Andre Rodriguez, age 30. Heavy equipment operator. Cause of death: Hypoxia.
Oliver Black, age 48. Foreman. Cause of death: Hypoxia.
As the list slowly scrolled, Garrus made a thoughtful noise; a low, quiet rumble in the back of his throat.
Lily Shen, age 25. Hydraulics technician. Cause of death: Hypoxia.
After their grisly discovery in the workshop, the team had hurriedly moved on, but the detective had used his visor to collect scans as they passed through, and the data was now being processed by the impressive suite of forensics software in his armor as they journeyed deeper into the mine. With the information he'd accessed earlier on the plant's network, each of the bodies they'd found now had a name and a small, smiling employee photo associated with them. The detective felt some small measure of duty to search through the files for emergency contact information, but he resisted the urge to dig any further—he couldn't afford the distraction of wondering about the families of dead strangers right now.
Nejad Allam, age 33. Mining engineer. Cause of death: Hypoxia.
As ugly a thing as it was to say, Garrus had to confess he was thankful that the dead were human, rather than turian. Stumbling upon a roomful of corpses was harrowing business regardless of the circumstances, but that degree of separation between species was a mercy of a kind. It was easier to compartmentalize and push back against the inherent awfulness of it all when confronted with alien features, rather than the dead faces of your own kind.
Stoicism was practically a defining characteristic of turian culture, right up there with a healthy sense of national pride and the condescending air of moral superiority that seemed to be required to get a seat on the Council. "Tears for the pyre," as the old saying went; amongst his people, most serious displays of emotion in public were considered inappropriate, bordering taboo. To openly show fear or anger or doubt was to openly show weakness.
A good turian—especially one acting in a professional capacity or in a position of authority—was expected to be practically emotionless regardless of the circumstances, and as much as he tried to pretend, it was something that Garrus had never been much good at. By turian standards, he was hot-blooded, even reckless, and in an organization as traditionalist and hidebound as C-Sec, he'd developed a bit of a bad reputation during his investigation into Doctor Saleon.
Long hours spent interrogating suspects and countless sleepless nights wasted poring over evidence in search of even the tiniest lead had worn away any sense of propriety he possessed. By then end, he... well, he'd been a wreck.
After a few weeks, his lieutenant had sat him down and given him the "it's alright to mark it a cold case" talk, and rumors were circulating that he'd be pulled off the investigation any day now. At the time, Garrus had been nothing short of desperate, and the discovery of the fresh incisions all over the doctor's assistant had seemed like exactly the break he'd been looking for.
However, when he'd kicked in the door of the salarian's lab with half a dozen other C-Sec agents in tow only to find that it had been hastily cleared out, relief and triumph had instantly turned into a cold sort of dread that sat in the bottom of his stomach like a lump of tungsten. The detective had put an out alert, but by the time he'd rushed into the traffic control center, he was too late to do anything but watch the bastard burning hard for wild space with a cargo of civilian hostages. When he'd been informed Saleon wouldn't be intercepted, Garrus had had a meltdown.
An argument with the watch commander in the port control center turned into a shouting match with Pallin in his office, and the detective recalled not giving a damn that he was probably putting an end to his career, there and then.
Somehow, he'd walked out without either resigning or being fired, but wasn't the least bit surprised when he arrived at work the next morning to find he'd been reassigned. A transfer to the Presidium placed him firmly under the Executor's thumb and well away from any serious cases. There, he'd spend the foreseeable future giving directions to lost tourists and fining people for littering, his days of running and gunning through the Wards as part of the Division of Investigations nothing but a distant memory.
Even his investigation into Saren's activities hadn't been an exception to that. It was a "snipe hunt" as Bailey had called it when the detective had first asked for the human sergeant's help—assigning a lone officer to look into the matter was the closest thing to nothing the Council could do. Still, he'd have given anything to see the look on Pallin's face when the Council had stripped Saren of his spectre status—perhaps he'd make a stop by his office the next time they were on the Citadel. As a bad turian, he wasn't entirely above gloating.
Shepard's voice crackled over the radio. "Garrus?"
