Garrus had never seen so many asari on the Citadel.
Asari had always had a dominant presence on the Presidium but today it seemed like they were the only ones. All Garrus could see was blue skin everywhere.
By the time he had spoken to what felt like the entire department and all their friends at C-Sec, the Presidium had switched to the night cycle. The lake was lit with colorful lights with glittering patterns and the statues were illuminated with new floodlights. At this time of the artificial night, the promenade filled with people strolling around, looking for a place to eat or drink. Couples were holding hands and watching the lights in the lake.
It took him a while to make out the familiar shapes of Shepard and Nihlus at a table of an interspecies restaurant. Nihlus turned around, trilling a greeting at him. He hid his disfigured fringe under a headscarf that made him look regal and authoritative. But the familiar spark in his eyes and the lewd undertones in his subharmonics destroyed any notion of regality. "Come here, Garrus, come come," he shouted and it sounded like he was inviting him to a sexy party.
Garrus had to wind his way to their table around groups of asari, who stood quietly together and were talking to each other with hushed voices. He also noticed a turian C-Sec officer at the side of the restaurant, who was apparently checking the legality of a pistol that an asari was carrying.
Garrus let himself fall into a chair next to Shepard and trilled at her in greeting. Shepard answered his trill with a tone of herself and a smile. Nihlus sang out in mocking, "Now aren't you two just adorable? Singing and trilling like two little fledglings in love." He made another note of teasing but Garrus also heard how happy he was for them.
"Here, Garrus, I ordered us roasted Kalkenda with fresh Sirtberries from Thessia, you have to try it, it's quite delicious," Nihlus said and nudged the plate over to him. Garrus swallowed two pebbles from the decorative bowl next to his plate took one of the roasted lizards and a few berries and pressed them against his gums before swallowing. It did indeed taste very good and he savored the taste of fresh food for a change. As fresh as Kalkenda could be if it was not eaten alive like it was traditional.
"I haven't had fresh Sirtberries in a while," Garrus remarked.
"There're many transports going to Thessia right now and when they return, they bring lots of fresh wares," Nihlus said.
"What's with the strict gun-control?" Shepard asked, pointing at the officer and the asari at the far wall. She twirled an orange stick of some fruit or vegetable around in a bowl of white sauce in front of her but seemed to have forgotten to actually eat it.
Nihlus turned around and looked at the officer. "Ah yes, I can explain. You may have noticed that I had Spectre level gun licenses transferred to your omni-tools as soon as you arrived on the Citadel."
"Yes, I had wondered about that but then forgot all about it over the discussion with the Council."
"Well, enough rumors of the geth and the Reaper threat have filtered down to the general public and people have begun to arm themselves. As it turns out, when more people have guns, more people die by guns."
"Funny how that works. Most nations on Earth have learned that too by now, we have almost planet-wide gun-control," Shepard said. She turned to Garrus. "Let me guess, no gun-control on Palaven?"
Garrus shook his head. "Or any of the colonies, no. Every turians is expected to take up arms to defend the Hierarchy at any time anyway."
Shepard laid her head to the side in thought. "Well, for a disciplined species like turians this might work but humans seem to be too impulsive for that."
"Asari can be very impulsive too," Nihlus said, "the recent rise of asari getting shot in private disputes was actually the main reason for the stricter gun-laws."
"Asari are shooting each other?" Garrus wondered. "During my time at C-Sec I had asari hurting each other with biotics most of the time, hardly ever with guns."
"There's something weird going on among asari, have you noticed how many asari are on the Citadel right now?" Shepard said.
"It's been that way for weeks now," Nihlus said, "they're waiting for transports to Thessia. The carriers have doubled their scheduled routes to and from Thessia. That's why we get so many fresh fruits from Thessia."
"Dania told me about that," Shepard said, "it looks like some asari, not everyone but some of a certain standing and… well – isolation I guess, have received a 'call home'."
"Isolation?" Garrus asked.
"I don't know how else to describe it, Dania for instance has not received such a message. She has lots of contact with other species like turians and humans. Maybe she is seen as a security risk?"
