Shepard was in no position to be disappointed Thane hadn't fucked her. She had come three? – four times? – and they were fucking transcendent climaxes, too. She couldn't wait to do more with him, although her heart secretly hoped they would be able to take their time.
Also, he had never taken his pants off. The mystery was killing her.
She stood and sauntered up the steps by the fish tank to find Thane with bowed head in the bathroom, communing with his gods. She paused to watch him, and felt the muscles of her cheeks burn with a grin that probably verged on lovestruck goofiness. His eyes finally opened and his gaze landed upon her, nude and leaning against the glass of her empty display case. His smile in return was like an orbital horizon: a flare of starlight around a planet's curve, visible only when the cockpit was oriented just so. Rare, heartbreaking, and precious.
"If that's how drell reproduce, I'm game for that forever," Shepard joked — but her voice was thickened by recent sensual fulfillment.
Thane dropped his head with a chuckle. "No, not quite, although I share the sentiment." He stepped toward her, drawing her close to him again. "I thought I might gain some field experience while you were… compromised." He looked down into her eyes, seeing her, but also gauging her irises. The orgasms had helped to clear her system somewhat, although without the sensory saturation of his hands all over her body, a ghostly seeker bug or two flitted in her peripheral view of the fish tank.
"I'm going to need you to stay here with me and make sure I don't mistake an airlock for an armoury." She pulled him to her for another kiss — no tongue, this time. It was awesome restraint, but she would need to come down from his psychedelic sooner or later.
"Understood, Commander." The newly subversive subtext of this formality shot a thrill up her spine. She nearly giggled.
N7s don't giggle.
That alone should have been indication enough. She was in well over her head.
Shepard's hair was back up in her chignon, freshly scented of shampoo. She hit the elevator for the CIC to plot a course for the evening shift. A disembodied voice flickered at her ear. "So how was it?"
Shepard's omnitool flashed and a cloaking device crackled, hit with an overload. A pixellated shimmer resolved itself into Kasumi Goto.
Kasumi must have slipped onto the elevator at the crew deck. Shepard had ridden down an extra level to steal a few more throat kisses from Thane before she resumed her post for the evening. Shepard was grateful that Kasumi hadn't been a hidden passenger for that.
Unless she'd been camping in the vestibule between the elevator and her cabin door. A wince flickered on Shepard's upper lip at the thought.
"You're an evil genius, Kasumi-san. How did you know?"
"I'm not stupid," the thief protested. "You two were gone together for a long time. You smell nice, by the way. As they say, scrubbing evidence is its own kind of evidence."
Shepard's lovestruck grin was back, and trying to wipe it away only made her mouth work in awkward ways. "Keep it to yourself, will you, Kasumi-san?"
"You know I only gossip to you, Shep."
The elevator opened to the CIC. At the sight of the galaxy map, twitterpated Shepard was instantly replaced with Commander Shepard, quick as a pistol shot. Kasumi, for her part, was either invisible, or gone.
Shepard strode to her post, her eyes hooded with seriousness. Over her shoulder, she asked Kelly, "Anything I should know?"
"Tali would like to speak to you in Engineering, Commander," the yeoman replied in her singsong voice.
Shepard's mind wandered during the ritual of strapping on her armour.
Garrus, Tali, Wrex: all figures from her last tour of adventures, all murky identities from her past. She had bluffed her way through the encounter with Wrex and immediately jetted from Tuchanka, leaving him nobody to question but antiproton exhaust. Garrus would never be shaken from her company, but he was easy to be around. He negotiated familiarity and fondness without crossing too many boundaries. Even when he did venture into an exposed position, he quickly withdrew again. After that awkward moment in Life Support, he made himself scarce for a while, and then returned to his usual self, cracking jokes on the crew deck. Turians made it easy. Or maybe that was just Garrus.
Tali was somehow trickier. Shepard liked her, a lot. They had a tremendous amount in common. They spoke the same language of technical jargon and shared a straightforward attitude toward problem-solving. Shepard found her rather adorable.
