XXIII

A Question of Loyalty: Fleet

Shepard piloted the quarian shuttle to the Alarei. The tension in the shuttle was thick enough to cut with a knife. The second they stepped on the Raaya, the mission had become about much more than keeping Tali from exile, the punishment for quarian treason. Tali had as good as abandoned the Migrant Fleet on her own, at least temporarily, after what had happened on Haestrom. This was about her father.

Shepard docked with the Alarei without a problem, and Garrus had his rifle out before she opened the door, prepped for engagement with synthetics. In a way, it was a good thing that it was geth, Garrus thought. All three of them had had plenty of experience taking those things out.

And it didn't take long for the geth to show up. As soon as they stepped inside the airlock to the first room on the research vessel, Garrus saw the lights of the geth's primary processing center moving across the room. Blue lines lit up on his visor—he picked a trajectory and fired.

The layout of the ship was good for a firefight, at least in this room. It looked like a barracks, where the scientists slept in the off-shift, so there were plenty of bunks to use for cover. Good for Tali—she could get in close with her shotgun and still have obstructions between her and the geth.

Right away, Garrus saw Shepard fall into the pattern she'd used on the SR-1 when just the three of them had fought together. That hadn't been often, but he'd seen it enough to recognize Shepard taking a step back from her usual aggressive flanking maneuvers, focusing her efforts on supporting Tali. Garrus remembered the first couple of times he'd seen her switch styles like this it hadn't made sense—until he realized Shepard's first instinct wasn't to neutralize the enemy: it was to keep her people safe. With less military training than most of the crew, and much more vulnerable to injury in combat than most of the crew, Tali was more at risk than most of the crew, so Shepard protected her, sometimes at her own expense. One time it had gotten her shot. They'd trained Tali since then, and from what Garrus had seen, Tali'd learned a little on her own. Tali wasn't the liability she'd sometimes been back then, and Garrus hadn't seen Shepard this focused on keeping Tali safe since she'd joined back up. But none of their other missions had been this personal, either.

Shepard watching Tali's back left most of the flanking offense she usually took care of to him. Fortunately, he'd been ready for it. He fired the Mattock in three- and four-shot pulses at the geth coming in on either side.

If Tali had only sent parts and pieces, though, Garrus thought, either something strange had been going on here or EDI really hadn't been kidding when she'd said the geth had been rebuilding themselves. He hit two with an overload program and turned away from the sparks to fire at a blue light floating in the air by the exit on the opposite side of the room. This wasn't just a few geth, this was enough geth to wipe out a unit of quarian marines, state-of-the-art stealth and battle units that were armed and angry.

When they had a second to breathe, Garrus saw them—armed quarian corpses on the floor, surrounded by pools of red blood. Shepard signaled him to stand watch and stepped over them to a console bank on the opposite wall, flickering with somebody's saved vid. "There's a log here," Shepard waited for Tali and Garrus to draw level, then hit the playback button on the screen. A female quarian came up on vid. Garrus noted the time stamp—two days ago.

"Something's slowing down the systems," the quarian on the vid observed. "We're taking down the firewalls to rebalance load distribution. Rael'Zorah ordered us to bypass standard safeties. Following security protocols will take too long."

Out of the corner of his eye, Garrus saw Tali tense. Whether or not she had been careless in the materials she sent here, her father had certainly been careless in how he had handled them. He saw Shepard watching her, too. But Shepard didn't comment. "Let's move on."

The corridor outside of the barracks was silent and dim. The hum of the air filters said the Alarei was still stable, but it was dead in space. Only the emergency lighting still illuminated the interior. "Garrus?" Shepard murmured, keeping her voice low.

"Not picking up any geth energy signatures," he told her. "Not here, anyway."

"Stay sharp," she replied. "This can't be all of them."

There was a door on the left, and Shepard took it. Garrus glanced around what seemed to be a salvage lab, but he stopped at the door, watching the hall as Tali and Shepard took a look. There was an open canister lying on the table with tech pieces still inside. Out of the corner of his eye, Garrus saw Tali gesture at it. "This is one of the storage units I sent to Father," she told them. "Looks like parts from a disabled repair drone, plus a reflex algorithm that I didn't recognize. I got this on Haestrom."

It was important—evidence of what Tali actually had sent back to the fleet. Shepard flexed her wrist, and Garrus's visor alerted him that she'd begun recording the conversation—an interview to use in evidence at the trial. "What made a part worth sending back to your father?" Shepard asked evenly.

"It had to be in working order," Tali explained, "Something that could be analyzed and integrated into other technology. Anything new had priority: technology the geth had developed themselves, signs of modification, clues to their thinking."

Shepard nodded. "And you salvaged this on Haestrom? How? The place was a war zone."

I should ask her about her interrogation training sometime. It would be interesting to learn whether all Alliance operatives were trained to conduct interviews or if it was something they just taught the spec ops. Shepard's question to Tali had two purposes: it would remind the quarians listening of Tali's service to her people on Haestrom, but it would also relax Tali—as an implied compliment to her skills, with no real relevance to the investigation, it was an opportunity for her to breathe for a moment.

"These suits have more pockets than you'd think," Tali said drily. "Quarians have learned how to salvage whatever we can whenever we can." She chuckled. "Within reason. We're not vorcha, but we repair what most people would throw away. Hundreds of the ships in our fleet were salvaged wrecks, either found dead in space or purchased for next to nothing."

Returning to the point, Shepard asked her, "How did you get these things to your father?"

