"I can't believe you involved a turian in an Alliance mission," Coats exclaimed. He'd been pacing behind his desk when Shepard entered his office, and now stood frowning at her, fists braced on his hips.
Shepard lifted her chin. She'd known he probably wouldn't like her choice to invite Garrus along, but she was willing to bet he wouldn't do more than reprimand her. "You said I could have whoever I wanted."
"I said you could have whatever Alliance personnel you wanted."
"Vakarian has plenty of experience working with Alliance personnel, and he's got by far the most experience fighting geth."
"Vakarian's also high in the Hierarchy command structure. There's no way they don't know about the whole incident." He shook his head and sighed, breath whistling out between his teeth.
Shepard couldn't very well explain why she'd wanted Garrus particularly. She took the offensive instead and raised her eyebrows. "Aren't the turians our allies? Is there some reason we want to conceal this from them?"
Coats ran a hand over his close-cropped hair. A muscle pulsed in his jaw. Shepard hadn't seen the man so agitated before. "It would be nice if we had a better idea what was going on," he bit out. "What's the situation with this sphere you hauled back?"
"Be careful with it," she said sharply. "It needs to be shielded, it..." Val stopped herself at the wary look on Coats' face. She was getting presumptuous. If a subordinate officer had talked to her this way, she'd be seriously annoyed. She had to be more careful not to overstep her bounds.
"Shielded for what?"
She took in a breath and let it out, slowly, trying to figure out how much she could say. Should say. "I think it was controlling the geth somehow."
Coats frowned, skeptical. "Some kind of indoctrination device? That seems like a leap. Reapers don't need indoctrination to control the geth. They've got direct access to their code. What happened on Rannoch showed that."
"Still," she said. "Doesn't the Alliance have some kind of record of objects like this?"
His eyebrows rose, then pulled together. "Not that I'm aware of. Could be the report never crossed my desk." He gave her a hard look, waiting.
It was an invitation to give him a real explanation, Val realized. Unfortunately, all she had were details from her memories of the Normandy. Val hesitated, trying to assemble what she knew, or thought she knew, into something a practical Alliance officer might find persuasive. "There was a man named Bryson," she tried, "who was researching a Reaper-killer. The Leviathan?"
Coats sat back in his chair with another frown. "Doesn't ring a bell."
"Vega said Sh- the Normandy crew had encountered him. But Bryson was murdered by his assistant, and the trail seemed cold. That sphere, or one like it, it was controlling the murderer, somehow."
Coats stared at her. Shepard tried very hard not to look like she was crazy or desperate. Eventually he said, in a dubious tone, "I suppose it won't hurt anything to keep it contained."
She wanted to sigh in relief. She settled for saying, "Thank you, sir."
He sat down in his desk chair, and waved her to the seat opposite. "I question how we're to study it without closer observation, however."
"The researcher's daughter. Ann Bryson." Shepard tried to sound confident. "She should be able to help."
Coats' eyebrows went up again. "You know where she is? Or even if she'd alive?"
Shepard pressed her lips together. "No," she had to admit.
He shook his head. "I'll put the word out, but it's a long shot. We're having a hell of a time keeping track of people who are Alliance personnel, let alone civilians. There are millions of people unaccounted for, Shepard."
Val swallowed. It was so easy to get caught up in her own routine and her own problems that she lost sight of the bigger picture. Feeling a little ashamed of herself, she said tightly, "I'm aware of that, sir."
"So you want us to just keep this thing in storage?"
Hell, maybe she should have left it in that mine. It was too late for second-guessing now, though. "That... might be for the best," Shepard hedged. "Until someone with appropriate qualifications can have a look at it."
Coats' mouth curled. "We're a little short of scientists on-site, I'll give you that. What makes you think this Bryson woman can help, anyway?"
"She's familiar with her father's work, sir." Val hoped that was still true, at least.
"And you're acquainted with this woman? You know she's reliable?"
Acquainted, in a manner of speaking. "I know her reputation, sir."
Coats' face twisted into a frown again. "There's no reference to any of this in your file."
Val put on a tight smile. She hadn't managed to think of a sufficiently plausible lie. Could she attempt to pass it off as an error in her records? Something sufficiently classified it didn't even make her file? Coats undoubtedly had a higher clearance than she did, which would make it difficult to pull that one off. She settled for saying nothing at all.
Coats finally shook his head and gave up staring at her. "Clear it with me first before you involve any non-Alliance personnel next time," he sighed.
"Yes, sir." Relief washed over her. She'd gotten her way this time. Now if only he'd give her a little more...
Coats reached for the first of the stack of datapads on his desk. "Dismissed, Commander," he said without looking up.
