Note: All standard disclaimers still apply. Thanks again to all the people who've taken time to encourage me by adding me or my story to favorites. And, most especially, thanks to those few who've written reviews. Your interest and support is always appreciated, and often instrumental to maintaining the inspiration necessary to develop a story.
Chapter-Specific Note: This chapter is a continuation of Parts Answering Parts, Chapter 12: Controlled Crashing, and takes place on one of the very first ground-side missions in ME1. I don't necessarily have a specific mission in mind. Yet, anyway.
The next fifteen or twenty minutes seemed like fifteen or twenty years.
By the time the huge, hairy, worm-like Thresher Maw gave a final bellowing roar and collapsed, flailing and flopping across the ground like a water hose unexpectedly disconnected from the output valve, Shepard and Alenko both had beads of moisture collecting across their foreheads.
It was a mystery to Garrus where all that moisture could even come from. He felt as hot and dry as a desert, the plates on his forehead expanding and contracting in a vain attempt to vent his adrenaline-amped body temperature as he drew breath in exhausted, warbling bursts.
Shepard and Alenko were panting, too, a low, harsh sound that grated on Garrus' nerves.
Shepard looked around, her normally pink-tinted face pale. "Everybody in one piece?"
Garrus bobbed his head in affirmation, noting-vaguely, but not for the first time-how odd and convenient it was that humans used a similar gesture in the same manner...sometimes, particularly lately, he found himself musing over the bitter irony that two cultures who met for the first time in brief-but-furious battle due to miscommunication should have so many similar gestures for the purpose of communication.
"Thanks to you, Commander," Alenko said soberly, still sounding winded.
"Commander," Garrus said inquisitively, the question emerging with the slow, deliberate shape of the word, "how did you know?"
Shepard sighed, reaching up to rub her shoulder, rolling it as if it ached. There was something...distant...about the motions, as if she did them by habit, rather than because she had managed to wrench her shoulder against the safety harness in the course of the Mako's wild gyrations. "Akuze," she repeated.
None of the other humans Garrus had worked with had ever used this word to answer questions, rhetorical or otherwise. He tilted his head almost imperceptibly, his lips barely parted to ask-
"It's an answer, Garrus," she said, "but...only because it answers your questions."
Alenko made a sputtering sound that might have been laughter, or might only have been the liquid from his canteen going down wrong.
"Commander?" Garrus could feel his mandibles twitch with a reaction somewhere in between confusion and consternation. Was he missing something obvious? Was Alenko making fun of him? Was Shepard? They both seemed like intelligent officers. Why would they undermine team morale that way? He'd worked with humans before, not often, and not over long periods of time, but enough so that he'd thought he was reasonably competent at understanding them...though, he suddenly remembered he'd felt unsure of that the moment Shepard had stared him down in Dr. Michel's clinic.
Shepard, watching him, shook her head. "I mean it's not a word most humans use to answer questions," she explained. "It's the name of a planet. Actually, I sort of expected you to recognize it."
"There are a lot of planets in the galaxy, Commander," Garrus said mildly, pleased to note that his voice was smooth and steady in spite of the jolt of sheepish shame that sparked through him. Of course, it was the reaction any self-respecting turian would expect to have at the thought of disappointing his commander's expectations. But Garrus had long thought he was no good at meeting expectations...especially when it came to his reactions. Weird, how a handful of days among a few dozen humans could make him feel more fundamentally turian than all his years in the service, or all his father's nagging. He wasn't sure, yet, though, whether the idea worried or amused or pleased him... "I stopped trying to keep track of them all quite a while back. The only planets I know anything about are the ones involved in whatever it is I happen to be investigating."
Shepard paused to take the canteen Alenko held out in invitation, touched the Lieutenant's now-empty hand, briefly, with the very tips of her fingers, a gesture Garrus assumed-given the context of the situation-to be of gratitude, took a violent swig at the canteen, handed it back to its owner, and wiped the back of her forearm across her mouth.
"A sensible attitude," she reflected. "Akuze is one planet I wish I knew nothing about."
"I can see why," Garrus said ruefully, "it you encountered one of those monstrosities."
Alenko made that odd, choking-laugh sound again. "Not one, Garrus. Several."
"What? At once? How did-" Garrus broke off suddenly, horribly aware of the words he hadn't spoken, not quite, echoing in his ears. From the looks of what he took to be discomfort on their faces, Shepard and Alenko could hear them, too.
"Barely. Just barely," Shepard said grimly, rolling her shoulder again, so violently it was apt to do more harm than good.
"It was-" Alenko broke off and looked at Shepard. Shepard nodded, rubbing at her shoulder. Alenko watched her for a minute, his dark eyes inscrutable, then turned his attention more fully to Garrus. "There was-is-a human colony on Akuze. One of the settlements on the outskirts of the colony proper had gone completely silent, and people were worried, thinking it might be a batarian raid. Shepard's unit was sent in to investigate."
