Baggage

Kind of liking Liara's personality now that I'm getting the hang of writing her. Opinions to the contrary welcome.

Eight pages of talky bits and technobabble! Liberties taken with in-game dialogue. (Special thanks to thirteenthchime for compiling the "Romance Dialogue Project – Kaidan" at the Mass Effect community on Livejournal.)

The shipping docks at the Czarnobóg Fleet Depot were crowded. Humans of all shapes, sizes and colors milled about, some moving the heavier, bulkier crates and carriers with exosuit cargo-loaders and cranes. Systems Alliance soldiers –Em Peas? Liara wondered – stood at attention at nearly every station. The heavy, dark-gray Hahne-Kedar armor worn by the Em Peas was a contrast with the lighter clothing of the dock workers and merchants. Liara didn't like the look of the rifles in the Em Peas hands.

She wondered what Em Peas meant exactly; the translator had no alternative words for her. "Lieutenant Moreau?" she asked as she and the Normandy's helmsman made their way towards the transport that would take them to another human installation, Arcturus Station – the Human System Alliance's base of operations. She had not gotten a chance to ask Shepard what the term meant before the Commander had briskly turned on her heel and strode away after seeing Liara and Joker to the Normandy's airlock.

Joker didn't answer as they navigated around a particularly noisy batch of humans haggling over a dropped container of goods. Armor and weapons mods and ammo had spilled when a large cargo-loader had dropped the large shipping container with Kassa Fabrication's logo emblazoned in green on the side.

Thinking of the Commander brought the painful, broken message from the beacon to the forefront of her mind. She reeled, suddenly unsteady on her feet.

Not sure. [Dyo]. The science will prevail. [Okto]. Three hundred sixty. Eve far from there. Seven hundred forty nine. [Endeka]. Do not go there. [Deka] [exi]. Planet of [ydronefoseon]. Strike blind [ktitores]. Protect the life. You destroy to them. It is not nowhere sure.

Liara sucked in a breath. Exhaled. Her head felt heavy, her legs felt wooden. She swallowed thickly, her tongue and throat not working properly. She needed more time to meditate over the images that came with the message. They were too much. Her temples throbbed as she tried to regain control of her senses. She focused on the fallen container, on the logo, catching only snatches of heated conversations. She realized with a start that she couldn't understand them. The images gradually faded from her mind's eye again.

It appeared the humans weren't haggling over the container at all. An argument? Her translator was universal and top-of-the-line; however, she had only downloaded the humans' trade language from the Extranet. In the Traverse, that was all she had needed to communicate. Here though… They had been ashore fifteen minutes, and already she thought she heard at least seven different languages.

By the Goddess, how did they keep up with one another? How had they expanded so quickly? She made a mental note to get the latest software and patches for her translator once they were on board their transport.

"What do you want?" the helmsman asked finally. "Everyone calls me Joker, by the way." It took her a moment to realize that he was talking to her. He was a little bit farther ahead than she was since she'd distracted herself by watching the humans bicker over who was at fault for the shipping container.

What had she been meaning to ask?

Oh. Right.

She scurried to catch up with him so that she would not have to yell over the sounds of voices projecting, cranes lifting, and robotic joints whirring. The buzz of the mini mass effect generator in Joker's leg braces was soothing to her senses amongst the hubbub of the shipping docks; the images were completely gone by the time she spoke. "I do not know what the Commander was talking about when she said to be careful of the Em Peas," she told him. "The soldiers?"

"MPs," he replied. He stopped briefly, leaning on his crutches, and looked over at her. It was difficult to discern his expression because of the strange hair covering the bottom half of his face, but his eyes were pretty. "Military Police personnel." He gestured vaguely at the gruff-looking soldiers before putting his hand back on his crutch. "Don't give them an excuse to throw your ass off the station. Aliens aren't exactly welcome here."

Confused, Liara stared at him. "But I have not done anything."

He shrugged – at least she thought it was a shrug. "Yeah, well. We're kind of insulated types, us humans."

"Would it not be easier to integrate?" she asked. Out of habit, she ran a finger across the darker coloring of her brow.

He made a growling sound, maybe it was grunt, and moved away using his crutches to propel him along. Liara wondered how long it took him to learn to navigate using such devices. He was very good at keeping his balance. "We can't even 'integrate' amongst ourselves, Dr. T'Soni."