Nihlus lowered his voice, "It's like a secret message. Calling asari home – but for what?"
"I don't know," Shepard said equally quiet, "Dania has been trying to find out what's going on but she said it's really eerie how old friends suddenly avoid her and how the few she talks to change the subject whenever she tries to find out what is going on. She says she feels alienated."
"I know what she means," Nihlus said, his voice unusually glum. He pointed his chin toward an asari with white symmetrical markings who stood in a group, waiting for a table. "I know her. Watch."
He raised his glass towards the asari in a toast and for a second as she saw him, she reacted in a smile, even turned as if she wanted to go towards him to greet him. But then her eyes moved to his company and the smile fell off her face. With a sudden jerk she turned her back to Nihlus and pretended to engage in the conversation between her friends.
"That's not the first time I've had that kind of reaction," Nihlus said under his breath. "Asari friends, who I thought I knew well, don't return my calls anymore, brush me off, pretend to not see me when we run into each other."
Garrus leaned forward to keep their conversation private at their table, suddenly feeling like he was at a conspiratorial meeting in enemy territory among all the asari around them. "Asari used to pride themselves on their interest and open mindedness towards other species. Not only for sexual reasons. This is a weird shift for them."
"I bet this has something to do with the old Amathe religion and matriarchs like Benezia." Shepard had kept her voice very low but two asari standing close to her turned their head on her mentioning that name.
"Anybody else feel like we should go somewhere else?" Nihlus said and hummed low in his subharmonics.
"Agreed," said Shepard and Garrus hummed his agreement. He gestured to a waiter to pack up their food and stood up. A group of asari immediately gravitated towards their table and they had to shoulder their way towards the door. When they got their packed up food and left, Garrus looked over his shoulder and noticed that the room was now exclusively filled with asari.
Outside, they walked over to the lake and settled down on a lonely bench. Shepard chewed on her orange vegetable stick, making weird crunchy noises with her teeth.
"That sounds ridiculous, my dear," Nihlus said.
"What, me chewing?" Shepard said and crunched even louder towards him. "Not everyone gobbles their food up whole, some people have to chew before the food reaches the stomach."
"One wonders what you even have a stomach for if it is not grinding down your food."
"We have acid in our stomach to liquefy our food."
Nihlus and Garrus stared at her. Nihlus shook his head, "Spirits, you humans are terrifying," he mumbled.
"Well, I don't even want to think about how that works with your gizzard and the pebbles you swallow," Shepard said and shuddered as she watched Garrus and Nihlus each swallow a Kalkenda whole. "Anyway, let's get back to our asari conspiracy. I talked to Skeev's girlfriend with Dania. She was very... strange."
"How strange?"
"She was so nervous, she was practically shaking and whenever we tried to go deeper into something, she changed the subject. It was really disturbing, she was like... like... almost like something stopped her from talking about certain things."
"I got the same feeling when I talked to one of my friends," Nihlus said, "she just ignored what I asked. Even Leo noticed that."
Shepard pinched the ridge of her nose. "So, let's go with this, asari are getting called back home and are not allowed to talk about why and who ordered that. Am I the only one who thinks that this has something to do with the Reapers?"
Garrus hummed in accord. "It would be too much of a coincidence otherwise."
"I wonder if Liara knows anything about this?" she said, scratching at the corner of her lips. Garrus found that very distracting and looked over to Nihlus.
"If there is some kind of ranking," Nihlus mused, "in how much an asari is involved with other species, Liara would probably have a high risk ranking, being a member of your crew."
"Still," Shepard raised a finger, "she's the daughter of Benezia and I have a feeling that Matriarch Benezia had an influential position in that religious... conclave? Sect? Whatever it is called. Her name may still mean something." She opened her omni-tool. "I'll send her a message, let's see what she can find out."
Soon after Shepard had sent off her message, they decided to call it a day and make their way back to the Normandy. The Presidium was still bustling with asari and a few other species, who looked slightly bewildered by all the shades of blue around them.
