Mass Effect: "All Along the Watchtower"

Chapter Three – A Turian's Back

"We do not have time for this," Ka'hyra said to the soldier cuffing her. The young man turned his wheat-haired head to protest, but a glance from Captain Bryant turned it back again.

"What's your hurry, Velotto?" he asked, as curious as he was annoyed by her words.

"Trouble's coming."

"For you, or us?"

Ka'hyra showed a little frustration in her face, very lightly so that a human could not read the emotion, but Bryant smiled at her. Behind her back, she fiddled with her handcuffs, easing her anger with an attempt to break their locking mechanism.

"They will come for both of us, now that you've captured me. They'll find out what you are, or what your men are, at least, and they'll want you dead, too. The spirit of this ship is not as well-concealed as you may think. I should not have come with you."

Bryant stared, waiting for more explanation to convince him, but found only prolonged eye contact, which she broke off when it became embarrassing for them both.

"Well, outcast, that is fascinating," he told her, taking a little glee from the anger the word caused. "And for this very vague reason, you want my men to leave their fallen comrade behind?"

She shook her head. "I want them to run. I would not have your Chief's body lay there in the forest, but we do not have time f…"

Bryant turned away, silencing her. "Alenko, tell them to get a move on, just in case." With a nod, Kaidan jogged away to the comms room.

Kaidan was somewhat unaccustomed to the array of equipment in the tiny cabin, being usually on the receiving end of communications. After a few moments he recognized the key sequence and got through to the team leader's helmet radio.

"This is Lieutenant Alenko," he said, keeping his tone reverential. There was no response from the others, which hardly surprised him. Perhaps they blamed him, or maybe they didn't like taking orders from an L2 either. It didn't matter which right now. He continued, "I don't like telling you this, but you need to move as fast as possible, even after you've recovered the body. We're in a hurry. Captain's orders."

The communications channel abruptly cut out, and Kaidan decided to leave it at that. They had been told, but he still wondered why this had to be rushed. When he had seen the captain and his prisoner speaking, the sense of urgency in her alien voice was clear to everyone in the room. She was expecting trouble. And somehow she had figured out that Kaidan and his fellow crewmen were biotics. But she wouldn't explain herself.

Without too much haste, he made his way back to Bryant's modest quarters, remembering Sang and hoping the duty of notifying his next of kin would not fall on his shoulders. When he entered he found his commanding officer and the turian still arguing.

"He goes by the name, Tarius," Ka'hyra was saying, resting her hunched back against a wall.

"Tarius? As in, Tarius Soletian?"

"You like to use last names, captain. Yes, Soletian. Another outcast, by your terms."

"I know of him."

"Yes, very good, captain," Ka'hyra sighed. Her turian vocal chords made it sound as if she were sighing twice. "I'm terribly impressed." Kaidan hoped that the little contest between the two would end now that one had become sick of it.

Ka'hyra folded her arms, scratching one with the other as she did. "Tarius was, as I'm sure you know, a fine general with the armada. One day he turned and vanished, betraying his rank and my people. Now he is a wandering murderer."

With a disbelieving raise of his eyebrow, Bryant cut her off. "Sounds familiar," he said.

"It matters very little how I am perceived by the galaxy, so long as I can assist in its healing," Ka'hyra replied. There was a softness to her voice that had not been there before. "Call me a murderer if you will, but I'll have to respectfully disagree. I may have left the Hierarchy, but I do more good on my own."

"You did some great work out there on the colony," Kaidan blurted out, surprising himself.

"I'm truly sorry about your chief, however much both of us may have resented him. But we would both do well to resolve this false guilt." She looked intently at Kaidan for a moment, but he was too stunned to react. Bryant let it go, too, so she spoke again. "I deeply regret his death. Those traps were there for Tarius' men. I was not expecting a human biotic squad to arrive, let alone so quickly."

"About that!" Kaidan spat again, this time with more confidence. "How did you figure out what we are? None of us used any biotic abilities down there, and I know we didn't talk about it."

Ka'hyra said simply, "It's very obvious from your demeanor, lieutenant. It's in your stance and in your stride; someone whose body is still adapting to the implants you rely on. And to mention the obvious, when you brought me to your captain, your right arm glowed blue. A reflex action I suppose."

Kaidan stepped back a little and exhaled a breath he had been holding without realizing. "Oh."

Bryant gave Kaidan a little nod to quiet him, and told the turian, "You can explain your good deeds at the colony when we get you into custody on Palaven. I was hoping you'd be tried by a human court, but it seems the brass want you to answer for your record on your home planet. Be assured what you did to those scientists, and to our chief, will be included in the list of charges."

Looking at Kaidan, Ka'hyra said, "There was no other way for them. What I saw and discovered about the… leaders of that colony was horrible, and they needed to be stopped. It was my only option."

