"What about the Exiles?"
"What about them?"
"You didn't mention them. Or how you lied to me about Dad when you used our SAM implants to talk while I was in a coma."
Sara glanced up from her spot on the bed and wished she had another pillow to chuck at Scott. It felt like old times and made her bemoan the fact they didn't have the capability to order takeout. "You know about all that already. It's all Nexus horseshit."
"Yeah, all Nexus horseshit you were stirring."
"Scott-"
"What about what everyone's saying about Kadara?" he said abruptly. "Is any of it true?"
"How should I know?" Sara scoffed. "Who is everyone, anyway?"
"All I'm saying is if my sister really had sex on top of Sloane Kelly's corpse, I'd rather hear it from her first, instead of-"
"Jesus, Scott! ...wait. Really?"
Her brother laughed, but he wheeled his chair closer to the bed. "I don't know."
Sara scowled at him and he silently stared her down. His face had always been longer than hers, but their dark eyes were mirror images. Scott shot a single brow up and struggled to choke down his mirth.
"Oh, like I don't have stories about you," she muttered.
"Not in this galaxy," he replied. "I've been a good boy for six whole centuries!"
Sara shifted her leg off the side of the bed and used it to kick his chair back. She waited until he rolled and bounced softly off the wall. "Havarl, first," she said.
"All right, sure," Scott agreed. "Havarl."
In a bid for Evfra's trust and cooperation, the crew of the Tempest, under Jaal's watchful eye (and even more watchful space monocle,) was tasked with securing two planets away from the kett.
Well, a planet and satellite. Havarl wasn't a planet, exactly.
Everyone seemed to agree with Sara (or not care,) on attempting the op on Havarl first. Voeld was a kett stronghold and had several scattered angaran bases. Sara liked the fact that the angaran birthplace of Havarl was mostly deserted. Less likely to damage diplomatic relations if you avoided anyone you had to be diplomatic with! Besides, Voeld was frozen and icy and after the listless brown of Eos, Sara was hoping for at least some pleasant weather as she narrowly avoided death.
Dubbed "Habitat Three" by the Initiative, Havarl was supposed to be temperate and beautiful. And maybe once upon a time, it had been. Jaal alluded to as much, but whatever the Scourge was and what it did wreaked holy hell on the entire cluster.
Even if Havarl stayed the same in the six hundred year trip it took to reach it, it already had inhabitants. What would the Initiative have done if they landed and found a civilization of angara? Especially if they were told that world was full up and they had to find their own? It made Sara think about Earth and how humanity would have reacted had aliens just shown up.
Aliens had shown up! The salarians vehemently denied it and tried to accuse the asari, but Area 51 from the 1960's was the stuff of legend. So, Sara had her answer. There were too many variables, so many ways things could go wrong. It made everything they'd done up until that point seem naive and shortsighted. A shame no one had thought to bring that up before hopping into cryostasis.
Jaal spoke of Havarl as if it was hallowed and sacred. It certainly was beautiful, in a quiet, eerie, untouched way. The Tempest was met by a flock of what Sara could only describe as massive, floating crustaceans. They curled and flicked their chitinous tails in the air as Kallo brought the ship down for a landing in the thick of the jungle.
Havarl felt like the reason Sara came to Andromeda. With its massive blue vines that twisted around columns and devoured forgotten cities, it reminded her of the awe she reveled in at Prothean dig sites. Quana had been nothing like this, Mars was practically a kiddie museum by the time she'd reached it. Fuck Tann and his agenda, Sara could stay on Havarl forever with nothing but a datapad and a spade.
Cora had spades. Sara had seen the other woman use one to transplant a bulb in the ship's bio lab. Maybe she had one to spare?
Liam was, once again, the first one off the ship. A friendly fist tapped against Sara's shoulder and he was bounding down the gangplank. She watched him go, seemingly without a care for his own personal safety as she pulled her hair into a ponytail. Jungles were humid and sticky, and she was kind of liking how her dark roots were beginning to show through her head of pale blue.
"It really is pretty," she heard Vetra murmur and wondered if that meant the turian was volunteering.
"Rem tech, old tech, fun tech, my tech!" Peebee chanted as she sat directly in the middle of the gangplank and pulled her boots on.
Sara had really hoped for Jaal to accompany them. It was his people's homeworld, after all. Nice of her crew to wait and adhere to her authority.
She took her time, dragging her feet with every step, as she searched for him in each unlikely nook of the ship. Eventually, she found Jaal staring out the window of the bridge precisely where she'd left him. If Peebee and Liam were too enthusiastic to wait, maybe they'd make Sara's life easier and clear a path. Or their scattered body parts would be a cautionary tale in regards to the local flora and fauna. Either way, helpful.
"I was really hoping for your opinion," she told the angara.