The detective dismissed the list of names from his visor with a wink. "Another two-hundred meters or so, and we'll reach a processing area. The map just shows unexplored tunnel beyond that, but based on the foreman's logs, the ruins should be close by."
"Understood." The spectre replied. "Catwalk ahead. Looks like there are railings, but watch your step."
Through the doors where they'd discovered the workers, the mine opened up into a massive underground cavern, formed millions of years ago from the remnants of what must've once been a truly enormous magma chamber. The miners had built a network of catwalks and rails along one of the upper terraces, allowing them to exploit the cave system to reach mineral deposits left behind by the flow of molten rock.
However, whatever was powering the doors apparently hadn't reached the other systems in that section of the mine, leaving the cavern utterly black and eerily silent. As a result, the squad marched through the darkness at a walking pace, checking their footing as they went.
Without power to light the way, what Garrus expected was probably an impressive view across the massive subterranean canyon was nothing more than an endless expanse of suffocating darkness. Even with his visor's low-light mode activated and Shepard on point, the detective found he had to keep his light trained on the ground to ensure it was still there. The ledge was barely wide enough for two people to walk shoulder-to-shoulder, and a careless stumble into an unseen hole or slip on a loose slab of rock would be all it took to send one of them plummeting over the sheer cliff that was little more than arm's length to their right. The rusty cable that hung loosely between posts as a sort of guardrail didn't inspire much confidence.
Ahead of them, the rough stone path gave way to a narrow metal walkway that bridged a wide gap between ledges. Shining his flashlight through the slats of the metal catwalk, Garrus could see a wide passage had been cut into the steep slope beneath the bridge to permit the construction of a set of hauler tracks that disappeared deep into a different section of the mine, the top of the steel rails glinting faintly where the wheels of passing carts had scraped away the corrosion.
With a grunt, the detective abruptly halted, shutting his eyes and listening intently, much to the confusion of Alenko a few paces behind him. Ahead, Vandas and Shepard heard the biotic's confused murmur and paused to look back at him, exchanging perplexed glances. The commander called out to him cautiously.
As a rule, turians generally enjoyed better eyesight and hearing than most races, but in the sprawling underground mine, the sharpshooter's senses were starting to play tricks on him. Aside from the steady tread of their footsteps across the metal bridge, the caves were deathly quiet. The indistinct noise of a few small rocks shifting and tumbling down a slope somewhere behind them in the darkness sent him whirling in search of something lying in ambush. The subtle creak and groan of cooling metal and machinery became the whispers just out of earshot. If Garrus strained to listen, he would've sworn he heard the peculiar siren of one of the mining haulers somewhere, calling through the empty tunnels like some sort of ghastly phantom...
The turian's eyes snapped open. Wait, check that—he could hear a hauler, and it sounded like it was getting closer.
"There's another hauler moving around somewhere, stay on your toes."
"Yeah, I think I hear it, too." Shepard remarked, her head tilting ever so slightly as she listened. "Let's get moving, I wanted to be off this ledge before that thing catches up with us."
Suddenly, the air was filled with the awful screeching of metal against metal, the sound ringing off the stone walls of the cavern as the entire squad turned in search of the source. Even as he clenched his teeth against the jarring noise, Garrus felt a touch of amusements.
Despite only being aboard the Normandy for a few of weeks now, it hadn't escaped the detective's notice that the commander seemed to have some sort of arrangement with the universe at large under which once in a while she would say something while on a mission only to be immediately contradicted in the most dramatic fashion possible. It wasn't enough for Jane to be occasionally unlucky and wrong, the powers that be wanted to make a show of it.
Farther uphill, their wandering mining hauler appeared from the darkness, preparing to round the corner that would take it into the narrow trench that ran beneath them, haloed by a storm of bright orange sparks from the wheels. Riding low on the rails with a heavy load of ore, the cart barreled into a curve without slowing, tilting precipitously for a moment before finally slamming onto its side with a thunderous crash. The boxy ore carrier tumbled and spun down the steep incline like an advancing avalanche, crashing against the wall and turning sideways across the passageway and sending a landslide of ore and contorted steel careening towards the walkway's supports.