They passed a Keeper, Shepard once again making a wide berth around it. It was working on one of the Keeper consoles that no one else had ever been able to access. Nihlus ignored it like everyone who lived on the Citadel long enough but when he was right next to it, it suddenly emitted a shaky beep and turned around in a disjointed movement.
Nihlus jumped, "Stercesti, what?" He stared at the Keeper, who was extending its long upper extremities towards him as if it was trying to grab him. Nihlus stumbled backwards, trying to get away from the sharp, claw-like appendages. The Keeper was beeping and wheezing, trying to walk forward on legs that didn't quite seem to listen to it. As Nihlus scrambled to get away from it, the Keeper got stuck on a support structure and beeped loudly. It kept waving its claws towards Nihlus until he had reached a certain distance. Then it froze, shuddered and walked back to the console. It attached itself to the console and seemed to be oblivious to its surroundings again.
"What in the blazing Spirits was that?" Garrus blurted out, looking at Nihlus who just made a weak trill, indicating that he had no idea.
A groan behind them made them turn around. Shepard was getting up from the floor where she had been kneeling, holding her head. Garrus hurried over to her, helping her up.
"What happened to you?" he asked.
"Major fucking, nail-gun shooting wild in brain fucking headache from hell," Shepard groaned out between her teeth.
"I've never seen a Keeper reacting to anybody," Nihlus said, "and your headache could indicate that it was transmitting something."
"It must be the Reaper signal block you have implanted that it reacted to."
Nihlus hand went up to the disfigured side of his fringe, feeling for the circular implant with his talon. "We should test that theory, I'm going to go close to it again."
"Whoa, hold it," Shepard called out, "let me get far, far away from you first. One headache like that was enough." She jogged up a walkway and moved up to a balcony overlooking the path they were on. She gave a thumbsup and Nihlus took slow steps toward the Keeper. He held his arm with his glowing omni-tool in front of him as if he carried a shield.
Garrus scanned the Keeper with his omni-tool. As always, its signals were low in energy and appeared to be scrambled, randomized. No one had ever managed to make sense of them. He saw a signal coming from Nihlus, a normal signal peak from his armor. The new implant didn't show up on his scan among the normal 'noise'.
The Keeper didn't react to Nihlus, it kept on working at the interface and its signals didn't change. Until Nihlus was about two steps away – Garrus' omni-tool gave a beep as the translucent display suddenly filled up with an array of signals, patterns he had never seen before. The Keeper turned again and stalked towards Nihlus, its upper appendages extended and twitching. Nihlus took a step backwards but then stopped himself and Garrus could see in his display that he turned on his shields. He looked up to Shepard. She stared at her own omni-tool, to Garrus' relief apparently unaffected by the Keeper.
The Keeper twitched, its legs shuddering as it took small steps towards Nihlus. It didn't quite stop when it reached Nihlus, rather it bumped into him and its hind legs kept on trying to walk forward. Nihlus' shield shimmered golden around him as it stopped the Keeper from touching him.
Garrus alternated between looking at his omni-tool and at Nihlus. The Keeper was still sending out a dense signal. He tried to remember what the pattern reminded him of when it suddenly stopped. The Keeper stepped to the side and made a strange whistle. Garrus could see a new signal on his scan as the Keeper made to walk out to the main walkway. But when it reached a certain distance to Nihlus, the signal disappeared, the Keeper stilled, shuddered and turned around with a jerk and returned to its station.
Garrus kept on scanning it but the Keeper disappeared among the background noise. It ignored them again. Garrus saved the file of the scan and let some analyzing algorithms loose on it.
They quickly made their way to the Normandy, all three of them dividing their attention between winding their way through the groups of asari on the walkways and the read-out from their omni-tools.
"You got anything off it?" Shepard asked in the elevator. Both Nihlus and Garrus hummed negatively. "Me neither. Maybe Tali can get something out of it." She typed on her omni-tool, probably sending the file to the quarian right away.
Tali was already on the Normandy when they arrived, her console brightly lit and her omni-tool flickering. She just nodded at them and kept on working as she spoke. "The Keeper did send out a direct signal, this was not just a random broadcast. I'm sure it was trying to communicate something to you specifically."
