Chapter 29
"There was this one time while I was perusing around Omega, just minding my own business," Kevin explained. "I have a usual dance partner in Afterlife. You guys know the place, right?"
Several heads bobbed.
"An asari that freakin' lives at the club. Anyways-"
"Ohh, an asari. Kevin, you chase the blue tail?" Bela razzed. There was a round of rising "Ohhs" around the table.
"Let me finish, Merni. So she spots me and comes over to say hi, right? Now apparently she was just dancing with a krogan. A krogan! If you must know, they can't dance for crap."
"Have to agree with you there," Arla said with a chuckle. "Not surprising that she jumped at the chance to bail."
"This krogan was a younger one, I think. Not too bright, even by their standards. He got pissed that I stole his night's fun. Personally, I think he was just looking for a little after-party treat. Stepped up to me while the asari was grabbing my attention." He paused to murder his meal a bit, leaving time for others to heckle.
"Well put, Folner. Grabbing your attention," Riik sniped. A round of chuckles were had.
"Minds out of the gutter, guys. Geez. So in an attempt to assert himself as the dominant of the two of us, he gave me the death glare and pulled the asari back with him. She wasn't enthused."
"Are you sure? I'm pretty sure women love being fought over," Bela commented. "I do, anyway."
"ANYWHO. So I gather up a bit of dark energy and put both of his lumbering feet in a fairly strong positive mass effect field. In essence, increased their mass to make them each weigh about as much as a fully loaded fighter. Confused, he kept pushing and pulling on his legs to try to break free of the mysterious snare. As he did that, I randomly changed the mass effect field from a positive one to a negative one and back."
"I can see where this is going," Tyr said as he cheerfully leaned back in his seat.
"Results were, he would randomly kick nearby dancers hard enough to lift them clear off the ground. Needless to say, he quickly became the least liked individual in the entire club. Fights broke out and he got the boot by security. Probably wouldn't have known it was me if I didn't have such a huge smirk on my face."
"Well played, kid," Tyr admitted.
Kar paused sucking on his meal to make a mental note. "I guess biotics are good for more than just throwing things, huh?"
"Oh you have no idea, guys. No idea!" Kevin finally got done mashing his meal to smithereens and began attempts at consuming it.
"I can just imagine some of the possibilities," Ralik stated with a sly smile.
"I've always wanted to kick around a lifted volus," Riik stated.
Tyr nodded. "It'd definitely make hauling inventory around easier."
"You guys are thinking small time," Arla said, pointing her tube of dinner around. "You could use biotics to win arena fights with a snap."
"You and your violent impulses," Kar denounced. "It'd do better for work around the shipyards in the flotilla. It would certainly save the host ship some energy."
"Weightless sex," Bela blurted out.
The room fell silent.
"What? It could work." She concluded by taking a confident chug of her meal.
Arla shook her head, likely smiling to herself. "Leave it to Bela to stop a conversation dead in its tracks."
"That takes skill, I'll have you know," she shot back cheerfully.
Kevin tapped the chin of his helmet in thought. "I suppose it could work. Man, I'd be exhausted by the end, though. Keeping mass effect distortion fields active is tough work. I might keep that on my 'things to do before I'm dead' list."
"Aw, Kevin, you just need more stamina!" Bela responded without inhibition.
"Well, Bela, you sound like you might be able to help me with that," Kevin challenged.
Arla reached over the table and slapped at Kevin's helmet. "Don't encourage her!"
"Your room in two hours?" she goaded.
"It's a date."
Arla leaned in to slap Kevin a second time, but he prepared himself with an overly cartoonish martial arts stance.
"Relax Lieutenant, you know they're just joking around," Tyr said to reel her in. His tone depicted him being in a much better mood than he had all day. Arla sat back down and resumed her meal, but it wasn't without further comments from the peanut gallery.
"If we didn't know any better, we'd think that it actually bothered you," Riik said with an elbow to her side.
Arla turned her head to the side away from Riik. "It doesn't bother me. Why would it bother me?"
Bela leaned forward. "I didn't mean to break rank, Lieutenant. My apologies."
Arla turned to look at Bela. "What? Break rank how?"
"I mean, if you think you're better qualified to. . . you know, 'train Kevin's stamina', then by all means!"
Kevin forced back a chuckle and covered his visor with his free hand, facepalm style.
Arla recoiled. "You- You guys are being absurd! Cease and desist!"
