Disclaimer: I do not own Mass Effect. This fictional story is not making me any money (unless BioWare takes note and decides to pay me).

A Hundred Memories for the Journey Home

Day Six

"Major, we're entering orbit over Gotha," Joker reported over the comm.

"Thanks, Joker. Pass the word to Vega and Traynor. I'll be up in a minute," Kaidan replied.

The flight lieutenant paged the requested crewmen, and true to his word, Kaidan was standing behind his chair before Joker had finished his message to James.

"Any contacts on the surface?" the major asked him. It took almost ten seconds before Joker realized that he was supposed to answer, and not... Not for the first time today, he pushed the thought out of his mind.

"Uh, yes. The C Team ships are still docked, looks like to a couple of the geth mining platforms," Joker replied after a moment. "Both platforms seem to have communications; I'll try raising them."

It took a few minutes before a response came back.

"I read you, Normandy. Heard you were showing up to help out," a man's disembodied voice came back. "My name's Thomas. Should have the C Team all packed to the gills in a couple more hours, then we'll start with you. In the meantime, if you've got able-bodied crew twiddling their thumbs..."

"This is Major Alenko; if you'll give us coordinates we'll start bringing personnel in our shuttle," Kaidan said from over Joker's left shoulder. "Lieutenant James Vega is the one in charge of coordinating this mining endeavor, so we'll send him in the first wave, along with any of our tech specialists we didn't leave to help with relay repairs."

That's a short list, Joker thought. Seems like we left everybody but Adams at the relay. He tried not to think about Tali's parting words to him, and forced himself to remain in the present. "Coordinates received, Major," he said to Kaidan. "Sending them to the shuttle."

"Thanks, Major. Thomas out."

"Okay, Joker. Hold us close to those platforms for now; once we drop our people off, we're going to try some prospecting of our own," Kaidan said. "Warn...Adams to prep some probes." He hesitated briefly, but Joker pretended he hadn't noticed.

"On it, sir."

His fingers flew across the screens in front of him, cutting the Normandy's thrusters back as requested, allowing the ship to gently float towards the designated 'parking zone' over what appeared to be the primary mining platform. That done, he began to sort through sensor data and refine the processes for ore detection. At one time, it had been a simple subroutine that Commander Shepard had suggested be added to the new Normandy SR-2 to reduce all the driving around in the Mako, hoping to stumble upon raw deposits. EDI had been the one to put it into action, back when she'd been a chained AI, and since then had handled all probe telemetry and sensor data reports.

And there it is again, Joker thought closing his eyes briefly. When he opened them again, he looked straight ahead, and not at the empty chair behind and to his right. The first day back in the pilot's chair, he'd caught flashes of silver out of the corner of his eye, and would turn only to see a panel glinting as stars passed by overhead. Now he knew better than to keep looking; the robot body EDI had used for her mobile platform was down in the AI core, where it would remain until Joker could do something about it.

After learning about Tiptree, he'd thought that maybe...EDI would be the one thing that didn't leave him. She was unchanging, couldn't get older, wouldn't show her age. She would be a constant in the universe. In his universe.

But he'd been wrong; her blue box was nonfunctional, and without a complete copy of her code to put back into that specific blue box, code which she of course had modified herself and had been very protective of, there was nothing to be done. It was all scattered fragments and strings of gibberish. Even if they'd had a copy to move to a different box, it would have resulted in a different personality. It might call itself EDI, but would she be the AI he knew?

Why didn't you trust anyone, EDI? he thought. Why didn't you trust any of us enough to let us make a back up in case this happened?

Joker didn't know. He didn't even know if EDI understood the concept of trust, or at least the way humans perceived it. And...it hurt to think that she hadn't trusted him.

He might have continued with that unpleasant line of thinking, hadn't a message from Liara popped up on his console. The asari had been trying to tone down her making a nuisance of herself, but in reality Joker appreciated her attention. He knew he was giving off bad vibes, and the crew was tiptoeing around him as a result of it. Liara just seemed wilfully ignorant of his desire to have a bad attitude, and sent him messages or found reasons to run into him three or four times a day.

"Hey Liara," he said, pushing his hat back a little. "What's up?"

"I just got a message I think you'll want to see," Liara said, sounding happier than she had in awhile. "Can you take a break and come down here?"

Joker nearly groaned; he didn't want to get up if he didn't have to, and this was probably all a ploy to get him to eat lunch. "Can it wait?"

Liara's tone turned firm. "We're in a parked position over a planet, using the shuttle to make multiple trips for at least the next two hours. Get. Down. Here."

