Chapter 17
"How long have you had the suit on?"
"Are you going to take it off eventually?"
"How did you get the suit in the first place?"
"Have you tried the neural stimulators yet?"
"Don't you have clan colors to add?"
Over the next several hours following Kevin's conversation with admiral Han'Gerrel, Kevin was left alone and bombarded by questions coming from small mobs of quarians. The questions they had were genuine and curious, and they mostly pertained to Kevin's situation and the details regarding his experiences with the environmental suit. Unfortunately, most of these questions seemed repetitive and increasingly inconsequential to him, particularly because he was the one all the questions fell onto despite their changing origins. Sometimes he would encounter a few quarians within a group that differed in that they took Siri's previous advice to heart and treated him like one of them. In those cases he was able to have more natural conversations, and even a laugh here or there.
He couldn't blame them for their behavior on a whole. He would have been just as excited if he found out that one of another species as different as his was to the quarians decided to take up his unique perspective, regardless of how they previously perceived it. Even still, he still felt uncomfortable. The reaction from the masses was a much more positive one, but he was still the center of attention. To him, it didn't matter whether the general emotion of the surrounding crowd was positive or negative – he still felt exposed when he was the focus. Luckily, a familiar face broke through the assemblage and stood by his side.
"Come to ask me questions too, Tyr?" Kevin asked, weary of the constant inquiries.
"Actually, I thought you could use a hand," Tyr said, amused. "Private Rolush should be the one up here since he's the one who put you in the suit, but he's busy with more important matters right now."
"It's about time," Kevin said, not really as irritated as he sounded. "I was starting to feel awfully abandoned over here since all you guys went to chat with people."
Tyr sat next to Kevin on the bench the human had been glued to since he was left alone and looked upon the somewhat thinner company of quarian bodies. And not a moment to soon. Within minutes, another group who had heard about the strangeness of a human in a quarian environmental suit entered the room and began a quick visual search of the room. Their search only lasted a few minutes before they found Kevin, almost as though they had been told exactly what to look for. Kevin lightly slapped the side Tyr's closest knee with the back of his hand to gain his attention and then subtly pointed at the oncoming curious bunch.
"Show time," Kevin quietly said.
When the group arrived, the slew of questions started the same way that the other sessions did, with one question common across all the groups that had come before this one.
"Are you Kevin'Folner vas Kellius?" they asked.
"Yes, that is me. What can I do for you?" Kevin did his best to keep a pleasant composure. It wasn't their fault that they happened to come after several others asking the same things. He just wished that they'd tell each other what they asked him before they sent more his way.
"Well," said one of the male quarians up front, "we heard about your situation and we're curious about what you had been through before you got here. You know, how you got into the suit to begin with."
Kevin grit his teeth from hearing that question for the umpteenth time. It was moments like this that the obscuring helmet he wore was more of a blessing than a curse; it gave him one heck of a poker face. There was a pleasant change to the situation from the last fifteen or so, though, and this became apparent when Tyr began to answer for him.
"I believe I can help you with that. After this man saved us from some forsaken white planet and from the geth, we got ourselves into a situation where the atmosphere of our ship started venting out of our control. Kevin here didn't have a suit at the time, and the one he did have wasn't going to cut it against hard vacuum. So, we improvised. Tosh'Rolush, Ralik Dolannus and I pulled a stored suit normally used for repairs and fit him into it while he was unconscious. It was a close call, but we got it done."
The small crowd muttered amongst themselves. It seemed they were particularly interested in the fact that Kevin didn't make the decision to get into the suit. Perhaps it allayed their fears about a human simply deciding to get into it without any quarian opinion. After that, it was the usual onslaught of curiosity. Kevin was grateful to Tyr for showing up, as it made the series of questions seem less like a burden.
After that group was satisfied with the answers they had been given, they turned and headed back into the depths of the Neema, buzzing to each other about the interesting facts they had just learned. Kevin laid back into the bench once again and let free a sigh of relief. Tyr looked over to Kevin and tilted his head forward.
"Was a questionnaire really that taxing?" Tyr asked.