The team broke out into laughter. "Gets her every time!" Arla huffed and shoved her food canister to her tube.
After the hilarity died down and the meals were being wrapped up, everyone mutually concluded that since there's an actual solar cycle to observe, they should try and sync up their sleep schedules with it. The Kellius's sensor system would provide overwatch during the night until the perimeter systems were in place. Later, as Kevin was heading to his room to turn in for the night, Arla caught up with him.
"Hey, I know this is going to sound a little awkward after what went down in the mess, but. . . do you want to take care of our training sessions first thing in the morning? That way we can focus on our mission for the remainder of the day."
Kevin paused to turn to look at Arla. "Awkward? Nah. I'm game anyways, though." He paused. "Yeah, no better way to start the day than some tech and some hand-to-hand before breakfast."
"So. . . I'll see you first thing in the morning, then?"
"Not first thing in the morning. That's when I say good morning to my pillows."
"Yes. Right. I didn't mean-"
"You know, you're way too easy to get to when it comes to insinuations about affection."
"Why does everyone think that?"
"It's like Bela and height jokes. Get some sleep, Lieutenant, before you talk yourself into a corner."
"I- Right. Good night."
"Likewise." With that, Kevin headed to bed and fell asleep without much trouble.
The next morning, he was woken up by a blinding beam of light shining onto his face. The sun was at the perfect angle to shine in through one of the side viewports and right onto his face. At least he wouldn't have to be woken up by someone screaming into his ear over the comms. He sat up and focused on waking up for the next few minutes. He angled his head towards the sun so that he could feel the warmth of its rays on his face. To his dismay, the visor blocked thermal energy out. He could be blinded by the sun, but he couldn't take advantage of the natural heat given off by its energies. How disappointing. After he worked the fuzziness out of his mind, he up and left the master quarters.
Outside, he could hear a conglomeration of voices traveling down the hall. It sounded as though the rest of the team had just gotten up and was heading to the mess hall for breakfast. Instead of joining them, though, he turned right and headed downstairs and into engineering. He was surprised to find that Arla was not there waiting impatiently for him like he had expected. Figuring that he had just beat her there, he took a seat at the workbench and waited. And waited. It was little over an hour before Kevin gave up and left engineering. He sought out the crew quarters, aiming to inquire to one of his shipmates of her whereabouts. He didn't feel like listening to Terra's pseudo-realistic sounding voice this early in the morning.
He hit the panel on the door and it swooshed open. Inside, the room was empty – well, almost empty. There was a certain quarian who was supposed to be in engineering sleeping on one of the bunks. Seeing this as an opportunity to have a bit of fun, Kevin slunk into the room, leaving the door to close on its own. He silently stepped over to the bunk she lay face up in and brought his visor within a centimeter of hers.
"You're late," he said in a strong, but controlled tone.
Within the same instant, Arla's lavender eyes snapped open wide, and her body shook from the shock of being startled out of her sleep by a face and accompanying voice suddenly right at her nose. Her limbs reacted in a reflexive manner and exploded outward, leading one of her strong knees right to Kevin's unprepared groin. His suit absorbed the brunt of the impact, but it was no hardsuit; it could only do so much against the kinetic force introduced to it. Kevin fell to the ground, eyes squashed shut and hands automatically covering his injured bits.
"Wha- Kevin? You bosh'tet! You scared the piss out of me!" It took her a moment to realize why Kevin was now on the floor, squealing in pain ever so slightly. "Oh, Keelah. I'm sorry!" She tried to help him up, to which he refused. He didn't want to move right now. Arla continued to stand nearby, uncomfortably apologetic, while she waited for him to get up from his current state.
After a few awkward minutes, Kevin gathered himself together enough to stand. His stance was tender and his pride, badly damaged. "That's alright," he forced out, his voice normal but strained. "I wasn't using them anyways." All his hand-to-hand skill meant nothing in that moment. If only his ego could be as crushed as his little boys felt just then.
"You startle people out of their sleep often?" Arla sarcastically asked.
"Only when I'm driving a blade through their throat. I'm not used to people reacting like that. Or at all, for that matter."
"I can see that," Arla said through a chuckle.
"That's right, have a laugh at my expense. I'll just make it up come time for your training." Kevin straightened up and they slowly made their way out into the hall. He started walking bow-legged, but he eventually straightened that out too. "Speaking of training, what are we learning today, Ms. Tavval?"
