THESSIA
HECASIA CITY
BORDER DEFENCE ZONE
SEPTEMBER 2188
AMINENEE SHEEFA AWOKE TO THE LIGHT OF DISTANT FIRES. Sound dampers had been turned down, so the near-continual gunfire and scream of fighters and ground vehicles was muted to a dull roar. The perpetual cover of ash and dust and smoke had meant no one had seen the sun in quite some time, or would. It dragged morale down, even though they'd all been assured they were winning. Dead Reapers, sure. Millions of indoctrinated, husked and defiled bodies still attacked, maimed, killed, and destroyed.
The War was over, but the war went on.
Aminenee stretched, yawned mightily, her body sore, her wounds aching, sleep a fleeting thing that contained no rest, her eyes gritty and heavy. The only smells were sour unwashed clothes, dirty rooms, that burnt-circuit stink of the omnipresent piles of dead husks, the sickly-sweet stench of dead asari littered everywhere, dead krogan bodies everywhere, and that underlying miasma that seemed to crawl across everything, crawl under suits and armor, cling to skin like a greasy sweat that couldn't be washed off, that soaked into and clogged nostrils and coloured every fragrance – dead Reaper hulks, some two kilometres long, crashed here and there, massive carcasses that did not rot, but stank nonetheless. They were being removed, slowly, thanks to the geth, shielded and walled off to prevent further indoctrination. She was glad it wasn't her doing it. She would not have wanted to deal with what lay under two kilometres and millions of tons of Reaper when it collapsed on a city.
But you still couldn't get rid of that smell, that nightmare odour than made every day seem slightly more hopeless than the last.
"Neemil?" She called for her daughter after a few moments. "Any of that tea left?"
Once thought lost, Neemil had been one of the refugees that had vanished and then inexplicably reappeared not so long ago. It was not a mystery Aminenee cared to ponder. She was simply grateful her daughter had returned at all. Neemil had no recollection of having gone anywhere. Aminenee didn't press her.
"One moment," she heard from deeper in the shelter. "Pity you can't smell it. It's very nice."
"Honestly," she began, dragging herself into a sitting position. "I'd rather not smell anything at this point." She stood, balanced herself as she swayed. "I'd pay a thousand credits for a five second bath. A shower. Someone to throw a cup of warm water on me."
Neemil appeared in the door, smiled, handed her a cup of Amal-leaf tea. Humans would have found it familiar, in smell if not in taste, for it smelled like mint-flavoured coffee. It would have tasted like ginger, however. Aminenee took it gratefully, hugged it to her chest like a doll, inhaled.
"You have saved me. My life, my sanity." Her daughter smiled.
"It's the last we have, Mother. So savour your sanity while it lasts." Her mother looked up over at her, smiled, took a large gulp, shrugged.
"I was never all that stable." Neemil laughed, a welcome sound among the sounds of war.
"We have some food, not much – enough for a breakfast. It's human-liberated stuff, though."
"Oh? What?"
"Their native eggs and pork-in-a-tube things."
Aminenee frowned. They'd come across a crashed Alliance shuttle a week ago, it's crew shredded or turned by husks, but its stores were intact. They'd kept she and her daughter going – and armed. Their food was all dry-cooked and packed. It was reasonably healthy for asari to eat, not preferable (not that they had much choice in the matter), but left much to be desired taste-wise.
"You go ahead. I think I'll just have a ration bar." Neemil shrugged.
"As you say." She left, went back to the makeshift kitchen while Aminenee sipped her tea and pondered how safe it was to do armor maintenance. She'd not taken hers off in over three weeks, and it must long since needed it. If nothing else, she thought with self-deprecation, it'd be grateful to get off her and get some air.
A flick of a button and local nets came on, battle-talk and updates crackling through the receiver. Her unit was on some downtime, such as it was, and would not be called back for at least another day, depending on circumstance. It didn't stop Resil and Tovatali from chiming in on occasion, asking for sitreps. Those two probably never slept either.
There was a heavy thump on their prefab suddenly, rocking it, startling her, and she tensed. It wasn't repeated, and she slowly calmed. Probably debris. The smell of Neemil's breakfast reached her. She wondered how humans ate the stuff.
It was only when the smell became one of burning food, that Aminenee took any real notice. That girl. Probably engrossed in one of her precious books.
"Neemil? You're burning your breakfast – and ruining my appetite."
She waited. No reply came back. After another moment, her anxiety rising, she stepped from the bedroom.
"Neemil?" On the small stove, the smoking pan, which she quickly turned off. One of Neemil's irreplaceable books was floating in a sink of dirty water. Aminenee tore through the rest of the prefab, but Neemil was gone. No windows or doors had been opened, their locks tight and secure. Entering or leaving would have set off the alarm. There was no way out of the place without her knowing.
Yet Neemil was gone. Aminenee began frantically calling her compatriots, the authorities, such as there was.
Neemil would only be the first of fifteen thousand, four hundred and thirty others, all from the refugee vessels recovered in earlier in the year, all of them pregnant, to vanish.
They would never be seen again.