"I'm just not used to being put in the spotlight, that's all. It's an occupational hazard I tend to avoid. Put that on top of the fact that I had already done this song and dance at least fifteen times by now. . ."
"Ah yes. Subtlety is certainly hard to achieve when everyone's looking at you," Tyr agreed.
"I'm trying my best not to harbor any hard feelings, but. . ."
"No worries, Kevin, I understand. I think it's time we started getting back to the Kellius anyways. We need to formulate a new strategical plan. There are a lot of new factors to consider."
"You read my mind, Tyr," Kevin said, relieved.
"Let me just find the others and we'll head back. Chances are that some of us will end up helping the engineers mount the new guns to get it to move along faster, but I think they're still working to take them off of the old Cerberus vessel. Depends on the captain's mood, I suppose."
Kevin nodded to Tyr and the quarian headed off towards a few clustered people near the center of the room. Kevin had been ready to head back for a while now, but he was alone up until this point. It would have been counter-productive to try and find maintenance bay six without a guide, both because he wasn't cleared to be walking through the whole ship and because he couldn't read the quarian directional signs. He would have ended up lost and in trouble.
The first to show up next to Kevin from Tyr's calls for regrouping was Arla. She said nothing to him and leaned against the wall next to the bench with her arms crossed. Kevin wasn't letting her off the hook that easily, though.
"You what this means?" Kevin asked, not looking in her direction.
There was a moment of silence between the two of them before Arla finally responded. "What?"
"This means we can continue training each other. We have plenty of time now."
She didn't respond. His prodding wasn't sharp enough.
"Oh come on," Kevin prodded. "We just started getting the hang of everything. We can just pick up where we left off."
"Right, because it was so simple to begin with," Arla coldly stated while turning her head away. "We will see."
Kevin raised a brow. That was the Arla he knew, for better or for worse. Mostly the latter, in his opinion.
The next familiar suit to appear was Bela, followed shortly by Riik and Tyr. Before any of them had the chance to say anything, Kevin asked a question that had been nagging at him in the back of his mind for an hour or so now.
"Where's Ralik?"
"He's with the captain," Bela pointed out. "Apparently they caught your salarian friend wandering about after the meeting, so she asked for his help with ship prep to keep him out of trouble."
"Good one, Ralik," Kevin stated to himself.
"Shall we head back, then?" Tyr asked the group.
Everyone responded with a nod. Kevin stood up from his seat on the bench and followed the crew out of the courtyard and back into the crowded room beyond. They carefully weaved their way through the moving traffic with ease and Kevin followed closely in their wake to avoid getting separated. On their way to the bay that now held the Kellius, he noticed that they were heading further back into the tail of the ship. They passed the hallway that contained the docking cradle where he entered several hours back and proceeded to step up to the large closed double doors further down. Tyr pressed on a panel to the side of the doorway and the two slabs of metal split diagonally down the center and sunk into the walls.
Inside the doors, the path was far less crowded with bodies. The hallway down the tail of the ship was larger than the one outside the double doors both in width and height, but didn't compare at all to the courtyard. After a small junction or two, the hallway opened up into a very long room whose open space almost, but no quite rivaled that of the courtyard. Even though the room was wide, tall and ran quite a distance before meeting another wall, it completely lacked the tranquil motion that the courtyard boasted. Even more, though the number of bodies moving around was half that of the other rooms, the description of 'busy' served to be an understatement.
The floorspace, for example, was littered with equipment, crates and other more industrial grade things than what he had seen so far. Kevin likened it to a distribution center. Large metal crates and cylinders were the main objects being moved, and anything being moved had a quarian behind it. Whether it was bulky mechanical suits tailored to moving several objects at once, or crane-like claws that gripped huge collections of freight all at once. Nothing was automated back here. No mechs for loading gear, no stocking cranes without drivers. . . Even the whole ship's inventory was closely monitored by quarians rather than just scanned and checked in.