But Tali remembered everything about their travels together. They were the cherished memories of the Greatest Pilgrimage Ever. Every time Shepard sensed her gaze through the translucent glass of her mask, she felt the quarian bursting with stories and "remember when?"'s. Coming across her research logs on Haestrom, Shepard found her own name in every other entry, as a source of inspiration or larger-than-life figure deified by her own demise.
Shepard felt a strong push and pull to her interactions with Tali. She wanted to be friendly with her, and she could tell Tali desperately wanted this too, but Shepard's secret forced her to keep her distance. Tali remembered far more about the year before Shepard's death than she did.
Despite this, when she learned Tali was to stand trial for treason, Shepard was upset by it. Angry. She wanted to stand up for her compatriot.
Perhaps her body remembered more about their friendship than she did.
She plotted a course to intercept the Migrant Fleet without delay.
When it came to deciding who would accompany her and Tali onto the Rayya, Shepard found herself approaching the question from its flank. Who would be better than Thane?
She realized she was trying to wrestle with a worry of suddenly having a reason for the favouritism she'd displayed for him in her ground teams. Well no, that wasn't right. She always had a reason, but now they had done something illicit together, and if found out, it could be the only reason some people might see.
She never took much stock in Alliance policies against fraternization. People are going to fuck, and making it forbidden only brought out the darkest shades of soldiers' carnal pursuits. Marines developed feelings of all sorts for one another. With or without hormones, feelings inevitably modulated command decisions. In Shepard's experience — or so the story goes — the most intense emotions, whether loyalty, hatred or desire, brought out secret depths of strength and willpower to achieve the impossible in a tight spot. In the N-program, they all learned well the necessity of leveraging everything they have — every skill as well as every hidden font of resolve or emotional combustion.
Or maybe that itself was the extraordinary quality of the Ns: the ability to transform, without exception, every structure in their personal landscape into a weapon. Maybe most people couldn't actually handle placing their lover in danger.
Shepard was comfortable with being the exception to the rule.
Besides, the way Shepard saw it, the only line that had been crossed with Thane was going from being possessed by a desire for his body, to having her body be possessed by his desire. The difference was logistical, at best. Arbitrary. Right?
But it never hurt to run a self-diagnostic against loin-directed bias, so: who would be better than Thane?
It would probably be a diplomatically delicate situation. Certainly her Cerberus crewmembers were out of the question. She wanted to downplay her affiliation with the pro-human fringe group as much as possible. Her destabilizing firestarters were also a no-go, so that excluded Jack, Samara, Zaeed and Grunt. Quarian resources were limited enough without letting a thief on board their liveships, so that excluded Kasumi.
Mordin, Garrus, or Thane? She wasn't sure she wanted Mordin's interventionist sensibilities on this visit. He might suggest some type of political meddling that would promise optimal results and be very difficult to unsee.
Garrus. Garrus could eat their food.
But Thane knows what it's like for a species to lose its homeworld, she pointed out to herself. To be fair.
Garrus or Thane? Apparently this would be a recurring theme in her life.
She didn't want to be the only person unable to eat there anyway.
So it was Thane again, as usual.
Really, deviation from the pattern would have been more suspicious than taking him. By now, the rest of her ground team had adjusted to focusing on their ship responsibilities, since these days they were half as likely to be called upon for away missions. Miranda, Jacob, Garrus and Mordin had plenty to keep themselves busy in their respective office, armoury, battery, and lab, and the Normandy was humming along much more efficiently because of it. Samara was as patient as a Boddhisatva, and was mostly occupied with meditation after the resolution of her 400-year struggle with Morinth. The rebel squadmates in the lower decks had taken to competitive training games in the hangar. It was building great camaraderie among individuals who would otherwise be loners — and it kept the Cerberus maintenance staff busy with repairs after Jack and Grunt had left their marks on the bulkheads.
Besides, consistent physical activity was important for his health, to slow the advance of Kepral's.
Thane again? Wasn't she thinking about something else?