At that, he at least managed a chuckle. "Yes ma'am."

. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .

"Okay, Holloway, this is an easy one," Vega said to his trainee. He was sitting in the copilot seat, watching as Holloway checked her pre-flight screens. "Just to the platform and back with a nice, easy navpoint."

Holloway, for her part, didn't seem to want to deign him with a reply. "Yes, Lieutenant," she said flatly, clearing a couple of the screens and powering up the engines.

The more he tried to talk to Holloway, the less James was sure he wanted to. Yeah, she did good bodywork, just like she said, but she always seemed snippy, using just enough words to get by. Sure wasn't your winning personality that made the Alliance recruit you, he thought to himself. When asked about her service history, she replied shortly that she had been recruited for her biotic ability as soon as she'd turned eighteen. She'd been medically discharged in 2184, less than three years into her career.

James shook his head; rough hand to be dealt, but then, everybody right now had their own personal battles to fight. "You guys ready back there?" he said loudly to the dozen crewman in the back.

"Yes sir!" Copeland said. "Even though I think we didn't really need to strap in."

James shrugged. "Can't be too careful with the chica nueva driving," he said over his shoulder. Holloway didn't even bother with a reply.

"You gonna let him talk to you like that?" Ellie Young, one of the command deck technicians asked Holloway.

"I'm just an FNG," Holloway replied levelly. "He can talk to me however he wants. Hatch closed?"

"Yes," Copeland reported. "Seriously-it's Holloway, right?-don't let Mr. Bigshot here get the best of you. He's a horrible teaser."

Holloway didn't reply as she punched up the navigation screen. James kept an eye on her and spoke instead. "Don't distract my trainee when she's driving, Copeland."

The Normandy shuttle zipped out of the shuttle bay with no problem, then dropped into a slow, parabolic descent toward the designated mining platform. There was almost a collective indrawn breath as Holloway set the Kodiak down with only a few moderate thumps.

"Okay, helmets secure, and all you lolos out!" James yelled with a wave of his arm. "You gonna be okay with the rest of the runs?" he asked the shuttle pilot, who was taking a few deep breaths and going back over her thruster logs as if to pinpoint where exactly she'd gone bumpy on the final approach.

"Yes, Lieutenant," she said with a curt nod as he put his own helmet on. Holloway slipped a breather mask on and then Copeland popped the hatch.

"Remember, the geth don't need air, water, or banos, so we'll get all that sorted out when we reach the command center here," James told the crewmen as they jumped to the angular, alien-looking platform. He took a quick look around, and waved at one of the Aysith workers who motioned for the Normandy crew to follow.

Holloway began powering up the engines as James stuck his head back inside the shuttle. "Hey, Holloway?" She turned. "It takes awhile. It'll get easier."

"If you say so, Lieutenant." And she got up and closed the hatch in his face. James shook his head, turned away, and jogged after the crewman, the wash from the shuttle's engines buffeting the back of his suit.

. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .

Doctor Karin Chakwas was having a stare down with the camera drone. It had already erased her first recording attempt, apparently, and she wasn't sure it was taking her second try, either. She sighed and finally erased that one, too.

"All right," she said aloud to the empty lounge, fluffing her platinum hair and then patting it down again. "You know what they say about third times..." She switched on her omnitool and adjusted the settings for the drone once more.

"Hello, Commander. I'm afraid I've had a bit of trouble with the camera drone, so if this message is...piecemeal, I apologize. I thought, however, you'd like to hear the story of how your mother and I met for the first time."

Chakwas directed her best troublemaking look at the camera. "Oh yes, Hannah. It's time she knew the truth, don't you think?"

. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .

It was Valentine's Day, and the young, fresh Dr. Karin Chakwas was without a date. In previous years, she had hardly noticed the event, since she'd had her nose to the grindstone in medical school. But that was all behind her now, and she was trying her hand at being a general practitioner. She'd always had an attraction to the Alliance, and was lucky enough to have discovered an office looking to hire a replacement doctor at the brand-new Alliance Academy Station in orbit over Mars. She spent her days processing and vaccinating new recruits, keeping accurate files and performing routine screenings. She'd tried the whole Earthside general practitioner stint for the whole of six months before she realized it wasn't for her.

The discovery of the strange, alien spacecraft buried on Mars barely three years prior had awoken something in her; a realization that humanity was going to have to change its views very quickly, and very soon. And then a year later, the further wonder that was the Charon 'transit station' had been activated, proving further that there was an entire galaxy out there to be explored, thanks to the remnants of this lost prothean civilization.