Kevin began to realize just how much he took automated systems for granted. From what he gathered, the quarians didn't have automation because of their mistakes with the geth. They didn't trust any machinery that could move on it's own, especially in their own home. He started playing out a simple conversation in his head with someone such as himself who was used to automated mechanics and the quarian situation. Why wouldn't you automate a freight crane? It's just a crane. Kevin figured that's what the quarians thought about the geth before their revolt, too. Now they play it safe. He didn't blame them.
His group took a left just inside and started up some stairs that led to a catwalk that ran down the left wall of the long room, above all the carefully controlled action at floor level.
"What's this room for?" Kevin asked, wanting an answer from someone who knew better. "Aside from the obvious."
"This is what we call disassembly," Tyr replied, his voice raised to overpower the ambient noise from all the shifting equipment and banging of crates. "All the freight we receive from other ships gets loaded and stored elsewhere, but this is where it all moves to when they need to prepare it to be used by the residents of the ship. The Neema isn't a liveship, so as you can imagine, they are constantly getting shipments of food in to replace what comes through here to be consumed."
"Food, medical supplies, anything that isn't generated on the Neema has to pass through disassembly," Riik mentioned. "It serves as both an inventory checkpoint as well as a place to disassemble the shipping crates to prep the goods for the public."
Kevin nodded to indicate his understanding of the information he was absorbing as they passed the entrance to one of several cranes. It looked to him like individual crates taken off of their bulk load were locked onto small hovering platforms to be moved by mechanically unaided workers or gathered by other power equipment. He noticed that on the floor level there were several doors on the left and right sides of the elongated room where these individual crates were pushed into, probably to be opened up and have their goods unpacked so they can be taken to where they need to be.
As they neared the other end of the busy room, they came across a set of stairs leading back down to floor level. Instead, however, Kevin's group took another left to head up some stairs in the wall. There was a clearly marked sign above the stairs written in quarian, but no matter how long Kevin stared at it, he couldn't read it.
"It says 'maintenance bays four, five and six," Bela whispered to him.
Kevin nodded. "I take it one, two and three are on the port side?" Bela nodded back in response.
Kevin and the others climbed up the stairs to the deck above them. Stairs, not an elevator. He had to wonder if the stairs were part of the original design of this old clunker of a ship or if the quarians simply favored them across the board because stairs only need a fraction of the maintenance that elevators did, even in this modern age. The fewer things that contributed to an old ship's upkeep, the better.
At the top of the short climb, they stepped out into a small hallway that was hardly populated. Down on their left further towards the aft of the long tail of the ship and where they were headed, the hallway opened up some. There was a window on the left side of the hallway that allowed them to view what was in this particular maintenance bay. This one happened to be bay six, and Kevin saw his ship being worked on. What surprised him, though, was that the 'maintenance bay' was actually external to the Neema. Docking rigs and cradles held the ship firmly in place with its nose against the side of the quarian ship while long, sturdy beams with a variety of purposes jutted out perpendicular to the side of the Neema. Quarians in their usual every day environmental suits were hopping about the hull of the Kellius, wearing small propulsion packs for directional control in the perfect free-fall of empty space. They were tethered to the long beams by thick but flexible wires in case one of them fell away from the ship.
They were already working on getting the second GARDIAN laser tower installed on the Kellius, and it was the second of two hardpoints now exposed on the top of the frigate. A huge claw mounted to one of the thicker and lower beams gripped tightly onto the third laser tower, slowly and carefully positioning it under the Kellius. Kevin surmised that it was setting up the hardware so that when the crews installing the pieces on the top of the ship were done they could move right onto the one underneath.
Kevin had never seen exactly where the hardpoints were located. They were covered by hull armor that matched the rest of the exterior. Those circular hunks of plated metal were each now attached to sets of rails that he could swear weren't there before. Kevin had seen this sort of setup before, however. When they weren't being used, the GARDIAN laser towers would sink into the hull of the ship where the ablative armor slabs were housed to conceal their existence. Upon activation, the cover would pop up and quickly slide out of the way so that the towers could rise to their functioning form. Nice.
