After taking a short rest to let Tali recollect herself (during which both Liara and Garrus carefully watched their friend), they got around to the task of accessing the computers and data on the ship itself. They had arrived on what passed for the bridge and, as expected, were presented with more Geth corpses strewn about. Tali looked around, still shaking from her recent near-death ordeal. Seeing the carnage around her, she numbly came to the realization that at this point she felt nothing. To be honest, she wasn't sure how she was still able to have rational thoughts after the harrowing experience in engineering in the first place.
It's different without John here. She released a deep sigh that was equal parts relief and sadness. She had to choke back fresh tears and released a sniffle instead. I can't believe…how did I almost not come back to him?
Garrus placed a hand on her shoulder, asking her if she was okay; if she needed more time.
"Thank you, Garrus. I'm…well, let's just get through this next step, okay?"
A simple nod, and that was that.
She thought then of all of the great escapes and near-death experiences that she had been privy to since setting out on her pilgrimage. They were too numerous to count, and almost all involved some harrowingly violent scenario. Through them all, she had come out relatively unscathed, and the vast majority of them had been at Shepard's side. So often, she had been acutely aware of how she had felt - or would feel - had he not made it through any of their ordeals.
Normandy-destroying Collectors attack notwithstanding.
The most sobering thought that she had was a simple question. What if she hadn't made it?
And what would have happened to him?
For the first time in a long time, she wondered how he would have felt if such a thing had actually occurred. She knew how she'd felt at the prospect and understood that it was simply the nature of their bond - without the other half of her soul, she hadn't really wanted to go on. But what would it have done to him? He was human, and therefore differed greatly from quarians in that regard, but she had a feeling that he might have come to the same conclusion, or something rather similar. Would he have been able to overcome such feelings of sorrow? Would he have moved on without her?
When the lift stopped moving and its doors opened onto what passed for a Geth bridge, Garrus and Liara immediately exited.
Tali remained where she was, with her eyes wide and soft.
Would he have moved on?
Shuddering and shaking her head, she did her best to dismiss those thoughts from her mind. "Keelah, at least we can see now."
They had taken a few steps out of the lift, and regarded their surroundings.
"Yeah, not that it's much of an improvement." Garrus took a few careful steps, glancing around at the corpses as he did so. "Uh, anyone else think that this is really creepy? As in, the lights just made this worse?" In a way, it reminded him of the Citadel when they were trying to find a still-living Shepard: the bodies were everywhere, but the silence was deafening.
"Yes Garrus. 'Creepy' is a good word for it," Liara intoned dryly from behind the others.
Tali gave the room a quick appraisal, satisfied that the now-restored main power had reengaged all of the terminals. "Okay, Liara. It's our turn." She began walking toward a pair of terminals at the opposite end of the lift and past a Geth hub. Tali pointed to her left (hoping that the shudder found there was not too noticeable), and Liara immediately began tapping at a few keys. Pulling away, she retrieved her own tech drone from one of the pockets in her armor.
"Is that Glyph?"
The asari chuckled softly. "Yes, Tali. Feron was not as…enthusiastic about it as I was. He informed me that he did not need it; that he would use a simple interface instead. So, I took it with me." On cue, the drone lit up, its blue spherical visage still comically adorned with a bowtie - a holdover from its time serving as their party master.
It buzzed about, steadying itself at eye-level with Liara. "Hello, Dr. T'Soni. How can I help you today?" Its voice was transmitted to their individual earpieces.
Garrus snorted. "Can he bring the levo alcohol?"
"You would not be able to consume it in these conditions, Mr. Vakarian."
Tali let out a loud laugh. "Liara, did you…did you program it with…humor?"
Liara sent her a knowing glance and a smirk. "Maybe."
"Well, I can't say that I approve of the competition."
She chuckled. "Oh don't worry, Garrus. You know that we could not replace you."
"Nor would we try."
He shook his head. "Well, thank you both. It's nice to know that you care."
During the entire exchange, Glyph had busied itself flitting about to and fro. In the meantime, Tali had reset and updated her own drone - Chatika - to configure it with her newly-created hacking protocols.