"Sometimes I left packages at secure drops in civilized areas," Tali explained. "Someone on Pilgrimage would see that it was shipped home. For very valuable finds, I'd signal home, and Father would send a small ship."

Shepard gestured at the drone. "Does that salvaged gear give you a clue as to what happened here?"

Tali looked at the parts, the data on the computer console attached. "No. I don't know. Shepard, I checked everything I sent here. I passed up great finds because they might be too dangerous, prone to uncontrolled reactivation or self-repair. I don't know which possibility is worse: that I got sloppy and sent something dangerous or that Father actually did all this."

The evidence was certainly pointing that way, Garrus thought. This mission would be complicated enough without the question of what handing over whatever evidence we find might do to Tali. That her father was involved made this galactic security issue tricky, to say the least. He couldn't help looking at Shepard, but she wasn't talking. She was slightly turned away from both him and Tali, visor averted, obviously thinking hard. There's not really a right choice we can make here, if everything here went down like I think it did. Then she nodded at Tali to take point and followed her out of the room, ready to back her up.

The corridor wound down and to the left. Even the emergency lighting flickered, casting long, dark shadows on the quarian corpses lying at broken angles on the floor. There was a work station in the middle of the hallway where they found some researcher's tech project—armor shielding based on the geth, but there wasn't anything else on the terminal. Shepard downloaded the info anyway; the professor would be able to make good use of it. But it wasn't until the end of the hall that they had better luck finding intel about what had happened on the Alarei.

There was another log set up just before the door. Garrus came up to stand beside Tali as Shepard activated it. "Who's running the system diagnostic?" a researcher on the vid asked a coworker. "I didn't authorize—oh, Keelah! How many geth are networked?"

"All of them," the coworker had responded, like it should have been obvious. "Rael'Zorah—"

"Shut it down!" the researcher yelled. "Shut everything down! They're in the system!"

"That was the beginning of the attack then," Garrus guessed.

"This looks bad," Tali said. "That researcher talked as if there were supposed to be active geth aboard this ship—if they were reactivating geth here for their research—no. They can't have been."

Garrus frowned. In the end, they wouldn't be able to cater to what Tali would be happy thinking had happened here. If a quarian admiral had run experiments on live geth here in an effort to develop weapons to provoke them again, it was a war crime that would impact more than just the Migrant Fleet. I should talk to Shepard, find out if there really is a ban on discussing the quarians' 'sensitive military matters.' It's bad enough fighting the Reapers. If the quarians bring down the geth on us all again, it'd probably be a good idea if some of the other races who could suffer for it had a clue about what might happen.

The next room was a lab. It looked as quiet as the hall—until Garrus saw a blue light that had blended in with the emergency runners shift in midair. He fired at the same time as Shepard and Tali, and the stealth technology of the unit that had been lying in wait shorted out. It fell to the floor of the lab. Garrus looked down at it.

EDI had said there'd be 'heavy resistance.' For a ship that wasn't supposed to have anything but parts and pieces of geth, that'd been true, maybe, but so far, they hadn't run into what he would call 'heavy' resistance anywhere else. But the geth here had taken out an entire unit of quarian marines, and probably all the scientists.

Either the marine unit did better than they thought back there on the Raaya, or there's more up ahead. A lot more.

There was still another log at a work station by a flight of stairs up to the next level. At the foot of them, Garrus saw an open, sparking door. The geth broke through here earlier.

When Shepard hit playback on the log, a panicked female quarian came on the screen. "We've locked down navigation. Weapons are offline. Our mistake won't endanger the fleet," she said. "They're burning through the door. I don't have much time. I'm sorry! I'm so sorry! Jona, if you get this, be strong for Daddy! Mommy loves you very much!" Her voice rose in a scream as geth fire filled the audio and the camera froze—not a scream of fear or pain but of desperation to get that last message to her child.

Garrus looked to Shepard for the order to move, but she was rigid, her left hand locked around the table, staring at the frozen screen on the vid. He reached for her at the same time Tali did, and their eyes met behind Shepard's back for a split second. Shepard tensed then relaxed when they touched her, as if just remembering they were there. She shook her head, and pointed ahead with her gun.

The Alarei's laboratory stockroom had been upstairs, but here, Garrus's visor started flashing again. "Enemies!" he warned, as the door across the room opened, and geth began charging in, firing already.

In the close confines of the stockroom, they were almost overwhelmed immediately. The geth had waited until they could come at them from two different sides, in a room small enough Garrus and Shepard would be out of their element, forced to fight at close quarters when both of them were deadliest at a distance. That's the trouble with geth, Garrus thought, as he clubbed a hunter out of his way with the butt of his assault rifle, fired on another, and dodged fire from another unit on his left. Adaptive collective consciousness. Mercs and organics, you can tap into their transmissions, hear them talking to each other over the radio. The geth just think at each other and the plan changes.

Shepard and Tali each hacked a geth unit to fight on their side. Tali's drone tried to give them suppressing fire by one of the doors, but it was ugly for a couple of minutes. Garrus saw both Shepard and Tali taking some fire, and his recently patched armor was taking some damage too. Shepard's heavy pistol glowed blue, charged with disruptor ammunition that worked to short out geth systems even while her omni-tool cooled down. She dodged and ducked, vaulting the low storage drawers and cabinets to get her back against a wall and put some distance between her and the the geth flank. Garrus held on Tali's six, hitting the enemy with the butt of his weapon and his omni-blade as often as he did with his tech attacks or bullets.