And Karin Chakwas wasn't sure how or even why, but she wanted to be a part of it. There were plenty of Chakwas family members who had made names for themselves in the medical field, with new techniques, excellent research, and modern breakthroughs that could save hundreds of lives. But not one of them had gone into space. Not one of them had met an alien, or even considered going beyond the comforts of the local cluster.

Karen Chakwas was different. After her duty shifts, she liked to rub shoulders with the cadets on the station. It was fun to listen to their horror stories about their least favorite instructors, or the training they were undergoing in a particular field. She'd even made a couple of friends among the second- and third-year cadets; she frequented the same tea establishment around the same time every morning and had seen a few of them more than once. They were merely acquaintances, of course, but it made Karin's mornings a little less lonely.

But back to the Valentine's Day of 2151, according to the original Earth calendar. In truth, she almost would have forgotten it, hadn't the tea shop put up paper decorations and one annoying flying cupid VI that seemed trained to scatter holographic confetti on anybody who went in or out of the door.

"Hey Karin!" Jacques greeted her when she got to work. "Full roster today, but we'll be closing an hour early, so it's only to be expected." He handed her a datapad with her appointments listed.

"An hour early?"

Jacques nodded. "Yeah, most of the cadets are being given liberty for the weekend. It's the end of a semester."

"Oh." Karin shrugged. "Well, at least it'll be nice to have the extra time..."

She'd put it out of her mind then, in a day full of the usual: exams, consults, even a few prescription approvals for instructional staff who were taking leave thanks to the academic calendar break. She deflected a couple of questions during lunch about what her Valentine's Day plans were for the evening, until her nurse Mona wouldn't accept her vague answers.

"Girl, you need to go fishing!" she declared when Karin at last admitted that she had no romantic plans. "Grab yourself a fishing pole and some bait and get out there! Find a nice, friendly bar and make some friends." Her warm brown eyes danced with laughter. "There's plenty of young cadets to choose from; all you have to do is pick the age, the weight, and the size!"

"Mona, it's okay if I don't want to complicate my new medical profession with a transient love affair," Karin protested. "Besides..." she hedged, "I have some important reading I need to catch up on."

Mona tsked and had fixed her with a skeptical gaze. "Girl, there's something wrong with you!"

At the time, Karin had been emphatically sure that she was just going to go home, whip up a salad for dinner, and perhaps catch up on a couple of the medical journals she'd left languishing on her coffee table. But then, Karin Chakwas had never been one to back down from a challenge. She'd glanced at the journals, then glanced at her closet. I must have something in there that doesn't label me as an out-of-touch med student, she mused.

Then there was the question of 'bait'. Some girls would take a book with a popular title, or maybe a thermal clip to fiddle around with. Karin didn't really consider herself an expert on either, so she settled for something that might at least earn her some friendly, amused conversation: a couple of her vintage Sky Pirates comic books.

Forty-five minutes later saw her sitting relaxedly at a table on the edge of a food court just inside the Alliance Naval Academy's side checkpoint. She had a deliciously decadent double-chocolate milkshake and was reacquainting herself with the devilish Captain Mac Runn and his crew of creative miscreants, all the way from his loyal first officer Zaore to the quirky engineer Keli.

"Sure you don't want something stronger than that?" a female voice interrupted her thoughts. Karin looked up in some surprise to see a young woman, clearly a cadet by her tags, smiling at her. "You might need it, to get up enough nerve to be chatty with these guys." She gestured around her at the teeming crowds of young men and women going to get dinner, go out for their Valentine's dates, or find some sort of entertainment in general.

"Well, I thought I'd start with dessert before drinks," Karin said, leaning back and studying her visitor.

"I admire your choice of bait, though," the young woman said. "Classic comic that, although I always considered it to be more of a graphic novel. Personally, though..." She pulled a book out from under her arm. "I find everybody's heard of this."

"'War of the Worlds'," Karin read aloud. "Can't say I remember enough of that to use it for bait."

"Really? That's a shame." The cadet pulled out a chair and sat down. "I guarantee Captain Mac there's a model of dashing bravado, good gunslinging, and witty one-liners, but this," and she tapped the cover of her book, "this is meant to stand the test of time. You should try listening to the audio files from the original radio broadcasting-that'll give you some perspective on meeting aliens."

Karin paused. "Before we go any farther...I'm Karin Chakwas."

"Hannah Scott," the young woman identified herself. "And it's nice to find a fellow fisherwoman on a day like today." She settled back into her chair and sighed. "Been a long semester. And the only bright star in it was the cute visiting marine instructor." Hannah gave Karin a knowing smile. "He's probably got some poor lonely wife at home on Earth, but a cadet can dream, right? He was about the only thing that made the planetary reconnaissance field technique lectures bearable."