"Move!" Shepard shouted from the front, turning and making a sprint for the other end of the catwalk. The others turned to follow suit, but the avalanche of stone and steel was on top of them an instant later.
The hauler slammed into the walkway's columns, crumpling the metal pillars and shearing anchors from the stone face with a horrendous noise. Garrus and Alenko found themselves suddenly cut off when the platform sheared away in front of them, grabbing hold of the railings to avoid being bucked over the side. On the other side of the gap, Shepard and Vandas found themselves caught near mid-span as the structure gave way.
With the awful shriek of bending steel, the section of the catwalk beneath Nick's boots suddenly buckled sideways and he gave a muffled gruntas he was slammed hard into the deck. The corpsman's rifle clattered out of his grasp as he scrambled in vain for a handhold on the smooth deck, and Garrus felt his stomach drop when the medic slid over the edge an instant later, disappearing into the abyss with a surprised shout. The systems in sharpshooter's visor followed the corpsman's tracker into the darkness for a few moments before it too vanished.
Shepard only narrowly avoided the same fate, grabbing onto the railing with one hand even as her feet slipped out from underneath her. Garrus and Alenko watched horror from their vantage point, the detective frantically coiling a length of utility cable he'd pulled from one of his armor's storage compartments in the hopes of throwing the spectre a lifeline. Just when it seemed as though Jane might hold fast, the swinging catwalk crashed against the cliff face, and Garrus could only watch helplessly as the force slammed her chest-first into the guardrail and threw her over top rail.
There was the awful clap of her armored body against the steep canyon walls and Garrus saw the barest flicker of the lights on her helmet as she plummeted head first over the edge. There was an airless wheeze from Shepard over the team's radio frequency, and the last thing she probably heard before the world went black was Garrus yelling her name.
...
Everything was so impossibly black that until he noticed the dim glow of his armor readout in the corner of his heads-up display, Nick wasn't even sure if he had his eyes open at all.
The medic groaned loudly as he eased himself up from the ground, forcing himself onto his hands and knees before stopping to collect himself. He felt his arms sink to the wrist into something soft and faintly warm, and clutching a handful, he felt loose ash slipping between his fingers before tossing it away.
Fantastic. He'd gone from stumbling through a mine in the dark to falling into a volcano in the dark.
The lack of any serious, sharp pains and the fact he could move were both encouraging signs that nothing was seriously broken or out of place, but a deep, pervasive ache throbbed across the corpsman's entire body, like someone had thoroughly worked him over with a meat tenderizer. His lips found the mouthpiece of his hydration pack tucked into the inner edge his helmet and he gulped down several mouthfuls before giving a weak, sputtering cough. The water, warm from the heat, came as a welcome relief.
His rifle was somewhere nearby, the glow of its partially obscured flashlight giving off just enough light that his visor's low light mode allowed him to get some sense of his surroundings. Through the shroud of fine dust that had been kicked up when he landed, Nick could discern he'd landed in the bottom of some sort of massive chasm, the darkness that stretched endlessly above him making it impossible to judge how far he'd fallen.
A section of broken catwalk had landed nearby with one end embedded in the ground, looming in the cloud of dust like the murky outline of a massive tombstone, and Vandas couldn't help but imagine the sort of damage it would've done had it come down on top of him. He doubted he would have been around to see the aftermath.
The medic tried failingly to recall what had happened, remembering little more than a shout from Shepard before the world dropped out from underneath him, followed an instant later by the sensation of weightlessness as he fell. He wasn't certain how far he'd fallen, but remembering the precipitous drop the team had been navigating along the edge of, he was somewhat surprised he'd woken up intact.
He checked the time displayed in the corner of his heads-up display and frowned, trying to determine how much time had passed. If he'd lost consciousness, it was possible he'd been down here for hours, though since the dust was still settling, that seemed unlikely. Perhaps it was a moot point, anyway—in his experience, the difference between being knocked unconscious and simply getting too rattled around to do anything except lie in a daze for a while was minimal.