His point was punctuated when a yellow cargo-loader barged past, the operator paying no mind to pedestrians. The helmsman said nothing, watching the loader move away. The skin pinched between his eyes, the tufts of hair above his eyes slanted into the expression Liara thought was a frown. There were shouts from workers and other pedestrians along the exosuit's path as humans dodged the machine's legs. Someone yelled, in galactic, a colorful curse about the operator's questionable parentage.

Oh, of course, the translator had to pick that up, she thought, irritated.

"Those things walk like chickens," Joker complained with a shake of his head. Liara knew that chicken was a type of meat that the humans ate - and rumor had it: everything they ate tasted like it - but she'd not bothered to research what the animal looked like. The loader walked like any other mech she had seen, so she said nothing. She made another mental note: Look up chickens.

They continued along the docks looking for the bay. Needing to get to the deck above, they took an elevator. Thankfully, the elevator was devoid of people. The strange stares she was getting from almost everyone was beginning to claw at the edge of her already jumbled nerves. She stepped closer to Joker, the hum of the generator in his leg braces calming her somewhat.

"Did you see the Commander's vision?" Joker asked when the doors had closed.

The sudden question startled her, her blue eyes darting to his green ones. Gone was the hidden, unreadable expression. He was frowning at her. Anger radiated off him.

"Yes."

"Did you hurt her to get it?"

She shook her head. "Of course not."

He studied her a moment; the anger seemed to subside. "Ash seemed to think you did."

"I'm sorry: Ash?"

"Gunnery Chief Williams."

"Oh." Her. "The melding took a lot out of both of us," Liara said, not knowing exactly how to explain. Shepard had a very strong will. Syncing their nervous systems long enough to extract the images - By the Goddess those images! - had been difficult at best. It had become a battle of wills. Shepard had no concept of relaxing. Liara was still confused as to how Shepard had managed to read Liara's thoughts. She hadn't meant to push that hard. Goddess, how embarrassing! She didn't know if explaining that it had been her first meld would make either she or Shepard (or her crew, a voice in the back of Liara's mind added unhelpfully) feel any better about the debacle. "I would never intentionally hurt Commander Shepard."

"Your mom is traipsing across the galaxy with a rogue Spectre and a geth army," he stated, eyes narrowed.

She looked at her feet, her mouth turned down. "I do not understand any of this," she told him, looking back up at him. "Benezia was always an advocate of peace." His expression remained stern. She swallowed the lump in her throat. "What more do you wish for me to say, Joker? I have no idea why she would follow Saren. Especially since he has openly attacked a human colony with his geth followers."

"Three colonies," he corrected her, moving away and taking with him the pleasant hum of his generator. "Four systems in the Armstrong Cluster were overwhelmed last month and three more colonies have gone silent since we picked you up. It's a full-blown war. Casualties are in the tens of thousands right now." He set his crutches aside. Leaning against the wall, he massaged his forearms where the pads of his crutches had rubbed the area raw. Humans are so… pink. Even the darker-complexioned ones."And the Council hasn't done shit to help us." He looked up at the elevator's ceiling. "How are we supposed to 'integrate' if we don't get help when we need it? How many more have to die before they even notice us?"

Liara winced. She had not realized the humans' side of things. Were they that much of a threat to galactic stability that the Council was doing nothing? Had the Krogan Rebellions truly scared them that much? "The Council can only do so much," she offered. "I do not know what else to tell you." She did not know how much he knew of the Rebellions or the Rachni Wars. The humans she had met on expeditions had known next to nothing unless they were treasure hunters. Those particular ones had not lasted long against her biotics when they had attacked her.

"Dr. T'Soni, it doesn't matter." He gazed at her. "They were rhetorical questions anyway."

"Oh." Not knowing what else to say to him, she awkwardly told him, "Joker, you may call me Liara."

Normandy's decon chamber itched just as much as it always did. The UV light passed over their skin, baking away the microbes, the venting system disinfecting their bodies, their clothes, their hair.

"Vyrnuus had it in for me after that," Kaidan said as he and Shepard waited for the airlocks to disengage. The ache was beginning to subside from his shoulders. "He cut corners, pushed hard." He shook his head, memories barreling to the surface. He wet his lips. "I mean, you either came out a superman or a wreck. And a lot of kids snapped. A few died."

Shepard nodded. "I have the list," she said. She met his eyes. "We can skip it if you need to."

"I'm thirty-two, Commander," he said with a shake of his head and looking away. "You don't serve as long as I have without coming to terms with stuff like that...or yourself. I'll read it."