In the end, they held out, and the geth stopped coming. The Alarei was silent again except for the sound of three people breathing heavily through their helmet filters. "Everyone alright?" Shepard asked after a moment.

"One of those hunters got through my shields," Tali panted, looking down at a small rip and dripping red patch on her left bicep. "It's a graze. Nothing serious. You?" She ran her omni-tool over the injury, activating a medi-gel application. The wound itself wouldn't be as dangerous as an infection, Garrus knew, but Tali knew that, too, and she didn't seem too worried.

"Armor's looked better, but it's looked worse, too, and I'm alright," Garrus reported.

He saw carbon scoring on Shepard's armor, too, and as he watched, she flexed her hand around her omni-tool and tech activated around her right hip and left calf. "I'll be fine," she told him, catching his gaze. "Let's not let them catch us like that again."

"Sounds like a plan," Tali agreed.

The lighting was better up here, Garrus noted, as Tali took the lead again to head toward the bridge. The geth were concentrating power up toward the front, trying to get the ship moving again. Probably whatever was left of them would be defending the bridge itself.

Tali led them into another hall, and then paused for a moment. Garrus and Shepard stopped with her. Tali was looking at a console bigger than the ones they had seen so far. Measurements and readouts were still scrolling across the left side of the screen. "This console might have something," Tali told them, activating the interface on the wall. Garrus and Shepard waited as she scrolled through several screens, taking in information like only trained technicians could. "Most of the data is corrupted," she reported, "But a few bits are left."

Garrus's visor showed Shepard cuing up her recording software again. "They were performing experiments on geth systems," Tali explained, still scanning the data. "Looking for new ways to overcome geth resistance to reprogramming."

"Did you know what kind of tests your father was running?" Shepard asked, speaking in that neutral, interview voice again.

"No," Tali said. "Father just told me to send back any geth technology I could find that wasn't a direct danger to the fleet. I suspected he might be testing weapons, but I thought he was just working on new ways to bypass shields or armor."

"Do you think testing weapons on the geth was right?" Shepard asked her. Garrus couldn't tell if she was angling for an answer that might make Tali more sympathetic to Zaal'Koris or genuinely asking, but Tali reacted defensively.

"It's not testing weapons on prisoners, Shepard. I only sent Father parts. Even if he assembled them, they wouldn't be sapient. You saw what Saren and Sovereign did with the geth. Any research that gives us an advantage is important."

She had a point, Garrus thought. Outside of companies like Synthetic Insights and specialized technicians like Sensat, there weren't a lot of soldiers equipped to handle geth technology. And what happened to Sensat? the nasty voice in the back of his head asked. Garrus pushed the guilt and self-hatred aside for a better time.

Testing tech on simplified geth tech was smart. It made sense. The geth's reactivation and militarization here proved the admiral had gone a bit further than Tali was claiming he could have, probably veering away from what was ethically acceptable into war-crime territory, actually. But it looked like Tali hadn't been involved in that part of it.

Shepard jerked her chin at the console. "Could any of that data clear your name?"

"Doubtful," Tali replied. "This is mostly results data. Effects of different disruptive hacking techniques. I don't understand all of it. But . . ." she hesitated. "They may have been activating the geth deliberately. I don't know. Nothing here says specifically, but if they were . . . then Father was doing something terrible." Tali gazed at the console. "What was all this, Father?" she murmured to herself. "You promised you'd build me a house on the homeworld. Was this going to bring us back home?"

Garrus distinctly saw Shepard hesitate, then she said, "Tali, it might be time for your people to let go of the idea of reclaiming your world from the geth."

"That'll go well," Garrus muttered under his breath as Tali rounded on the commander.

"You have no idea what it's like!" she cried, gesticulating at the bulkheads. "You have a planet to go back to! My home is one hull breach away from extinction!"

To be fair to Shepard, Garrus thought, she hadn't ever been really at home on Earth. Shepard wasn't exactly open about it, but Tali had been there with him the time Shepard had come close to telling the whole story about how she'd lived before joining the Alliance. Still, Tali was as right as she was wrong. Shepard had grown up passed around like a sack of pebbles. She didn't have people like Tali did. Like you do. But she'd grown up in a place humans belonged while Tali had grown up in what amounted to a drifting refugee camp.

Shepard was quiet a moment, but when she answered, she answered gently. "Have the quarians considered colonizing a new world?" she asked.

Tali waved her hand angrily. "We'd have enough difficulty reacclimating to our own native environment. Adjusting for exposure to a foreign colony would be even harder! It's the difference between sixty years and six hundred. For anyone alive now to watch a sunset without a mask, we must take back our home." She made a disgusted noise. "At the very least we can take back one ship," she turned away and stalked off. "Come on."

Garrus quickened his pace to catch up with her. "Tali," he murmured. "I get where you're coming from. It isn't fair your people are still out here. No one alive now had anything to do with what happened three centuries ago."

"No, we didn't," Tali said vehemently.

Garrus cut her off. "But you will be judged on what you do now. How you go about fighting the geth—and how it affects the rest of the galaxy. You aren't in a vacuum out here. What you do will have an impact. Better to think about it now than after the geth have become the new krogan rebellions. Or worse, the new Reapers."

"The geth have already helped the Reapers," Tali retorted. "We might be doing the galaxy a favor if we wiped them all out." She sighed. "But—I understand your point." She looked around at the ship, the sparking cables, the quarian bodies on the floor and the bloodstains on the walls. "We weren't ready for the geth two years ago, and we aren't ready now. Just a few units did all this. Garrus—I don't want to know what happened here."