Feeling his way blindly across his chest rigging, he found the pouch that contained a small flashlight and pulled it out, the pitiful little beam—intended for little more than examining injuries—struggling to push the utter darkness back more than arm's length amidst the smothering cloud of ash.
Surveying his surroundings, he noted his HUD marked Shepard's position some distance away with an orange diamond, indicating that she was likely injured. However, at this range, his armor's medical suite couldn't sync with the commander's and didn't provide any details.
"Shepard, do you copy?" The medic called over the team's radio net. "What's your status?"
Silence.
Outstanding—he was going to have to slog through the dark to find his commanding officer, and then he was probably going to have to drag her around through it when he found her.
With a pained hiss and a long, colorful series of curses aimed at everyone from himself to volcanos in general, Nick climbed back to his feet, quickly sinking into the thick layer of ash. He never felt his boots meet solid ground, but once he had sunk roughly shin-deep, it finally seemed to support his weight. With no small amount of effort, he waded into the darkness towards Shepard's beacon, struggling blindly through the deep ash. His feet sunk with each step and the weight of the ash against his legs seemed to grow increasingly heavy, and a part of him feared he might step off of a hidden ledge or into some unseen soft spot and suddenly vanish under the surface. Somehow, the knowledge that his armor held several hours of breathable air made the thought of being entombed in the dark all the worse.
Fortunately, his rifle happened to be in the same direction he was walking, its bright tactical light the only reason he was able to find it in the darkness. It felt mostly intact, though the barrel shroud bore a wide scuff mark where it had apparently bounced off of something hard on the way down and the stock wasn't at quite the right angle.
He stowed the damaged weapon on his back, removing the working flashlight from underneath the barrel and clipping it to the shoulder strap of his chest rig so it pointed ahead of him. It didn't actually help all that much, but since some genius had removed his headlamps to stuff an improved medical suite into his helmet, it was a definite improvement over his penlight.
It took a grueling five minutes of wading to reach the commander's marked position about twenty yards away, and even with the beacon, he didn't spot the form of his commanding officer half-buried face down in the ash until he'd nearly tripped over her.
Despite himself, Nick felt a stab of dread at the sight of her lying unmoving in the darkness, but took some reassurance from his armor's readings that indicated she was still very much alive. Aside from a few obvious scrapes on her armor, it appeared she too had survived the fall more or less in one piece.
Kneeling, the medic had to use both hands to dig her out before carefully rolling the unconscious N7 onto her back so he could examine her, taking the end of a small optical data transfer cable from his omni-tool and plugging it into a discrete port along the collar of Shepard's armor.
An array of diagnostics and synchronization status bars flashed quickly across his HUD before he was finally able to access her armor's medical suite. Inspecting the simplified human figure that appeared on his visor and reading through the array of scans that annotated it, the corpsman gave a thoughtful, displeased murmur.
While Shepard's armor had registered a non-penetrating blow to the head that warranted further investigation, he couldn't detect any significant injuries. Blood pressure and heartrate looked fine. Respiration and oxygen saturation were a little lower than he'd have like, but were still acceptable. Unfortunately, he'd been warned by Doctor Chakwas that the built-in sensors generally did a poor job of detecting non-displaced fractures and similarly subtle internal injuries, meaning there could be no guarantee Jane would be leaping back to her feet as she usually did once she woke up. Still, like him, it seemed the soft landing had meant she'd been spared far more serious injuries.
Slowly running his gloved fingers over the commander's helmet in the dark, Nick felt a hairline crack in the armored shell. Originating just above her left eye, the fracture ran between the plates towards the back of her head, grey ash clinging to the line of sticky silver omni-gel the helmet had dispensed to repair the small breach.
"Normandy, this is Witch Doctor, do you copy?" Nothing. "Garrus? Alenko? Do you read me?" Silence.
While Vandas wasn't surprised he was unable to raise the Normandy from so far underground, it was distressing that he couldn't reach the rest of the ground team, especially since they had no way of knowing whether or not the pair had survived the fall. Unfortunately, he couldn't be sure if they simply weren't receiving him, or if his hardsuit's radio had been damaged in the fall. For now, he just needed to focus on escaping the danger area of any more debris falling from above.