"Actually, I had a request. Sir," Val added. "Could I have access to the Normandy mission reports?"
Coats raised his head and looked at her with eyebrows arched. "Why? This seems like an odd time for hero worship."
Her face turned hot. "It's not that. I'd like to see the report on Bryson, that's all." What she really wanted was to see what the other Shepard had done, whether there were other things left out, and what familiar events lay, distorted, behind those reports. She didn't have much to help her understand what was happening, but those reports might help.
"It's a little irregular," he said.
Shepard held her breath, trying to come up with another argument that might sway him.
"The whole situation's irregular, though," he grumbled, looking down at his desk. "Fine. I'll see you have access."
She took that for the boon it was, and left Coats' office before he could change his mind.
#
Val had half-hoped the reports would be released to her that day, though she knew the Alliance bureaucracy rarely moved so quickly. Still, without them, she felt tensed like a wire, and fidgeted her way through the morning's training sessions and lunch. It took an effort to keep up her patience with the half-dozen beginner biotics she was supervising that day and their wavering barriers. That was one of her own weak points, limiting how much she could demonstrate for them. She needed to get these youngsters mingled with some of the other more experienced biotics.
She rewrote the schedule of training sessions after she'd dismissed the group, which took an hour of fiddling. By that time, her most experienced group had showed up for their afternoon session — that, she needed to leave on the schedule, because it was important for this crew to train against challenging opponents. She paired them off and set them to work, barriers against warp or singularity or whatever they could muster as an attack. She demoed her charge a couple of times; most of them couldn't manage the maneuver, but a couple of them were interested in trying it out. All in all, it was a good enough session, ending with everyone sweaty and scarfing down energy bars. Val thought, guiltily, that it was a lot easier to work with biotics at this level.
It was still mid-afternoon when she locked up the training room behind her, but after the events of the last day, she really wanted a drink.
... possibly that was a bad sign.
At this early hour of the day, the bar was mostly empty; Celina, behind the bar, gave Val a nod as she came in. One of the younger servers was leaning against a bar stool, listening to the sandy-haired man sitting on it. An older man was snoring in the corner; there was no one else there. The guy at the bar waved his hands for emphasis, leaving a thin trail of smoke from the cigarette in his left hand.
The server giggled. "I can't believe you really faced down a marauder like that."
"Had no choice, really." The man took a puff. "It was him or me, after all."
She giggled again. Val rolled her eyes at the obvious posturing and flirtation. The man at the bar turned his head enough to cast his face into profile and Val stopped, eyes narrowed. He didn't look at her, but continued talking to the younger woman. She stared at him, taking in his features: sandy-blond hair, pale green eyes, and a crooked nose, the same shape she'd seen enough times in her own reflection. He spoke with a Russian accent, accurate enough to her ears but also — a near-perfect mimicry of her mother's.
Hardly believing her eyes and ears, Val took a couple of steps forward. That did catch the man's attention; he turned to glance at her, and his own eyes widened. She saw a flash of recognition there, one that mirrored the certainty growing deep in her gut. He took another drag on the cigarette and swiveled on his stool, leaning back against the bar. "Val. There you are."
Shepard remembered her brother twelve years old, with a nose too big for his sharp face. The smartest out of the four of them, short for his age and sharp-tongued. They'd bickered frequently, but he'd been the one to help her with her math and science, even though he was four years younger.
He wasn't twelve years old any more. She had nothing, no memory of the years in between. Frustration rose in her, lodging in her throat with the unfairness of it all, that she had no idea how to talk to her brother as an adult. All she remembered was a twelve-year-old boy who'd died before coming into his promise, not the adult man who sat on a bar stool with blond stubble on his chin and green eyes that gave her nothing back.
She swallowed, clearing the thickness from her throat to find words. "Alex," she said. His name felt strange in her mouth, she hadn't said it for so long. "What are you doing here?" What am I doing here?
He shrugged, scruffy and nonchalant in his battered jacket. "Heard you were looking for me."
"So you came here?" Her voice came out sharp and aggressive. Terra Nova, fine, but why the bar, instead of coming right to find her? The youngserver edged away, her expression shifting somewhere between disappointment and curiosity.
Alex shrugged again, apparently taking no notice of her tone. "Thought I might need a drink first."
She snorted in spite of herself, though the statement made her heart speed up. Didn't they get along? "Nice way to treat your only sister," she said.
Alex raised an eyebrow. "You're one to talk."
She had no good response to that; she didn't even know what he meant by it. Unease settled in her gut. "Am I that bad?" she muttered.
He laughed and flashed her a crooked smile before taking a drag on the cigarette. She couldn't see anything past the smile and the lounging posture, and the uncertainty left her floundering. She should be able to read her own brother, shouldn't she? Even after a decade apart? Couldn't they be easier on each other? She added, "I was trying to find you."