She still opened the door to keep moving, and the fire started up again.

Garrus could see the doorway leading to the bridge down a ramp, past climate control and what looked like engineering on the left. There were geth on the ground floor. They had the high ground there, and the advantage. But there were also geth in deep cover at the engineering stations on the upper level, flanking them.

The geth had their neural network. Garrus was fighting with the two people he knew and trusted most on the Normandy, and before either of them said a word, all three of them knew how this would play out. Garrus crouched down behind the railing on the right side of the ramp and took out his sniper rifle, and he went to work. On the left, Shepard was crouched on the other side of the barricade the geth in engineering had set up, focused on tearing down the enemies on their flank. And stupid as it was, Tali charged down the ramp. Like Taylor, Massani, or Grunt would, just like she could take that kind of fire.

Garrus aimed his shots on her flanks, at her six, at the geth trying to close in on Tali on every side, letting her focus on the front. She kept that clear. Her shots were brutal and efficient, and her tech attacks were better than anything he or Shepard had against the geth. Well. One advantage of her approach was she was the same thing to the geth that he and Shepard had been to the mercs on Illium—the enemy they most wanted dead, the focus of most of their fire. And when the geth were focused on taking Tali out, he and Shepard could eviscerate them without too much of a fuss.

Shepard cleared the engineering gallery, and in a couple of minutes, he and Tali had fought off the rest of the geth defenders on the ground. Garrus guessed there might be a few more on the bridge, but they'd won. Just the three of us against enough geth to kill every scientist here and a whole unit of marines. 'Destroy the enemy with overwhelming force' is the first thing they teach you in basic. It's only after you've fought with a Spectre that you learn overwhelming force isn't worth crap against just a handful of troops with that kind of training.

Shepard came up beside him, and they walked down to join Tali on the ground. Up ahead, there was another work station with a log frozen on the screen. They looked at Tali. Her shoulders were hunched, her visor pointed down, but she nodded. Shepard hit the playback button, and a female quarian came up on the vid. "First entry: Our hacking attempts failed," she reported. "The geth have an adaptive consciousness: Hack one process and the others autocorrect. Still, we're making progress. Rael'Zorah is convinced we'll have a viable system in less than a year. This weapon will put our people back on the homeworld, and it's all because of Rael'Zorah."

That was going to be the difficult part, Garrus thought. The quarians' desire to return to Rannoch was so strong by now that for a lot of them, it would outweigh any concerns about ethics or intersystemic politics. They weren't thinking about whether killing every geth on Rannoch would be genocide or whether what they were doing here could be considered a war crime. They weren't thinking about what provoking the rest of the geth beyond the Veil could mean for the rest of the galaxy. The only thing they were thinking of was everything they'd lost and everything they wanted back.

"The bridge should be just ahead," Tali said. "They—" she broke off whatever she was going to say as they stepped around a workbench and another quarian corpse came into view. "Father!" She bolted forward. Garrus took three quick steps, running a scan for geth in the hallway as Tali fell to her knees beside the corpse, pushing at it, beating at it. "No," she cried. "No no no no. You always had a plan! Masked life signs or an onboard medical stasis program, maybe. You wouldn't—they're wrong! You wouldn't just die like this! You wouldn't—"

Shepard signaled Garrus in one abrupt movement to continue watching the door, and in an extension of the same movement, jerked up on Tali's wrist and pulled her roughly to her chest in one of the most violent hugs Garrus had ever seen. She resituated her arms around Tali and squeezed, heedless of her plate armor.

Tali didn't seem to care. Her fingers flexed against Shepard's armor, seeking a hold. She bowed her head and sobbed, and Garrus heard her vaporators start up inside her helmet. He kept his eyes on the far end of the hallway.

We knew from the start he was probably dead. Spirits, though, I hate this. Sniper, cop, gunnery officer, or tech, Garrus had always liked fixing things. Some things, though, you just can't fix. Sometimes there was nothing to say, nothing to do. And all there is is standing here like an idiot, making sure my friends don't get a bullet through the head while they're taking care of what's really important.

Tali beat her fist against Shepard's shoulder. "Damn it! Damn it! I'm sorry—"

"Don't apologize," Shepard told her. She let Tali shudder and sob against her for about ten more seconds, then Tali stood up.

"Maybe—he would have known I'd come. Maybe he left a message."

She knelt by her father's body, more carefully this time, and after a moment, Rael'Zorah's omni-tool went live, and a holo of his head and shoulders appeared. "Tali, if you are listening, then I am dead," he'd said. "The geth have gone active. I don't have much time. The main hub will be on the bridge. You'll need to destroy it to stop their VI processes from forming new neural links. Make sure Han'Gerrel and Daro'Xen see the data. They must—" The recording, like others they had seen, ended in a blast of geth fire.

Tali stood, but her shoulders were bowed. "Thanks, Dad," she said. Her voice had so much bitterness in it Garrus could taste it.

Shepard approached and put a hand on Tali's shoulder again. "He knew you'd come for him," she offered. "He was trying to help you. It's not perfect. It's not what you wanted, maybe, but he was trying."

Tali looked down at her father. "I don't know what's worse," she observed in a thick voice. "Thinking he never really cared, or thinking that he did, and that this was the only way that he could show it." At this she gestured explosively—at Rael'Zorah, at the Alarei, at the whole damn catastrophe. "It doesn't matter," she decided. "One way or the other, I cared. And I'm here. And we are ending this."

