XII: COGWHEEL
SSV Normandy
Eleven months.
Eleven damn months.
Keelah, she had not talked to him, seen him, or even touched him in eleven whole months. The matrix of her mind had threatened to erase his features in that time, slowly wiping away one little detail with each passing day, only for her iron will to prevent such erosion from occurring.
And now, here she was, about to board his ship. Like she had never left. It actually hurt her to be back amongst familiar settings. Things had changed, but much of it still remained the same.
Her heart was pounding. It felt like she was going to vomit out of fear.
What did she have to be afraid of? This was John. The only person that she could even conceive of waiting through the heat death of the universe for. The one person who had looked upon her face and smiled so tenderly. But as much as logic kept her dark thoughts at bay, she could not help but access those remote threads of doubt. Eleven months was a long time. A lot could have happened in between then and now.
A lot had happened, actually. The start of the war. The fall of Earth. And her people's foolhardy plan to retake Rannoch. All in less than a year. She remembered seeing the feeds when the fighting had first started on her lover's homeworld—she could not take her eyes off the glowing red zones of burning continent, swathed beneath endless skies of gray smoke and clouds. She had stayed awake for hours, waiting for a confirmation that John had gotten free of Earth and had managed to escape the Reapers. She had nearly sobbed with relief when reports a few days later had placed him on the moon of Menae, alive and well.
He was out there, keeping up the fight. His people had undoubtedly seen sense and had reinstated him. For that man's sake, she needed to make sure she did her part as well. The galaxy needed Commander Shepard more than it realized.
She still couldn't believe she was here. When the admirals had announced their decision to begin outside talks for assistance after the tide of the war had crumbled against their favor, Tali had been floored when they had revealed they would be rendezvousing with the Normandy in a couple days' time. The war for Rannoch had been going catastrophically and if thousands of lives and hundreds of ships had not already been lost, Tali would have been gloating to their faces until her vocal cords were raw. They never listened to her, nor did they seem like they even cared to solicit her opinion. Despite her rank, it was clear they saw her as just a child. They never saw her as anything more.
But now she was so close to the one person that had truly seen her for what she really was.
Oh, Tali thought, I think I really am going to throw up.
When the envoy ship had entered the Dholen system and docked with the Normandy, Tali had stayed behind so that she could compose herself. She had given a lame excuse about feeling queasy (which was starting to manifest as an actual sensation, ironically enough), and had spent several minutes in her quarters, pacing back and forth in agitation. Nothing had changed, she had to tell herself over and over again. She still felt the same way about the human. Surely, he would too, wouldn't he?
After a while, she took several deep breaths in an effort to dispel the shivers. This was ridiculous, she should not have to be scared of seeing this man again. And besides, the other admirals were going to start wondering where she was, now that ten minutes had passed.
She exited her quarters and headed out across the umbilical that connected the two ships. Short LED lamps the color of warm gold lit the pathway, which was littered with tubing and coiled masses of wiring. The low rumble of atmospherics trembled the gangway, a dim shudder.
The airlock of the Normandy scanned her for contaminants before allowing her entry. Same old layout inside, except that Alliance techs were now occupying the seats along the spine of the craft. A welcome change from the Cerberus days. She had been swallowing her trepidation back when Shepard had served underneath that terrible organization, so it was a weight out of her stomach to be back amongst a group that was on the right side of history. The humans lifted their gazes and provided her respectful nods before they went back to their monitoring. None of them recognized her and they too were unfamiliar to her.
"EDI, check your thermal readouts again. The temp scans are either too low or your diagnostics are malfunctioning."
"I have gone to the trouble of performing the scans in triplicate. The vent ports upon the ship do not match up to recorded signatures, which indicates extreme modification."
Familiar voices to the left, within the cockpit. Tali smiled and quickly strode in that direction. Her presence here was not supposed to be a secret. Besides, it would be good to see another friend today.