The corpsman—sweaty, bruised, and coated from head to toe with the invasive volcanic ash, had to take a few moments to muster the necessary strength before lifting the commander onto his shoulders in a fireman's carry. With his body battered from the fall and threatening to cramp from the heat, he struggled for a moment to avoid dropping her, before finally finding his balance.
He could feel the added weight pressing down on his shoulders and the sting of fresh bruises beneath his armor when he breathed, and the medic could only imagine the collage of purple marks he'd discover when he took his armor off later.
But, before then, the first order of business was to find some solid ground.
Unfortunately, disoriented from the fall and blinded by the cloud of ash, that mostly meant picking a direction at random and starting to walk. His armor's built-in dead reckoning system would keep him from walking in circles, but without an uplink to the local tactical net from the Normandy or pocket satellite the frigate had deployed when it arrived in orbit, it couldn't provide any guidance.
By trial and error, Nick eventually realized he was actually in a fairly narrow section of an old lava tube only about fifteen yards wide, the roof having collapsed at some point in the past and deposited the monstrously thick layer of ash that had probably saved their lives.
Unfortunately, with Shepard's additional weight on his shoulders, he'd sunken clear up to his knees in it, and the medic had almost completely worn himself out trudging forward at a snail's pace. Wading through the ash was a bit like walking through thick muck or deep snow that shifted and filled in behind him, meaning that each step was just as difficult as the first.
If he kept moving, he could somewhat avoid sinking, but it was absolutely exhausting, and he found himself having to stop every couple of dozen yards to suck down water from his hydration pack. If he still had the stretcher, he might have been able to use it as a sort of improvised sledge to drag his unconscious commander along behind him, but he'd lost it when he fell and wasn't about to wander about looking for it.
Suddenly, the entire cavern seemed to stir with life around them, the soft ground shifting ever so slightly beneath his feet. For a moment, there was the clatter of loose stones cascading down the steep canyon walls and the crack of fracturing rock echoed through the chamber like a gunshot.
Eventually, the tremors subsided, leaving Nick standing in silence and casting nervous looks upward. He'd experienced a few minor earthquakes during his deployment in Afghanistan, but after everything that had already happened in the mine, the chances of the roof of the cavern coming down on top of him didn't feel nearly as remote as he'd have liked.
Then again, on a planet as volcanically active as Therum, tremors were likely fairly common, the corpsman reassured himself. If the rock overhead had survived the collapse of the magma chamber beneath it for tens of thousands of years to form the cavern system he was standing in, Nick could only hope he hadn't shown up on the day that suddenly changed.
As he stood listening, he felt Jane shift on his shoulders. "Shepard?" He shook her slightly. "Wake up."
Shepard gave an unintelligible grumble and when he gave her another shake, she abruptly jerked awake with a confused noise, trying to force herself upright from her position slung across the medic's shoulders and nearly wriggling out of his grasp.
With his boots stuck deep into the loose silt, Nickeli stumbled as his center of gravity suddenly shifted and, realizing he couldn't avoid falling, contorted himself to spare the commander as much of the landing as possible. Unfortunately, his twisting had the unintended effect of landing him face first in the dirt with Jane's weight pinning him there.
Oh, hello ground, the corpsman mused grumpily, it's good to see you again. "Why, good morning, Commander."
"Wh—Nick?" He felt a wave throbbing pain from the sea of bruises across his back as she tried to pick herself up off of him. The spectre shifted and inadvertently found herself kneeling right between his shoulder blades, eliciting a pained groan from the corpsman. Despite the faceful of ash covering his visor, things still got slightly brighter when she turned on her helmet lights. "Where are you? What happened?"
"Right here." He managed to raise a hand and wave it around weakly, though it was barely enough to catch her attention amidst the enormous plume of ash they'd kicked up when they'd fallen. The medic gave a moan of relief as Jane quickly rolled off of him, but couldn't immediately muster the strength to get back to his feet. At length, he began to explain. "We fell when the catwalk gave in, and landed somewhere deeper in the mine. I haven't been able to reach anyone, but I think Garrus and Alenko managed to avoid falling."