Shepard turned her thoughts to her anticipation of a firsthand view of the Migrant Fleet. She had a strong appreciation for design, and could only imagine a world comprised of a nomadic space archipelago constructed according to quarian values. With her colonial heritage, she shared the sentiment that there was nothing quite so satisfying as a good repurposing.
There: assembled and suited up, for once not to keep the bad stuff out, but to keep the bad stuff in and protect the quarians' sterile environments.
Her Death Mask dangled from her fingers as she strode through the CIC to the airlock. Tali was waiting there, wringing her hands and shifting her weight from foot to foot. Shepard couldn't imagine what she was going through; these were suboptimal conditions for a homecoming. She offered the quarian a smile, reached out her hand reassuringly. It was hard to tell if it got through to her, although Tali bowed her head briefly in acknowledgment.
Thane silently appeared at Shepard's side.
"Thanks for coming along," Tali said to them both. "I have to warn you, the decontamination procedures are pretty thorough, and you won't have an opportunity to take off your breathers until we're back on the Normandy."
"I'll make sure to give my nose a good scratch." Shepard patted the tip of her nose with a glint in her eye. She swung her Death Mask on and it clicked to her chestpiece with a soft hiss.
It occurred to her that she'd not yet seen Thane's breather. She turned to see him pull a flexible nano-synthetic weave over his head, an air filter integrated with ballistic mesh that fit snugly to his face. The look of it suddenly reminded her of bondage gear.
She was glad the Death Mask was on to hide her blush. Trusty old thing.
Decontamination was lengthy and arduous, especially for poor Tali, who kept shaking her head to herself, no doubt racking her brain for the source of the allegations against her.
"They should be decorating you for your achievements, not threatening you with exile. We'll find out what's going on," Shepard said softly to her.
Tali could only nod, distracted and meek.
The Rayya was one of the three Liveships of the Migrant Fleet, tremendous feats of engineering born of improvisation and necessity. When it became clear that there could be no return to their home cluster after the Geth War, the quarians needed to solve the problem of feeding their population. The Liveships were bootstrapped into agricultural arks, undergoing gradual augmentation with salvage, until their farming output was able to support seventeen million lives. The Rayya was an unrecognizable new organic form, iconic to the quarians, bearing little trace of the type of vessel it used to be in the days when quarians walked unmasked. Shepard's best guess was the Rayya had been some type of helium-3 transport, meant to integrate with large-scale mining infrastructure. The great vessel embodied repurposing at its best: breathing life into obsolete structures to meet new needs.
The light in the docking area was orange and murky, as though the air had rusted from excessive recirculation. How the place smelled was an unknowable mystery, since no one had taken a breath there sans filter for three centuries. Storage crates lined the passageway, some slightly askance from frequent use, but all carefully labeled. The atmosphere was surprisingly oppressive, not just because of Tali's growing agitation beside her.
Seeing someone she called "Aunty Raan" seemed to alleviate Tali's tension, but only added to Shepard's. Admiral Raan divulged two key pieces of intel: first, Tali was stripped of her ship name, making Shepard legally her captain. Second, it would be Shepard who served as her defence counsellor. It was clear to Shepard she was sharing only what she needed to. The admiral was holding back heavy secrets.
"Our legal rules are simple. There are no legal tricks or political loopholes for you to worry about. Present the truth as best you can. It will have to be enough."
So she said; and with her next move, she sent Tali in front of the Admiralty Board to be skewered through the heart. In the middle of the garden plaza, the young quarian was blindsided by the news that her father was likely dead, his ship overrun by geth that may have regenerated themselves from parts she had sent them from the field.
"Shepard, we have to retake the Alarei!" Tali said urgently. Yes, Shepard could see the importance of this mission: both to find Tali's father and evidence to exonerate her. It was decidedly not to pursue an honourable death, as she made clear with a pointed, "We'll be back."
"We're going to find my father, and we're going to punish those geth for what they did." Tali sat with grim stillness in the shuttle on the way to the Alarei. "They can't possibly be prepared for you, Shepard."