"It reacted to the Reaper block as if it recognized it," Shepard said.
"Yes, it looks like the Reaper block has triggered a response, something like an emergency signal. I'm comparing it to all signal patterns we know."
"Could it be a geth-signal?" Garrus asked.
Tali shook her head and her speaker flickered. "No, the geth still use signals that are similar to the original quarian systems, only with new encoding. This is very different."
Shepard kneaded her lower lip as she often did when she was thinking. "Did you compare it to the readings we got from the beacons on Eden Prime and Virmire?"
Tali shifted her stance and her body language indicated frustration. "My scans from the beacon on Virmire are gone, just like yours. I don't have access to the Alliance data from Eden Prime."
Shepard cursed quietly and entered a long line of commands into her omni-tool. "There, that's everything from Eden Prime. I copied it to your console here on board."
"Won't you get in trouble for that? I'm a quarian after all and not a member of the Alliance." Tali asked, her eyes so wide that they were visible behind her mask.
Shepard let out a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sigh. "If what we believe is true, Saren and Sovereign are threatening the galaxy. And if a bunch of people don't pull their heads out of their asses, we might end up having to steal this ship. What's a few military secrets compared to that?"
Tali made a squeak unlike anything Garrus had heard before and he wondered briefly if this was how quarians sounded without translator modules. The gravity of what Shepard had said was slowly sinking in and he couldn't stop a subharmonic growl. He had been vaguely aware that if the council kept stalling them, they would have to do something drastic. But hearing it put into words like that was something different.
Stealing the flagship of the Alliance, a Council vessel at that! He was all for bending the rules a little but this was not only a career suicide, this could get them charged with high treason and land them all in prison.
He listened for a reaction like his own from Nihlus but heard nothing. When he saw how calm the Spectre was he realized that Nihlus had been aware of these implications from the beginning. Maybe he had already planned this with Keggs even before their meeting with the Council.
"That's the plan? Stealing the Normandy?" he blurted out, his voice vibrating with conflicting emotions in his subharmonics.
Shepard looked at him with a forced smile. "If you have any better ideas, I'm all ears. We're stuck here and nobody is doing anything. If Saren gets access to some kind of super weapon on Ilos, the Reapers will kill everyone in this galaxy. I know it sounds crazy but I've seen them do it, I see it in the visions. They've done it before, killed every civilized being in the galaxy and they will do it again." She looked at him with pleading eyes. "I don't know why this task has fallen to me but if I can stop the death of billions, the fall of the galaxy with this ship, do I even have a choice?"
Garrus swallowed the lump in his throat and stepped in front of her. "You are wrong about one thing," he said and raised his hand for a turian salute. "This task has not just fallen to you but to all of us. We are all with you."
"Please think about this," Shepard said quietly, "you're risking everything, your job, your reputation, your chances of becoming a Spectre one day..."
Garrus kept his talon on his cowl in salute. "There is not much of a career to be had in a dead galaxy. And my reputation in the turian Hierarchy is not my concern."
Nihlus trilled a sarcastic tone. "The kind of turians who care for their reputation in the Hierarchy are not the kind of turians you like, Shepard."
Shepard placed her hand on her chest in a turian salute and nodded at Garrus. He let his hand drop and almost leaned forward to press his forehead against hers. But he stopped himself, that could wait until they had time to themselves.
"Thank you," she said quietly and her eyes were shining. "If it comes to that, if we have to steal the Normandy, I'm gonna ask for volunteers and let the rest of the crew stay on the Citadel."
"Do you think they won't follow you?" Garrus wondered.
Nihlus laughed out. "This is your crew, Shepard, they will follow you. Don't even doubt that."
"You can't be sure of that. Treason is no easy matter."
Nihlus hummed reassuringly. "Your crew, Shepard. Explain it to them and they will follow."
Shepard looked like she was still in doubt but she nodded. "Before we can worry about that, we need a way to get the Normandy out of the docking bay and to the relay. The docking clamps are secured by council order and C-Sec's relay guard won't let us waltz out of the Widow system either. And the guns need to work."