Shepard seemed to consider this briefly. "Found a way out?"
"Was workin' on that, actually." Vandas said with a sigh, slowly picking himself up off the ground. Rising to his knees, he shuffled around until he was facing her. Producing a small flashlight, he leaned forward to get a better look at her. "How're you feeling? You hit your head on something on the way down."
"Getting sick of this mine." The spectre joked tiredly.
"Mhm. Look straight ahead for me."
Jane made an exasperated sound, trying to bat away the penlight he was using to check her pupils. "Knock it off, I'm fine."
The corpsman grunted unhappily.
"Commander, you may be unusually hardheaded, but if you keep slamming it into things, you will eventually find something harder." He stated dryly, putting the flashlight away. She was awake, alert, and her eyes were dilating normally. Despite the damage to her helmet from whatever she'd hit on the way down, as best he could tell Shepard appeared to have avoided serious injury—it seemed her peculiar brand luck had struck yet again. "Are you experiencing any nausea, dizziness, or headaches?"
"I'm fine." The redhead insisted, actually beginning to sound a bit irritated. "What about you? You sound exhausted."
The medic saw it for the obvious change of subject that it was, but took the bait anyway. He gave a slow shrug, not wanting to lie, but not wanting to be entirely honest, either. He was exhausted. He was also running out of water, beaten black and blue beneath his armor, and carrying around an equally battered rifle that he wasn't certain would fire if he needed it to. "I've been better. Can you walk? It's a hell of a lot of work to carry you."
With a wince, the spectre stiffly rose, struggling for a second to find her footing in the loose ash. She took a long moment to stretch, giving a strained groan—the N7 was no doubt just as bruised beneath her armor as he was. Even so, a sly smirk tugged at the corners of her eyes. "I think so. Though, between you and me, if the part where you carried me doesn't make it into the after-action report, I don't think I'd mind."
Nick managed a hoarse chuckle. Was Commander Jane Shepard, decorated Alliance special forces officer and the first human spectre, embarrassed to have been carried?
"And say what? That you fell off the cliff and landed on your feet at the bottom? That I found you buried up to the neck and had to dig you out?"
The commander snorted, but didn't object, apparently considering it preferable alternative. Offering a hand, she helped the corpsman to his feet. Nick rose with a groan, wiping at his visor and leaving finger-shaped grey smudges in the ash that coated the armored glass. Thumbing a button along the underside of his chin, a light inside his helmet illuminated his face, allowing him flash a haggard smirk.
Vandas supposed there wasn't any harm in leaving out a few non-essential details. "Orders, commander?"
"Well, let's see..." Shepard activated her omni-tool, the orange glow illuminating the shroud of ash that hung in the air around them. After a moment, the commander gave a victorious whoop. "I've still the signal from the power source Alenko detected. It's not exactly a map, but we should be able to follow it in the right direction."
Nick managed a tired smile; it was more than they'd had a minute ago. "Lead the way, ma'am."
The commander nodded, drawing her pistol and keeping it at the ready in her right hand as she held the left outstretched, letting the orange glow of her omni-tool guide the way through the darkness.
By chance, Nick had already started in the right direction, saving them from doubling back through the debris field where the destroyed catwalk had landed.
Unfortunately, following didn't prove much easier than leading, and Vandas given up trying to walk in her footprints when he'd realized they were just slightly deeper holes to get stuck in. Still, seeing the spectre up and walking instead of needing to be carried was a relief in itself—misery loved company, after all.
Eventually, he found a steady rhythm to follow, keeping his head down and mentally counting his steps until he got distracted and lost count, and then started counting again. They continued in silence for what felt the corpsman like hours, though he knew it likely wasn't more than thirty minutes or so. The pair didn't stop to catch their breath to avoid getting mired in the deep ash, but their pace was still agonizingly slow.
"Quite the mission this has shaped up to be, huh?" The commander's words shook Nick from his daydreaming, her voice heavy with exertion as she walked. "Creepy abandoned tunnels, killer mine carts." Shepard paused between steps, starting to sound winded. She glanced back at the medic. "Do you think there's something down here trying to kill us?"