The cockpit was bespoke and swathed with anodized aluminum. Ultra-specialized for performance, unlike the industrial and downright emotionless cockpits that pilots sat in on the quarian liveships. The Normandy boasted customized leather seats, filled with high-pressure gel, that could contour to any shape. A tableau of simmering orange tac-screens blotted the air in front of the pilot, who was a rail-thin human with a scraggly beard of dark red hair. A simple cap adorned his head, this time boasting the insignia of the SR-2 in navy blue and dark gold.
He did not seem to notice Tali until she came up and placed a hand on his shoulder. "Joker."
The man whirled around, jaw becoming agape. "God damn," Joker murmured, before he stumbled to his feet. "You are a sight for sore eyes."
They embraced, and Tali accidentally squeezed too tight, which she was reminded of when Joker coughed and squeaked out, "Ribs."
"Sorry!" Tali released him and they sprang apart. Joker had been the Normandy's pilot for as long as she could remember. If he was still around, then maybe things had not changed as much as she had feared. The ache in her lungs had even dissipated a tad.
Joker steadied himself against his chair for support. He swept a hand to indicate the cockpit. "Don't think I need to give you a refresher. Guts are still the same. Think the drive core still has your presets saved in it—EDI saw to that. Exactly how it was when you left it."
Left it. Joker had not meant that to be a crack, but it still stung regardless. Tali twisted her fingers together, a habit she had never been able to fully shake, and looked upon the controls and the vast menagerie of stars past the windows at the nose of the ship. "I was afraid that things would have become unrecognizable," she said.
"Ah, the Alliance has moved a few things around," Joker flashed a disarming grin, "but for the areas that were perfect to begin with—like the drive core and my custom chair—didn't even get touched." His grin then seemed to turn devilish and he cocked his head to his left. "But there have been some improvements that you probably could not anticipate. EDI?"
The copilot's chair turned and Tali caught a curvaceous being of chrome occupying the seat. Tali's mouth momentarily became agape as she beheld the shining gynoid with a female face, a holographic band curving in front of its eyes, and a welcoming smile that was at odds with its starkly synthetic frame.
Had Tali not met Shepard, who had helped scratch the surface of her fostered predispositions regarding artificial intelligences, she would have shot this… thing on sight.
Her confusion, plus Joker's relaxed demeanor, stayed her from making any sudden or rash movements. And when the mech spoke in EDI's voice, Tali was in for yet another shock.
"I would have hoped to have alerted you earlier, Tali, knowing your stance on this subject."
The leather on the seat made a creaking noise as Tali's hand gripped it so tight it was nearly tearing. Unleashing her breath slowly, she wrenched her fingers free and looked the gynoid up and down. "Well," was all she could say at first, "I was expecting some surprises today. This was not one of them." She took a cursory glance back down the hall, another well of consternation forming in her gut. "The other admirals don't know about you, do they?" She could only imagine the absolute fit that Raan or Gerrel would pitch upon seeing the unshackled gynoid roaming about the ship. More than likely they would whip out their shotguns and turn the bipedal mech into smoking scrap before EDI could launch one of her notoriously bad jokes.
EDI folded her hands behind her back, trim and militaristic. "It was Jeff's idea that, given your people's history with synthetic life, that I should take precautions to limit knowledge about my presence while the other quarians were on board."
"That was probably a wise idea," Tali nodded. "Also, what were you discussing before I came on by? Something about venting?"
"Oh," Joker turned a hand back and forth, "just noting that your envoy ship had a surprisingly advanced heat dissipation system installed. Not that many ships have that tech—it's technically experimental." He pitched his head down and smiled slyly. "You don't have any explanations to make, do you, Tali?"
Tali knew that Joker was giving her a hard time, but it still incensed her to realize that her people had been stealing sensitive tech from their allies. If anything, the development of the heat-diffusion venting had been the work of Daro'Xen, who had more than likely deep-scanned the Normandy when it had to make that unfortunate visit to the flotilla.
EDI came to Tali's rescue from Joker's rhetorical question. "In the same vein that Cerberus duplicated the Alliance's own efforts when constructing the SR-2, Jeff?"