Nihlus scrolled through messages on his omni-tool. "Didn't Leran send you an update?"
Shepard checked her omni-tool and her expression brightened. "Oh, I must have overlooked that, they're making good progress on the new programs. Leran promises that the guns will work with 99% precision after calibrating."
"I'd like to get familiar with the new programs," Garrus said, "then I can take care of the programs and the calibrations on our way to Ilos."
"Yes, good idea. Join Leran and Mirhale in the forward battery. Tali," she turned to the quarian, who was already working on her console again, "you keep analyzing that Keeper signal and all other signals we have from Sovereign and the geth. I'm going to collect the scans from the crew for the Reaper block –"
"No, have someone else do that," Nihlus interrupted, "check your messages, Anderson wants to see us, he might have a solution to our docking clamps problem."
"Captain Anderson?" Shepard called out, "you can't involve him, he can't risk his career like that!"
"It was his idea," Nihlus said. "Keggs and I have been meeting with him for days. He knows what's at stake, he believes you, Shepard. He's our access to get the grounding order revoked on Council level."
"But... not the Captain," Shepard said almost inaudible.
"It is his decision," Nihlus said. "He wants to meet us at Flux right now."
"Alright," Shepard said and tapped her voice interface behind her ear. "Kaidan? Are you back on the Normandy?" She waited for his answer and ordered him to meet them at the docking bay so that she could copy the scan program to his omni-tool.
Outside of the Normandy, Kaidan Alenko waited for them and let Shepard copy the program to his omni-tool. Shepard ordered him to scan everyone on the crew and send the scans immediately to Pauline. He accepted the order but looked a bit uncomfortable.
"Commander, may I speak plainly?" he asked with his back perfectly straight.
"Of course, Lieutenant."
"With the Normandy grounded, what is the point of this Reaper block? Saren isn't here."
"I'll explain later," Shepard said. "Collect the scans of those who are willing to receive the enhancement and let everyone know that they can't stay without it. The Reaper block is mandatory to serve on the Normandy. My orders."
"Understood, Commander." Kaidan gave a short nod and turned to step into the Normandy at a brisk pace.
Garrus turned to Shepard as soon as Kaidan was out of earshot. "What will Kaidan say to our plan?"
"You mean stealing the ship? Mr. By-the-book himself?" Shepard made a snorting sound. "I'm not keeping my hopes up. He's had enough trouble in the Alliance as a biotic, I'm sure he doesn't need this mark on his career."
He had to agree with that, it was hard to imagine that Kaidan would break the rules like that. Which was a damn shame because his phenomenal biotic abilities would have been useful against Saren's biotic attacks.
"I thought you wanted to work on the guns?" Shepard asked quietly as they made their way back to the Lower Wards, winding through crowds of asari. Some were in agitated discussion, others stood around rather aimlessly. Garrus felt their looks on him and it made his plates itch. They weren't threatening, at least not yet but they looked like they just needed a small spark to turn to attack.
Garrus kept looking at the crowds, estimating their level of aggression like he had done during his C-Sec days. "That can wait, I'd rather – you know – see how we get out of here."
"Yeah, I know what you mean, we're wasting so much time here."
"We have to wait for the reaper block and working guns anyway," Garrus said, straining his ears to listen to the conversations around him. It seemed to be normal, everyday stuff but the looks they were giving them told a different story. "As long as those things aren't done, we are not really wasting time."
"I just hope we won't be too late. Whatever Saren does or finds on Ilos, I just don't want to be too late for it." Shepard took his hand for a moment and squeezed it. Garrus saw her shoulders relax and she let out a long breath before letting go. A tiny sound of happiness escaped his subharmonics, knowing how his support, him just being there, helped her.
Captain Anderson had messaged them to meet him in the Flux bar. Flux had always been frequented by many humans and they at least didn't act any differently. Anderson waved them over to his table at the large window that overlooked the Ward stretching towards the center ring of the Citadel. A magnificent view that none of them paid attention to.