Now that he could get a better idea of exactly where on the ship the grid towers would be, he was able to get a better sense of how he could use them. They were positioned on the port and starboard sides of the Kellius, equidistant from the center between them and about halfway down the length. Two were on the top side, and the other two looked to be set directly under the first two. This pleased Kevin, as this meant that he would have a bare minimum of two towers covering every angle around them. He could have all four tracking a target directly in front or behind the Kellius as well, minding the thrusters. This meant that they could take the classic frigate military maneuver of circle-strafing a target and put it into practice. Finally, they could take on other frigate sized ships in dogfights.
Below them, Kevin could see that the loading ramp on the Kellius was open and that the gap was filled by a long umbilical corridor wide enough to cover the entire rampway. Likewise, another corridor coming from the same beam that the gun toting claw was mounted on was latched onto the airlock of the frigate – the entrance of which was down the hall a little further and behind another door. As they took a left into that door and headed down the beam to where the airlock corridor was, Bela contacted her superior.
"Captain Kortel, we're back and heading into the airlock."
"I'm in the VI room with Rolush at the moment. Meet me in the briefing room," the captain replied.
"Understood," Bela said before shutting her comms down.
Down the corridor they went, pausing only to let the airlock's decontamination process complete. Inside, the headed into the briefing room just in time to see Siri step in. She moved with purpose and curled a finger at Bela. She didn't stop walking, but she did acknowledge everyone's presence with a nod.
"Merni, with me. I need your ship weapons experience to help calibrate the new grid."
"Yes ma'am," Bela said, slightly surprised at the urgency in the captain's voice.
Without another word, Siri and Bela filed out of the ship via airlock.
"What was all that about?" Kevin asked, also taken aback by Siri's behavior.
"She's. . . a bit of an overachiever when it comes to doing things around the flotilla," Riik mentioned.
"She's eager to get back out and continue the mission," Tyr said. "It may not look like it, but she's still taking the loss of her crew on that planet pretty hard. It's helping her keep her mind occupied, and gives her something to look forward to."
Kevin didn't reply, but he still thought about that. He hadn't seen in Siri what Tyr did, but he didn't know her nearly as long as the others. She certainly did a good job of hiding it since she needed that moment after they left the white washed planet. He admired her ability to hold such a steel-firm grip on her emotions, but he suspected that a portion of it had to do with her face being hidden and his inability to comprehensibly read quarian body language.
"I'm going to see if the captain needs my help anywhere," Tyr said, flicking a large thumb towards the airlock.
"Right behind you," Arla said.
"Third," Riik followed.
"I think I'm just going to get in the way," Kevin noted, clearly realizing that he had no talent for weapons installation or large scale ship preparation. "I'll be in the master quarters for now. Hit me up on the comm if you guys need me."
Tyr nodded and left with Arla and Riik.
Kevin turned back towards the aft of the ship and started for the master quarters. He heard the quarians working on the hull as thuds and bangs reverberated throughout the hallway. He figured it was going to be noisy as long as they worked, so it didn't really bother him. In fact, it only took a few minutes for him to block out the noise.
Almost relieved to be in his own quarters again, Kevin slumped into the chair in front of his desk terminal. Despite the excitement of getting to see the inside of the quarian fleet, and moreso the inside of a quarian vessel, he was happy to be back behind familiar closed doors. Here he wasn't under someone's ever-watching eyes. Not anymore, at least. After one final sigh, Kevin sat up and went to reach for his data storage device only to find that it wasn't there.
He had forgotten what he did with it.
Kevin sat back into the chair again. As usual, this frustrated him but there was a lot more to it. That device was his life. It was as important to him as his blade, but he carried it around with him less for fear of losing it. It was triple encrypted with an algorithm that he and Tarsil put together, so it would be a long time before anyone was able to crack it without his password or the Kellius. But that wasn't what bothered him. If he kept on forgetting such important and personal things, it wouldn't be long before he forgot how to shoot a gun as well. He was well aware of the standard grade of neural decay associated with biotics, but it usually happened at a much slower rate. Each time he forgot something, whether it was actually associated with this neural issue or not, Kevin felt he was taking one step closer to total neural breakdown and becoming something not unlike a breathing vegetable. To face one's own loss of conscious thought, to foresee his own mind trickling away into the abyss of disassociation and cognitive collapse – that was one of the few things in the galaxy that scared the everliving piss out of him.
