Interloper Rewrite: Chapter 31
Tiptoe in the Rubicon
I awoke to the shudder of the docking tube engaging. I peered around groggily, fighting the sharp taste of bile. My planned lie down to steady my nerves after Commander Shepard's grilling had turned into a restless nap, and apparently that had further progressed into a fitful slumber. There was another shudder in the metal beams of the ship, and a metallic whine of machinery. Whatever we were docking with, it was big. I flung myself from the twisted covers and shrugged into a uniform jacket. I stumbled out into the corridor as the final thumb of a heavy docking collar closed around the Normandy's slender neck.
"What's going on?" I asked the first crewmember that I ran into. He was a member of the maintenance crew I'd pulled a couple of shifts with, Craig, or Daniel, or something.
"That's the boarding ramp," Daniel or Craig answered, "we're at our rendezvous." He bobbed his head towards the elevators. I followed.
"Rendezvous?" I asked, dubiously. That sliding, sickening feeling pooled in my guts again. Was this it? My ride out of the race against Sovereign and into a jail cell? My only crime being plucked from my own reality. For a fleeting moment, I considered finding some way off the ship.
"With the Everest," Craig or Daniel replied, "we're taking on marines." We reached the elevator. The mechanic stepped aboard and motioned for me to follow, but I shook my head. With a shrug, the man slapped the control panel and disappeared out of view. I was left alone, with rumpled shirt and a hurricane of emotions.
Taking on Marines? Nothing to do with me then. I took the stairs up to the command deck. About halfway up, I had to step aside for a stream of men and women in full battle dress. The hard faces didn't seem to register my presence. After about twenty the stream diminished and was replaced by a handful of techs hauling crates of gear. I slipped past these and found the Commander and Lieutenant Alenko conferring with an Alliance Captain. Shepard drew back and saluted the man, a gesture he returned crisply before spinning on his heel and striding out of the ship.
"Seems a little excessive, don't you think?" A voice said at my elbow. I turned to see Garrus. "A whole platoon to check on a missing Special Task Group. Knowing the Salarians, they simply got distracted by some shiny rocks." He chuckled.
"Why are we loading up on so many soldiers for this?" I asked.
"From what I've gathered, command got scared of your mad admiral's little stunt on Nepmos. Don't want their prime PR asset getting herself killed on a routine mission. Though if you ask me, a platoon of soldier's won't change much if we run up against a fleet again."
"They might just do something against the Geth though." I uttered absentmindedly.
"You think we're going to have a run-in with the Geth?" Garrus asked, "What gives you that idea?"
"Just a hunch," I replied lamely. I kicked myself at the lapse.
"You know the thing I don't like about your hunches; they're starting to have a frightening habit of coming true," Garrus said sagely, "though I think I would prefer the Geth to more of those Rachni."
"You and me both, Garrus," I said, watching the Everest drift away on a nearby monitor, "you and me both."
"You're up late." Liara sat down across from me at the mess table. I hurriedly closed out of my yellowjacket messaging program. I had been writing a message to a man who claimed to have jumped ship from Kohoku's SSV Manzikurt, and with all the new marines filling the crew quarters and the cargo bay, the ship was running out of private spaces. I offered her a tired smile and rubbed at the corners of my eyes.
"Going over the Nepmos disk. Thanks for saving me a copy by the way. I never would have been able to pry it out of the ONI tech." Not entirely a lie. The young deck Chief from the Phantom Fleet's contact information had been buried in the partially reconstructed files.
"Commander Amasova does like to hold on to her information, doesn't she? You're just lucky I made a copy for myself. Never know when something like that will come in handy. I would have expected you to be preparing for Virmire though." Liara offered. She took a sip on something hot that wafted with a tantalizing aroma of cinnamon with something spicier underneath. My stomach rumbled unsubtly. I couldn't remember eating since the debriefing. The general feeling of gnawing unease had overridden mere hunger pangs.
"I'm not sure I'll be on the mission," I let out. The words came out more morosely self-pitying than I was comfortable with.
"Because you were recruited for Cerberus?" Liara asked bluntly, "yes, I heard about that," She added at the expression on my face. "It is fortunate the Normandy is not a water craft, the number of loose lips that work on it. But I do not believe the Commander would have let you stay if she didn't still trust you. At least, I suspect." She finished, as if not entirely convinced herself. Whether she was confident in her assurances or not, she smiled and reached out to take my hand in hers. The hand was warm, surprisingly rough, and gentle. Its light squeeze pushed my anxious musings from my mind, at least for a time.
"Thanks, Liara." I squeezed back, folding her hand in mine. I closed out my Omni-tool and looked over at the blue-skinned alien. She held onto me, but her eyes were elsewhere, her expression distant, as if her mind was far away. Her lips were pressed lightly into the small circle I'd come to associate with her occasional bouts of worry. "You nervous?"
"No… Yes… A little," Liara admitted, "I was just thinking... about Nepmos." Her fingers tightened at the word. I grasped her meaning.
"The bombardment, you mean?" I said, feeling myself shake at the memory. All but the worst bruises from our brush with orbital bombardment were already starting to fade, but my sleep had been haunted by bright flashes and the ghosts of thunder. "That was a close thing, huh?"
