"So..." Scott kept the unasked question trailing in the air until his chair stopped rolling across the floor. "What was in the transport, anyway?"

Sara shrugged. "A seed vault."

"A seed vault," he repeated. "But you just said there was no way it could be a seed vault and that Drack was lying."

"He was! Kind of. And I was right! Kind of."

"Okay..." Scott was giving her a look.

"It was a seed vault," Sara said, ignoring the way her brother's face continued to contort. "But it wasn't plants. Clan Nakmor had discovered a naturally occurring genetic mutation that was resistant to the genophage. It upped egg viability rates from 0.01% to 4%. It would give them roughly the same reproductive rate as humans."

It was higher, technically. But humans had evolved as a social species to cooperatively raise singleton births whereas krogans had not. Scott didn't need to get bogged down by SAM's estimates on how 4% could level off krogan viability to a hopefully sustainable number.

"I could see how some folks might get nervous about a potential krogan baby boom," Scott allowed.

Sara raised a brow. "Some folks?"

"Tann."

"Tann's a xenophobe, but a coward. He wouldn't go beyond anything he could justify legally," she said. "He regularly hangs himself with red tape."

"Okay, so not Tann." She could tell she was losing Scott with her long-winded and oftentimes garbled recitation of events. He stretched his arms high above his head just so he could fold himself at the waist and play with his shoelaces. "Do you want me to keep guessing? Addison?"

Sara shook her head. "You remember Drack and Kesh grumbling about a William Spender?"

"Not really."

"Oh. Well, I didn't either. But I guess they had and I just wasn't listening." Sara would file that away with the other important but not pressing information- like the names of crewmembers or Angaran diplomats- that tended to get buried beneath all of her immediate situations and SAM's never ending calculations. "Spender was the Assistant Director of Colonial Affairs."

That got Scott to look up at her. "That's an awfully long title just to say 'douchebag,' isn't it?"

"You missed the flourish at the end."

"My apologies, Pathfinder. Big Fucking Douchebag."

"The biggest!" Sara giggled. She flopped back onto the bed and sighed. It was still warm from where Peebee had been before she abandoned them for popcorn. "He was the asshole who promised the krogan a seat on the council in return for them suppressing the Nexus uprising. I guess when Tann nixed it, it made Spender look bad so he held a grudge. But then again, there were also complaints of him trying to pull stunts like diverting power from cryo pods to other projects or shutting off O2 from residential apartments to conserve resources, so maybe he's just absolute garbage?"

"Wow," Scott whistled. The way his nostrils flared and mouth grew vomitously thin was a look he usually reserved for discussing Sara's exes. "Why'd they keep him around? At best he's incompetent; but you're making it sound like he was intentionally malicious."

She made a noise as she exhaled through her nose and waved a hand. "They couldn't afford the resources to thaw out someone who knew what they were doing, I guess."

Scott just stared at her. "That has got to be the stupidest shit I've ever heard."

"It wasn't my call," Sara replied, knowing full well that she had failed to keep any opinion from her voice. "Apparently carrying the entire Initiative is a mostly symbolic role when it's time for any Nexus decision making."

"These stiff shirt numb nuts realize that if someone screws up here, they don't just get put on paid administrative leave until someone else sorts it, right?" Scott's face hadn't changed since he'd caught her eye. "Whenever there's an oopsie, Elaaden's weather patterns include a light rain of turian civilian pods across the desert. If Spender was a fuck up, then you fucking get rid of him before he gets someone killed."

"See?" Sara pointed a finger at him. "Maybe if you decided to wake up in a timely manner, you could have told Addison that. Unfortunately, she wasn't swayed by my mean side eye."

"Jesus," he muttered, finally breaking his gaze in favor of massaging the bridge of his nose. "Given what you've said, I'm glad I woke up at all. I'm sure my life support could've powered a massage table or something as useful. An iced coffee maker!"

"Scott..."

"So how'd you get off that moon, anyway?" Scott asked suddenly. "Did you manage to save that scientist? Or did that interfere with reclaiming the transport?"

"I mean, Vorn sealed himself inside a container that was onboard the transport, so it was kind of a twofer." She rolled onto her side. "You looked a little bored by it, so figured I might skip ahead."

"Really?" There was that look, again. "You have no problem going into explicit detail over the exact fragrance of Liam's musk, but when it comes to legitimate action, you want to skip over it?"

"It's just that all that fighting gets repetitive..."

"Or, is it because you're a dweeb and are embarrassed about having to be babysat on the field so you can get back in one piece?" Scott really needed to learn not to phrase things as questions when he'd already decided on the answers.

There was enough truth in his statement for Sara to not feel a need to argue. She could have detailed the battle from behind the crate that Vetra had hastily shoved her, sure, and say that the turian moved with a systematic, almost mechanical precision that made her carefully chosen targets drop as consistently as beats on a metronome. Sara could say that watching a seasoned war veteran like Drack unleash wave after wave of biotic energy was a life-altering sight with the way the bulky krogan stretched with such practiced and fluid movements he appeared to be dancing atop the blue light of mass effect fields. Sara could say lots of things that would instantly become suspect by virtue of her cowering in a corner, continuously confused as to how someone swapped out her spade for a pistol.