"I know. I heard. Through the grapevine." He extended an arm. "So here I am."
Right. If he was here, there couldn't be that much bad blood between them. "Well, it's been a while, right? Maybe we should talk?"
"Aren't we talking?" he said, and at the look on her face, relented. "Sure." He stubbed out his cigarette on a battered piece of metal that passed for an ashtray and started for the corner booth farthest away from the bar. Not the one Garrus and James usually favored, and Val found she was obscurely glad for the change. Celina poured Val her usual without comment; she took the glass and followed Alex.
She took her seat and sipped her drink, trying to find a position that felt relaxed. Alex, slouching on the other side of the table, seemed to have no such problem. "So what have you been up to?" she asked, aiming for casual.
He gave her another shrug, eyes cool. "You know. This and that. Trying to stay alive. Got roped into working on the Crucible project for a while. You?"
The way he kept being flippant, her questions gliding off him like water, was starting to get on her nerves. "I was with a new special biotics unit," she said, deciding to stick with what was on her record. "We were in London, at the end. I got out of the hospital a couple weeks ago, just got cleared for duty again."
"Good." He nodded. "Glad you're okay. I figured you'd be in the thick of things."
"I... yeah, thanks." She didn't feel like she was in the thick of things, compared to what she remembered. It was jarring, and Alex's assessing gaze didn't help. He sounded sincere enough, though, if still nonchalant. She took a deep breath. "Mama said you hadn't been in touch for a while."
He leaned back and frowned. The way his forehead creased and his eyes tightened was suddenly, breathtakingly familiar. That face, Val knew. "I let her know I was okay," he said, a defensive note creeping into his voice. Like a kid who hadn't called home after school. Val knew that tone, too.
She shook her head. "I know, I wasn't trying to criticize."
"Okay." He still sounded wary. She tried again.
"Look, I ran into some people lately, who said you'd been working with them before the war." It had to be true, didn't it — if he wasn't connected to Jacob and Cerberus, he wouldn't have gotten her message at all. But she wanted to hear it from him, personally. Not just that he'd done it, but why.
Instead, his expression closed up entirely, and he glanced at a point somewhere over her shoulder. "I did a lot of things before the war. Can't believe everything you hear, you know."
"You did," she said with conviction. She'd believed Garrus, of course, and the fact that her message to Jacob had brought Alex here was proof enough, but this — yes, she knew this face. This was the stonewalling expression of a little brother trying to dodge punishment. Her frustration and disquiet boiled up and out of her mouth. "Cerberus, Alex? You joined Cerberus?" She leaned over and punched him in the shoulder for emphasis. "You know they're terrorists, right?"
"Ow." Alex rubbed his shoulder, looking wounded. She remembered that face, too: he used to get her in trouble with it.
"Baby," she spat, a teenager's reflexes taking hold.
"Bully," he snapped back.
They glared at each other, her with her teeth half-bared, him with narrowed eyes and a tight mouth. Then Alex sighed and rolled his eyes. "Fine," he said. "Yes. I was with Cerberus. I knew you'd be this way. You want to talk about it? Let's talk about it."
She thought he almost, possibly, seemed relieved. He reached into a pocket and pulled out a small metal case, popped it open, and took out a cigarette and lighter.
"Oh my God." Val had to fight the urge to snatch the lighter out of his hand. "Do you have to smoke now?"
"It's soothing." He clicked the lighter a couple of times before the flame lit.
She scowled at him. "Soothing? Seriously? Where did this come from, anyway? Is the Illusive Man your mentor now, or something?" The Illusive Man. Shit. She'd seen him die, but had that really happened? Or was he out there somewhere, scheming and manipulating away?
The cigarette lit, but Alex stared at her, ignoring it. "The Illusive Man smokes?"
It took Val a second to realize that she'd made a mistake.
"Uh. So I'd... imagine," she said, weakly. Shit. Shit shit shit. Stupid, stupid mistake. "Like a villain from the vids."
Alex tucked the case and lighter away and took a puff. "I've never seen the man," he said, brows drawn together. "Only cell leaders do. Sometimes. I guess. Maybe not even then. Above my pay grade, so I wouldn't really know."
She looked away, tapping her foot against the leg of the table. She took a drink to gather her thoughts. "Why'd you do it?" She hoped, desperately, that her little brother hadn't somehow turned into a full-fledged human supremacist. But knowing Miranda and Jacob and Kelly and the rest of the SR-2 crew had taught her that people joined even the shadiest organizations for all sorts of reasons.
"What, join Cerberus?"
"Obviously," she snapped, and blew out a breath, trying to calm herself. If he was willing to talk, she didn't want to push him away now. "Yeah, that."