She turned away from Shepard and strode away, shotgun already raised. Garrus hurried after her—and only then noticed his visor's life sign readings acting up, something that had only ever happened in the past when there were geth primes around. "Tali, look out!" he called.

His warning almost came too late. The second the door to the bridge opened, a rocket exploded into the wall above Tali's head. She had rolled forward into a somersault just in time. Garrus saw the shrapnel take out her shields in a burst of blue, and the light over her head went out in a shower of sparks. The smell of explosives and burning metal rose, acrid through the filters of his hardsuit, but Tali's omni-tool was already flashing, snatching the shields from one of the four geth immediately on the other side of the door.

Shepard seized a trooper, and it turned on the prime to the right. As Tali made a tactical retreat to the left, around a bullpen wall and into cover, Garrus filed in after her and joined his fire to the hacked unit's, keeping his body in between Tali and that heavy fire. 92% . . . 78% . . . 45%.

Heat flared out in a wave as Shepard aimed an incendiary directly at the fuel tank strapped to the back of the destroyer and it went up in a burst of flame, cutting off the prime's line of fire. Shepard charged through the flames as Garrus rounded the corner behind Tali.

"Another prime and two hunters on this side!" Tali cried. "Around the terminal!" Her combat drone rose up from her omni-tool to float ahead of them—but there was another one coming around the corner after them that seemed to be firing. "Hostile drone!" she called.

"You two go forward," Shepard ordered in a voice taut with tension, firing her Locust to short out the drone. "I've got our rear."

Garrus nodded, already sending an overload program arcing around the corner toward the prime hunkered down over the console at the far end of the room, probably trying to break the security the quarians had set up around the ship. Tali's drone zigzagged in the air, drawing and absorbing enemy fire. "Get the hunters!" he told Tali.

She didn't signal or answer him, but her posture shifted. She was still a moment, then her right hand came up, hit something aside, and she fired at a point just ahead. Garrus left her to it as the fire behind them began to slow and a metallic chassis fell to the ground. His shields had recovered to 83 percent. It would have to be good enough. He ran out from cover, aiming at the prime as he went. He saw the blue burst that was the prime's shields giving for good. He aimed his next bursts carefully—four shots along the trajectory toward the central processing unit in the head, and four toward the heavy gun on the right arm. Metal dented, puckered, and buckled, and sparks flew out like a fountain. The prime was still walking, but when Garrus's shields hit 64 percent, the fire stopped coming. The prime was now blind and mostly disarmed. Across the room, there was another trill of Locust fire, followed by another crash as Shepard's prime fell. Then another gun started firing on the prime—Tali's second hunter, hacked and on their side.

It was over in another few seconds, and Tali pointed her shotgun point blank at the last hunter and fired. Its head exploded and it fell back almost a meter, and except for the sound of the engines and air filters, the Alarei was quiet.

Tali breathed hard. She was tired and angry and grieving, but she didn't say anything, and Garrus decided not to press her. She walked over to the console the geth had been waiting at. "Looks like we got here just in time," Garrus said. "They were trying to disable the lock. Navigate out of here or uplink to other tech on the Migrant Fleet."

Tali nodded. "The console is linked to the main hub Father mentioned. Disabling it will also shut down any geth we missed—but it looks like some of the recordings they made remained intact. They'll tell us how this happened. What Father did."

"Are you going to be okay?" Shepard asked quietly.

Tali looked at her. "I know we have to look at this, but—this is terrible, Shepard. I don't want to know that he was part of this."

Garrus walked up next to her. "Mmm. Ignorance might be bliss, but it always bites you in the ass sooner or later. The only way we can make a decision here is to get the evidence, once and for all."

Tali looked over at him, took a deep breath, nodded, and hit the playback button. Rael'Zorah appeared on the console screen. "Do we have enough parts to bring more online?" he asked a nearby researcher.

"Yes, the new shipment from your daughter will allow us to add two more geth to the network," he replied.

"We're nearing a breakthrough on systemic viral attacks," another researcher noted. "Perhaps we should inform the admiralty board, just to be safe."

Rael made a gesture of denial. "No, we're too close," he said. "I promised to build my daughter a house on the homeworld. I'm not going to sit and wait while the politicians argue."

The male researcher seemed annoyed. "We'd have an easier time of it if Tali'Zorah could send back more working material."

But Rael had rounded on him, furious. "Absolutely not! I don't want Tali exposed to any political blowback. Leave Tali out of this. Assemble new geth with what we have. Bypass security protocols if need be." The recording ended.

Garrus's eyes met Shepard's behind Tali. Behind her visor, she looked grim. It was the proof they needed—everything that had happened here had happened under Rael'Zorah's authority. Tali was innocent—her father had deliberately protected her from his actions. But submitting the proof of what he had done would be enough to convict him of her treason instead, and war crimes besides. Why is irony never friendly?

"It sounds like he was doing this for you," Shepard offered to Tali. She was trying to make Tali feel better. But what little girl wants Dad to experiment on and torture sentients as a present, even synthetics in pursuit of reclaiming a planet? And how many quarians were working here? A dozen? Not to mention the unit they sent before us. Admiral Zorah's 'shortcuts' got them all killed.

"I never wanted this, Shepard," Tali said. "Keelah, I never wanted this. Everything here is his fault. I tried to pretend it didn't point to him, but this—when this comes up in the trial, they'll—we can't tell them." Her helmet swung to look down at Shepard. "Not the admirals, not anyone."

Shepard hesitated, and Garrus guessed what she was thinking. Without submitting the evidence Tali was innocent, they didn't have a lot they could do to get her off. "We're not going to decide anything here," she said. "Let's see what the admirals say once we get back."