"Too close. I've been in danger before. Even before I met you, archaeology isn't all tiny brushes and lengthy dissertations. There was a time, back before Therum, I was at a dig down in this ice canyon. Our local guide had warned us that the weather had been unseasonably warm, but we were all just out of the University and our travel visas were about to expire and I suppose we had something to prove. Anyway, we went down into that canyon with second hand excavation equipment and a will to retrieve some pristine prothean artifacts. It went well, for a time. We had just hauled the first cover stone out of the way when one of the locals spotted the cracks." Liara's grip became painful, but I bore through it.
"What happened next?" I asked.
"The cracks grew. It was so fast. If we hadn't seen it, taken cover in the ruins..." She trailed off again. "Nine hundred tons of ice dropped on us. It was the loudest thing I'd ever experienced. It was... indescribable, like the sky was falling on us and the world was getting ready to end. I had never been so sure I was going to die... until yesterday." Liara was working her lip between her teeth, nearly to the point of drawing blood. Her grip on my fingers lessened as she looked into my eyes. "I was so scared, Liddle. Scared that we wouldn't make it off the planet, scared I wouldn't be able to tell you..." She flushed heavily, her cerulean skin darkening to a cobalt blue. She smiled, once again the shy professor who'd stepped aboard on Therum. "But you saved me."
"Just doing my job," I murmured. Her smile cut through the funk that had settled in after my brush with Cerberus. "Liara, you really don't care that I wasn't what I said I was?"
Liara shook her head and leaned in; her hand slid down my arm to clasp my elbow. "I wouldn't make a habit out of it, but I don't blame you for it. My own record isn't exactly spotless. And you did save my life twice now."
My own head drooped towards hers, my free hand absentmindedly brushed against the edge of her fringe. The Asari leaned into my fingers, pushing the rough-yet smooth skin against the palm of my hand. Suddenly, my heart was running very fast. The world seemed all out of focus, everything but the shyly smiling face that had grown achingly close. Slowly, we drifted together.
"There you are!"
We sprang apart as if a live wire had been dropped between us. My eyes bugged about the room until they settled on the source of the interruption. Corporal Richard Jenkins stood across the mess hall with a brightly decorated OSD pinched between thumb and forefinger. His face fell as he saw us, a flash of embarrassment crossed between us.
"Oh, uh, I can come back later if you guys are busy." He said, sheepishly.
"No, no. That's alright," Liara shot back. She stood quickly, brushing a hand over a wayward fringe. Her face flushed ever more deeply. "I have work to do for the Commander. In my quarters, yes. Thank you, Liddle." She offered me one last apologetic smile and skipped from the room. Jenkins sat down in her spot under my resentful glare. His chuckle was like a bucket of ice water after Liara's furtive attentions.
"Man, glad I wasn't actually interrupting," my friend chirped cheerfully, "looked like you were pretty deep in conversation." Jenkins played with the flashing disk.
"Ha ha," I replied sarcastically. I leaned back in my chair. "Mark my words, Rick, if you 'don't interrupt anything' like that again, you're a dead man, Jenkins."
For his part, Jenkins looked properly chastened. He shrugged and offered up his golly-gee-golliest until I was forced to forgive him.
"So, what have you got there that was so important it just couldn't wait?"
"Oh, I just might have gotten a copy of the holy grail of vintage westerns off the Crew Chief on the Everest's hanger team. Trust me, you don't want to miss this." He let me read the title on the optical storage disk. I felt a smile touch my face at the golden lettering. Jenkins' earnest smile banished any lingering hard feelings over his stumbling interruption.
"Alright, you're on."
The briefing room was crowded almost to bursting with the gathered NCOs and officers of our new passengers, in addition to Shepard's own team. I found myself wedged into a corner of the chamber, perched atop the side railing, far from the projection screen in the center of the room. The din of chatter exacerbated the oncoming storm of a headache earned the night before with more than a couple of the marines' contraband bottles. The churning in my stomach, however, had a very different cause. I looked across the room, watching Ashley talk to Kaidan as they waited for the Commander to begin the briefing. Images flashed before my eyes. The Gunnery Chief in her white and pink armor, surrounded by Geth. The Lieutenant cradling a bomb, bright flashes of incoming fire lancing through his kinetic barriers. The Virmire Choice. One of them was doomed to die, despite my efforts to derail the track the universe seemed to be on. And so now here I was, watching the decisions being made in slow motion, quite cut out of the loop. The room quieted quickly as the lights dimmed, all but the ring illuminating Shepard at the front of the room.
"Ladies, Gentlemen," she began, "we have a few extra faces with us today. Third Platoon off the Everest will be joining us for our recon mission into the Attican Traverse. The Salarian Special Task Group has lost a team they put on the trail of Saren. I don't have to tell you how important their report may be in catching and stopping Saren. So, it's up to us to go in and pull them out." The screen in the front of the room flickered to life, displaying a slowly rotating world of vibrant blue oceans and a smattering of deep green archipelagoes. "This is Virmire. The last transmission from the STG puts our landing zone here..."
The briefing continued around me. An aerial insertion. Lines of advance. Plans and contingencies. It was all going to go unused, of course. Not that I could speak up and tell them that. As expected, I would be in charge of no one, my spot was back in the Mako, providing the wheels to a fireteam under Jenkin's command and Tali. As the briefing wore one, I could not shake the feeling of looming disaster. And I was in the wrong driver's seat to stop it. I left the meeting as soon as it broke up, entombing myself within the scant privacy of my bunk.