Joker grinned at EDI. "Touché."
Tali noted that the pilot seemed to be more relaxed in the mech's presence than before—trading barbs back and forth like a married couple. EDI was a quantum blue-box AI that had been created by Cerberus to aid in electronic warfare, and her installation had not been taken all that well by Joker in the beginning, who preferred flying ships without the aid of an AI. Tali's own misgivings on AI were nearly engrained in her culturally, but she understood the distrust that Joker had felt. However, EDI had proven many times over that she was deeply committed to protecting the lives of the Normandy crew—to Shepard, specifically—and had no desire to mount any sort of rebellion of such sort like the geth had done. If Tali had to work with an AI, then EDI would be her first (and only) choice of such a tool and partner.
EDI's new body seemed particularly hardy—her visor scanned the being's armor and found that it was made of an alloy that could resist high temperatures and small-arms fire. The hands and fingers were limber, the joints moving fluidly, with grace. Had Shepard been taking her out on missions? The thought of EDI out there, on the battlefield, offering ground support when she had been performing tactical overwatch up until now, was a baffling thing to imagine. She was going to have to ask Shepard about that later.
Looking at EDI, Tali said, "It's going to take me some time to get used to this. But I'm glad you're still here, EDI."
"As am I, Tali," EDI nodded, before she returned to her seat.
With a lurch, Tali suddenly snapped back to reality, remembering that there was a meeting going on and her presence was needed. And she had more old friends she needed to reunite with.
The lump in her throat returning, she turned to Joker. "Is… is John…?"
Joker closed his eyes sagely and pointed down the spine of the ship. "War room. The door on your left past the CIC. Can't miss it."
"Thank you. I promise we'll talk some more."
"You know where to find me."
She made her way down the long walkway that ejected her out into the CIC. None of the techs at their stations looked up at her as she passed. She saw that there was a dark-skinned woman manning the desk where Kelly Chambers had once worked, but did not pause to trade pleasantries. A security checkpoint had been setup in the next room, to which she was waved on through in short order.
Palming the lock, Tali entered the war room, which had been erected out of the gutted remnants of the conference room. The room was comprised of twin ringed walkways, an outer ring with console stations brimming at the edges, and down a short staircase, an inner circuit that encircled a hologram pedestal. Her pulse began racing as she spotted Garrus on the far side of the room, who lifted his head up as he saw her past the brimming hologram of the world of Rannoch, which was surrounded by fiery representations of dreadnaughts and fighter ships, swarming in conflict like furious gnats. Next to the turian was Kaidan Alenko and another stocky human whom she did not recognize. The admirals were standing within the inner ring, their backs to her.
And on that level, standing perpendicular to the door, head hung forward in thought, hands supporting him as he leaned against the pedestal, was him. He was dressed in his navy blues, the dull gold appearing pearly in the pools of dim light that brimmed within the room. The shimmering electric world before him warped in his eyes, a neon fire. He had probably just been informed about the quarians' dire situation and the plan to hit the geth dreadnought, hence his deep concentration. He had not noticed her entrance.
Raan turned, having heard the door open, saw Tali approach, and announced loudly to Shepard, "Our newest admiral has also offered to lend her expertise."
"New admiral?"
She saw Shepard raise his head, confusion dipping his brow. Then he looked over, realization brightening his face and wiping all of the dread and the pain he had taken over the past year.
They locked eyes.
Tali felt a comet in her chest begin to soar. A burst of confidence caused her to lift her chin high. "You were right about having regrets," she announced to the room, but mainly to that one man who kept his happiness guarded from the others, "but you were also right about your hopes. I'm ready to hit that dreadnought whenever you are, Commander."
Shepard cleared his throat, trying to maintain his composure, and somewhere, Tali swore she could hear Garrus snicker.
"I wouldn't have wanted anyone else for this mission, Tali," he said, his voice heavy and thick with some untranslatable emotion. Tali did not want to read too much into things, but in this room full of people, it almost was like he was trying to put his devastating longing into words.