"Does this marine have a name? Or only good looks?" Karin teased Hannah.

"Lieutenant Jonathan Shepard," Hannah clarified, picking up one of the other Sky Pirates volumes and leafing through it slowly. "He was in the team that originally discovered the alien outpost on Mars."

"Really? Sounds like he had some interesting stories," Karin said thoughtfully.

"Oh, it might sound glamorous and adventurous," Hannah warned, "but after so many hours of theoretical diagrams and squad approach schematics my brain started to numb up."

"I've thought of enlisting, but I was rather hoping for some glamour and excitement," Karin admitted with a rueful smile. "I thought I'd better see what the new 'Systems Alliance' stood for before joining up...Hannah? What's wrong?" she asked, as Hannah had suddenly turned rather pink in the face and was trying not to stare at something to Karin's left.

She turned, and saw a fairly handsome young man in an Alliance officer's uniform. He was clearly absorbed in answering a message on his omnitool, so Karin took a chance and murmured, "Is that your 'cute' lieutenant?"

"Yeah," Hannah muttered back. "Probably on the omnitool with his wife."

"That's his mother," Karin said with certainty, even though she couldn't really tell one way or the other. "I could try to bring him over, if you'd like."

"Why don't you just say 'here fishy, fishy' while you're at it?" Hannah asked in a mortified whisper.

"What, all that talk and no follow through? I hope you're not in command training," Karin said. She folded her comic book and set it down next to her half-empty milkshake glass. With a wink, she started to get up, but needn't have bothered as the man in question came toward the table. Somehow, Hannah managed to keep her blush from darkening any further.

"I thought I recognized those comics," Jonathan Shepard said. "I used to be a huge Captain Mac fan back in the day."

"Really? Hannah was just telling me about them," Karin improvised. "I'm more of a novel reader, myself." And she slid Hannah's book across the table to herself before the cadet could object.

"Oh yes. I remember you-Scott, isn't it?" Jonathan asked Hannah.

Karen bumped Hannah's knee under the table when it appeared that her new acquaintance had completely frozen in the spotlight.

"Yes sir!" she answered hastily, belatedly remembering to jump up and salute. Jonathan returned the salute, clearly amused.

"Sit down, Scott."

Before you hurt yourself, Karin thought with a grin. "Hannah tells me you're one of the people that was on Mars for the big discovery. Tell me, how do you see all this alien technology affecting us in the long-term?"

Jonathan looked at her civilian clothing and cocked his head to one side. "Just a visitor, miss...?

"Doctor, actually. Karin Chakwas; I work in the clinic on base. With all the new recruits, the clinic was taking any doctor who wanted to come all the way out here. I wanted to know more about what the Alliance plans to do with all this new responsibility before I throw all my medical school training into the military by enlisting." Karin sat forward and gestured to the empty seat between her and Hannah, who was still staring a bit starry-eyed at the lieutenant.

Jonathan hesitated for a moment, then shrugged and seated himself. Karin thought Hannah couldn't possibly sit up any straighter, but somehow the young woman managed it; her back so ramrod-straight it hurt to look at her. "It's only a matter of time before the Alliance exploration teams find the aliens that left behind that technology. And I'm willing to bet that if there are more transit stations out there, some of them have to lead to other worlds with new aliens."

"Humanity's going to keep expanding," Hannah added suddenly, apparently recovered from her brief moment of shy speechlessness. "My father always said that people like a challenge; what are these stations if not challenging us to see what's out there? He's always supported expansion efforts; in fact, his support of the Alliance is why the New Salem colony on Mars accepted the proposed Alliance government."

"Your father is Rex Scott?" Jonathan asked, surprised.

"Sure is. How do you know him?"

"Well, that's a funny story. See..."

Karin listened for a few more minutes, long enough to finish her milkshake. When it was apparent she was no longer needed, she took out a pencil, carefully opened to the back cover of Hannah's book, and scribbled her contact information along with a quick note. Let me know how it turns out. Best wishes! - Fellow Fisherwoman.

And then, like Captain Mac at his finest, Karin Chakwas excused herself and vanished into the crowd.

. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .

"And that, Commander, is how I set up your parents," Karin Chakwas said to the camera drone. "Don't ever let you mother tell you otherwise." She moved to switch off the drone, but then had a thought. "Oh, and Hannah, if you still have those comic books, you can keep them, as a...wish for future good luck."

With that, Dr. Karin Chakwas stood, turned off the camera, and sent her message.