"Advanced suit functions. I expect that you'll want to take that suit off sooner or later, or at least know how to prep it to get to that point."
"Looks like I won't be bugging Tosh with that now."
"I doubt you could even if you wanted to. He and Ralik are probably going to spending weeks on end with their faces stuffed in the data we compile about this planet."
". . . True enough."
Once in engineering, they began the training session. Kevin learned a lot of the technical details about a quarian envirosuit along with a number of processes for things like taking the suit off, removing the visor, removing and refilling the waste collection system, clamping off areas to prevent whole-suit breaches and the program management package. He was surprised at how modular the suit's operating system was – individual elements, such as the software that monitors vitals and software that checks food for foreign amino acids and contaminants can each be installed, removed, disabled, or modified without risking the integrity of the overall system. Arla explained that this was because individual parts may need upgrading, updating or hardware swaps, and they couldn't risk having their suit's software fail. They sort of need it to live.
Unlike the other tech training sessions, this one was mostly business and little idle talk. Even after two hours, Kevin was still learning new things he could do with the suit. Some of it was rendered useless as far as he knew because Tosh had to disable the related core systems for Kevin's safety. He didn't say anything to Arla so that he could learn them anyway. He might be able to use them one day.
Nearly two and a half hours into the lesson, Kevin and Arla decided that the customization of the envirosuit's many, many menus was a good place to stop. They had a brief discussion over whether or not to have breakfast before combat training, and in the end they decided to go without so that they'd be lighter on their feet. Within five minutes of ending their tech lesson, they were up in the entertainment room, removing their armor. This time, they removed their armor together; Kevin had finally acclimated to the configuration of the armor and no longer stumbled embarrassingly when removing or installing it.
Kevin had just decided, as they were piling their armor in a corner, that he'd take a hint from that nightmarish dream he had not too long ago. He would utilize the club functions of the lights in the room to create an absurd amount of visual noise. The difference was that he would have loud music playing in addition to the lights – mostly for their enjoyment. When Arla saw him heading for the podium on the side of the room, she simply had to comment.
"Uh, Kevin? I'm down here. We can't train if you keep running away."
"Hold on. I had a dream about this once," he speedily explained as he worked feverishly on the controls.
"You had a dream about us?" She almost sounded surprised. Flattered, even. "A dream about us fighting?"
"Yes. Well, more a nightmare. I. . . Don't really want to get into it."
Arla tilted her head. It was too late for Kevin: her curiosity had been piqued. "Oh, a nightmare about us? Now that is interesting. What happened? Were we in danger?" She suddenly had the demeanor of a schoolgirl who had just sparked a conversation about her favorite subject.
"It was. . . Situational? I don't know. I said I don't want to get into it."
"Or maybe it was just me in danger, and you weren't able to save me. Am I getting warm?"
"I said I don't-"
"I just want to find out what makes you squirm, Folner."
"That's kind of creepy."
Arla walked up to the base of the podium and leaned forward against the smooth wall of it, using her elbows to hold her weight. She placed her head between her hands while looking up at Kevin, slowly swaying her protruding backside back and forth like an innocent little girl simply waiting for a story.
Kevin let loose an exasperated sigh. "Alright. You want to hear how it went?"
Arla didn't let up on her pose. She simply nodded.
"Okay, it went like this. You and I were here in the entertainment room about to have a duel, when-"
Suddenly, the lights began to flicker, flash, and change color in sequences typical of dimly lit clubs. Loud, pounding music completely drowned out Kevin's explanation, though he nonchalantly continued anyways. Arla couldn't hear a word of it, and she quickly inferred that this was Kevin's plan to 'not get into it'. She stood up straight and gave Kevin an angst-fueled shake of the head, but in the end she admitted defeat. . . She'd pester him later.
When Kevin stepped down from the podium, she walked over and yelled into his ear to overpower the pulsing audio ambience. "What is all this for?"
Kevin positioned his head likewise and yelled back, "Visual noise! I figured we'd both learn something today! Let's see how difficult it is to spar with this fancy light show running!" Arla nodded, indicating she understood what he was getting at. They returned to the center of the room and began their training.