She almost wished she could shout out her affirmation, despite the catastrophic breach in decorum. It was just not knowing whether he really felt the same way that was killing her.
The hologram shut off, dousing the room in a gray dimness. Shepard stepped away from the console and gestured towards the other end of the war room, where Tali could see an electric blue glow emanate from just around the corner. "Admirals," he said, "I'll need to discuss the current plan with the Council, to keep them informed. As I understand, the QED link is already up and open. With your presence, I'm sure it can lend additional credence to the strategy. If you please?"
The admirals all agreed with the Spectre's suggestion and slowly filed out of the room. Garrus followed them, but not before giving an affirming nod, to which she echoed. Plenty of time to talk later.
Shepard waited until Raan had finished orbiting around the console before he squeezed past her to walk towards the end of the staircase. In just four steps, Tali was at the bottom, standing in front of him again. He looked so tired. A man who had reached the end of his rope. Darkness pulled at his eyes and several scars had nipped at his neck. But he still looked handsome, there was still that spark of playfulness lodged beneath the persona he chose to adorn like a suit of armor every day.
As if they had been cued, they looked at the retreating admirals, who were still within earshot. Raan even looked over her shoulder as if to say, "Are you coming?" to the pair.
Focusing on Tali, Shepard rubbed at the back of his neck, that cocky smile more mask-like than she had ever seen before.
He's nervous too, Tali realized.
"John—"
"Tali—"
They had spoken at the same time and each had paused to let the other complete their sentence. When nothing but silence overtook the room, they both nervously chuckled together. The knot in Tali's stomach loosened and she had to control herself from giving the human a bear hug in front of the admirals, especially Raan. Not that she was embarrassed about her relationship becoming public knowledge, but there was always the risk that her people would somehow politicize this information to use against her in some way. Maybe hang it over her head to intimate that she was an ineffective admiral who let herself get emotionally compromised, all due to an alien.
Alien or not, he's mine, she thought. Then, with some hesitation, the question popped in: Isn't he?
This was just painful. She needed to know, right now. Was this all real? Damn it, the words wouldn't conjure. As if delaying the question would delay some horrible truth. Breath refused to materialize. Her tongue felt swollen, and her nerves chattered like teeth were gnawing on them. An imagined point of anticipation, honed to a sharp knife, pierced her ribcage and twisted just below her heart. Shepard's face before her, half in the neon shadow, seemed to distort as if he was projected from a faraway screen.
"Are… are we still…?"
The hand closed around hers before she could even finish. His fingers worked together with her fingers until they were interlocked, his multiple digits ill-fitting yet comfortable nonetheless. He angled his body so that Raan could not see what he was doing.
Then, not taking his eyes off her, he clenched his hand. One long, simple squeeze. His entwined fingers curled, pressing their palms together. A strength he had reserved for her.
"I missed you," he whispered, voice so light that she had not heard it—her HUD had printed the subtitles out on the bottom of her visor.
The secret fire inside her had been stoked, melting the ice away. Those long months of anger at his absence: gone. All that doubt and worry that had been amassed: erased. All this time apart had seemingly been a speed bump, a momentary glitch in her timespan, whereupon she could pick everything back up as easy as hitting play on a vid she had left on pause.
"I…" she gasped, "I wanted to—"
But Shepard closed his eyes and shook his head. Slow and subtle. "Not here," he gave a jerk back towards the admirals—Raan was still watching. His hand slipped from her grip and she almost groped after it. "Too many eyes."
She understood, though the singular touch had not even begun to quench the drought that was her need for physical contact. "Okay," she said.
"Afterward, though. Come to my cabin?"
The admiral, not even in her thirties but layered with the weight of the galaxy once more, gave a very un-admiral-like laugh as they walked up the low staircase together.
"Did you think I would refuse?"
Zermatt, Earth
The china blue sky was patched with a magnificent array of cumulus. At this altitude, it seemed like Tali could just reach up and have her fingertips scrape the gray floors of the clouds, the stars and space further upward no longer seeming like an insurmountable destination.