"See Garrus?" She began teasingly. "I was doing preparations."
He shook his head with a smirk.
She gave a few taps on her omnitool, andthen let out a satisfied noise.
"Okay Liara, I think we're set. Let's start small by simply scanning the databanks. Let's get a look at how much data is actually in there."
"Of course." She directed her commands at Glyph. "Okay, Glyph. We need a quick scan of the databanks here before we try to break the encryption."
"Yes, Dr. T'Soni."
Their initial scans did not take long, and both drones confirmed the staggering amount of data.
"Keelah…how many OSDs did we bring?"
Liara looked at her with her own stunned expression. "I do not think that we brought enough, Tali."
"What do you mean? How much data?" Garrus had walked over toward them to see the display on Liara's omnitool. When he caught sight of the sheer amount, he could only stare at the display - for once he was dumbstruck.
They were looking at about 100 zettabytes of data.
They had OSDs for about a tenth of that.
Liara looked over at Garrus, who was still studying the readout on Liara's omnitool. "Garrus, how much free memory does the Malinor have?"
He didn't even have to think about this. "Not enough for all of this, I can tell you that. If we can pare this down to maybe 70? We should be able to swing that. I'll have to verify when we get to the ship, but that sounds about right."
Tali thought for a moment. "Liara, let's set up the drones with the hacking protocols. It'll probably take awhile, so we can stay on the Malinor until they're done. We'll sift through the data after, and then go from there. With any luck, we'll get everything loaded between the ship and the disks if need be."
She looked up at them both. "This is going to take longer than I had thought."
Still a little stunned, Liara simply nodded her head before turning to head back to the ship.
The three of them were seated in what amounted to the lounge aboard the Malinor, happy to have been able to take off their helmets (except Tali of course) while Chatika and Glyph did the dirty work. Garrus had confirmed that the ship's internal memory stores were relatively robust, and would have free space for 75 ZB of new data. Tali hoped that would be enough. Presently, she was busy completing repairs to her suit after sending John a message that she loved and missed him, and that she would call him as soon as they were on their way back (Keelah, she had been too close to not making it back). So, now she was busy enough to keep the pain of what was missing (Who, to put it more accurately) while chatting idly with Liara and Garrus. Eventually, they got around to what she planned on doing now that the war was really over with.
The room itself had opened up into a large circular area from the hallway that led from the cockpit. Around its walls was cushioned seating which presently held Tali and Garrus as they chatted with Liara, who was seated in a chair that she had stolen from the kitchen.
"Liara, you were a hell of an information broker. And you were so good at it." Tali was curious about what her friend would be getting up to now, but they all knew so precious little about her mindset. "But more importantly, Liara: How are you doing? You're always so quiet, and I know that you really only talk to Shepard about…things like that. But…I care too."
A glance to Garrus. "We all do."
It was true, of course. Tali, who only recently had realized that she was no longer in the company of just "friends", cared so much about the two people on board this ship with her. They had volunteered to help her out, when they had their own problems to attend to, and had done so because they cared for her too. Tali hoped that her feelings of togetherness and camaraderie weren't just hers alone.
At first, Liara hesitated. Her countenance could not hide the fact that she was masking emotions that she would have ordinarily kept well under lock and key. But something in Tali's voice…and with everything that had happened, Liara let her mask slip. Just this once, maybe she would let others in. She was in the company of two of the three people that she trusted most - and the third had already reprimanded her for not talking to her friends in the first place. Had these people - who had also sacrificed so much and put their lives on the line, often to protect her no less - not done enough to earn that trust?
Before Liara knew it, a small tear had crept out of the corner of an eye, and slowly streaked down her face. She initially raised a finger to stop it, but she hesitated. And then she spoke.
"Tali…I miss…" the thought never reached completion, as a sudden loud sob escaped her, shaking her entire body. She held her face in her hands. She had no idea how to express everything that she had felt - and kept tightly bottled up - over the last nearly four years. Because that was going to be what escaped her if she could not control these feelings that Tali had helped to uncork.