Unfortunately, the task was not quite as easy to adapt to as it was in his dream. Instead of a perfectly matched pair dodging and deflecting every blow, they both landed several solid hits on each other in a matter of minutes. Kevin quickly found out that they would both walk away from this one heavily bruised. Normally this wasn't an issue since they had stockpiles of medigel, but his being aware of their inability to return to the galaxy at large meant that rationing was going to become a priority very, very soon. He wondered if Arla knew yet.
His distracted thought cost him another chop to the outside of his right thigh. The impact caused his leg to collapse on the spot, but he used this to his advantage. He intentionally let gravity take him down and he performed a quick leg sweep to trip her up. Typically this was easily seen and dodged, but the added distractions of the music and lights kept her from reacting properly. The quarian fell onto her side with a comically inaudible thud, using her arms to absorb a portion of the impact. Kevin rolled over to immediately pin her arms. If he could succeed in pinning her down, he decided he would end the visual chaos so they might train for at least one hour without distraction.
And succeed he did. With his hands on her wrists, she barely did much to struggle free. Instead, she lifted her head up as high as she could towards his to communicate. "This is too hard, Kevin! I can't track your movements much at all! I feel like I've just lost everything you've taught me!"
"It's a learning experience for us both, Arla!" Kevin rolled off of his trainee, hoping that there wasn't another body in the doorway. To his relief, there wasn't. He promptly headed up the podium and shut down the music and lights, bringing back that calm, neutral gray-white of normal ambient lighting.
"Keelah, that was disgraceful. I feel like I'm back at the Neema again, training under Yolis again, and getting beat at every turn again." She placed a hand over her visor as an expression of mental weariness.
"I don't think you realize just how well you did back there."
"Here we go. The 'optimistic review after a failure' speech."
"Just stop and think about it for a moment. You not only managed to land hits on me, but dodged, blocked or deflected most of mine. Granted I landed hits on you, but that was a given before we started. Pardon the egotistical tone. In fact, I think we ran about even on that match."
"So. . . What does this mean?" Arla asked, still looking for the positive point to all this.
Kevin stepped down to Arla from the podium. "You were fighting dynamically, not from memorized approaches. You wouldn't have had the time to figure out what I was doing during all that chaos and execute a memorized set of moves quick enough for me to take a hit. Key words were: fighting and dynamically. You were doing on instinct what I've been trying to teach you this whole time."
Kevin could swear he saw her face lighten up a bit when she tilted her head up to that revelation. "You know, Kevin, now that I think about it, you're right. I don't remember actively thinking about what move set I was going to try. I didn't have the chance because I was way too focused on trying to follow your moves."
"Bingo. Lesson one is complete. The perfection of everything you learned there comes from excessive practice at this point."
Arla's head fell forward and down. "Lesson one? How many lessons are there?"
Kevin looked up to the ceiling in thought. "Uh, I don't know. Two, I guess. Maybe three. I hadn't thought that far ahead yet. . ." He saw her relax a bit in response. Kevin meandered over to the center of the room, arms crossed. "Well, I'd say we still have an hour or so before anyone actually expects to do something. We can work on perfecting that smooth and supple form of yours, if you want."
Arla stared at him accusingly.
Kevin jumped to correcting himself, "You know I meant your fighting form, not your body. I'll have no student-teacher relations of that kind until you can beat me in the ring!" He included a waving finger for added cheesiness.
Arla shrugged. "Lack of scandals makes for a boring drama, Folner."
"I prefer action."
She stared at him again with those lavender, wide, 'I can't believe you just said that' eyes.
"Action vids, Arla. Action vids. With shooting, and war and not interspecies relationships going too far."
Arla slowly leaned in and cupped a hand around the small light at her chin. "You're way too easy to get to when it comes to insinuations about affection."
Kevin paused with a pointed finger held aloft in her general direction. "I. . . Wow. Beaten at my own game. That sucks."
Arla held her head high in victory and trotted off towards the door. She wasn't even going to let him duel it out of her. Kevin sighed and trudged his way after her. After a quick breakfast, they headed outside to catch up with the rest of the team. As expected, everyone was already working on the research camp. The Skimmer, surprisingly, was still where Kevin had left it.
Bela was he first to notice them walk down the loading ramp. "Hey, they're finally done making out. Can we get to the good stuff now?"
Kevin was quick to return the snarky welcome. "Bela, that's because I had to work out some 'frustrations' since you stood me up. All night I waited for you and you didn't even so much as knock on my door. And here I thought I was going to learn from a master."