Beneath her mask, Shepard pursed her lips and looked away. The overt admiration would have felt awkward even if she had memories of what had impressed Tali so much. But her voice was soft and steady when she spoke. "You're also a star, Tali. It's you and I together who are going to turn this all around. Those geth are going to be hacked so hard they won't know their feet from their flashlights."
Tali was a masterful hack artist herself, with her own flock of combat drones. Between the two of them, they might as well have been boarding the Alarei with an army, equipped as they were to inflate the numbers on their side of any battle. Yet there was only so much inflation to be had, when facing a ship completely overrun with rogue geth. A quarian platoon had already attempted to board, and had made almost no headway before limping back with heavy casualties.
Shepard turned to Thane, helmet optics meeting in a cold, artificial eye contact. "Thane, things are going to get geeky out there. Tali and I will be bent over our omnitools waging cyberwarfare. Stay sharp, keep them off us, and call out positions. Keep it physical while we're fooling around in virtual environments."
Thane bowed his head sideways in acknowledgment in his particular way, which Shepard found so charmingly archaic.
"I don't want to have to do this." Tali's voice was low and melancholy. "I don't want to have to fight for my honour while searching for my father's… corpse."
First two dead teams, now charges of treason. Tali's spirit had taken a thrashing.
The shuttle was docking. Shepard leaned over with words just for Tali. "We've got this. You and me. Let's go."
The airlock cycled open, and it was time to fall back into the steady operations of battle. Tali called out hostiles on either side of the T-shaped hallway. Shepard slid into cover. The ship was dark, the life support systems powered down. They would be relying on the thermal readouts from their combat optics. The probability of finding survivors was beginning to edge that long statistical tail.
She signalled Tali to take the left group, while she took the right. They mirrored tactics: a steady sequence of overloading shields and transforming one geth apiece into a sacrificial lamb. The geth faced a berserking comrade on one side and a combat drone on the other — a pincer attack without Shepard's squad ever having to break cover. Any geth that got too close to the straightaway where they hid was softened up by a biotic warp and finished with a headshot from Thane's Viper.
"Good start," Shepard said when the death-whirring ceased.
"We should head for the labs." Tali pulled up a map of the ship in three dimensions to hover above her omnitool. "Maybe we'll find answers there."
Shepard nodded and indicated for her to take the lead.
Each room they passed through was hard-fought. Shepard fancied she could sense the growing desperation as they killed volley after volley of geth, their networked intelligence suffering with each small extinction event. She was personally rather ambivalent about the geth. As a tech-head, she might have been inclined toward sympathetic personification of them, but she found them disappointingly inefficient for a race of machines. She couldn't fathom why they needed to carry guns in mechanical arms, or why they even had heads that could be exploded with a well-placed sniper shot. Their design could be so much more streamlined. Was it some bizarre electronic sentimentality, unable to shuck the resemblance built into them by their creators? If she were the geth, she might have constructed herself more like a combat drone: quick and spherical, inscrutable, endowed with flight and micro-fabricators to fire any type of weapon she could imagine. Unfeeling and inhuman.
She had been constructed, she realized, and it was Cerberus' vanity for their species that had kept her in this inadequate bipedal form.
Firing from cover, she executed three geth, stunned and spasming from her overload, with three shots from her pistol.
She made do with the inadequate bipedal form, all things considered.
Thinking of Thane's touch, she admitted that it also came with certain advantages.
The trouble with this mission was they were looking for negative evidence. How could they prove the absence of anything incriminating? The labs yielded only innocuous samples sent back by Tali from the field. Of course, that sort of difficulty had never stopped Shepard before. Her standard operating procedure was that she'd know what she needed when she saw it.
"Go get them, Chiktikka!" she heard Tali shout over the din of gunfire, and the quarian's purple-tinted combat drone zoomed past them into the thick of battle.
There was something lively about Tali's drones. They flitted and zapped like electric hummingbirds. While Shepard was more inclined to make her drones explode in a kamikaze last stand, Tali directed hers to dodge attacks and achieve some battle longevity. A drone with self-preservation — not at all unlike the geth. It suddenly seemed to Shepard like using an attack dog to snap at wolves.