Thankfully, Kevin was able to get his train of thought back to matters at hand. His storage device – where could he have left it? The only two logical places he could have left it were here at the terminal and in the entertainment room hooked up to the jockey equipment. He then spun a new, less pleasant idea in his mind. If the device was plugged in when The Illusive Man made contact with the Kellius, does that mean he could have scoured the data, removed certain crucial files or even worse: purged it? He made sure to remove anything he uploaded to the ship that wasn't music, but if the flash storage was plugged in, anyone with access to the ship's systems could see it all. Kevin was up and out of his chair in the same instant.
He used the entertainment room's secondary and normally locked door – the one directly connecting the master quarters and Club Kellius. He stepped inside opposite the normal entrance and hurried over to the room's nearly out of place podium. He looked at the slot where it normally protruded while plugged in, but it was not there. The feeling of relief washed over him as he realized that it at the very least wasn't plugged in when The Illusive Man contacted the ship. There was still the matter of where it was now, however. Out of instinct, he looked around his immediate area and on the floor. He spotted it laying in one of the corners of the jockey station floor. Once again, relief. No one had been into the room since then, so it probably fell onto the floor when the ship rocked from the attacks made by the Cerberus hunter-seeker.
But why was it here? He racked his brain. The last time it was used was. . . When Arla was perusing through his music library before their training session. She must have unplugged it after she shut the music down and set it on the equipment's counter. He remembered! If only it had been that easy to remember where his helmet was. Kevin closed his fist around the small device and headed back into his master quarters through the still open door. As he stepped back into his room, the door shut behind him on it's own.
Thinking it now safer to plug it in than it had been the last few times he accessed it, he inserted the device's connection end into the terminal on his desk as he sat down. He now had a new view on the data he repeatedly checked and updated with comments that he hadn't had before. He knew that the project that bore him, this project, was Cerberus-led. Unfortunately, there was no real evidence as far as he could remember from the logs of just how much influence the human black ops group had on such a project. It didn't even sound like The Illusive Man was involved at all except for maybe thinking it up and getting it started. But that was only how it seemed, and it was obvious that The Illusive Man was a long time expert on making things seem ways they actually weren't.
Kevin brought up the device on the terminal and accessed the files. As he navigated the file structure, his focus hovered over the directory that contained the small collection of files locked with what was identified as a Cerberus-originated cipher. The cipher itself was rooted into the very code of the files in question and Kevin didn't know anyone he could trust – even Tarsil – that had a means of cracking it.
What about Tosh? he suddenly found himself thinking. Tosh was a programming savant in some ways. He had to be if he was able to reverse engineer the black box sectors in the VI to allow himself access to the hunter-seeker's internal near-critical systems. Next time he had a moment with Tosh, he would have to find out whether or not the quarian trusted him now. If he did, Kevin would ask if he could do it. For now, though, he settled on picking up another audio log to satisfy his reconnection with the information stored within. It felt like ages since he last listened, even in knowing that it had only really been just a few days. He picked out the one he had last listened to and he played the one after it.
"Log Seventy-three, time reference – one week following refresher day. Allison keeps attempting to reassure me that our initial hypothesis about the slowing of the children's neurological development is still only speculation, but the results we have been gathering from our new scan equipment says otherwise. Brain activity is only now shifting focus to the proper regions, and extra attention is always peripherally needed in order to keep the enhanced nervous system in check. We may need another few weeks to get a proper estimate, but initial readings suggest that the children are as far as a full month behind normal development schedules of other biotic children. I do my best to be optimistic around the staff, but in truth. . . I think the primary phase of this project may go on for a little more than a few years. McRoilie out."
Kevin raised a brow. He never remembered being a kid with any sort of hampered learning curve. As far as he could actually remember, he was on par with the other children at the Grissom Academy. He typed in a quick comment and the denotation of the first name of the staff to be mentioned: Allison. Right away he was on to the next file.