"I was. . . Busy!" the short one shot back. "Just making sure my skills were up to snuff. It's not me who's in desperate need of personal counseling."
"Hey, it was your idea to begin with!"
Ralik interjected here, "I think the human expression 'you two fight like a married couple' applies here, yes?" It worked surprisingly well; both Bela and Kevin shut up on the spot.
Tyr shook his head. Kevin was fitting in a bit too well. "Right, then. Onto the important matters. The basecamp is nearly complete, which means it's time to start preparing some field research missions. Last night, Arla, Tosh, Ralik and I briefly discussed the type of research we should be conducting during this phase of our mission."
Arla stepped forward. "We've broken that up into four branches, each being focused on by four two-man teams. The branches are: reconnaissance, which will focus on investigation and mapping of the region; sample collection, which will focus on acquiring all manner of organic and non-organic samples from the planet for study; perimeter defense and observation, which will focus on making sure no geth ruin our day; and finally, research, which will focus on the actual scientific study and compilation of data from the other branches into usable results."
"Have the teams been made up?" Ralik asked.
"We didn't make teams for this," Tyr explained. "I have a hunch that everybody's own preference will work this out on its own. Any volunteers for the varying branches?"
"I'll take recon," Kevin enthusiastically spat out.
"Research," Ralik and Tosh simultaneously announced. They looked at each other, rather unsurprised.
"I suppose I'll run some defense," Bela volunteered.
Riik jumped in just after Bela finished. "I'll work with Bela on this one. She'll need me for this." Bela met that comment with a playful backhand to the side of Riik's head.
"I'll take recon as well," Arla stated. "My sniper skills will more than likely come in handy if we run into hostiles."
"I can show you the wooooorld~." Kevin began to sing to Arla. Her reaction was nearly identical to Bela's.
Tyr nodded. "That leaves Welkas and I for sample collection." Tyr peered at Kar who nodded in acknowledgement. "Alright, we all know our objectives. I want everyone to be armed at all times, especially you two on recon. We certainly won't want any surprises from the geth to go unanswered. Are we all clear? Good. Let's get to work."
The team broke and headed back inside to gather up weapons and thermal clips before heading out on their missions. After that was taken care of, each team separated to go take care of whatever their first matter of business was. For Kevin and Arla, that was getting to the Skimmer and getting it powered up. Outside the cargo bay at the bottom of the loading ramp, Kevin greedily jumped into the driver's seat of the hovercraft and turned the machine on. Just as the hoverpods kicked on and began to lift the vehicle off of the ground, Arla jumped up into the driver's seat much the way Kevin did to her the day before. Kevin was subsequently shoved into the passenger seat.
"My turn to drive," Arla hollered over the roar of the engines.
"Fine!" Kevin said, taking his immediate defeat in some manner of stride.
Arla brought the Skimmer to full readiness and she punched down on the throttle. The Skimmer then lit up two discrete thrusters that were pointed forwards, located on the bottom left and right edges of the chassis, and the vehicle shot backwards a good thirty meters before coming to an abrupt stop. Luckily, it missed the tent.
"Oops," the driver embarrassingly muttered before setting the thrust in the proper direction.
Kevin, however, was plastered on the dashboard due to being completely unprepared for the ferocity of the directional momentum. "'Oops'? What do you mean 'Oops'?"
Ignoring Kevin's rhetorical question, Arla pushed down on the throttle again and the Skimmer sped off away from the basecamp.
Over the course of the next several days, each team went about whatever routine they established for themselves. For Kevin and Arla, this consisted of tech and combat training sessions first thing in the morning, breakfast, and then a long trip in the Skimmer for the remainder of the day. The trips were long, exploratory journeys to previously unmapped locations surrounding the leafy valley the Kellius sat in. They started bringing lunches and even dinners with them in order to maximize the time they could stay out, and thus maximize their scouting range. They needed to be as efficient as possible with their time, because time was the major limiting factor in their particular branch of the research.
The exploration was focused west and south of the landing site. To the north and east was the long, sharp, and hazardous mountain range that separated them from the bulk of the geth conglomeration. Kevin was confident that he could navigate through it using the Skimmer to hover over general hazards. Additionally, he could utilize the short-lived 'jump' feature, which was nothing more than an overpowered burst of power to the hoverpods. The problem was, taking such a trip was time consuming, and they couldn't afford to waste time in the mountains while there were other, more easily accessible regions to map.