Kaidan blinked, refusing to speak to her again. Though he could not agree with her reasoning, he could see she was genuine. Turians were not known to lie, and tended to be bad at it. This strange, nomadic woman was a killer, certainly, but one with a purpose, and evidently a moral code. Whatever she had been running away from, the scientists she killed had nothing to do with it.

"Would you have had me let those women suffer? Leave their tormentors to carry on until maybe somebody else noticed?" she asked, as if reading his thoughts. "If I had known an Alliance patrol was headed in, I would have spared th…"

"Alenko!" Bryant barked, loud enough to gain her attention as well as his. "Get out of here and wait for the team to get back." Again Kaidan nodded, turned and left.

--

The half hour it took for the return of the squad was a somber one, and when they returned with the body, draped with a sheet they had taken with them, the mood onboard darkened even further. Even Joker showed a little respect by saying nothing of it when Kaidan came to the cockpit after the body had been stored.

"Okay, Joker," he said a little wearily. "Let's go. Captain wants us inside Palaven's atmosphere and fast. He's talking to the ports now. Says he'll radio through and tell us where to land."

"Yeah, all right," Joker said absently. "Where's the turian? Locked up some place?"

"The captain left a team with her. I don't think he wants her around me."

This was enough to rouse Joker from his trance. Suddenly energized, he smoothly lifted Shiloh off the ground and began to turn her around on her horizontal axis. "Why not?" he asked, curious.

Kaidan placed his hand over a button for the sheer hell of it. Sometimes he helped Joker fly the ship, but he knew it wasn't necessary. The pilot was humoring him, really. "She keeps trying to get in my head. She's very… odd. Talks in riddles, you know?" A thought came to him and he manually angled the rear lift, to give an extra kick to their ascent, earning a murmur of approval for his efforts.

Responding to the move, Joker leaned the ship forward and shot it gracefully upwards. Kaidan watched the strip of glass at his knees, slightly disoriented as he saw the sky drop away, as if it was tired of holding itself up. After a while, the view was pure, stationary black, and he felt a little more at ease.

Joker was smiling now. "I'm glad we're out of that atmosphere," he said to himself. "Okay, we're en route to the Relay. Beginning acceleration."

"Good."

Joker stretched his arms and back, and made a satisfying crack beneath his collar bone. He noticed Kaidan jump a little, and a startled look slap itself to his face. He was used to this reaction from most people. Whenever anything snapped or cracked in his presence, people would stare at him with their mouths open for a few seconds. The lieutenant was a particularly jumpy kind of guy, so he almost expected it, but after the mission he was especially tense.

Kaidan noticeably sighed as he rested back into his seat, and Joker silently chuckled. "So," he said, lazily rolling the word around in his mouth, "what does a female turian look like? I mean, I'm just curious, you know! We didn't have a lot of aliens visiting us back home on Arcturus, and the only ones we saw were guys."

There was a little, embarrassed pause, which Joker enjoyed thoroughly. "What do they look like?" he repeated, with some incredulity.

"I just mean… I don't know if they're lizards, or birds or… I mean do they have…?"

"Joker, what're you talking about?"

Kaidan's honest voice suggested a hint of a smile so the pilot decided to run with it. Coughing to announce himself, Joker raised his head a little and forced Kaidan to make eye contact.

"I mean, you know, are they mammals?" He brought both his hands up and made squeezing motions near the top of his chest.

Kaidan actually laughed, a single short burst that conveyed his guilty pleasure and the outrage he felt was necessary. Joker joined in, his high-pitched victory laugh lasting a moment longer.

"You have a weird sense of humor, Joker," Kaidan muttered. His voice was still stuck between amusement and disgust, but he seemed more relaxed than when he came in.

Joker sat back. Scanning his eyes across his readouts to check that all was well, he suddenly soured his expression.

"Hey Alenko," he muttered.

Kaidain sighed, his moment of peace interrupted. "Oh God, what now?"

"Alenko, look. We got an incoming craft. Not Alliance. Unregistered." Moving his fingers with instinct alone so that he had room to think, Joker punched up an image of the ship and transferred it to Kaidan's monitor. "It's turian," he said. "Looks like one of their old Randoc Threes, but modified."

"Oh," Kaidan replied. "Good."

"I don't think so. This doesn't look like any turian cruiser I've ever seen, and it's gaining on us. You think maybe our guest had some friends looking to get her out of trouble?"

Kaidan paused, speechless and shocked by the development. Could Ka'hyra have been lying about the whole thing? Suddenly, he remembered something she had said. He heard Joker radio the captain, demanding, rather disrespectfully, that he should join them. And then he saw something move on the little video feed in front of him.