"Log Seventy-something. Time reference – nearly a month since the initial development hypothesis was established. Well, one of my colleagues was right, and I owe her a bottle of wine. It seems our fears for the cognitive development of the children were unfounded. Not more than a day ago, our daily readings registered brain activity on par with and exceeding that of other like-aged biotic children. It was a subtle change, but after reviewing several weeks worth of scan data back to back, I was able to see it lead up to this point. An easy way to describe it is this: A classic adage for humanity's brain potential states that we only use ten percent of our brains at any given time. These children, then, are using fifteen percent, rather than ten. Their physical brain structure has adapted at unfathomable speeds to deal with the extra load of the enhanced nervous system, which I will now call ENS from here on out. They seem to be developing cognitively as well as physically as normally as any other child, biotic or not.
"In fact, we are seeing a development cycle more stable than that of traditional biotic children. We suspect that the difference lies in the need for a biotic amplifier in standard cases. One theory is that no matter how well wired a biotic amp is to seem natural, the hard fact remains that it is recognized as foreign by the body and is treated as a gateway to the element zero deposits. The lack of an amp cuts out the middle man in a sense, and allows the brain direct and absolute access and development with the eezo nodules. Under normal circumstances, the resulting brain interactivity directly to the deposits would be far too weak to establish any usable mass effect field. This only serves to remind me why we've worked so hard and made these kids suffer through the ENS. Without it, all this would be moot. McRoilie out."
Kevin had to smile to himself. Even though he was only a pawn in a much larger game, This McRoilie guy really enjoyed his pawn-ish position. There was so much excitement in his voice when he discussed new developments, and so much worry when he outlined major causes for concern. He was honestly passionate about his work, not just someone assigned a job. Maybe that's why The Illusive Man picked him for the team.
Right in the middle of Kevin's pondering, Tyr's voice and a mixture of mechanical background noises blared into his ears, shattering his temporary mental immunity to all the noise from the installation of the guns.
"Kevin, you should come down to the cargo hold. You'll want to see this."
Intrigued by Tyr's enigmatic proposal, Kevin responded. "Be right there."
Kevin closed everything on the terminal and removed his storage device. He was only now taking notice of the ridiculous number of pockets and built in storage pouches on the environmental suit. Fitting for an entire species of technological pack rats to have as many places to hold stuff on their person as possible without it getting in the way. He personally could only figure a few ways that he could use them, and most of those involved extra thermal clips or new ways to holster his knife. He settled on placing his data storage in one of the pockets on the side of his left bicep. A little flap closed the opening snugly and prevented accidental loss of its contents. With that, he headed out of the master quarters.
Down at the bottom of the last set of stairs was the door to the cargo bay. He stepped inside, but was unexpectedly confronted by a second door that he didn't even knew existed. The first door closed and the air quickly cycled. It then occurred to Kevin that this was an on-the-fly airlock whenever the loading ramp was open and not officially docked in a bay. He only had to wait a few extra seconds before the second door opened and he was in the cargo hold.
Kevin looked around the hold. There was a lot more going on than he thought. Quarians running powered suits were lifting and moving various metal crates around, making room for more items that were being carried in from the Neema. He found once again that the quarians had a good sense of organization – the once overcrowded room was now properly and completely organized into clusters and there was still some floorspace left despite there being more in there than there was before. Ship materials were clustered together in one area, food and drink in another (separated down the middle to keep levo and dextro-amino based foods apart), fuel in third, and a couple other clusters he couldn't identify by looking at them. Unfortunately, the cargo hold's acoustics were considerably subpar before beingloaded full to bursting and the noise from the loading mech replacements echoed loudly. This explained the horrible background noise when Tyr called him.
Kevin found Tyr near the middle of the room, intently focused on his PDA while occasionally giving directions to the ones carrying the cargo around. He looked up in just enough time to see Kevin approaching him and he lowered the PDA.
"What did you want me to see, Tyr?" Kevin asked, getting right to business.
Without saying a word, Tyr turned around and reached for something behind a crate. When the chief turned back to Kevin, he was holding the breather helmet to the hardsuit he wore before.