"Captain?" Shepard said respectfully as she sat down next to him. He looked tired, and his hair was sticking out from his head as if he had raked through it with his hand too many times. The dark rings under his eyes stood out even on his dark skin.
Nihlus and Garrus sat down and they all leaned forward over the small, circular table and shielded their conversation from the other patrons.
"Captain, Sir," Shepard said, "when did you last sleep?"
Anderson smiled weakly. "I'm not even sure."
"I told him to just grab some sleep here and there," Nihlus said, "but you humans are just too set on one long stretch of uninterrupted sleep at night for hours! Who has time for that?"
"The one good thing that came with the bloody desk job was the regular sleep, I'm not going to change back to N7-bulkhead sleep now," Anderson grumbled and hid a yawn behind his hand. To Garrus' surprise, Shepard joined right in with a yawn of her own.
"Not fair with the yawning, Sir," Shepard said and shook herself. Garrus had no idea what she was talking about and made a mental note to ask her about yawning later. Shepard looked around in the bar. "Where is Keggs?"
"If he isn't here, not even special asari interrogations can get anything useful out of him," Nihlus said gravely.
A shocked silence spread out at their table. Interrogations by asari mind melds were more akin to mind torture and absolutely illegal in Citadel space. But the rumors of them still being used never stopped.
"You think...?" Garrus couldn't quite finish the question and stared at Nihlus in disbelief.
"Some bad stuff is going on, my friends, more than you are aware of," Nihlus said and Garrus felt more than heard his warning subharmonics.
"There's been some strange reports coming over my desk," Anderson said, "Admiral Hackett keeps asking me for reports and intel."
"Well, good to know that he's not just bugging me all the time. Sir, Nihlus said you may have an idea how to get the Normandy free." Shepard made a short pause and lowered her voice when she continued. "I assume, technically we still would have to steal the ship."
"Technically you would be correct," Anderson said. "I can issue an order to release the Normandy through the Alliance but that would not overrule the Council order. Udina could overrule those orders but –"
"– my special friend Udina, right," Shepard said with an angry grin. "I'm sure he's pissing himself in glee that he could outmaneuver us like that. No way in hell that he will release the Normandy on my suggestion."
"I could issue the command from his terminal in his office," Anderson said.
Shepard raised one eyebrow in question. "Without him noticing?"
"I'm tempted to just punch him in the face," the Captain said, his hands on the table closing into fists.
"With all due respect Sir, that's a stupid idea," Shepard said, shaking her head.
"Can I punch him in the face?" Nihlus asked, trilling in happy anticipation.
"No one punches the human ambassador, especially no turian," Shepard said with a sigh, "the relations are strained enough as it is."
"Diplomacy stercus, so annoying," Nihlus mumbled, humming a string of subharmonic curses.
"Maybe you could distract him," Anderson said to Nihlus, "I just need access to the terminal on Udina's desk, to issue the command in his name."
"He'll notice that eventually," Garrus said, quite familiar with the data trail that every terminal collected and saved on the Citadel servers. He had solved many cases with data like that, even if often, too often the lawyers and shady practices had taken the cases out of his hands.
"Yeah, our window of opportunity is not very big," Shepard scrolled through the messages on her omni-tool and smiled. "Captain Martel just agreed to be our distraction, he can be here in 20 hours. Once the cannons work and everyone on the crew has the reaper block, we are good to go."
"Can we get the reaper block on everyone in 20 hours?" Garrus asked.
Nihlus grinned. "Pauline already has 100 enhancements for humans and about 20 for asari preprinted. That will be plenty for the crew and the people at ANIS, they just need to be programmed. Pauline is working on that as we speak. The turian implants take longer but she already has one for you and one for Keggs."
Garrus nodded, suppressing the queasy feeling in his gizzard about an implant under his fringe.
"So, let's see how this will go down." Shepard looked around the table and lowered her voice. "Nihlus and Anderson visit Udina, Nihlus distracts him and Anderson issues the release command. The docking clamps release, we take off like a cat on fire and go into stealth. Then Captain Martel's Ferdele will cause some kind of chaos, keeping Citadel Traffic Control distracted until we have to drop stealth to jump the relay. Once we're inside the relay network, we have to keep going in direct jumps so that they can't lock us down at another port. There's just one problem though – we need fuel."