These feelings of loneliness.
Detachment.
Inadequacy.
Loss.
Her mother, who had wanted so much for her Little Wing, only to be revealed as a puppet to the traitorous Saren Arterious. With her own death, she had found a small but fickle redemption. This had, of course, only made Liara's pain that much more acute: that her mother had still been alive within the tainted shell that she had helped to kill.
Did that still count as matricide?
John, the first person that she had ever loved. He had shown her such kindness in a galaxy of people who had so often dismissed her and ostracized her for being a "pureblood" asari. She had fallen so hard for him, this man who had not reciprocated in the way that she had hoped. This man who had instead found in her friend Tali what she had hoped he would have found in her.
"And…I hurt Shepard." She was able to squeeze that out of herself, if nothing else. She noticed the posture that Tali had taken toward her - immediate defense for her bondmate. Hastily, Liara added a hint of clarification. "It's not what you think, Tali." Seeing the quarian relax, she continued, relieved. "You were there when I asked him to help me take down the Broker. Goddess knows that I didn't deserve his help. I did everything I could to not have to ask."
Garrus gave her a curious look. "Wait, so you risked your life - everything, really - to get his body back and give us all our friend back," he looked over at their quarian friend for emphasis, "and for Tali, more than that, I'd add - and you think that you didn't deserve his help?"
The asari shook her head. "Garrus, that was the least that he deserved. Besides, the galaxy needed him. We needed him." She lowered her voice to barely above a whisper. "At the time, I thought that I needed him." A moment passed, the two of them digesting what she had said. Liara felt the familiar knot in her stomach, the tightening and clenching of it as she knew that she had stepped into unfamiliar and perhaps even dangerous territory. Dangerous, because she suspected that there was a possibility that Tali would react…badly. "But things changed. I changed." She met the turian's gaze. "And very little of it was for the better, I think. Yes, we got him back, but I…was afraid that I lost him. As I did myself. I never thought that he would want to even see my face again. What I did to him…" Liara looked pleadingly at them, perhaps hoping for understanding but not expecting forgiveness, "I shut him out. I was so focused on taking down the Shadow Broker, I was not there when he needed me. He was on that Cerberus ship, lost and amongst people that we all considered enemies, missing two years - two years," she raised her voice for one of the few times that they could recall and slammed her fist against her thigh for emphasis, "of his life and I was nowhere to be found." She felt her throat constrict as she admitted all of this to them. It was something that she hadn't told anybody. Her brow furrowed at the memories of regret, followed by a short and contrite sigh. "And he helped me anyway."
"Hmmm. But Liara, you did what you had to do then. I think he understands that. And you did it, ultimately, for the right reasons. And of course he helped you. You are his friend. I'm told they mean a great deal to him."
She chuckled. "Yeah, I wonder what gave you that idea."
He huffed a small laugh. "No clue."
As for Tali, she took all of this in, trying to process it; digest it. Here was her friend, giving to her as open an admission of her feelings for Shepard as she could make, and Tali was desperately trying to control her instinctive feelings of possessiveness, to defend what was hers.
With watery eyes, Liara looked at her, noticing that Tali looked like she was…ready to pounce? "Tali…please do not…I would never…" She couldn't quite string together a complete sentence. Liara took a deep breath, finally able to continue. "And those feelings are long buried - dead as so many other things are." A heavy and rueful sigh escaped her lips.
Garrus watched them both keenly - especially Tali. He was not an expert on quarian bonding, but he had seen and heard enough from Tali herself to have an idea that this could get ugly, and that Tali would likely not have been able to stop herself.
The quarian admiral, who was breathing heavily as her pulse had started to quicken, closed her eyes and took a few deep breaths. Tali forced herself to think only of John. She saw his smile and his bright blue eyes pierce into hers. She sank into the feeling of him; his hands on her back, her powerful legs wrapped around his waist.
With a quiet and satisfied hum, she felt herself come back from the precipice, knowing that Liara was not really a threat. That instead, her very vulnerable friend had trusted Tali enough to make such an admission.