Tali reached out and gripped Shepard's wrist. "You're my captain in this hearing, Shepard," she said. "It's your decision, but please, don't destroy what my father was. Come on. If we wait too long, they'll decide we're already dead, and none of this will matter."

She's willing to be exiled to protect him, Garrus realized. No. It goes further than that. She's asking to be exiled to protect him. How will she take really being 'Tali'Zorah vas Normandy?'

Garrus fell in line behind Tali and Shepard, heading back toward the shuttle they would take back to the Raaya. Back when Tali had introduced them to Admiral Raan, she'd called Shepard 'vas Normandy,' too: the captain of their ship, but also from that ship more than she was from anywhere else. She'd called Garrus 'vas Palaven,'—a quarian's answer to the volus 'Palaven-clan,'—but he had to admit he wondered. He'd been born in Cipritine, sure enough. But he'd left Palaven, left the Citadel, and left the Hierarchy along with them to follow Shepard—and after that, he hadn't been able to go back. Not really. In this whole sorry galaxy, there's nowhere you fit so well as on the Normandy, either. Joker, Karin, Tali, Shepard—all of them were more vas Normandy than they were anything else, Cerberus or not. And that's really not so bad.

So in the shuttle, while Shepard flew them back over to the Raaya, Garrus leaned over to Tali. "I know it probably doesn't feel like it, but it's going to be okay," he told her. Tali gripped his arm.

"I don't know," she said. "If we have to tell them what my father did—I—"

"We're going to have to tell somebody what happened," Garrus told her. "Your father won't be the last one to try something like it, by the looks of things. But there's no reason anybody needs to know he was involved. If things don't go our way in the hearing, though—you're going to be all right."

Tali looked at him then. "Quarians aren't the only ones to have tight-knit societies. What happens to a turian who leaves the Hierarchy?" Like you did—twice—hung in the air between them.

Garrus forced a smile. "After someone's initial fifteen years of service, it doesn't really matter much," he told her. "You're a full citizen, with as many rights and privileges as you can earn."

"But you didn't serve your full time," Shepard said from the cockpit. It wasn't a question, though Garrus hadn't ever told her.

"I almost did—you got C-Sec to count our mission to stop Saren as service—but I was about three years short when I left for Omega, yeah."

Tali tilted her head. "Three years?" she repeated. "How young do turians begin their service to the Hierarchy?"

"You sure you want to talk about this?" Garrus asked her.

"No—it's helping," Tali assured him. "Please."

Garrus shrugged. Sometimes distraction was good in the moment. And I suppose if Dad had just died and I was about to be exiled, I wouldn't want to think about it, either. "Quarians, humans, and turians all have similar lifespans," he explained. "There's a theory evolution took similar paths on Palaven, Earth, and Rannoch, actually. Culture and biology are close enough we seem more like neighbors than a lot of the sapient races this cycle, or so they say. Quarians die about twenty years sooner these days—but that could just as easily be your higher mortality rates due to the fragility from living in space dragging the average down—"

"We think so," Tali agreed. "Another reason we'd like to reclaim our homeworld. A 100-year lifespan may not seem too short compared to 120 years, particularly against a salarian or volus lifespan, but those 20 years do make a difference."

"Turians mature a little faster than quarians or humans," Garrus said, getting back to the subject. "We start basic at fifteen, but you guys catch up quick, and it levels off after that. We serve in the military or any documented form of public service or law enforcement on a world where the Hierarchy has authority until thirty, usually, though naturally, a lot of turians serve a lot longer than that, and there are a few that take—well, 'gap years,' for want of a better term—and get full citizenship later."

"And what's it mean when you don't have full citizenship?" Shepard challenged him.

Garrus paused. He looked at Tali, glanced at the back of Shepard's seat, and dropped his eyes. "It's not quite like this," he said. "The Hierarchy doesn't care what I did on Omega—it's in the Terminus, outside of Council jurisdiction. So I'm not a criminal or an exile. But that I left—it does matter. I can't vote. Probably couldn't get a lot of jobs on Palaven, the Citadel, or our colony worlds. Couldn't qualify for a lot of privileges there." Most homeownership required citizenship, at least. Garrus had been a supporter of the law once. It made sense that people who wanted to live in a safe, prosperous society should work to support and protect it, and there were programs for even disabled individuals to serve their time. Now, though—I don't know. I could go back. Someone would take me. Patrol unit. Construction crew. But there's a whole list of things worth protecting that the Hierarchy doesn't count.

"And you're okay with that?" Tali asked softly.

Garrus thought before he replied. "Fighting for a broken system is worse than the penalties for breaking off to fight for what's right instead. Maybe that's not an answer, but it's the best answer I've got."

Tali regarded him. "Thanks, Garrus," she murmured.

Garrus felt the shuttle slow as they approached the docking bay on the Raaya. "Anytime."

Even the guard had deserted the airlock when they reentered the ship—it seemed everyone was already back in the garden plaza. As they walked down the short corridor, Garrus could hear Zal'Koris's voice addressing the room. "We need to face facts. There has been no word. There is no reason to think Tali'Zorah survived—"

"Sounds like the hearing's already underway," Tali muttered, quickening her step.

Garrus heard Raan arguing for a moment, but as they entered the room, she was preparing to concede. "Very well. Is the admiralty board prepared to render judgment?"