They were silent a moment before he shrugged and told her what was bothering him. It had been bothering him ever since Luna. He should have brought it up before now. "The point of all this – I guess – is that when you cut corners, it's not always obvious who pays for it."

Rahna paid for it. He paid for it. All the kids that had snapped or died paid for it. Vyrnuus paid for it in the end. Vyrnuus had made him into who he was. But the cost had been high.

"So why are you telling me this?" Shepard asked, concern and confusion scribbled in a line across her forehead. "Are you saying I'm cutting corners somewhere?"

He shook his head. "No. I'm saying—" Hell, what was he saying? Yeah, he'd wanted to talk about what had happened on Luna and Therum, and he'd wanted to talk about Jump Zero, but things were blurring into a tangled mess now that he was discussing it out loud. He took a controlled breath, decon's venting system playing havoc with his senses.

The cost of going after Saren would probably be just as high as the price he'd paid learning under Vyrnuus. The decisions Shepard would have to make… the ones she'd already faced were big. He couldn't just sit around and let her become another Vyrnuus. He didn't want to lose her.

More importantly, he didn't want to be the one pulling the trigger this time.

"It's probably inevitable that we'll have to," he told her in lieu of telling her about what he'd done to Vyrnuus. Damn it, he cared about her. More than he should. "And when that happens, I want to help you, Shepard."

An eyebrow rose. "That's not the appropriate way to address your commanding officer, Lieutenant."

Kaidan blinked. Shit. "I wasn't speaking to you as my commanding officer, ma'am." Had he misread her? He stared at her. "I don't want to send any bad signals. Just working on what I picked up. You tell me if I'm going too far."

She was quiet a moment, watched him. He licked his lips, nervously. With a pang, he realized that maybe she only saw him as an underling, just another grunt, just her detail commander. But instead of finding a way out of the conversation, he plowed right ahead. "Look. When someone important to you is up on a ledge, you help them. Keep them from making mistakes better left to a kid."

Shepard continued to watch him, confusion written on her face.

"Lot of static on the comm, Alenko," she told him at last.

He rubbed the back of his neck. "I didn't mean to dump any baggage, ma'am." She was accusing him of sending mixed signals? What the hell?

"We're marines," she told him after a quiet moment of contemplation. "All we have is baggage." She kicked her sea bag at her feet. "We just have different labels for it all."

"Lay it on me," he offered.

He hoped to hell it wasn't the stress of command catching up to her. He wondered if… connecting with Dr. T'Soni had somehow affected her. Garrus was right, it had been consensual, but he doubted Shepard was pleased about the public display. She was only open to certain degree. "Open door policy" didn't mean "let's have sex in the comm room." He wondered how Shepard could be so calm about what had happened during the debrief. Of course, she was also the type to try to work during an operation, his mind supplied unhelpfully. And who knew, maybe… maybe there was something there between the asari and the commander. The idea didn't sit well with him at all. It ate away at his heart piece by piece.

She looked at him, studying his features under the Normandy's decon light. He felt like a bug under a microscope. She opened her mouth to speak. Decon whirred to a stop and the locks disengaged with a hiss.

"Logged: The Commanding Officer is ashore," Normandy's VI chimed. "CMC Vassiliadis has the deck."

"I might take you up on that offer, Kaidan," she stated, gripping her sea bag. "Right now, we've got work to do."

"I'm here for you," he told her as they exited the ship, he took Shepard's bag from her and slung it over his shoulder. Garrus, Hardy, Tali, Wrex, and Fredericks were waiting for them on the dock.

As they looked for a transit to take them from dry-dock to the shipping docks, Kaidan took a moment to marvel at the view. He never missed the opportunity to look. The view never ceased to amaze him. He looked out at the ships coming in and going, at the repair drones and satellites working over the ships and tugs. The Czarnobóg Fleet Depot was in a halo orbit at Berstuk's sun-earth L1 Lagrange Point. From the dock, they could see Berstuk and its ring system in the distance. Roughly the size of Saturn with a similar ring system and over three dozen moons, the hydrogen-helium gas giant was a pale yellow-green because of the trace amounts of sulfur and chlorine in its atmosphere. The ring system was varied in colors of tan, white, and cream. The closest moon, Ingemann, was an oddly-shaped gray rock roughly two kilometers wide full of craters from impacts over the millennia.

Shepard joined him at railing for a moment. "It's beautiful, isn't it?"

He nodded, the anxiety from earlier easing away. "I remember the first time I set foot on Luna and looked up at Earth," he found himself saying, a smile finding its way across his lips. "Most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. We were at a layover before heading out to Jump Zero. They had a system malfunction with the ship we were taking and had to do some repairs."

