It can't be trained except one-on-one. Did Shepard take a lover just to learn hand-talk?

For detailed entries on all, see the Systems Alliance Officer's Codex

Ardat-Yakshi (Justicar) / ardatism or ardatic (medical) / Ardat (controversial, 'familiar' version) = An Ardat Yakshi or "Demon of the Night Winds" is suffering a medical condition related to the 'draw' of the meld, infertility, and biotic power. Upon detection, they are either secluded in monasteries, or refuse and are executed without trial by members of the Justicar order. A handful of them refuse and manage to escape.

See "Ardat-Yakshi and Ardatism Disorders" under "Intelligence" in the Systems Alliance Officer's Codex

Blackwatch = A top-secret turian military agency employing an elite subset of their Cabalist biotics that fulfills special operations roles on the battlefield, assassination and sabotage, and as well as more typical espionage duties within civilian institutions and governments.

See "Biotics, Society, and Citizen's Rights" under "Articles" in the Systems Alliance Officer's Codex

exfil = Short for exfiltrate, a covert operations term for leaving the area of engagement. 'fangs out' = A pilot's term for having an aircraft or ship's weapons activated or ready to fire as opposed to powered down or disarmed. LZ = Landing zone medigel or 'gel = A genetically modified single-celled lifeform originally developed by the human-run Sirta Foundation, designed to rapidly adhere to, disinfect, and seal wounds. It bonds to original tissue while attacking any other microbes present. Despite being illegal genetic research under Council law, the obvious utility of a self-replicating, self-inflating, wound-sterilizing bandage that can be bottled means that the law was revised and a permit was issued.

SYSTEMS ALLIANCE INTELLIGENCE SERVICES, CULTURAL DIRECTORATE, ASARI BUREAU

"Athamist Pantheon"

Athame is a goddess or "the Goddess" when referred to by asari in conversation. The senior goddess in the pantheon, Athame is goddess of fate and prophecy and giver of the Art of Athame (biotics to other species) or simply 'the Art'. Athamism is the current form of her worship. Proper Athamists pray primarily to Athame, "First Teacher", "First Mother" or "Universal Mother" and pray to the other goddesses in co-invocation that honors Athame first, and asks other goddesses to act with her permission.

Janiri is the goddess of seasons, storms, and agriculture. Fasts, sacrifices and rituals drawn from the Edicts of Janiri's were performed at the start of the wet season, which varied depending on the location on Thessia's supercontinent. Ceremonies bearing her name are at least as old as the writing with which to record it. As civilization stabilized, Janiris became less about praying for crops and more about celebrating the stability her gifts had already given them. The modern Janiris Day is a celebratory, five-day festival replete with food, wine, sexual activity, and music.

Kurinth is the goddess of war and hunting, which were treated interchangeably by early asari who largely avoided violent conflict amongst themselves. Her name is co-invoked with Athame in military ceremony, and in the christening of warships. While sexuality is not her domain, she is a sexualized figure to many asari in their maiden stage, because while Tevura possesses the domain, Kurinth is typically depicted with multiple partners, always adventuring to seek companionship.

Lucen was an early follower of Athame and the only mortal mentioned by name in the Edicts, the First Teachings in the Songs of The Goddess for the various members of the pantheon. A tragic figure in Athamist teaching, Lucen was tasked by Athame herself with teaching pottery, agriculture, writing and mathematics to ancient asari. In her late years, she demanded she be given the gift of prophecy to know if her people would thrive, but prophecy was Athame's alone, so Lucen was struck down when she tried to steal it from the goddess.

Piares is the goddess who assists Athame in bringing the souls (the 'lights') of her children to the Dawn. A secretive but simple figure, Piares appears in the texts merely as a guide: She does not choose or pass judgment on souls, only teaches them the path to the Dawn. She appears only in the Edicts and Songs of Athame and Tevura and has no books of her own. In parables, she is called by various epithets, mentioned obliquely and sometimes in unclear ways.

Tevura is the goddess of love, sex, travel and law, a peculiar convergence of domains that baffled human, salarian, and turian xenoculturalists (albeit for different reasons). A series of laws, customs, codes of honor and alliances were needed to protect wandering maidens and bondmate-seeking maidens from harm. In modern times, Tevura is primarily co-invoked ceremonially at trials and in prayers at bonding ceremonies, though in her aspect for travelers, she is sometimes co-invoked with Janiri, Kurinth, or both when undertaking dangerous voyages or military missions.