"Sorry we're late," Tali said loudly. Every helmet in the room turned to face her. Garrus heard exclamations, gasps, and a couple of grumbles. He smiled and took his place in the back of the pavilion while Shepard and Tali strode up to the defense dais.

"Tali'Zorah vas Normandy has killed or deactivated every geth aboard the Alarei," Shepard announced. "The ship can be reclaimed for the Migrant Fleet, and the bodies of those that died in the incident can be recovered with honor. I hope this proves her loyalty to the quarian people."

"Her loyalty was never in doubt. Only her judgment," Koris sniffed, and Garrus saw Shepard's spine stiffen again. This guy really gets to her.

"Perhaps Tali'Zorah can offer something to encourage more trust in her judgment," Raan suggested.

Gerrel was more direct. "Did you find anything on the Alarei that could clarify what happened there?"

Shepard hesitated, and Garrus saw Tali seize her wrist. Tali seemed to say something, but he couldn't hear her. No one needed to hear her. Just seeing the movement was enough.

"Does Captain Shepard have any new evidence to submit to this hearing?" Raan said, more pointedly than before.

Shepard's voice rose to soar over the plaza. "Tali helped me defeat Saren and the geth two years ago! That should be all the evidence you need!"

Koris's fists clenched behind the admiral's table. "I fail to see what relevance—"

Shepard cut him off with a deafening, wordless noise of disgust. "Relevance! Don't talk to me about relevance. Tali is completely irrelevant to what any of you are trying to do here. This hearing isn't about her! It's about the geth!"

Koris stood. "This hearing has nothing to do with the geth!"

"Nothing to do with a 'message' you want to send?" Shepard retorted, throwing his own words back in his face. "You want people to sympathize with the geth! Han'Gerrel wants to go to war!" She gestured toward Gerrel, as contemptuous of him as of Koris. "None of you care about Tali! Even though she knows more about the geth than any other quarian alive, and you'd think that if you were trying to decide what to do about them you might want to listen to what she had to say! But no: you're putting her on trial! Tali'Zorah saved the Citadel! She saved the Alarei! She showed the galaxy the value of the quarian people! I can't think of stronger evidence of her loyalty than that!"

No indictment the quarians can give Tali would be as strong as that one. Shepard's words rang out over a plaza that was just about silent—save for the ever-present sound of the engines. The only other thing Garrus heard was the shifting from four suddenly very awkward admirals. He tightened his mandible so he didn't laugh, and thought he'd never respected Shepard more. Nothing like seeing Shepard scold the ruling body of an entire species like a bunch of primary school children.

After the most uncomfortable pause Garrus had ever heard, Raan looked to either side of her. "Are the admirals prepared to render the judgment?" she asked again.

Gerrel entered his judgment into a pad in front of him immediately. Xen did, too—even she wasn't crazy enough not to see this was ridiculous. It took Koris another two seconds to give up. But he did.

Reading the result in front of her, Raan gave the judgement to the plaza. "Tali'Zorah, in light of your history of service, we do not find sufficient evidence to convict. You are cleared of all charges. Commander Shepard, please accept these gifts in appreciation for you taking the time to represent one of our people."

Shepard gave the admirals another good, long glare. "With all due respect, admirals, I didn't," she said. "You gave her a name and said it yourself—Tali'Zorah vas Normandy is one of mine. If you appreciate me, though, listen: the Reapers are coming. I'm going to need your help to stop them. Please don't throw away your lives against the geth."

Koris shifted. "Thank you, Commander Shepard. I hope this board carefully considers your advice."

Shepard didn't say a word, but from behind the dais, where Koris couldn't see, Garrus saw her left hand by her side move into a gesture Jack had given him before. Again he fought the urge to laugh.

"This hearing is concluded," Raan said. "Go in peace, Tali'Zorah vas Normandy. Keelah se'lai."

The quarians in the plaza repeated the ritual blessing and dispersed, heading off to their separate stations and ship shuttles, already gossiping about the hearing. Garrus let the crowd thin a little before walking back over to Shepard and Tali.

"I can't believe you pulled that off," Tali was saying. "What you said—I've never had anyone speak like that on my behalf. Thank you for being there for my father and me. Even when—"she cut off. "Thank you."

Shepard shifted. Her hand came up behind her neck—a useless gesture in full armor, but communicative enough of her embarrassment. "Tali, about what your father said—what he did—you deserved better."

Tali's posture still drooped. She was still unusually still, but Garrus heard a smile in her answer. "I got better, Shepard. I got you."

Shepard tensed all over, and inside her visor, Garrus could just make out her features—gone rigid. Her readout on his visor, left in targeting mode again from the Alarei, suddenly flashed blue as her heartrate jumped and her core temperature dropped.

It was definitely a fear-based fluctuation, and one similar to one he'd seen from her before. His visor hadn't had human readouts then, but he'd seen a similar response from Shepard, though less extreme, that day she'd opened up about her past two years ago and Tali had said they were friends in the first place. The Reapers, the Collectors, none of that scares her. The idea that someone cares about her, that someone's counting on her for more than just orders in combat—that does.

But Shepard forced a laugh and punched Tali in the arm. "Hey, now. Don't make me blush. We can still go back in and get you exiled."

Tali laughed, too. "Thanks, but I'm fine with things like this. It's fun watching you shout."

They went around to see some of Tali's friends, so she could say goodbye to Gerrel and Raan, Danna and—Garrus noticed—to Reegar. A couple of them asked questions that indicated they'd noticed Shepard might have found more than she'd released, but they were all too relieved and too embarrassed to pry too much further.