It was all true and something Scott would want to hear. He liked action and glory. The old vids were beginning to grate on Sara by this point however, with how they conveniently left out minute details like the way pooling blood and brain matter could make an eyeball begin to bulge out of its socket after a sniper's headshot, or even just what Drack did to Aroane's face after she and Vetra convinced him it would be more beneficial to keep the mercenary alive. In retrospect, Sara wondered if it would have been kinder to just let Drack drop the man down a mineshaft.

It wasn't really a conversation she wanted to have with her brother in the off chance he had some sparkling anecdotes from his own Alliance military service. Dad had said Scott's dishonorable discharge was a result of the smear campaign that occurred after his AI research had been exposed, but she'd come to learn that Dad said plenty of things.

Still, she hadn't been lying about the repetition. Even the vaults, with their unique interiors, some with caves of metal, some with open halls and quaint little streams of swirling energy were roughly the same when stripped to their basic components. It didn't matter that Sara could intuitively sense exactly how they would remake and reshape each planet just by touching an interface, if she couldn't explain the how of it, it just translated to inane boasting to Scott. There was no point in reliving each bullet-ridden body, every shattered skull, all the noise, when saying, "The important part is, we got the transport back," would suffice.

The other big takeaway from the mission on Submoon Three, was that Drack pissed off Vetra, royally. So while Scott rolled his eyes at Sara, disappointed over her lack of guns blazing, she leaned hard into a strength of her own: Talking Shit About Other People.

They hadn't even fully crossed the gangplank and into the ship before Vetra let loose. "You mind explaining what exactly happened back there?"

"What?" Drack shrugged off his weapons and began the long process of peeling off his armor. "We're all back, safe and sound."

"Yeah, no thanks to you." She didn't bother with disarming herself before she stormed up, nose to nose with him. "Contrary to whatever nonsense is rattling around in that thick skull of yours, you're not as expendable as you think."

"We're back in one piece, myself included-"

"You sure about that?" Each word Vetra spoke was punctuated by her finger jabbing every soft area of the krogan left exposed where his armor dropped. "How many organs do you have left at this point? How much of you is being held together with implants? You afraid you belong in a museum and not a battlefield?"

"Enough!" She didn't back up as he roared, but her finger froze centimeters from his armpit. "I do what I do well, because I know what it is I do."

"Oh? Enlighten me."

Drack shook his head and took a step away from her. "I'm a relic of the Rachni Wars. I fight. That's it." He exhaled a long sigh before he returned to his armor. "There's too much young blood on Elaaden. New ideas. Whelps like Vorn creating a future for our people while not knowing how to walk around me."

"Uh huh, uh huh." Vetra glared, unimpressed. "So where in all of that is the part where you decided on a suicide run and then got angry with a group of pirates for being too incompetent to kill you?"

"Say you're mad and move on," he growled. "I don't need to be lectured by you."

"Only if you say you won't pull a stupid stunt like that again in the middle of a mission!" Vetra snapped back.

"There was no stunt! It was battle!"

"Oh, whatever. I'm comming Kesh."

"Do not bring her into this-!"

A hand clamped onto Sara's shoulder in what was probably intended to be a comforting gesture, but instead sent her flying. She supposed it made sense that the argument would be heard by others on the ship, but it didn't mean she appreciated that painfully sympathetic expression Liam shot her with his handsome features. She choked on the yelp in her throat.

"It was beyond reckless, Drack!" The audience seemed to strengthen Vetra's performance. She puffed her chest out and kept right in the krogan's face. "You want to get killed, fine, but do it on your own time. You think I would have been able to get out of there without you?"

"Of course you would have," he scoffed.

"While babysitting Ryder?" she said as freely as if Sara hadn't been standing right there. "That'd be real great, kill the only useful Pathfinder the Initiative has, because you felt underappreciated. I have a sister waiting for me on the Nexus! Too many people are counting on me, so don't you dare drag us into your pity party."

Speaking of pity, Sara shrugged Liam's hand from her shoulder. Let him try his luck offering Drack awkward back rubs.

The krogan breathed an irritated huff at Sara and Liam, and anyone else who was likely eavesdropping over the intercom, before he dropped his gaze to his armor. "Vorn thinks he can court Kesh," he grumbled.

All the anger Vetra had mounting was washed away in the length of two quizzical eye blinks. "That's what this was about?" Her head fell back as she snorted. "You big baby. Get over yourself."

"I knew you wouldn't get it," he said.

"Oh, I got it," she replied. "But everything I said still stands. Do it on your own time."

With the crisis averted and Drack and Vetra shuffling off to their respective corners of the ship, now Liam felt it was the right time to intercede. "Maybe we should go check on them, yeah?"

Every neuron in Sara's brain screeched 'no,' but she had been telling Liam no quite a bit, lately. Besides, wasn't this part of what Cora had advised her to do? To get involved and invested with her crew? Sara nodded. "Good idea. I can talk to Vetra. I have a brother, I get why she's pissed."

"Solid plan." Liam nodded. "I'll handle the big softie, don't you worry."

Sara smiled as he trotted off. If she had a worry, it wasn't for Nakmor Drack.