"Your parents never took you to Luna?"

He snorted. "You say that like going to space is cheap."

Shepard shrugged, or tried to and ended up wincing and reaching for her injured shoulder. "My father was a geophysicist; my mom was a marine xenobiologist. We travelled all the time before they were offered jobs on Mindoir. Dad said it was a dream job. From what I remember neither one of them had liked Demeter or Eden Prime. I think we even lived on Bekenstein for a time. Lots of lights."

"When did you move to Mindoir?"

"I was six. My sisters were three and two. My brothers hadn't been born yet." She smiled sadly.

"Big family," he said. His cousins were fun, but he wondered what it would be like to have siblings.

The sad smile didn't fade. "The first of five." She sounded proud of her status. "Two sisters, two brothers."

She stepped away from the railing when the transit arrived, looking at Berstuk a final time before boarding. Kaidan followed, more questions coming to mind as he boarded behind her and looked around for a seat. The only available seat was right next to her.

He shoved their bags in the overhead compartment. "You have an L3 implant," he said as he sat down. His leg brushed hers. "Were you exposed in-utero?"

Shepard shook her head. "Secondary exposure from an explosion over our colony when I was fourteen. I was one of thirteen teenagers that suddenly could break our own bones when we got angry." She gave an unladylike snort. "Lot of broken bones that first year. Then the Raid happened about two years later. I'm the only biotic left from Mindoir."

He did the math in his head, his breath catching in his throat when he realized the year. "You were exposed right after Conatix shut down?"

She nodded. "I think so. Quite a coincidence, huh?"

Kaidan gritted his teeth. Yeah. I'll say. No one could prove ship drives were intentionally detonated over the colonies, but, damn, how was that for a fluke?

"How did your family wind up on Mindoir? It's just a farming colony right?"

"There are gold, silver, and platinum mines, too," she told him. "My mother's parents were farmers in Riverside, Iowa. When colonization opened up for Mindoir, they jumped at the chance to farm there. It's one of the few worlds with enough nitrogen in the soil to feed Earth plant life. After they found how rich the soil was, they moved the whole rest of the family there and sold their Earth farms. Dad got on a mining company as a consultant. Mom was a consultant for a fishery."

"It's hard to picture you as a farmer," he admitted.

She laughed. "If it makes you feel better, my grandparents on my dad's side were accountants."

The transit came to a stop and the doors opened for them to exit.

While the Citadel was packed with aliens of all sizes, the Fleet Depot was seemingly devoid of them. The ones Kaidan did see were viewed with suspicion. Wrex, Tali and Garrus were getting strange looks as they walked them to their transport. The aliens, minus Dr. T'Soni, were going back to the Citadel to hunt for clues to Saren's next move. Shepard's rank only went so far here; even her Spectre status among humans was looked on with some doubt – they found that out going through customs. And besides, there were very few restaurants that served dextro-amino food. Wrex and Garrus both had contacts at the Citadel. Kaidan wasn't sure what Tali was going to do. Fredericks and Hardy were going to go with her to "keep her out of trouble." Keeping Tali out of trouble was just as easy to do as keeping Garrus and Wrex from fighting. Kaidan wanted no part of it. The less he knew the better, he was sure of it.

"I'll keep them out of trouble," Tali assured him as the five boarded their transport, a civilian Athabasca-class freighter called the MSV Screaming Eagle. The ship's captain was a retired Marine drill instructor named Mack Slaughter. He was a tall man with large, beefy arms, a bald spot, mustache, small beady eyes, and gruff expression. He stood on the loading bay, looking imposing. Kaidan saw at least two turians among the crew that milled about – a good sign.

"Commander Shepard?" a woman asked from behind them.

Shepard and Kaidan turned to look. The woman was thin and reedy with deep bronze skin, high cheekbones, and dark hair that was chopped just below her ears and slicked down with oil. A cam drone floated to her left. "Khalisah Bint Sinan al-Jilani, Westerlund News."

Kaidan found he couldn't stop staring at the large mole on her forehead.

Berstuk – an evil Wendish god

Bernhard Severin Ingemann – a Danish poet/novelist who published a thesis on a Slavic/Wendish pantheon. (His works are located on Project Gutenberg, for those interested.)

The Prothean message was achieved by writing a simple paragraph in English and translating it to Greek and back again a few times using an online Babel Fish translator.

I could resist neither the Star Trek nor the G.I. Joe references. ;)