Nick gave a single sharp, barking laugh, the sound echoing cavernously off the stone walls of the tunnel like the crack of a gunshot. Between the maddening heat, the dusty bullshit he was currently sinking up to his knees in, and the ongoing series of catastrophes the mission had shaped up to be, it had in fact occurred to him that perhaps events were conspiring against them. "Do you mean the universe at large, or were you being more particular?"
"I'm serious." Jane insisted, her tone abruptly shifting from weary to suspicious. "Think about it; the power cutting out, the methane build-up, and then the hauler crash. Someone used the mine's systems against workers to trap them down here, and now they're using them against us."
The medic was silent for a long moment, allowing the commander's theory to hang heavily in the still air. It was admittedly a bit far-fetched to think someone had managed to arrange all this, but Vandas hadn't survived a tour of duty fighting insurgents without becoming at least a little bit paranoid.
When he spoke, there was a note of grim consideration in his voice. "Do you think it might be Doctor T'Soni?"
The archeologist was an unknown quantity, but it wasn't inconceivable. Saren had been willing to nearly wipe out an entire colony in order to secure the beacon on Eden Prime, and with Benezia as a willing accomplice, it wasn't a stretch to think believe the matriarch's daughter might wipe out a mine full of workers for the sake of some Prothean ruins.
Shepard didn't respond, but from the way her head snapped back forward silently he could tell the possibility weighed on her. Nick didn't press the issue, fully aware that they had enough problems to deal with at the moment without wondering what new ones they might encounter further down the line.
Jane marched on without answering, and the corpsman followed after a moment. It seemed they would cross that bridge if and when they came to it. Nick went for a drink of water, cursing quietly when he got barely enough to wet his mouth before was sucking air. That was officially the end of his water. His armor's cooling system had been happily thrumming away, but it was still hot and at this point the absorbent inner layer of undersuit was saturated with sweat.
He was doing fairly well considering the temperature was in the triple digits, but it was still miserable. The air in his helmet was unpleasantly stiff and he could feel his own hot, damp breath against his face as it reflected against the industrial sapphire visor. For the most part, Nick preferred the cold to the heat any day, being far better acclimated to it. Summers back home were fairly mild, but in the winter, storms would brew over the lake and bury them in snow. Even in Afghanistan, the wintertime had meant mud more than anything else.
At the moment, he would've much preferred wading through the freezing muck. They'd entered a section of the lava tube where the roof hadn't collapsed, and while that meant the ash was marginally less deep, there was a low, arched ceiling to trap the oppressive heat. With little to see ahead of them but the rough stone walls illuminated by Shepard's helmet lights, the experience felt uncomfortably like marching through a brick oven.
Suddenly, Shepard came to an abrupt halt, a note of relief in her voice as she spoke. "Finally, solid ground."
Vandas leaned to peek around her, staring in confusion at the vertical wall of stone the commander stood surveying with a smile.
Eyes darting from the wall, to the spectre, and then back to the wall, Nickeli's expression tightened into a frown. Perhaps he'd been a little hasty writing-off that blow to the head she'd taken.
However, after a moment, the beam of her flashlight tracked upward, revealing that the redhead hadn't gone completely delirious from the heat like the corpsman may've thought.
Above them, a smaller lava tube merged into the one they'd been walking through, leaving a steep shaft that climbed upwards about ten feet to another passage. From below, it looked as though there might be a large enough ledge to scale to the top, but it was going to be an unpleasant climb. Nick's groan was loud enough to earn a laugh from Jane.
"What? Shouldn't you be telling me how good we have it these days? How you used to climb mountains and how you didn't have climate-controlled armor?"
The medic managed a hoarse chuckle. He supposed that since he'd been born nearly two-hundred years ago, that technically made him the oldest person on the ship. Well, aside from Wrex, anyway.
"Actually, I was in the south my first tour, so it was mostly poppy fields and irrigation ditches. If they shot at us from the mountains, we just dropped bombs on them—no climbing required." The marine replied matter-of-factly.