"You've gotta be kidding me," Kevin said in disdain. "Where was it?"
"One of the loaders found it while setting up cluster space. It was rolling about on the floor in the far corner to the right of the ramp. I wish I had seen it while I was running the inventory check the other day."
Kevin shook his head. The helmet was useless to him in its current state since the suit it went with had its legs forcibly removed. He could get it adapted to fit the second suit in the closet of the master quarters if he wanted, but. . .
Could he do it? Siri made an interesting point when they had arrived on the Neema. He was seeing things from a perspective that no one had before. The perspective of an eternally suited quarian. If he even so much as opened the visor under anything but extreme circumstances, the effect and the experience would be lost. The fact that he hadn't yet garnered a level of respect and even acceptance from the residents, and maybe even Siri's team. Normally he didn't give two craps about what people thought about him, but it was more than just opinions. If he had the helmet adapted and abandoned his current garb for a more comfortable hardsuit, it would be a metaphorical slap in the face to most of his new squadmates. Maybe even paired with a right hook to the gut. Still, the option was there, and he wasn't about to minimize his choices to appease the quarian general public. He decided to hold onto the helmet for the time being.
"Thanks, Tyr."
"Don't know how much use it'll be now that your hardsuit's chopped up. I figured you'd at least want to know where it was hiding when you needed it most."
It then struck Kevin that the quarians, or at least Tyr, didn't know about the second, bulkier hardsuit in the closet in the master quarters. Either one of them went to get it when he was out and is keeping secrets, or Ralik did and just hasn't told them. He'd just let it be for now.
"Speaking of hardsuits," Tyr continued over the clangs and mechanical hisses, "I requisitioned a set of tri-layer ablative armor for your enviro suit. You're a member of the squad now, and you can't go fighting geth with nothing but a shield and a bare suit. Sorry, it's fresh. No battle scars to match your past accomplishments."
"Thanks again, Tyr. I'll put it to good use, don't you worry."
"I certainly hope not. I'd much rather your shields deflected everything close enough to actually hit you. Can't win them all that way, though, so armor's your next best layer of defense. Anyways, they said it'd be ready in a couple hours, so we should have it before we leave. That's assuming the captain doesn't overdo this overseeing thing she's doing and push to prep a ship in record time."
"Guess we'll just have to wait and see," Kevin said.
"Now if you'll excuse me, I have to have a complete and accurate inventory report for the captain by the time we disembark. She tasked me with this personally, so I've got to make sure it's done right the first time. Can't trust any of these kids here to keep track of everything."
"Don't hurt yourself," Kevin lightheartedly jabbed.
Tyr immediately went back to monitoring all the moving items and noting things on his PDA. Kevin turned and headed for the small airlock while staring at the scuffed face of his old breather helmet. It seemed as though it was mocking him, knowing full well that it just happened to be the required item, absent when Kevin's life hung by a thread. While the design on the face made no attempts to simulate any sort of face, Kevin saw it anyways. A smirk. A wink behind the thin visor. How did it even get down here in the first place?
The airlock cycled for a few seconds before granting him passage into the innards of the ship. This time racking his brain did not help him resurface any memories regarding what he did with his helmet prior to all this. It was annoying, but it was also inconsequential. He was still alive, likely to the dismay of the accursed smirking helmet, and he had a new getup that would probably last far longer than his old one with the proper care.
The bangs and clangs of the GARDIAN weapon installations were now louder towards the bottom decks of the ship rather than the upper decks. This was good news to Kevin and he headed for his room once more so that he could relax a bit before he was called again. The rest of the prep still had a few hours to go and Siri hadn't assigned him anything yet. Best to take the moment while he could since he had no idea if he would get any moments to relax until they got back. If they got back. Kevin set the helmet down on his desk next to the terminal and used what little he had learned from Arla's tech lessons to get his omni-tool to turn on the massive vid screen lining the wall between the entrance door and the door to the entertainment room. Surely there were some vids or at least a game or two he could play to relax a bit. He sat down on the long couch and started scrolling through a surprisingly long list of media.