"I'm getting the distinct notion that you like ordering me about."
"Funny, I'm getting the distinct notion you like me ordering you about."
Jaal muttered something that SAM lacked a translation for as he shook his head. "I thought we were going to attack the Roekaar, not cavort with one another."
"Okay, okay. Flirt later, Ryder?" Peebee winked.
"Sure thing," Sara replied. "Back to business."
After Sara had the hunch that the third monolith of Havarl was in Roekaar territory, she had contacted Peebee for the additional firepower and enthusiasm. The asari came as fast as her legs would carry her at the first mention of Remnant. Past Pelaav and straight to the river embankment, a single, questionable bridge was the only divide between the Moshae's research team and the Roekaar camp. It seemed a precarious thing to rush and bottleneck, but that's where Peebee and her biotics came in.
While the Roekaar were focused on the bridge and what they thought was the only point of attack, Peebee used her biotics to heft boulders at their cover. It gave Sara and Jaal the distraction necessary to begin to make their way across. And when the Roekaar quickly reassessed and began lobbing grenades to blow the bridge? Peebee dropped the boulders and retaliated by throwing Sara and Jaal at them, instead. Sara did what she did best. She screamed.
"Fuck!" And with that amazing introduction, she collided head on with a Roekaar skirmisher. She unloaded a full clip into his chest as her enemy twitched beneath the weight of her body and the piece of bridge Peebee had flung along with Sara.
Jaal was obviously doing better than the archeology-student-turned-galactic-savior. He kept his sniper rifle strapped to his back and pulled out a long, serrated blade. Peebee lunged from the other side of the river, encased in a glimmering biotic haze of blue light. She crushed their body armor into paperweights while the angara were still wearing it. The last thing they saw was her button nose and pursed lips as she blew them kisses. Sara shuddered at the once living, now smoldering pile of meat underneath her and shoved herself upright.
Safely away from the embankment that overlooked a death drop into the river below, Jaal sheathed his blade. He ducked behind a knotted vine as thick as a tree stump and pulled out his rifle. From what Sara could gather from the screams and comm chatter, the Roekaar were turning their attention to the glowing biotic goddess who was owning them between giggles. It gave Jaal the opportunity to snipe exposed combatants while they were distracted by Peebee. Sara could hear him cursing when the Roekaar mentioned something about, "adhi."
She recharged her pistol clip. "Jaal..!"
"Watch your flank!" he growled.
Then she saw them. Snarling, four legged things with a central dorsal fin along their backs. The adhi lacked fur, but reminded Sara of attack dogs as they bounded over toward her, their momentum making them momentarily immune to her pistol fire. Spittle and other fluids- blood, maybe mucus- flew and splattered across Sara's forearms as one leapt at her. She kept firing even as it knocked her over and bit down on her arms with its dying breath.
She hoped Peebee and Jaal were better off. On her back, sandwiched between the dead angara beneath her and dead adhi on top of her, Sara wondered if now was an appropriate time to question her life choices. She delicately tried to pry the adhi's jaws open and extract her arm.
"Quit being a layabout."
The adhi carcass immediately became lighter and flopped off of Sara. She glanced up and saw Peebee's outstretched hand. Sara let the other woman hoist her to her feet and took a moment to take in the carnage.
Peebee had Roekaar wrapped around trees and trees wrapped around Roekaar. Some of the shots that Jaal had made were so clean that his victims looked like they were sleeping where they fell. One adhi was still snapping uselessly at the large rock that turned its back limbs into a smear. And then there was the mess around Sara courtesy of her poorly disciplined trigger finger.
She shook her head. "Taavos?"
Sara was answered with far off gunfire.
"Does finding Taavos really matter?" Jaal called from his cover. "The last monolith is either here or it's not."
He had a point, but it was also getting cumbersome to be wandering aimlessly in a jungle. "If he could point us to the monolith or vault, yeah. It would be helpful."