And she knew that John was her saera - that he was hers, as she was his. So after a few somewhat tense moments, the feeling passed. It turned out that that trust was not misplaced. Tali simply nodded her head in understanding.
They watched Liara quietly, attentively, because as she raised an unsteady hand to her forehead, it was clear that she was not yet done.
Like most of them, Liara had lost so much of her own. Unlike them, quite a bit of it had been of her own doing. It was a pain that she was still trying to come to terms with. But she had bottled up that pain, and the pain of their losses, and buried them all under a mountain of work and a singular focus. That focus, while useful in a number of ways, had had a very noticeable side-effect: her ability to deal with her emotions had atrophied to a critical point. Which is why she found herself about to confess what she was about to.
Because of all the people that she'd lost?
Of all the monstrous ironies?
Javik. The last Prothean. The dead Prothean.
Far more than Shepard, this was a loss that she hadn't expected to feel so acutely, and its fresh pain was still more than she could bear.
She was alone, once again. And the pain was so raw. She wasn't sure if she could even verbalize it. How could she describe to them exactly the sorrow that she felt? Every chance she had had, every opportunity for her own happiness had methodically been stripped away from her. Those chances had been stripped away either by her own doing, or by some heartless twist of fate.
"I…" she tried again. The words failed her completely. What escaped from her instead was a queer combination of a gasp, a sob, and a sharp cry of pain. Liara could feel the tightness in her chest; it was a feeling that she'd not experienced in some time. It was constricting, consuming, and if she didn't find a way to be rid of -
Tali, who had initially given her space to work through whatever she had been thinking about, leapt into action. Like a coiled snake, she jumped to Liara and knelt down in front of her, wrapping her arms around her. Shortly after, she felt the presence of Garrus do the same from behind their clearly hurting and distressed friend. In a way, it made Liara relieved that her friends - especially Tali - had not abandoned her.
"Liara," Tali began, "you don't have to tell us, if you can't. But we'll be he-"
"I miss…Javik." She croaked this admission out of her throat. Hearing it in her own voice sounded foreign, alien to the woman that had made it. There was a pause of complete and stunned silence. "Oh, do I miss him, Tali." Almost as an afterthought she added: "And I miss my mother, even after all this time." During the mission to take down Saren, few of them had even bothered to check in with her after they had killed her mother on Noveria.
Well, besides Shepard, that is.
Those were different times for all of them.
Liara cleared her throat. "Did you know about us?" She looked at both Tali and then Garrus, seeing only looks of sympathetic confusion - even in Tali, her head tilt and slightly narrowed eyes giving her away.
"Uh, no. Liara…we had no idea," came the gravelly voice of the turian. "How did you two…?"
She let out a sad laugh. "How did we tolerate each other, let alone have an emotional connection? How did we keep it a secret?"
Tali squeezed her hand.
"Uh, yeah, Liara," the turian continued, "all of that. The Normandy wasn't exactly the biggest ship. And it's not like we ever heard any…screaming or anything."
It at least elicited a soft laugh from their asari friend.
"I'm glad that it did not. We had tried to keep it secret. The last thing either of us wanted was for EDI or Joker to make some…remark. He was so wounded. And arrogant…but it was an arrogance born from his wounds. I mean, he had no one else, and anything that might have been familiar to him was long dead." Liara paused momentarily, before beginning again. "And while he at first found…me to be foolish regarding his people, he came to at least respect that I had wanted to learn. And that I was willing to adjust what I thought that I knew accordingly."
"That's still a good ways off from -"
"Love, Garrus? Yes, I know that. And…maybe it wasn't love. But it was something, and its loss hurts me." Her tone had betrayed a hint of her defensiveness. "But, we talked…after Thessia. And he apologized for his behavior." This time, even Tali could not hide her confused head tilt. "And he admitted that not knowing what I could not have known was not my fault."
She stopped to drink some water before resuming.