"Shepard," came Thane's voice over the radio. He never shouted in battle, not once, but his warm rumble contained a note of warning.
She looked over her shoulder at the doorway where Thane was guarding their flank. A Prime with a court of troopers were swarming in from the next room.
It was the tipping point of battle, she realized. They had managed so far by scattering their attackers, fomenting chaos with well-placed hacks and herding them with combat drones. But the geth's strength had always been in numbers, and they had come to converge on their position.
The Prime was being knocked back continually by the hard blasts of Thane's sniper shots, but not enough. Troopers were surging through the door and around their leader like a nest of angry ants.
"Thane, join Tali to clear out that room ahead. I'm going to need somewhere to fall back to. On the double!" The military-speak was an old habit that only emerged when she was thinking too fast to moderate herself. The strategy was unfurling in her imagination, how to cycle this room with dodges and hacks to keep herself from being pinned down. She had to hold back the geth flanking manoeuvre, buy her teammates time to clear the room so they could present a single, unified front. Working alone, she could stay mobile and really fuck them up, Spectre style. She fell smoothly into motion, anticipating each step and counterattack, allowing her body to execute commands in the comparatively glacial pace of realtime as her mind raced well ahead.
Hack one at the back. Surprise them with fire from the rear.
Drone in the midst of them. They will turn to face it.
A brief opportunity to spray with SMG fire. Go to next cover.
That one's too close. Overload shields. Pistol shots to the big, dumb flashlight head.
The Prime is the main target. Overload. Overload. Use the drone to keep the troopers off of me. Steady hand with my SMG.
Check my HUD. Looks like it's at 2/3rds of its armour.
Too close. Stagger them with an incinerate blast. Pistol shot. Pistol shot.
Too close. Next cover.
A scream, over her radio. Tali.
If Shepard said the words "status report", it was from some automated subroutine of her mouth.
"Tali's down, but I have them," came Thane's steady murmur.
Oh, you do baby.
She heard the thundering bursts of biotic explosions and the precision shots of Thane's Viper. If he hadn't switched to his sidearm, things were probably still in control up there.
Then she heard him grunt in the surprise of pain. They must have finally punched through his shields.
"Enough. Change of plans," she mumbled, and pulled out her particle rifle.
She bolstered her shields with some extra juice, stood from cover and trained the yellow beam of her Collector prize on the Prime's purposeless head. She fried the shields of the troopers trying to surround her and let the rifle's clip drain. The Prime was warbling what would be its last commands in that damnable digital chatter.
Dropping into cover, she reloaded the rifle while hacking another trooper, letting it get into fisticuffs with the geth nearest her. A second load of power cells in the particle rifle, she burned all of her rage into the giant robot's chest.
It died in a satisfying explosion.
"Now for the rest of you fuckers." She leapt over the workbench she had been hiding behind and dual-wielded her pistol and SMG, gunning them down in two directions. Their unshielded bodies dropped. She let her drone take the last kill, and fought down the urge to high-five it before it fizzled back into virtual storage.
She pumped her legs in a sprint back into the other room.
The first thing she saw was a geth trooper, its foot poised above Tali's inert form, about to crush her helmet.
The trooper snapped back in an electrical seizure in response to her overload attack. Nearly simultaneously, its head exploded from a single Viper round.
The shot came from behind a short glass wall where Thane crouched, about to be flanked on either side by two Hunters that had just come uncloaked.
"No!" Her overload was still recharging, and her plasma attack would be too slow. She picked one and blasted it with heavy pistol shots, hoping at least to slow it down.
Thane arched backwards as gracefully as water, undulating free of the shotgun blasts so the Hunters damaged one another instead. A smart kick sent one over the wall to tumble to a lower floor.
Shepard's incinerate attack was already arcing toward the other one, setting it ablaze. She trained her SMG on its head and fired a continuous blast until it was ashes.
She holstered her guns and waved a negligent hand, sending a drone to duel with the one that was damaged by the fall. She stalked over to Thane.
"Are you alright?"