It got Garrus thinking again, though, about how much they were going to release outside of the fleet. They left the Raaya to return to the Normandy. Garrus took his helmet off for the first time in hours and felt another twinge of sympathy for Tali. She didn't seem to notice, though. Goodbyes said to the Migrant Fleet, she walked off toward the elevator in a daze. Garrus watched her go and turned to Shepard.

Like him, she'd taken off her helmet almost the moment they got through the Normandy airlock. Her hair was plastered to her head with sweat, curls breaking free of the gel she'd set it in. Helmet under her arm, she ran the fingers of her other hand through her hair, sending airflow through to her scalp. Feeling his neck getting warm, Garrus cleared his throat. "How much intel are we releasing?" he asked quietly.

Shepard's mouth tightened, and she shook her head ever so slightly. "Hit the showers," she said. "Battery's probably due for the next calibration cycle. You can catch me up on how we're doing during rounds. See you later, Garrus."

She walked off, but even as she did, her fingers moved over her omni-tool, already typing an encrypted message she wouldn't tell him aloud—too sensitive to speak where EDI could hear, too short to call him up to her cabin. His own omni-tool buzzed in less than thirty seconds. His encryption program took down her basic lock in another five, and her message came up on his 'tool. I'm locking down names for this. I don't want "Rael'Zorah" in anything going out. But I'm going to send a brief to IM in case he finds out anyway, and a full report to Anderson. And I won't give a gag order if you want to send the gist of what happened back there to the Hierarchy.

Thanks, Garrus typed back. The truth was, he wasn't entirely sure who he could trust with the report of what had happened on the Migrant Fleet today. The Hierarchy didn't have the cleanest record of palatable methods when it came to finding intel on the enemy, and he wasn't positive any report he might send to some official back in the Hierarchy wouldn't just end up inspiring some military researcher to try the same thing and end with the Hierarchy provoking a war with the geth instead.

He'd write the report all the same, he knew. File it with everything else he was compiling about the Collectors and the Reapers, everything the Hierarchy might need to know about what they were doing here and the impact it was going to have on the galaxy. They needed to be ready.


The Normandy turned her nose toward Tuchanka that afternoon. Shepard made her usual rounds before dinner—but both she and Tali skipped the mess that night. Garrus ate with Goto, Chakwas, Rolston, and Hawthorne and hoped they'd be alright. Hoped Shepard was with Tali instead of down in the hold with Grunt or hiding out in her cabin after today. He thought about leaving to find one or both of them, but after dinner he went back to the battery instead, sat down on his bunk, and opened up a link back to Palaven.

I didn't die today, he typed.

He had to wait a few minutes before Solana responded. Yesterday now, G. Twice in one day for you, huh? You must really miss us or something.

Today I did, Garrus replied. Is Mom there?

She's up, came the answer. She's calling me Devora and asking about the erdin they had right after she joined Haliat, before she married Dad. You don't want to talk to her.

Garrus sighed. If his mother was confusing Solana with her own sister, killed on tour in a pirate raid ten years ago, and the pet erdin they'd had twenty years before that, Solana was probably right. But there was even more to worry about. You're right there with her? Don't you need to be at work?

We've had to cut back Irial's hours with her, Solana reported shortly. 'Irial,' Garrus guessed, was the nurse they'd been hiring to make sure Auralie didn't run into too much to handle during the day. Another text scrolled across his screen, like an excuse. Dad does what he can, but someone's got to sit with Mom when neither of them can be here. I'm taking some time off.

Basically, we're out of money, Garrus translated in his head. Routine healthcare was free to every citizen in the Hierarchy, but for something like Corpalis, you still needed specialists and medication that wasn't.

Garrus's eyes stung, and it was a long time before he could reply. You shouldn't have dropped out, Solana. It should have been me.

Yeah, well, you're off playing hero on the other side of the galaxy, she answered. Guess we'll both be a disappointment to our ancestors and descendents.

Always provided we have descendents.

There's always that, of course, Solana conceded. You die before I ever have nieces and nephews, and I end up alone forever. Nice to know there's a bright side. Sure you haven't knocked anyone up living wild as a glamorous outlaw out in the ass-end of the galaxy, G? Even an asari strip-dancer?

Garrus laughed aloud. Trust me, that's one thing you don't have to worry about.

Because why should either of us actually have fun throwing our lives away? Solana asked rhetorically.

I'll send money next time I get paid, Garrus promised.

It'd help. Not as much as you would, but I'm learning not to hold my breath for that. Is it good night?

More or less, Garrus agreed. Is it good morning?

How about goodbye? Solana suggested. Hear from you tomorrow? Or am I looking at another month?

We'll see how it goes, Garrus typed. But I'll be in touch.

Take care of yourself, G, Solana said. She signed off, and Garrus lay back in his bunk.

He felt as massive and heavy as a planet, and he knew odds were he wouldn't sleep better tonight than he did most nights, but as he stared at the battery ceiling, Garrus felt both guilty and relieved that at the very least, tonight he wasn't Tali.


A/N: Guess what! I'm not dead, and neither is this fic. Hope some of you are still out there. For those of you that are going back and reading The Disaster Zone: Resurrection alongside Sometimes Grace, the end of this chapter is concurrent with DZ:R Chapter Four, "Something Better." Shepard is pissed about how the people that claim they care about Tali have treated her, but the orphaned foster kid and soldier who has spent all her life holding others at a distance is very unconvinced Tali's doing any better to trust her, especially on what's supposed to be a suicide mission.

Review if you've got something to say,

LMS