"So we talked, and he asked me about life in this cycle. Life before the war. And he seemed…genuinely interested in…" Liara trailed off then, perhaps trying to forge words from her thoughts or, more likely, feelings. "He seemed to have an interest in the past, believe it or not. Specifically his past, well the Protheans, of course." She emitted another soft and sad laugh. "I think he wanted to learn about his people, maybe discover them for the first time - what they really were, before their war." She bowed her head, tears returning. "But he never got that chance."
"Liara, I'm so sorry."
"I know, Tali. So am I."
The silence that befell them was not an uncomfortable one. When Liara would begin to cry once more, they were there for her. When she had gone to lay down again ("Saving your life has exhausted me, Tali," she had said with a sad smile), to rest, Tali stayed by her side, still holding her hand.
She was still by her side when their omnitools pinged that the decryption was complete.
When they arrived back onto the bridge, both drones were floating idly. Chatika, with no personality protocol, simply floated in mid-air, hovering above the console it had been working on. Glyph, on the other hand, was playing soft piano music and humming to the melody as it floated aimlessly around the room. Both Garrus and Tali had stopped, turning their heads to her in curiosity while the music piped into their earpieces.
"What?" Liara scoffed at them. "I always liked that song." She smiled to herself. "It was the only one I ever learned to play. I was on a dig site years ago and another researcher had a keyboard. Taught me to play while we waited for the weather to clear up."
Tali gently grabbed her arm. "Well, it's a good song, Liara. I like it." Then after a moment, "Do you think you could…teach it to me?"
There was no hesitation. "I'd like that. Do you play?"
"Keelah, I haven't played in a while. I never played on a, what was it called? A keyboard? I had a te'nir. John said that it seemed a lot like a 'geetar'." Liara chuckled softly at the pronunciation, but she knew what she'd meant. "I think the last time I actually played was during some down time on the Neema, before the war with the Geth." The last words dropped like stone off her tongue, but she recovered quickly, as she was learning to do with so many of her painful memories. The flipside to having almost prefect memory recall, was that the recall of such memories was just an instant away.
But so were the good ones, as she had often been told by a certain saera.
They entered the bridge proper, again taking caution to avoid the Geth strewn across the floor. "Okay then. Let's get started. So, here's our basic guidelines: we want to prioritize technology of basically all kinds, historical records, and anything else that grabs your attention. If it looks odd or noteworthy, call me over and we'll have a look."
Tali received the customary words of acknowledgment, and with each of them taking a seat in front of their respective consoles, they got to the task at hand.
Tali had expected meticulous recordkeeping, but even this was nothing short of astonishing. They had started with what appeared to be basic records and the Geth, to absolutely no one's surprise, had kept meticulous records dating back all the way to before the Morning War. The implication of that bit of information managed to turn her stomach slightly.
Once she got down into it though, Tali found that they could discard a lot of the minutiae - weather patterns, sunrise/sunset times - things of that nature. Stomach-turning implications or not, the information itself was largely irrelevant.
What she did find interesting though, were easily the most poignant and depressing items: detailed records of every quarian killed in the Morning War. Their names, their dates-of-birth, where they were from, the dates they died…how they died. Tali was more than a little dismayed to find that entire quarian families and bloodlines had been wiped out. Even more dismaying to her was that not nearly as many as they had been taught were killed by actual Geth.
Mob mentality and all that.
So it goes.
Tali was surprised and more than a little disquieted to find that she felt very little actual sadness about what she was anything, she was saddened by her lack of sadness. Even with the names and dates to go along with the sheer number of the dead, she found that her capacity for such large-scale sorrow was, perhaps, at an end. Garrus could hardly have blamed her. After the Reaper War, he wasn't sure that, were he in her position, he could have reacted any differently. Because in the end?
They were but numbers; statistics. Just another byproduct of a cold, ruthless calculus - centuries' old as it may be.
Despite her own relatively passive reaction, however, Tali decided to keep all of this information as well as what audio logs she could find leading up to the war itself. There were people alive that should know what had happened to their own ancestors, even if the reopening of old wounds was a pain that seemed too great to bear. Ultimately though, she decided that this needed to be preserved for one overriding reason: so that it never happened again.