Each time "Team Skimmer" left, they came back a little later at the end of the trip. It got to the point where they were returning to the basecamp after the sun had set and the rest of the team had already retired into the Kellius. This was a problem for Tosh and Ralik, because they needed to link up their omni-tools with the Skimmer's interface in order to sync up with the newest geographical data, and they were not looking forward to staying up later than they had to in order to accommodate the two trip junkies.
Kevin and Arla blamed this on the planet's most noticeable feature: the ever-frequent isolated lightning storms. Tosh explained that the planet's strangely powerful magnetosphere was somehow involved, but exactly how these storms formed so frequently in such stable atmospheric conditions was beyond his understanding. Even more interesting, the bolts of lightning were always ground-to-cloud, not cloud-to-ground. These 'upside-down' lightning bolts were a beautiful thing to behold, but were every bit as dangerous as normal lightning. Every time a storm rolled in, Kevin and Arla explained, they had to shut down the Skimmer somewhere low and not exposed to the sky in order to prevent their vehicle from getting fried by the large number of bolts in the thirty minute storms. The storms also included the usual elements typical of any garden world thunderstorm like high winds, heavy rain and sometimes hail.
While all of this was true, it wasn't the entire truth. As expected, the planet's strong magnetosphere was constantly at work shunning the powerful radiation from the local star. After the sun set, the sky was usually ablaze with an amalgam of dancing colors. The planet had geomagnetic storms at extremely low latitudes, and it almost seemed that they could see the planet's aurora borealis wherever they went. Sometimes they would find a nice high spot and shut the Skimmer down for a few minutes just to take in the awe-inspiring vistas as they got bathed in a sweeping spectrum of color. It was far more interesting than watching the Kellius discharge high in the atmosphere of some unnamed planet.
Occasionally, the duo would come across peculiar geographic formations during their trips. The first example they found was a solitary mountain at the extreme western end of the range that passed north of the research headquarters. The top third of the formation was mind bogglingly cylindric. The bottom two thirds of the mountain looked as though the land was flowing like water from the direction of the range, had splashed up against it and engulfed around it, and had frozen in time before the backside could settle into the gradual slope of a typical mountains. For such oddities, Kevin and Arla performed extensive scans of the formation themselves so that Tosh and Ralik would have a complete picture of whatever it was. Unfortunately, the picture was as incomplete as the scans from the Kellius in that the surface was easily captured, but anything further than a certain depth down was simply blank. Kevin thought about trying to get a look inside the 'mountain', but the rocky crags of the top third were sheer cliffs. The Skimmer couldn't jump that high.
When it got to the point that Kevin and Arla couldn't make it back before dark without making any stops, they decided to segment the research there. They'd look at other objectives to see what else needed to be done. They made that decision on their eighth day on reconnaissance. That night when they finally got back, they saw Ralik impatiently sitting on the loading ramp while playing with some handheld tools. He looked up in time to see them approach, probably sporting a foul gaze behind that helmet of his. Arla carefully drove the Skimmer into the Kellius's cargo bay, which had been serving as the unofficial garage for the past week. After the vehicle was shut down, Ralik then decided to get up and approach them.
"I don't even want to know what you two could possibly be doing out there that causes you to take this long to get back."
"I already explained this to you, Ralik," Kevin said as he hopped down to the floor. "We're running out of unmapped areas that we can reach via Skimmer. Just sync up and get your cranky face to bed."
"Have you even looked over the map data yet?" Arla asked, irritated.
Ralik walked up to the Skimmer and synced his omni-tool to the VI within. "Erm. No. No we haven't. There's just way too much data to process. Your new map data is added to our virtual region map and that's about the long and short of it. Tosh and I have been bogged down trying to figure out this planet's exhaustingly expansive array of peculiarities."
"So. . . You're slacking off," Kevin drolly stated with a half-hearted accusatory point. Arla tosses in a nod for emphasis.
Ralik had to pause his work to look up at the two. "Slacking off? What. . . nerve. We're just. . . Well, we're enamored with the new challenges this planet presents." He attempted to finish the statement strong and with pride, but it still sounded like an excuse used to dodge the issue.
"Good Lord. Whatever, Ralik. Let me know when you're ready to handle the real objectives. You know, the ones we came for in the first place." The way that Kevin worded it carried a different meaning for Ralik than it did for Arla. To Ralik, it was more of a spark of nostalgia back to the moment they left the Citadel after that talk with Tarsil.