"Did you see that?" Kaidan yelped.

Joker threw his attention at his own monitors but before he could mouth a response the ship was buffeted by an impact above them.

The ship was quick to stabilize as Joker's fingers raced across the console. All trace of calm within the cockpit was banished away under the oscillating tune of proximity and damage alarms. Before long, they were back to status quo. The pilot's eyes communicating nothing but absolute focus.

"What was that?" Kaidan asked through panicked breaths.

"Torpedo," Joker said quickly. "Good one, too. Hurt our barriers. Activat…" his voice trailed off as he began hitting more buttons.

"Activating what?" Kaidan demanded.

"God, Alenko!" the pilot was grinning again, but not wasting any time by looking at him. "Activating Gardian, all right? Jeez. Do I have to explain everything I'm doing to you?"

Kaidan saw another torpedo on his screen. Figuring he could at least serve as an extra pair of eyes whilst Joker concentrated on evading enemy fire, he opened his mouth to alert the other man of the danger. Before he had formed a word, a ray of pure, clean light appeared between the missile and the edge of the screen and quickly vanished. The projectile exploded, its pieces floating away harmlessly.

All Alliance ships bigger than fighters were equipped with a General Area Defensive Integration Anti-spacecraft Network, known to the rank and file as a Gardian. Kaidan figured the unnecessarily long name was given to the system in order to facilitate the acronym. Shiloh was not meant for combat; even for a frigate it was small, so it had nothing beyond the GARDIAN and a standard kinetic barrier for protection. A single sluggish torpedo cannon served as the vessel's method of attack, and it would be useless at this range.

The door shot open, and Bryant marched through. Ka'hyra followed, frowning in concentration.

"Moreau, do we have our shields and Gardian up?" the captain snapped.

"Yes sir," Joker answered quietly. It annoyed him that he was not allowed to concentrate on planning evasive maneuvers but apparently had to provide a running commentary to the senior crew.

"Now one of you three had better tell me who's attacking us."

Ka'hyra spoke up. "There are many threats to peace in this galaxy, captain. I warned you of the one immediate danger to your crew, and now you display confusion when the enemy is at your door?"

The captain's body tensed with anger. His eyes showed evidence of an outburst that could take form at any moment. But he expertly restrained himself. Saying, "Humor me."

"Indeed," she began. "That's Tarius' ship out there, captain. I had been trailing it for weeks, but when they became aware of my presence it didn't take long for the tables to turn. I managed to escape, just barely, and ditch on your colony's moon."

The turian sighed, watching all her plans fall by the wayside. "I had hoped they would find me before anyone else did."

Bryant managed to show a hint of appeasement. "Finally, I get some answers from you, turian," he snarled. "Carry on. What does he want with you?"

"For the exact reasons, I do not know. Turian biotics are a rare thing, as you've most definitely been briefed on in my case." Ka'hyra pondered on the captain's question further, as if she still didn't have an answer, even for herself. "He simply wants nothing more than the complete eradication of our kind. That's what drives him. Keeps him on the run. And allows him to attack Alliance ships with abandon, I'm afraid."

Kaidan's ears followed the conversation while he watched missile after missile being obliterated by the automatic, precision aim of the Gardian lasers. Joker was lost in concentration beside him, flipping the ship sideways and diving backwards with such grace that neither Ka'hyra or Bryant had even noticed.

"Get to the point," Bryant said sharply.

Ka'hyra looked placid. "There is no point, captain. There is only us before the gun and no reason why the trigger must be pulled. If I had all the answers, you wouldn't have found me hiding on a human moon."

The floor juddered slightly, and everyone looked at Joker.

"Are we hit?" said Bryant.

"No, sir. We dodged. Normally you don't feel anything when I change direction, but that was close." A flash of silver appeared in the little window, but nobody saw it.

"I need more," Bryant said, ignoring Joker's smart remark and returning his attention to Ka'hyra, who was resting her back against the wall. "How many ships?"

"Just the one. He calls it the Pathfinder. If he has a base of operations, I don't know where it is. That's what I was hoping to find by tracking it for so long."

"Got their engines," Joker said calmly, grabbing everyone's attention again. Kaidan nodded to the captain, a little embarrassed by the other's cocky attitude.

While the two standing had been talking, and Kaidan had been watching and monitoring the laser defenses, Joker had maneuvered Shiloh beneath the faster, stronger ship, dodged three close-range missiles and launched his own missile into a bank of the Pathfinder's fusion torch engines.

"That'll slow them down," Joker announced through smugly-curled lips. "I can get us into FTL speeds and through the Relay before they get back up."

"I must disagree with you in that regard," Ka'hyra said solemnly. "Human, you will only see a turian's back when he is dead."

Joker nodded and extended his bottom lip. He liked a challenge.