"I am fine. Tali needs assistance."
She turned back to the quarian, who, almost as though sensing their attention, stirred from where she lay. "Uggh. I… think I had a suit puncture and my med systems overreacted." Her voice was slurring from painkillers.
"Yeah." Shepard set her omnitool aglow, and it registered a breach at the neckline of Tali's suit. Shepard moved to her and knelt by Tali's side. "It's in a bad spot. But…" She felt herself wince at what she was about to say. "We have to keep moving, Tali."
"I know." Tali was gloomy, but prevailed over her mood. "Luckily we're on a quarian ship. It should be pretty much sterile, and I'm surrounded by ways to patch myself up."
"Good thing," Shepard said, although she felt fairly mirthless. "Are you… bleeding in there?"
"Maybe I was, but it's sealed off now." Tali rose gingerly to her feet and walked toward a medical station mounted on the wall. She docked her wrist to it, and Shepard heard the rhythmic hiss of medigel being pumped in to refuel her suit's medical unit. With her free hand, she pulled open a drawer at a nearby desk, and after briefly feeling around, pulled out some squeeze tubes of suit patching gel.
"Could you…?" she asked Shepard, indicating the breach at the back of her neck.
Using her omnitool readout to guide her, Shepard isolated the crevice and daubed the gel into the gap, sealing it with a carefully calibrated application of heat. She'd done hardsuit field repairs many times before, but this still demonstrated tremendous trust from a quarian. She felt a low burn in her heart, wondering if she had truly earned that trust. Or still deserved it, after marginalizing Tali'Zorah on the SR-2.
Everything needs repair, sometimes.
Just then, Shepard's drone floated up to rejoin them after completing its work of destroying the last geth.
"Good job, –" Tali cut herself off. A name was meant to be at the end of that sentence, but the drone didn't have one.
Shepard let the drone fizzle out. "It works for electrons, not praise."
"But you've been through so much together. How do you not get attached?"
It was an uncomfortably good question.
"You know, I… I used to. But it's been a long time."
"What do you mean?" Tali's curiosity had gotten the better of her weariness.
That weariness was not negligible, however. The quarian was swaying on her feet. A quick radar check: it seemed they were all clear for the moment. The geth would need time to regroup after the failure of this aggressive attack. Not much time, but Shepard would take it. They could break for a story, to take Tali's mind off things and let the medigel help her shake off the injury. Plus, this was a story with no other witnesses, and so no worries of being caught with a missing detail. It would be good practice for Shepard. She needed a remedial class in talking about herself.
"As a kid growing up, I couldn't get enough of VIs of all sorts. It was boring as hell on Mindoir: isolated, not a lot of kids around to play with. So, like the epic super-geek I was, I built friends."
She heard the soft laugh from Tali. It was the reaction she'd hoped for.
"I had all kinds of custom-built VIs and drones. Fliers and walkers and even some with little novelty cloaks. Basic one-note virtual personalities, but decently configurable. A lot of them looked like different kinds of animals." The story had started like a recitation, but memories were starting to unexpectedly fuzz into existence. She had a sudden vivid recall of a small stegosaurus, the same bright orange as her combat drone today. She faltered.
From his sniper's perch on an upper level by the door, Thane was watching her through the combat optics of his hood, still as a gargoyle.
She pressed on, partly so Tali wouldn't notice anything awry, partly because she desperately did not want to lose this thread, as the tale began to coalesce into a substantial memory.
"My parents didn't mind at all. In fact, I think they encouraged me. They'd had careers before arriving on the colony, as tech specialists and material scientists who'd decided to opt for a simpler life on an agrarian colony." It had seemed strange to her then, but they had not lived past her reticent teenage years. She had never taken the opportunity to ask. The thought made her new heart ache in an old way.
"When the slavers attacked, my father locked me in a storage silo. He destroyed the door mechanism from the outside. You know I… I never figured out exactly how he masked my heat signature. I guess he still had some old tricks." These thoughts, these feelings were worn like an athletic track, years of pounding feet in circles around questions. Like Ashley and Virmire, not even her own death had managed to dull the edges of these blades. "I also never figured out why slavers would come and take no one alive. Seems… counterproductive.