"He might be dead," Peebee suggested. "We did just kill a bunch."
"Great," Sara groaned as she poked at her bite wound.
"Taavos!" Peebee called out. "Taavos, did we kill you?"
"You need to try harder, you alien skkut!" A voice roared from the direction of the gunfire.
"Oh, good, we didn't kill him!" Peebee exclaimed. She stretched her arms until her shoulders popped.
"We can always remedy that," Jaal suggested.
"Or how about we just reactivate the vault and save the planet without wanton murder?" Sara snapped. "Jesus!"
"Relax, it was a joke, I'm sure." Peebee flexed her fingertips and her biotics glowed to life. "A defense mechanism. This whole kill or be killed is stressful. I, for one, can't wait for a long soak in a tub."
Her biotics worked as almost an extension of her arm, telekinetically smashing vines and crates out of the way beneath a ray of blue light. She cleared a straight path directly to where the remaining Roekaar were huddled behind a scavenged escape pod. Now exposed, one rushed them with guns blazing, his screams cut short when Peebee slammed him into a tree as easily as if he was a ragdoll.
"We just want the monolith, Taavos!" Sara cried. "We don't have to fight!"
The Roekaar that Peebee pinned against the tree was not having it. "Fuck these aliens!" he bellowed. "Let them die not knowing!"
Peebee turned her full attention to him. "You're a feisty one, aren't you?" There was a crunch as his armor's chest plate began to fold in on itself. "Hush."
"This alien has reactivated the vault on Eos," Jaal announced. "The air there is beginning to clear. Even if you will always hate aliens, surely you can recognize the value in using them for this purpose?"
"Traitor!" The Roekaar spit. "Give them nothing!"
"And still, he keeps talking," Peebee sighed. If the armor collapsed any further around his chest, there was no way he'd be able to breathe.
"Wait." One of the huddled Roekaar stood. "If I just give you the location, you will let us go and no one else will die?"
Sara shrugged to Jaal's chagrin. "Sure."
The pinned Roekaar began to protest, but was silenced by his friend's raised hand. "I am Taavos."
"And you know where the monolith is?" Sara asked. "The sages of Mithrava said in a past life you were an angara named Zorai."
That got a derisive laugh as he inched forward with his hands in the air. "They would say that, wouldn't they?"
Sara shrugged. If there was a joke, it went over her head. "Jaal?"
Jaal snorted. "Bullshit."
"When I was one of the sages atop Mithrava, they called me Zorai," Taavos explained. "I suppose it would feel like a past life, in a way, with how long ago it was."
"I don't understand." Sara began to shuffle toward Taavos, and mimicked his cautiousness step for step. "Why wouldn't they just say that?"
"Would you have come here and harmed so many of my brethren if you had the coordinates to start?" Taavos replied. When he was in range, he began to upload the information to her omni tool. "Even blunt tools have a purpose."
"Nice to see I've traveled light years from my home and nothing's changed," Sara muttered back.
"Even if you manage to save this planet, you won't be welcome here." The way he said it, almost sounded like he was reassuring her. "I would return from where you came."
"Impossible!" she replied, almost cheerful. "Welcome or not, we're going to have to make ourselves at home somewhere."
"Understandable," Taavos allowed. "And likewise, now that we've seen you and your friend's abilities, trust that you won't catch us unaware, again."
As if that was her cue, Peebee released her grip on his companion and watched the angara crumple to a heap on the ground.
The coordinates that Taavos gave them led them to an underground chamber in a cave. Between the uncontrolled plant growth and it literally being below the surface, there would have been no way it would have been discovered by any of their ship's sensors and that was without considering the fact that it was in Roekaar territory.
Peebee flitted about the monolith site and scanned every piece of tech she came in contact with into her omni tool. Jaal was more cautious, his responsibility toward their objective obvious as he shielded Sara's back, but he gazed at the structure with a quiet wonderment. It made her show off, do unnecessary flourishes with her hands as she buzzed with anticipation.