Ralik finished up his work with the Skimmer and sighed. "If it will help you sleep at night, Kevin, I will endeavor to focus on the mission from this point forward."
Kevin smiled at his miniscule, but fulfilling, victory and he began walking towards the airlocked stairwell. "See? That wasn't so hard. Now if you're done, call it a night with the rest of us."
"Yes, yes, yes. As you wish, your majesty."
"Will you two get a room?" Arla quipped.
Kevin and Ralik stared at each other for a moment and shook their heads before continuing upstairs. On their way up, Kevin mentioned grabbing a bite to eat before bed, since he and Arla hadn't so much as snacked for hours. Ralik decided to join them, if not to at least chat a bit about random things. Just before they stepped into the mess hall, however, they heard fervent conversation in the briefing room at the end of the hall. Curious, the trio put their meal on hold and headed into the briefing room themselves to see what the commotion was about. Inside, they found Riik, Bela and Tyr standing around the briefing table with a hologram active centered between them. The hologram looked to be an image of the star system they were in with an amalgam of lines both interlacing throughout it as well as shooting out and away in one defined direction. The three around the table barely gave the trio of newcomers a glance as they debated.
Riik was currently the one explaining something. "No. See these lines here? Those head outside the solar system. Way out beyond our range." He swung his hand along the path of the lines shooting off to the edge of the hologram.
"There's a lot of noise in here," Arla stated, indicating that the ranking officer wanted to be briefed on what was going on.
Bela took the initiative here. "Perimeter security has been tight – and boring. Tosh helped me adjust the Kellius's scanners to filter out local interference caused by the magnetosphere and the star. Riik and I, on the other hand, have been using the scanners to monitor off-world geth activity and movement during quiet hours. These lines plot out various ship movements throughout the solar system."
"You'll notice," Riik explained, "that while the majority of the activity is within the solar system, there is definitely some extra-system activity."
"Exploring, maybe?" Ralik asked with a shrug.
"We considered that, actually," Bela replied. "This doesn't seem to fit that behavioral profile, though, because they all head off in the same direction every time. There must be a destination of some kind."
"Why is it that whenever we discover something new about the geth, it sounds like bad news?" Arla asked.
"Probably because it usually is," Kevin said with a chuckle.
"Does this information change anything?" Arla wondered aloud.
"I was just thinking the same thing, Lieutenant," Tyr concurred. "I'm leaning towards 'yes'."
Riik extended his arms from their usual crossed position to lean on the table. "If there's something out there the geth decided was worth their collective attention, it is in our best interest to find out what it is immediately. We need to know if it could be a potential threat to future operations."
Arla nodded. "Makes sense. Do we have a timeframe?"
"Depends on whether or not we're going to pack everything up," Bela commented.
"Screw that," Kevin interjected. "I'd much rather we had someone stay here and keep an eye on the place."
"I take it that means we have no automated defenses?" Ralik asked.
Bela shrugged. "The Migrant Fleet can't give us everything."
"Guess that's one thing Tarsil forgot to send with us," Kevin drolly stated.
"We can always lock it down," Tyr suggested. "We have some heavy duty cables and locks. We might have enough to encompass the tent."
"That won't stop the geth if they're curious enough," Arla replied, "but we don't know what we'll find. We can't risk heading out there a man short, and we can't waste all that time packing everything up. We may have to deal with a simple lockdown. This has taken top priority."
Kevin crossed his arms. "Tomorrow, then?"
Tyr nodded and leaned on the table the same way Riik was. "Rest well tonight and get a good breakfast in tomorrow. We'll lock down the camp as best we can then head out to track the geth to whatever their destination is beyond the edges of the system. Don't forget your weapons. Votis, will you relay this new intel to Rolush and Welkas?"
"Yessir," Riik said with a nod.
Arla dismissed everyone and they all left the room. Kevin, however, remained for a minute or so staring intently at the hologram hovering over the table. Something concerned him about wherever the geth were heading. It was that same gut feeling he had when they first learned about the valesh'saat waiting outside the Melkanis relay. He wasn't ready to lose another squadmember. He let out a long, slow breath and shut off the holographic representation of the solar system. He left the room to catch up with Arla and Ralik before any more unwanted thoughts could invade his mind.