"I still had my omnitool, though." She looked at the glow of her wrist, now many model upgrades later — even to the wrist itself. "I was a precocious little shit, and had one fitted as soon as I turned twelve. By the time I was sixteen, there was nothing left of the manufacturer's still in that thing. It was all tweaked and custom, able to do any silly thing I could think of.
"My whole fleet of toys, my little VIs, some of them I'd had since I was very, very small: I could interface with them with my tool, from inside the silo where my dad locked me, while the batarians were systematically murdering everyone else in the colony. Those drones kept me alive. I could see outside through their little cameras. I could get one to run interference while another would sneak me food and water through a window about ten metres up."
"Sneak you food?" Tali asked in a hush.
"I was there for about nine days, give or take." The sensations were evaporating into just facts, once again. "I managed to get some of those batarians pretty good too, by overloading a couple fuel tanks at opportune times. It wasn't smart, but it was satisfying. It probably delayed their departure by quite a bit. They knew there was a survivor, and she was righteously pissing them off." She tried to laugh bitterly, but it felt hollow and inauthentic. "They didn't leave until the Alliance cruiser arrived."
She sighed, rising to stretch and get ready to head out. Her radar was starting to warn of geth signals gathering just out of range. "I was pretty mixed up by the time they found me. The Alliance grunts got majorly pissed off when they realized the 'other survivors' I was begging them to find were actually beaten up VI toys. Most of those old things had gotten irreparably fried by the batarians along the way, anyway." At this point in her tale, she was numb. It didn't feel like a lacuna; it was more like enforced sensory silence, a psychological shutdown. Maybe that itself was the authentic experience of the old Shepard.
"Those VIs were so real to me. They had become so important, especially after I spent nine days whispering to them in the dark."
Tali's slow nod was contemplative. "That's why VI toys are taboo among quarians. Getting attached to them looks too much like relating personally to AIs. Some say it makes kids grow up to be geth apologists."
"Humans have a bit of that stigma too." Shepard considered herself an iconoclast, but this decision dated to her younger days: "When I joined the Alliance, I really forced myself relate to the drones as just tools. It wasn't a reputation I wanted, being the traumatized little girl who confused VIs for real lives. Especially since it wasn't true. I knew all the colonists were dead. I found their bodies." She paused. "Well, I'd seen them. My scuttle drone found them. That was what broke me, confused me, in the first place."
Tali gasped. The sound was all midrange, the trebles and lows filtered out by her suit. "You… saw them?"
"Yes." Shepard considered a moment before speaking. This story had always been for Tali's benefit. She let the narrative hammer fall. "I found my father's body first. He hadn't actually gotten that far from the silo before they got him. It was…" She searched for words that would seem right. The encyclopaedic version of this event, as supplied by her cyborg brain matter, was of no sentimental use at all. "It was the worst thing in the entire world, Tali. The gravity well just dropped out from under me." It seemed like an appropriate enough metaphor — far better than, say, 'I don't actually know, but my guess is it was really, really bad'.
Tali's mask was angled away. The subtext of their current situation, in search of her father after a slaughter, was ringing dully on the walls of the darkened room.
"But he was lying there because he loved me. That was it. That was all there was."
And that was all she could say. All of her knowledge.
Tali's helmeted head hung, but not due to the weariness of lingering pain medication. She was weighed down by the anticipation of grief. Loss was about all the things that would never be said, would never be asked, would never be shared. Confronting death, perceiving the cadaver, was the final bulkhead slam that isolated breached compartments to the sterile vacuum of space.
Shepard's father spent his last moments trying to keep her safe. That kind of love communicates from beyond the grave — both of their graves. Receiving that transmission made healing possible, then and now.
Shepard hoped there would be a message for Tali.
She outstretched a gauntleted hand to the quarian, an unspoken inquiry if she was ready. Tali bobbed her head in a nod, and moved toward the locked door on the opposite side of the room.
