twenty-three
"See, even she thinks we're a god."
"Shut the FUCK up."
"Did we used to swear?"
He didn't know. The memories returned to him with his name were so vast, so full of pitfalls of despair and confusion, Shepard had not examined them in detail. He'd pulled out the parts that jabbed him in the metaphorical ribs, the painful parts, the memories that didn't want to be forgotten. He'd left the rest for later.
Got nothing but time.
Would examination of self, for 49,179 years, send him through the wormhole of insanity? The Catalyst had sounded anything but sane. Hell, that was half the reason Shepard had made the choice he had. An arrogant, self-absorbed, hero-complex-driven desire to do better. To FIX SHIT once and for all.
Accessing the stream of energy that buzzed around Kat's wrist, Shepard typed: I am sorry about Finch.
He was. He might have lost his humanity, but he had not lost the capacity to feel. His emotions had been muted, mostly a matter of anxiety and memory, but now that he knew who he was, or had been, he felt everything. He understood Kat's pain.
I know what it is to lose a friend, he added.
Kat didn't answer, but her posture suggested thought rather than utter despair. She was upset, he could see it in the lines of her face, the way her chin kept dipping toward her chest as if holding her head up proved too much effort.
Shepard let her rest. He turned his attention to other problems, of which there were many. His damsel in distress had no food. He could continue to extract and combine the building blocks of water from the thin atmosphere inside the asteroid, but food was another matter entirely. He couldn't make food. Even ground up, the rock of the asteroid lacked the right protein strings. Kat would not be able to digest it.
He also had the small snippet of entity to consider. The inert lump of something hanging in space where the Bataille had been some twenty four hours earlier. Out of curiosity, Shepard expanded the bubble around it and watched, unsurprised, as the dark mass expanded along with, eating the space dust and adding it to its mass.
"Wonderful."
The flicker of annoyance incited by the sarcastic jibe from the kernel faded into absorbed thought. He'd talked to himself before he had died, so he could hardly claim to be surprised by the fact he did so afterward.
Seeking a distraction, Shepard turned his attention to Clobaka. The terraforming platforms housed approximately three hundred scientists and their families. As he watched, the first two shuttles rose from the planet surface. Apprehension gripped him, briefly, until he remembered Cerberus did not have ships circling the planet waiting to gun down traitors to their twisted cause.
Cerberus had gunships somewhere. As an entity, they still existed and were just as dangerous as the blob of black he kept as a souvenir. But they were not his concern right now. Not his concern, ever, really.
Back at the asteroid, he considered the problem of tunneling through the collapsed tunnel so he could extract Kat and ferry her to safety. Could he carry her to Clobaka in time to board one of the shuttles? Theoretically, he could. The explanations behind her journey and subsequent appearance at the far end of the system would require more than theory, however.
One problem at a time.
He began absorbing and moving rock.