"And you will have it," Jaal promised in a way that made her doubt it would please anyone involved.
Long ago, Daar Pelaav had been a town. Jaal directed them to the ruined hamlet ravaged by overgrown jungle because the Moshae had assigned a team of scientists to it. It ensured a clear landing pad and a point of contact for their mission, not that Sara was one hundred percent sure of their mission.
It was a science team doing science. Somehow they ran into trouble. They likely needed help, but whether the help required was the processing speed of SAM or just brute force hadn't been specified. Maybe it was "yet to be determined."
Once outside the ship with Jaal, Sara could feel the air thick with moisture. There was a chittering off in the distance that reminded her of the keepers on the Citadel and the way they'd click their forelimbs against the metal flooring. Sara shrugged at the thrilled shiver that ran down her spine.
"It's beautiful!" Cora exclaimed as she appeared on the boarding ramp. "Maybe there are golden worlds left."
"Yes, beautiful and deadly." Jaal sounded almost proud. He glanced ahead to Liam who was crouched over a glowing, bioluminescent mushroom. "If you've touched that, I suggest washing your hands."
"Containment suit for the win!" When Jaal didn't join in with his laughter, Liam quieted and stood up. "Alright, yeah. I probably should. How close are we to Daar Pelaav?"
"Suvi got some interesting readings on the local flora," Cora told Sara.
"You want some for your garden, don't you?" Sara snorted.
"No, not exactly," Cora replied. She pointed to a long, spindly vine creeping by the gangplank. "These things are mutated, and appear to be growing rapidly. I only thought that you would want some people outside- maybe Drack and Vetra- to make sure the hull isn't encased in stems and flowers by the time you get back."
She had a point. "Yeah." Sara nodded. "That's a good call. Thanks, Cora."
Cora smiled. "Just doing my job."
"Ryder, are you coming?" Peebee bellowed. "Or do you trust me unsupervised to act as Jarun Tann's ambassador?"
Sara didn't not. And judging from the way Cora's smile thinned, she also did not. With a final nod to Cora, Sara huffed it over to Peebee.
"Jeepers, I thought you'd be stuck, gabbing with the 'huntress' forever," she exclaimed when Sara joined her. "I know you're the capable sort, so I got a little excited when I saw an opportunity to rescue you, even if it wasn't exactly life or death."
"My hero," Sara deadpanned.
"Huntress?" Jaal asked.
"It's what asari commandos call each other," Liam chimed in. His voice echoed through the helmet he'd put on since Jaal's scolding. "Cora's biotics are so powerful she was handpicked for an elite, cross-species program."
Now, Liam's words were met with laughter. He paused as Peebee chuckled and might have been staring her down if anyone could see past his tinted visor. "What?" he asked the asari.
"Nothing." Peebee shrugged. "I'm sure for a human, she's a very powerful biotic. Hey! What's that called?"
She reached for a translucent purple bloom and Jaal quickly slapped her hand down. "Glass stars are poisonous," he said.
Kiiran Dals was frustratingly similar to Foster Addison. She didn't care who Sara was and had no time for the song and dance of manners. Her people were in trouble and in her mind, Sara could keep talking about how she would help them or leave and actually help them.
What was the phrase Kiiran used? "Ocean of fish, one will have gems in its mouth." A fancy way of telling Sara that she just got lucky with the vault on Eos and shouldn't gloat. However true that was, it was also equally true that both the angara and the kett managed precisely fuck all with the vaults, (as far as SAM could deduce with the information presented,) so Sara was content to keep swimming.
She was good. She smiled. She did not inform Kiiran Dals that this particular fish would spit bullets at her, not gems. Instead, Sara excitedly told SAM to document that fish were known to the Andromeda galaxy.
Sara and her team left for the monolith where the science team had trapped themselves in a suspended animation of sorts. They kept their formation tight and didn't stray from the path Kiiran and her scientists had carved out of the jungle, because if mutant, world-eating plants weren't worrisome enough, Havarl was also a base for the Roekaar.
The Roekaar was a sect of angara that Jaal conveniently failed to inform them of until after they'd landed. A branch of xenophobes that refused to see the difference between the kett and humans, the kett and asari, the kett and any alien that wasn't angara. It was kind of refreshing to know that Sara would be shot on sight due to her species and not because of something Tann had bungled behind her back.
Exiles, Remnant, Roekaar and kett. Everything had already devolved into a convoluted cesspool before Sara had even woke. She wanted to be annoyed over the lack of a fresh start, but she'd also kind of assumed that her dad would be there to sort that nonsense out while she made small talk over drinks with the first bad decision she came across in this new galaxy. Him being dead really borked up the consequential severity of her making good decisions versus bad.
