Liam took a deep breath, counted to three, and tried to remind himself that this was exactly what he signed up for. Exploration. A leap into the unknown. A brand new start for all the different races of the Milky Way, free from their historic hostilities and territorial disputes. A chance to start a bright new society where people had both choices and chances.
He just didn't know why these people were making these choice and taking these chances. He just wanted to shake Tann and Addison and Kandros, shake their common sense loose from wherever it was hiding and force them to look around. They were scared. He could understand scared. But their fear was making them blind to the possibilities.
What was it Drack said when they first met? About all those Initiative idiots thinking they were safe, just waiting to die up in space?
He re-read his latest message from Verand, offering to trade some of their information for his. It was a fair deal, honestly, and he didn't want to try and get something for nothing. Not tech, not information- he didn't want the angara to think for a second that the Initiative were users. Like the kett. But the things Verand wanted weren't really his to give.
And there was no way anybody from the Nexus would sign off on that.
No way the Pathfinder would, either. She couldn't officially sanction going behind Tann's back. He wouldn't put her in the position of having to say yes or no. Either answer would put her between a rock and a hard place.
He jittered around the cargo bay for a moment, blessedly uninterrupted- privacy being a rare and beautiful commodity on a ship—before deciding he couldn't make this call yet. He had to give the Nexus an opportunity to establish relations with the angara properly.
Unable to sit still, he stripped out of his uniform shirt and hooked his hands up on the lip of the overhead storage bin. It wasn't meant to be a pull up bar, but it would do in a pinch. And everything about Andromeda so far was definitely a pinch.
He pulled himself up, and curled his knees up to his chest, doing his best to control every aspect of the movement. He was only three reps in when the door hissed open.
Sara.
Ryder, the Pathfinder, he corrected his internal monologue. She hesitated in the doorway. He hesitated too, but after a moment he decided to continue what he was doing.
"That looks. . . difficult," she said. She leaned against the doorframe, crossing her arms over her chest. Her eyes followed his progress. He couldn't help but grin.
"Supposed to be," he explained. "Not a biotic. Only got my muscles to get me positioned right when I jump jet right up a baddie's nose."
"Makes sense." She kept watching. He did two more, then let himself drop down lightly onto his feet. They'd shared a few drinks, comfortably. He knew her well enough by now to know she'd tell him what she wanted in her own time. She was what his mom would have called reserved. But her facial expressions never hid her thoughts. She'd make a bad liar, and a worse poker player- though she, like him, tended to abstain from gambling. Right now she looked pensive.
So the key would be to make sure she knew she was welcome.
He pulled up two bottles of beer, fresh from the Vortex—the still was practically the first thing set up on the Nexus—and offered her one. She accepted with a wry smile and unfolded at last, plopping down on the couch. He joined her, consciously unhitching the tight knots that threatened to kink up his back.
"We're en route back to Prodromos," she said. She took a sip of her beer. A true soldier, she didn't even grimace at the taste. The chemist at the Vortex brewed a very sour mash. Her eyes rested on some point beyond the far wall, her shoulders hunched. "There's some kind of kett power station right near our outpost. And, surprise surprise, the bunch of scientists I sent out there isn't equipped to handle that kind of thing."
"Regretting your choice, Pathfinder?" he asked. She snorted, and glanced up at him at last. In return for his open grin she gave him a shaky smile. A good trade.
"Live fire didn't kill my dad. It was tech we didn't understand. Tech we shouldn't have been messing with. And we have to keep messing with it, we can't just. . . no. Science was the right priority for the outpost," she said. He smiled brighter, reflecting out the warmth that hearing her talk could build up in his chest. Just above his heart. "I can run a sweep, I can send an APEX team, but I can't keep settlers from dying because there's some kind of microbe that gets into the hydroponics."
"So what's giving you heartburn about this?" he asked. She took another sip of her beer.
"What, I can't be apprehensive about leading a strike team against an entire kett facility?"
"Uh, no?" he laughed. She looked at him in surprise, her eyebrows climbing. "First fifteen minutes I knew you, you were shoulder-down yelling at me to hurry up jump jetting across a lightning moat. And it's only gotten weirder from there. One little kett power station is nothing. You got this."
"Ha," she muttered. She favored him with a speculative look, but he'd managed to get that smile to stick around on the corner of her lips. He counted that a win. "That wasn't when we met, you know."
"It wasn't?" Now she'd surprised him.
"You don't remember?" She set her beer down, and folded her legs up so she was sitting indian-style on the couch. He didn't say a word to her about her feet being on the irreplaceable antiques, though he considered it. "I guess we weren't really introduced. But I saw you when you came in for screening."
He was just surprised, he told himself. That was why his heart started racing all of a sudden. Trying to remember what stupid things he might have done in front of the woman who became the Pathfinder.
"You remember that?" he asked. He didn't, that was for sure. But all the people he met in the rush of his preparations to leave the Milky Way tended to blur together. He remembered being interviewed by Alec Ryder, personally, and he'd met Scott briefly. Greer, too. But not her.
"Pretty much the whole Pathfinder team was there. Dad's team. My team? A little more scattered," she acknowledged. He laughed off some of his ridiculous nerves and she laughed, too, so already things were better than they were when she came in. "I never thanked you, did I? After Habitat 7, you stayed with me until I woke up."
He swallowed, hard, past the residual fear of things-that-didn't-go-wrong. She seemed to notice, and more, give a shit, because she leaned in, her eyes steady on his face. There went that little cheerful fire again, burning away in his chest.
"We're in this together, Pathfinder. Not about to leave you on your own," he said, and he toasted her. His voice came out softer than he really meant, but she seemed to understand him. She always seemed to understand. Something soft and warm sparked in her eyes, and his will to keep the conversation light and easy hiccupped to a halt.
"So," she said, after an interminable time where he just stared right at her like the gormless idiot he was, "you up for storming a kett facility?"
"Oh, you know I'm in," he assured her. "Question is, do you want to take Jaal or Drack? Jaal is good long-range support for your biotic charges but Drack's basically an artillery unit."