"This should take us towards the command centre of the Alarei." The tremor in her voice was contained, all things considered. "If anything I sent back was more dangerous than what we found in the labs, they would be brought here."
She unlocked the door to find their secondary objective twisted on the deck, a lone corpse suited in admiral designations.
What prescience had led Shepard to share her story, when Rael'Zorah's body lay just beyond the threshold of that door? It was the same dumb luck, the same amoral synchronicity that had spared her head of countless flying bullets and pieces of shrapnel, had brought rescue not a moment too late time and time again. Shepard led a charmed life of improbable survival through the incalculable twists of events, the continual making-right of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and sometimes, like this time, it made her look like a battlefield prophet, sharing a story immediately prior to its profound relevance.
"No… no," sobbed Tali over her father's corpse. Shepard knelt by her, her armoured bulk offering consolation through proximity. "Maybe… maybe he knew I would come. Maybe he left a message."
There was always a message. Always, in some form or another.
It was eerie to watch her activate the omnitool of her dead father. To Shepard, quarians were so much a part of their suits, it seemed like he was being unnaturally reanimated — although it was ironic as hell for her to be squeamish at the thought of reviving the dead.
Shepard had talked big about fatherly love and last stands, but Rael's message to Tali contained little sentiment. He only urged her to share the data in the mainframe with the other admirals. Shepard kept silent on that observation.
"C'mere," she said softly to Tali, and embraced the smaller woman. There was something heartwrenchingly isolated about the tears of a quarian. It was impossible for anyone to wipe them away.
Perhaps they were reconstituted, cycled and processed by the suit into something to sustain her.
It was surely a strengthened Tali, and not a weakened one, who finally rose and said, "Come on. Let's finish this."
Shepard saw it, and she knew it. The evidence they needed was in Rael'Zorah's own voice, emphatically directing his subordinates to keep Tali uninvolved with his illegal treatment of the geth parts she was sending him. There was his love for his daughter, motivating him to commit atrocities to be able to give her the gift of their homeworld. Except Tali was begging Shepard to promise to bury it.
Shepard's gut was telling her this was out of the question.
"Tali, without this evidence, you're looking at exile."
"You think I don't know that? You think I want to live knowing that I can never see the Fleet again? But I can't go back into that room and tell them that my father was the biggest war criminal in our people's history! I cannot!"
"Rael'Zorah doesn't need you to worry about him anymore," Shepard tried again. "You heard him say he didn't want you to be caught in the politics."
"You don't understand, Shepard. They would strike his name from the manifest of every ship he ever served on. He would be worse than an exile. He'd be a traitor to our people, held up for children as a monster in a cautionary tale! I can't let all the good he did be destroyed for this, Shepard!"
Shepard licked her lips, briefly uncertain under the stoic face of her mask. This could kill any hope of friendship with Tali. It could break her heart. But Shepard was a principled woman, and a commander. She sent good people to their deaths in order to do what she deemed was The Right Thing. She was willing to live with fouling a relationship with an old friend.
"I can't let all the good you've done be buried either, Tali." The decision made, her voice was low and steady. "And I won't let you play cover-up like the Council after Sovereign. Or for that matter, Saren!" The words rolled from her with seething conviction. "Goddammit, Tali, you know this: the truth always comes out. And it comes out because there are people like you, exceptional people who know the value of the truth, who will risk their lives to deliver evidence to the right people, the way you did when we first met."
Tali had no retort, standing deflated before her. So Shepard continued.
"I came here with you because I knew you were innocent of these charges, that you would never commit treason against the Flotilla. Now you want to knowingly withhold evidence of your father's research from the Admiralty Board? Destroy it, even? From where I'm sitting, that'streason, Tali, and I consider it a mission failure to let you commit it."
A wail heaved itself through Tali's body, and she threw her arms around Shepard, the smooth visor of her mask crushing against an N7 shoulder guard with a glassy chink. "I know Shepard, I know, I know," she sobbed. "I just–"
She collapsed into wordless weeping, for her father, for the Alarei, and for the brink from which she had just been snatched.