But it didn't stop there. There were even communications logs that helped show how their networked brains worked, adapted, and learned. While these were interesting to see, they offered nothing different from what they already knew about how they had worked. And there was so much of it. She decided that while these were interesting, the logs offered little in the way of actual value. In fact, they simply reiterated what the quarians had already known about their functionality. Ultimately, she decided that the information was not worth keeping; after all, they had a hard limit to stay under.
After a few interruptions so her teammates would be sure that they were on the right track, she got back to it and finally came across some truly interesting files. Tali had, in fact, stumbled upon files regarding the adaptation and strengthening of the quarian immune system.
From what she had been told in previous meetings with the other admirals during the war, the Geth had begun the adaptation process with those living on Rannoch, even to the point where individual Geth had uploaded themselves into quarian suits to facilitate this. But, she was told, the Pulse had taken away any future plans, or their trajectories, or how to finish the job. On Rannoch, they only had the raw data of what they had already learned. No future plans, no "next steps". But here?
She had the full extent of their work - everything that they had theorized and had planned going forward - at her fingertips. The Geth had postulated enhanced immuno-boosters, gene therapy, and…even nanites? When she found the timeframe projections, Tali audibly gasped. The Geth had projected that the quarians could safely tolerate "limited exposure" in less than a year, and "full integration" into the Rannoch environment within two. She couldn't believe how quickly they had thought that their immune systems could re-adapt to Rannoch.
Keelah. Could we make this work?
It was too soon to tell, but she was hopeful.
Hope: what a precious commodity, and one that she'd learned to not easily discount. She immediately transferred the files to the ship via their local network connection.
They continued to scan the data. Garrus had come across a number of heavy weapon designs, indicated by his muttering about "these beauties". But then something gave him pause. He looked up. "Hey, Tali. Come here. I think you need to see this."
Satisfied that her teammates were seasoned enough with the type of work that they were looking for, she felt genuine curiosity now.
Looking over his shoulder, her breath caught in her throat.
"Keelah, is that…?"
"It sure looks like it to me."
Liara now joined them and her gasp gave away her presence.
"Tali, I think they were -"
"Building their own Normandy."
Indeed, on screen were the schematics of a near clone of the stealth frigate. Tali scanned over some of the details. There were enhanced heatsinks, a more efficient drive core, and even a -
"A dual-barreled Thanix cannon. Yeah, I know. I saw that too."
"You know, I only ever interacted with Legion when I visited after we took down the Broker." Liara had finally found words. "But I would not be surprised if it was able to formulate the design just from its time aboard the Normandy."
That actually made too much sense.
"Garrus," Tali's tone was so matter-of-fact that it almost elicited laughter from the sharpshooter, "please transfer all of the files - anything you might think is related as well - to the Malinor." Abruptly, she turned on her heels, muttering to herself while shaking her head in disbelief.
They continued in silence as they each tried to shake off the initial shock of seeing a Geth Normandy.
Eventually, it was Liara who let out a little gasp. "Tali, Garrus? Can you come here? I think you need to see this."
Ancestors, what now?
"Sure Liara, what have you got?"
The asari pointed to her screen, at an image that they were all certain had to have been doctored somehow.
"Spirits, Liara. What the hell is that?" Garrus had no idea what he was looking at, but he knew enough that it was a contradiction of every known law of physics.
On screen was an image of what appeared to be not one, not two, but three mass relays. They were tethered together somehow, and looked very much like what Tali recognized (from stories of Greek mythology that John used to tell her) as a "trident".
"Keelah, what the fuck?" This drew Liara's attention, as she did not hear Tali invoke human swear words often. Garrus just snickered, knowing exactly how and from whom she'd been "learning" English. But after seeing a Geth Normandy, Tali had thought that she'd already seen the craziest thing that she would see during their deep dive into the data troves.
Oops.
She scanned the details of the entry, which consisted of very little actual information. The Geth had simply called it "Anomaly 1.4x10^7".
Garrus spoke for all of them. "Yeah, we are definitely keeping this."