Jane just shook her head, still smirking. Putting her back up against the wall and offering her cupped hands, she jerked her head upwards. "Well, there's going to be some climbing required here. You first."
With a nod, the medic stepped forward and began upwards, the commander grunting as she took his weight. Struggling for a moment to find purchase on the flat stone ledge, it took Nick a long few moments to pull himself up, finally able to plant a knee after an encouraging shove from below. Reaching down and offering his hand to Shepard, the commander took it firmly, her boots scraping noisily against the rough stone as she climbed. With the pair already worn down from the heat and the long march through the tunnels, an otherwise unimpressive ledge made for a trying obstacle. Eventually, Jane managed to reach the top, lying flat on her stomach beside Nick on the narrow terrace as they both took a moment to rest.
"Hey," Shepard began between heavy breathes. "Can I ask you something?"
"Shoot."
"Would you go back, if you could?"
The tired medic rolled onto his side slightly so he could look at her. "Huh?"
"You, know—your own time. Afghanistan. Home. All that." The commander replied with a vague shrug. "Would you go back?"
The medic gave a quiet, raspy laugh.
He'd been warned about the commander's tendency to ask deep, personal questions out of the blue, and based upon what he'd heard from members of the ground team, he had probably been lucky to avoid it for this long. Still, he could admit he was surprised to have her spring one on him in the middle of a mission.
Even so, Nickeli didn't answer immediately, instead rolling onto his back and folding his hands over his stomach. Staring silently into the darkness above them, the medic considered the question.
Bringing him aboard the Normandy hadn't been her decision, but she didn't view him as a stranger to be cloistered aboard the ship and regarded with suspicion nor had she been quietly hedging her bets on him. She'd welcomed him aboard despite others' reservations, and had made him a valued member of the team—just like she had for Wrex, and Garrus, and Tali. Perhaps most of all, she'd given the opportunity to find a purpose aboard the Normandy—and that was something he'd been without since his first tour had abruptly ended with him being hustled into a medevac helicopter. So, he owed Shepard the truth, at the very least—and the truth was that he had little desire to go back.
Nick was content aboard the Normandy—even happy. Sure, there were a few minors things he'd left behind he missed and the corpsman still had a long way to go in adjusting to the wider galaxy he'd found himself in, but sometimes that was simply the price you paid for change, and he did his best to emulate the waggish sense of adventure that Shepard seemed to attack uncertainly with.
"I don't think I would."
Was that wrong? Should Nick have wanted to go back to the world he knew? To his old life? There was a gnawing sense of doubt in his chest that made for no easy answers.
Shepard shifted, propping herself up on her elbows in a way that made her look strangely girlish. There was a note of surprise in her voice. "Really? Don't you worry about your family?"
The question was met with stony silence, and Vandas felt any touch of amusement at the commander's probing vanish. Her line of questioning had strayed into dangerous territory, and the he stopped just short of snapping that it was none of her business, reminding himself that the redhead only meant well.
"It's… complicated," The young marine confessed, somewhere between a sigh and a hiss. "But the short answer is no."
Nick didn't have a family to worry about, as far as he was concerned—he'd seen to that himself. It was a bitter pill to swallow, but it was the truth. Anger, regret—it didn't matter how he felt about it now. It was the past and he'd been the one to drive the last nail into that particular coffin. He preferred it that way. "I wasn't on speaking terms with my parents when I left. I had…"
He stopped when his voice threatened to break. A little brother. He almost said the words. But it was too much, too raw even after nearly two years. "Nevermind."
Goddamnit, how had this even come up? What'd it matter to her?
With a rough cough from his dry throat, the corpsman forced down the unbidden surge of anger rising in his chest and sat up, pushing himself back to his feet. He found himself thankful for his helmet. Shepard sat quietly for a moment before, and Nick wondered if perhaps she felt a bit of regret for prying.
He wasn't upset with her—come to think of it, the commander was the first person in a long time who'd cared enough to ask about his family—but this was neither the time nor place to unpack all of this. They had a job to do.
"Let's get going."
A/N: Therum stretches onward. On the bright side, it'll definitely be finished up next chapter.