A moment, while he heard him inhale the smoke and blow it out. "To tell the truth, I was probably in before I knew it. It was just one thing after another, you know? I was working on civilian sector R&D projects. Got promoted, got moved to more interesting labs. Some of those had to be Cerberus projects, even if I didn't know it, so who knows when I was first in. Eventually I hit a point where someone sat me down for the talk. Are you in, or are you out. Give us a commitment. Hints about what kind of opportunities might come next, dangling the carrot. Intimations that interesting work would dry up if I said I was out. So I said I was in."
She turned her eyes back to him as he inhaled the smoke. He was looking off into the distance, seeing something else. "They're good at getting the people they want, you know. Smart people, skilled people. A lot of scientists will jump at the chance to work on the most challenging, most exciting projects, with less paperwork and less oversight. No need to chase after government and corporate funding."
"Ethically challenged projects," Val said pointedly.
"Yeah, sometimes." Alex brought the cigarette to his lips. "Look, most people aren't sitting around going 'muahaha, I want to be an evil mad scientist!' But review and oversight processes are cumbersome. Nobody goes into science because they want to fill out a million forms justifying every little thing they want to do. Cerberus streamlines all that stuff and pays pretty well. Little by little, things slip."
Val stayed silent but nodded, reluctantly. She could see how it would happen.
"Anyway, they gave me a lab full of equipment and interesting problems to investigate. I was doing that... hm. Not quite a year, I guess. Then they sent me to the Normandy to assist Dr. Solus." She saw him shrug out of the corner of her eye. "That was even better work. Mordin's brilliant, absolutely brilliant. And the Collector tech we were working on..." He shook his head. "Amazing. You can't imagine what it was like."
"I guess not," she said. A sickening thought suddenly occurred to her, and she leaned forward, resting her elbow on the table. "Alex. Were you okay? Were you in the fighting, or—"
He shook his head. "Ship crew only." His lips twitched into a grimace. "That was... well, we knew it was a high-risk mission, but the consequences were still... unforeseen."
"The Collectors," she whispered, her stomach churning with nausea. She could still remember that colonist screaming as she melted in her pod, and that could have been Alex.
He was staring at her. "Who have you been talking to?"
She leaned back, recovering herself. "Garrus," she said. "But you were... okay, in the end?"
"Vakarian, huh," he said, and added, "I'm here, aren't I?" He paused for a long drag. "So. Fortunately the cavalry showed up in time. We got back after, and the Commander did what he did. Mission over, I went back to my lab, but the whole thing had made me think. Then I started hearing rumors about other techs started disappearing." He shook his head, his mouth twisting. "If Cerberus was cleaning up loose ends, I wasn't going to sit around for that. I called a couple of contacts and disappeared first." Another drag on the cigarette, and he glanced to the side. "You weren't ever supposed to know. None of the family was."
"Until I had something they wanted," she said. "Then they'd use you to get it out of me." She could see that possibility all too clearly, too. It would have been easy to blackmail her with her brother's life.
His shoulders twitched. "Yeah. Maybe. If that ever happened. If you think they're not everywhere in the Alliance already, you're naive."
"Yeah," she muttered, thinking of the Leviathan orb now in storage with a sinking sensation. "What about now?"
"What about now? I've been trying to avoid Cerberus, not hanging out with them." Alex shook his head. "Like I said, I had a couple of contacts, and got roped into the Crucible thing. Not really my area, but it paid, and it was about as safe as anywhere could be. That's obviously done now. Heard you were here, and here I am."
"Here you are," she said softly. Her anger and frustration had faded, leaving her relieved, halfway to amazed. Seeing her brother again was more than she'd ever hoped for. "It's been a long time, hasn't it?"
"A few years," he agreed. His gaze suddenly seemed sharp. "You were hurt."
She shrugged. "Yeah. I'm fine now. Got off lucky, considering."
"I guess we all did." He put out the cigarette and spread his hands. "So there you go, the sordid story of Alex joining Cerberus."
She shook her head. "Mostly I'm glad you're okay, Sasha." The old childhood nickname slipped out without any thought. He'd insisted on Alex when he started getting older, like she'd preferred the more Anglo Val, but she'd always called him Sasha from time to time.
For once, Alex didn't object to it. He gave her a crooked smile, one that seemed warmer now. "Likewise, sister mine."
"You know," she said slowly, trying not to smile back. "Mama's also here."
His eyes widened. "Mama's here? Hell. Is she all right?"
"She's fine. Practically running the quartermaster's office, as far as I can tell. She took up knitting."
Alex regarded her with a slow blink. Val hid her grin by finishing her drink. "You should come to dinner with us."