Liara shot him a look of obviousness. "Just what gave you that idea, my friend?"
Tali huffed in annoyance as she managed to restrain herself. As much as she wanted to dig deeper into the details right that second, she knew that they had to keep moving through this. Her hand even hovered over the display, caught as she was between wanting to know more and needing to be done with this. She relented. Her curiosity would have to wait, and there would be time enough for that later.
Shaking their heads once again, they resumed their work without further interruption, and in a few more hours, Tali called time on their survey.
"That was…keelah…I don't even know what to say." She stood up, stretching her back. She'd have to have John take care of that when she got back. Her companions also got up, joining her by her station.
"So is that it, Tali?" Liara looked around the room, once more dismayed at the sight of the dead.
"I think so. The ship's memory is just about to capacity, and I think we've gotten everything important. What do you think?"
Her two friends looked at each other for a moment before giving each other a slight nod.
"Yeah Tali, I think that's everything."
Liara nodded her agreement.
Tali let out a sigh. "Okay then. Just one more thing left to do." They eyed her curiously as she brought out Chatika once more.
"What's that for?"
She met the asari's eyes. "We have to wipe the memory core." It was said so matter-of-factly that even Garrus flinched.
"Now Tali, are you sure that's a good id-"
The admiral exhaled loudly. She had known this would be coming. "Yes Garrus, I do. Think about it. All this technology, a new stealth frigate, the…whatever the relay thing was…do you think it's a good idea to just leave that information out in the open? Keelah, the only reason I'm taking it is because the Geth wanted us to have it. It was…their dying wish." She rubbed the top of her visor. "Besides, do you think the Alliance - or anyone for that matter - can keep this area secure? That someone wouldn't let this information slip into the wrong hands for the right price? Garrus, you were on Omega. And Liara," she glared at her other companion, "you know better than most the lengths that people will go to do bad things. No. This must be done."
"Tali, what about the Alliance? What about Admiral Hackett?"
"What about him, Liara?" Her tone was harsher than she had intended, but why were they being so damn difficult?
"Won't he be expecting -"
"Expecting what? Me to just hand this over? Keelah, I'm not an idiot. We've already discussed this. And by 'we', I mean the Board and the Alliance brass. They assisted us here, and we will offer more assistance in rebuilding other planets - primarily Earth, but also Palaven and Thessia."
Garrus and Liara were still uneasy about this.
When their friend spoke again, her tone was softer. "Look, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to sound like a bosh'tet. It's just…" Tali sighed and began fidgeting. "I'm not feeling like myself. I feel…"
Incomplete. That's what I feel.
Her friends nodded their understanding, which Tali took as a sign to continue.
"Anyway…what I should have started with was that me and the other admirals already discussed…compensation with the Alliance. We told them that because the information was likely to be 'sensitive' regarding quarian interests, we could not just freely divulge whatever we found here. But we agreed to play a bigger role in helping to rebuild. And that we would consider a closer…partnership with the Alliance in the future."
After a few moments of silence, it was Garrus who broke it.
"Okay, Tali. If that's already been agreed, then do what you have to do." He took a few purposeful steps before putting his hand on her shoulder. "But you could have led with that, you know." He offered a small smile.
He could see her visibly relax before she surprised him again.
Tali put her arms around his shoulders and gave her turian brother a quick but meaningful hug.
"I know. I'm sorry."
She turned to Liara, before opening her arms as if to say "Come here, you know you want one."
Which she did.
Tali sniffled lightly. She hadn't liked hurting her friends, and she hated how she was feeling. Getting back to her saera could not happen quickly enough. She missed him so much, and she could ill afford to keep fumbling over herself and offending her friends.
Her family.
"Liara, I'm sor-"
"Shh. Tali, it's all right. I've already let it go."
"Okay." She let out a relieved sigh. "Thank you for trusting me."
When they disembarked for the Malinor, they each did so with a clear conscience, and one final look at this haunted and haunting place.
This monument to the dead.
In time, it might even lead to new beginnings.
That was the hope, anyway.