The monolith on Havarl looked nearly identical to the monoliths of Eos. To see all of Kiiran's team frozen in a field of blue light made Sara shudder with a wave of retroactive panic. If they'd done anything different on Eos- a jump to the left, a step to the right, if Peebee hadn't tackled her- maybe they'd all be glowing blue statues, too. Unsettling for Sara to see a possibility that in her naivete she'd overlooked.
"Hello!" Liam waved a hand in front of one of the frozen scientists and shrugged. "Is anyone there?"
Peebee gave them a quick scan with her omni tool. "Their vitals are stable. Looks like REM sleep. Wonder what they did to end up like this."
"Kiiran Dals wasn't kidding," Liam continued. "I've never seen anything like this back home!"
Sara had. Or read about it, at least. From the writings of a Dr. Liara T'Soni about the Prothean ruins on Therum. There was a tiny mention of a purported defense mechanism, that trapped T'Soni, before it got lost in the paper's larger focus of the doctor's rescue and consecutive dealings with some Commander Shepard.
The main difference was that T'Soni could talk and was aware. She was just essentially paralyzed and floating in a force field. Sara decided it wasn't worth the intellectual exercise to argue that point, so she just quietly raised a hand and began to interface with the monolith.
This monolith contained similar glyphs to the ones that she'd seen on Eos and what SAM and Dad had dealt with on Habitat Seven. It was safe enough to assume it was a language, but at present so much information was missing that even SAM could only make educated guesses as to what it was actually saying. Unlike Eos and Habitat Seven, however, this monolith on Havarl was already active.
With each glyph glowing green and online, it became a new mystery. Somehow the scientists had gotten trapped and somehow the plant growth on Havarl had been dialed up to eleven, so the big question for Sara and SAM was if those two issues were related.
"Eos had three monoliths," Sara muttered to herself, to SAM, to anyone who might be listening. "How many are on Havarl?"
"Two," Jaal told her.
"Or two that you know of," she replied as the data began to flood her mind. There was just an empty chasm of broken code that was massive enough to match in size the two fully powered monoliths. A trail of glyphs stretched out as they tried to bridge the gap with jagged, imperfect code. Clever of the scientists, if haphazard.
"Could there be a third monolith?" Sara asked. "Possibly?"
"If there was, it's been lost to time." With how reserved and formal he was now that he'd officially become their envoy, she almost missed the Jaal she'd first met with his snarling ferocity.
There was plenty of time. Sara was certain she would piss him off again, sooner or later.
"We need the third monolith to get the planet's life to stop going nuclear," Sara announced. "As for the scientists, well..."
They were on the right track, kind of. But the systems within the monolith were too sophisticated. In spite of the scientists' handiwork, it recognized that glyphs were missing and assumed the coding that attempted to bypass the third monolith was malware. So, SAM removed, and scrubbed everything input while Sara wondered how many months or years of the angaran's work they had just deleted.
It worked. Havarl's ecosystem was no less strained, but as the monolith updated, the blue field around the scientists fizzled and dissipated. The first one came to swinging.
"Hey there." It was only after Sara waved that she realized the disconnect between her gesture and Liam aiming his pistol at the aggressive scientist.
"Torvar," Jaal said as he stepped toward the other angaran.
"Jaal?" Torvar was clearly disoriented. He swayed drunkenly between Liam and his pistol, Jaal and his concern, and Sara waving like a dunce. "Skkutting stars! More aliens out of nowhere? What did..? Where?"
"I'm Ryder," Sara said. "I'm part of the Initiative. Jaal brought me here to help."
"Torvar, do you remember nothing?" Jaal asked. "You've been trapped in some kind of stasis for days."
"We were working," Torvar insisted. He reached a hand out to Jaal and as he made contact with the other angaran's shoulder, SAM detected some kind of transfer of electrostatic energy. "Then I looked up and all of a sudden you are all surrounding me."
"Jaal?" Sara began. "What did he just-"
"Wait a second," Peebee interrupted. She scrambled in between the three of them. "More aliens? You said more aliens. You mean like the kett or Remnant? Or you mean like us?"
Torvar blinked at her. "Not like any of you. Gray, spiky heads, with claws for fingers. I ignored them, because they were skirmishing with the Roekaar and that kept them both away from the monolith and my work."
"We need to get him and the others back to Daar Pelaav," Jaal snapped. He placed a hand on his friend's arm in support.
"Spiky heads?" Liam dropped his pistol. "Another alien group indigenous to Heleus?"
"No." Torvar shook his head as Jaal continued to usher him away from the monolith and toward the dirt path.
Sara wanted to compare the description to known races, but SAM and his databases were faster. "Turians," she announced. "Turians are on Havarl."
Peebee eagerly clapped her hands. "Did we just find a missing ark?"