"The settlement was a mess," Shepard said, rolling her shoulder again. "Looked like an earthquake had hit it... walls half-gone, stuff strewn everywhere. But there were no bodies. We decided-well, I guess I decided...I was in charge. It was-it was my fault." She shook herself slightly, like a turian trying to ease some muscles after a particularly strenuous sparring bout. "I decided we should sift through the rubble, try to find some sort of indication as to where the settlers had gone. We were at it most of the day... the team was tired, but I was determined not to request pick-up, not until I had some sort of answers, something to offer our superiors."
Alenko reached out and put his hand on her shoulder, perhaps to offer comfort, perhaps just to keep her from developing a repetitive stress injury. She turned toward him, looked at him without any indication of seeing anything.
"We were setting up camp when the ground started to shake."
"On foot?" Garrus interjected, horrified, then subsided under Alenko's positively thunderous look.
"On foot," Shepard confirmed. "I was still thinking of earthquakes, though I don't really know why. My first thought was to get away from the buildings, so we wouldn't be buried inside if they collapsed. I told the men to head for higher ground. We were scrambling up this steep, rocky incline when the first Thresher erupted out of the ground behind us. We were all still gaping at it like it was a some sort of visitation from the divine when the damn thing spit. The acid ate the face off the guy beside me. Literally. He didn't have time to scream. I suppose that was a small blessing... for me, I mean, not for him. If he'd screamed, I'd never stop hearing him-"
Using the hand cupping her far shoulder, Alenko pulled her closer to him, as if offering her the shelter of his larger frame. She seemed to resist for a moment, then relaxed into the momentum he'd created, allowing herself to lean against him. She rested in the lee of his body, looking tired and drained.
"That's how I got this, " she added, reaching up to touch the break in the center of one of the arches over her eyes. "I think. The doctors thought for months I might lose my eye. But I beat the odds. I'm good at that, I guess."
"Commander," Alenko said, his voice surprisingly gentle.
Shepard shook her head. "No, Kaidan. It's okay. I'm okay." Still leaning on Alenko's shoulder, she continued, " Even though we made more obvious targets, the three of us on the hill-face had better luck than the three behind us. More Threshers erupted up and out, biting men in half, swallowing them whole. Wrapping them in their coils. I can't really tell you what happened-it's just a confusion of images, all blurred with a a kind of red haze-from the blood in my eyes, I suppose?
"Anyway, we ran, taking cover behind anything we could. We learned the hard way that even walls don't stop that spit...one of the guys was hit in the gut. We didn't have enough medigel, but even if we had, it wouldn't have done any good, not without some way to get that acid off of him. He died while we were trying to stabilize him enough so we could move him. In retrospect, stopping at all was kind of foolhardy, under the circumstances, with those things on our heels, but I'd do it again. I hope the other guy-his name was Toombs-would too, but I'd have to ask him and, of course, I can't."
She lapsed into silence.
Garrus stared at Alenko. Alenko stared back. Shepard stared into space without noticing.
"With the wall gone, we could see that the structure was some sort of mining garage. And there was an armored car, equipped with a mining laser and some blasting caps. We didn't have a wounded man to move, but we figured we had as good a chance in that car as on foot, so we got in anyway. It was Toombs who realized... the whole time we'd been running, those damn worms never came up under rock... and the rocks we'd hidden behind hadn't melted the way those walls did.
"We circled back around...to look for survivors, to get some payback, six of one, half a dozen of the other. We didn't see any trace of the men we'd left behind-the acid is probably to thank for that-but we managed to kill three or four of those worms, before we hit the jolt-I lost control of the car-" she laughed, possibly at the expression, "The way I drive may be like crashing, but it is definitely under control. Except that it wasn't. Not for that split second. And that was enough. I wrenched the wheel back around. The front tires were back on the rock. And that frigging worm came up underneath us, under the back tires. Took the gunnery station right out of the back, caught up in that damned fringe around its head. Don't know if it meant to or not."
Garrus, who had been beginning to feel more comfortable, suddenly felt as though he might spontaneously combust. He looked around his station and patted the seat under him with a nervous talon, grateful Alenko seemed to be watching Shepard, grateful Shepard didn't seem to notice. She was still talking, almost to herself, as if narrating a nightmare.
"I dropped out of the harness, crawled through a window and got the ridge between us. I just watched that damn thing, trying to figure out what to do, how to get the car seat away from it...
"I wasn't even sure whether or not it was worth it. If there was any residual acid in that fringe, well... Toombs was already dead. I probably would have died, standing there debating over a dead man, only the remaining ordinance in the car decided to explode. Went off close enough to the Maw to give it a good scare, and whoosh, the whole damn thing is rushing past me like a freight train to nowhere. It went underground, taking that seat and whatever was left of Toombs with it."
And whenever she was on a planet, whenever she was near flat ground, she kept waiting on it to return and finish the job. But...she kept going groundside, anyway, and when a Thresher did appear, she'd kept her cool and saved herself and her team into the bargain. Garrus couldn't quite believe it, and he was willing to bet Alenko couldn't either.
There was a long and profound silence.
It seemed as long-or longer-than the attack itself had.
"Well," Shepard said, pulling herself upright. "The way I drive may take some getting used to, but-mark my words-you'll learn to love it. It keeps things interesting. What's life without a few bumps?"