"I'm afraid that's not your only problem," Nihlus said. "The Normandy is pretty famous by now, Citadel Traffic Control will most likely ask for confirmation when they receive the release command."
"Maybe Captain Martel's distraction will prevent that?" Garrus said hopefully.
Shepard shook her head, "Too risky, I would rather have someone in there to maybe prevent the confirmation being asked. Do we know anybody at CTC?"
Nihlus made a thoughtful hum, "Not quite at CTC but Leran is with Citadel Technical Support, he could probably do something to the terminal so that the release order gets approved automatically. At least the turians at CTC probably won't even look at him, he can pretty much do what he wants."
Shepard made a surprised sound in the back of her throat. "Why won't they look at him?"
"Embarrassment?" Nihlus said with an uncertain trill. "We don't like asking personal questions or dealing with differences. You know how turians say that we don't care how you live as long as you fulfill your duty to the Hierarchy? That also means that we like to ignore things we don't want to deal with or don't want to look into. Leran could be almost invisible in a way."
"As shitty as that is," Shepard said with a frown, "it could help us in our situation." She checked her omni-tool. "I would like to hinge this all on Captain Martel's arrival. Once the SSV Ferdele comes out of the relay, we have to get going. I'm giving you all the countdown for their arrival. I'm not sure what they will do but I bet we have to move quickly."
They all agreed, synchronized the countdown across their omni-tools and left the bar. Garrus and Shepard hurried back to the Normandy where they explained to Leran what he had to do and gave him the countdown timer as well. The turian, who looked like a woman but sounded like a man, agreed eagerly, only a hint of fear lacing his subharmonics.
Shepard left to find a way of fueling the Normandy to capacity. She had put her hopes in Keggs at ANIS to provide her with a discrete way of putting fuel into the ship. Garrus stayed with Leran and Mirhale and studied the cannon's software. It took him a while to get into but he was relieved to find that his background in game programming helped him in analyzing the algorithms.
Hours later, he hadn't even realized how long he had stayed, enchanted by the elegance of the algorithms, he went into the mess hall in search for Shepard and something to eat. The ship was quiet, it was the sleeping shift for the human crew. Only a few people manned their stations and even Joker had left his chair to sleep somewhere.
He found Shepard in the captain's cabin, busy writing reports and sorting through pictures and recordings from her omni-tool. She told him to wait a bit and he laid down on the bed, watching her at the desk. The bright lights from the Citadel and the purple shine of the Widow nebula poured through the window and formed a halo around her head. It wasn't the warm light of the sunset on Palaven but it was still beautiful. He fell asleep before he could tell her that.
At some point during the night, Shepard must have crawled into bed with because he woke up with her pressed against his back. That was unusual, Shepard never really cuddled but now she had one arm thrown over his ribs and her face pressed against his cowl. He took great care not to wake her as he twisted his neck to look at her. She was asleep, breathing deeply and her eyes were moving behind her eyelids. After once waking her because he had thought that the moving eyes meant that she was almost awake, she had grumpily explained to him that this phase was actually the deepest and healthiest phase of sleep. He had sworn to never disturb her during that phase again. Which meant that he now had to stay where he was even though he was wide awake.
He pulled out his arm and adjusted his position so that he could work with his omni-tool. With time to spare and no access to the programming algorithms he had learned about today, he decided to continue the letter to his sister Solana that he had started awhile ago. So much had happened and he didn't even know where to start.
How do you write about a rogue Spectre, a famous turian at that, who threatens to hand the galaxy over to a sentient machine?
It felt like he should warn her about the possible doom. But how could he do that? Where could she go? If Saren was successful and if Sovereign hadn't exaggerated, every person in this galaxy was under threat. There was no place to run to.
Closer and closer we are getting to the grand finale!
Big thanks to divadevi8088 once again for editing this chapter.