This was his planet. The home of his ancestors. His world. He'd never seen three monoliths sync up and shoot a beacon through the sky in a blaze of yellow light. Sometimes good things did happen.
The monoliths lit up the air around them and cut through the blackness of the cave. As quickly as they were bathed in that warm, golden light it was gone and dispersed into the walls of rock. Jaal was smiling, a child attempting to distinguish the fireflies between the dying embers of a campfire in the night sky.
"Let's go get that vault," Sara declared.
Thankfully, her hypothesis was correct and the vault on Havarl was nearly identical to the one on Eos. There were slight, structural differences (like their length of time spent in the gravity well having a discrepancy of two seconds) that could be attributed to the overzealous growth patterns that pushed into and shifted the foundation. The smell of soil and humid, jungle heat gave way to cool air and metal.
Peebee dashed ahead without waiting, without looking back. Sara just chuckled. She could instantly think of four professors that would absolutely lose their minds over having to share a dig site with that asari. "Don't Touch That" Donoghue would break out in hives. If he was still alive. That was six hundred years in the past. He had to be dead by now. Right?
Sara glanced at Jaal. "When I reset the last vault, it set off a heat wave," she told him. "Like it was sanitizing the area. We'll want to make sure we have a clear path back to this entrance."
He nodded, his blue eyes glinting almost iridescent in the dim lights along the walls. Maybe she had looked like that on Eos, if she hadn't been pushed along furiously by panic.
"Come on," she said. "The Remnant won't be friendly until we reactivate the vault."
They traveled quickly to the heart of the vault and only engaged the Remnant when necessary. Sara commed Peebee before interfacing with the tech to give her friend a headstart to escape the vault's fail safes. After she'd gotten the go ahead from Peebee, Sara motioned for Jaal.
"Ready?" she asked.
SAM made it seem easy. A wave of her fingertips and suddenly everything sparked to life. Stars turned to flares of light before their eyes. Knowing what she did now, Sara could recognize Eos in the cluster of constellations, she could recognize Havarl. Other planets dotted across her vision that she knew SAM would document for later. As quickly as the images appeared, they faded into the ether, the memory of their glow still warm on the edge of their consciousness. There was a silly desire to stand there and gawk as the entire vault hummed alive, but Sara knew better. Sara didn't hesitate. She dashed back toward the entrance and used the rocket propulsion in her suit to close any unnecessary distance between a ledge or meandering path.
It occurred to her that maybe she shouldn't have brought Jaal down there. If he wasn't fast enough or tripped or all the multiple other unforgiving what ifs, she'd be responsible for explaining why the one person tasked with learning about and babysitting the denizens of the Milky Way ended up dead. But sure, trust the humans etc. and give them a planet.
It was fortunate then, that Jaal was proving to be extremely capable. His body appeared to be meant for flexibility and speed as he deftly followed her back to the gravity well. Peebee was already waiting there, as unconcerned as if they had completed a simple stroll in the park.
"Evfra will need to hear about this," Jaal declared as soon as they were clear of the entrance. "He will have to see that you can be trusted."
"We can comm him on the ship," Sara said.
The change in Havarl was more subtle than Eos. There was no radiation to clear, the world was still jungle heat. But Sara noticed the stump of a branch they'd hewn with a machete, she saw a footprint she'd left behind on her way to the vault. The explosion of life had stilled to a sustainable spread.
She could get used to success. It gave her time to focus on other curiosities.
As it turned out, Sara had been overthinking everything. Sometimes, the best things happened not by careful planning, but just by being in the moment. So, as Peebee scampered up the gangplank of the Tempest to the lab she'd slapped together in the escape pod and Jaal hurried to notify Evfra, Sara made her way to the crew cabins.
No elaborate set up, no charming conversation. Just a knock on the door and an uttered, "Hey."
It wasn't Tennyson, but it worked.