The high mountains of the Pennine Alps ridged the skyline, forming a nearly impenetrable valley that nestled the tiny hamlet of Zermatt down below. Tali sat on a rock, basking in the sun of the cold day, while she took in the ridged slopes where the snow never melted, the shaded sides of the hills where evergreens were plentiful, and of the pyramidal peak that was the clear standout in this already-wonderous landscape.
The Matterhorn was the crown jewel of the entire Alpine range, a towering spear of dark rock, dusted with snow, that loomed above the valley, as tall as a Reaper. Right now, a wisp of clouds clung to the tip of the peak, obscuring the summit from view, as condensation tended to group around the last vestige of land before the void of nothingness. Since arriving in Zermatt, Tali had never been able to shake the mountain's gaze for very long. Even she was impressed enough by its scale and awe-inspiring formations to spend several moments studying it while hiking over the range, appreciating just how quiet it was out here.
Tali's country-hopping spree had inevitably landed her back in the former country of Switzerland—something had been hinting in her head that she should draw herself closer to Shepard, anyway. She had been acting from several extranet tips which indicated that the Matterhorn was simply one of the greatest natural formations on Earth to see before dying. Keen to see if the hype was worth it, Tali had booked a ticket and a hotel room after she had recovered from her little spell back on the Greek islands, her fever having dissipated.
Getting to Zermatt was not easy. The town prohibited flying craft except for rescue vehicles to cut down on any pollution. She had to take the cogwheel train from the town of Visp, twenty miles away, which was crowded with tourists looking to hike around on the nearby mountains and in the forests. Her hotel had been close to the train station, where she had booked a room for a few nights. The next morning, after a Swiss breakfast, Tali had taken yet another cogwheel train up to the Gornergrat observation peak, where a mountain hut had been erected that provided an unobstructed view of the Matterhorn directly east from the mountain's position. From this mini-summit, there was access to several hiking trails, one of which she had chosen to avail herself to, which was a mostly downhill trek back to the town at the bottom of the valley.
She had disembarked the train and had waited on the platform for the rest of the occupants to finish gaggling over the mountains and finally disperse to tackle whatever trail they had on their agenda for the day. Only then did Tali set off from down the slope, once she was alone.
The land here was raw and bare, devoid of any vegetation, even grass. Ice from previous winter snowfalls had scoured the ground clean of anything that could grow. Hardly anything could survive, except for the occasional marmots that wheeked when they thought that no one could possibly see them blended in amongst the screens of rocks.
Tali crunched her way down the slippery paths of rock, adopting a lackadaisical pace. The air was stark and the cold inched its way through her suit, but she was moving enough for the low temperature to provide a comfortable contrast.
It was just so quiet up here. Apart from the rippling of the wind, she was so far removed from the other hikers to not hear any sort of constant drone. Gone were the thrums of the ocean waves and the mechanical cacophonies of the cities. She could just sit up here all day and only have her thoughts to keep her company.
She hiked past multiple alpine lakes, which were the remnants from departing ice sheets, the water within a sublime and deep blue. A couple of groups of people who had taken recreational drugs to become more attuned with nature, or something along those lines, had perched themselves upon the shallower gradients where the scree had thinned—they did not even look up at her as she walked past them.
Glaciers flowed down the mountains in the backdrop, like melting ribbons of white, streaked with slategray. Lichens scuffed the rocks that rimmed the tiny ponds dispersed about the hills. Tali marched alongside a dried creekbed that would be gurgling when the snowmelt was at its highest rate. Soon, she was ascending again, passing underneath power lines and the spiderwebs of cable car routes as she made her way along the path that etched itself into the side of where a recent rockslide had occurred.
Edelweiss and alpine rose timidly bloomed the further she descended, each bud a defiant burst of color amidst the thin stalks of tender grass that yellowed under the sun. Before long, she had reached a part of the mountain where a loose collection of huts flanked the sides of the trail, but only for about a hundred yards or so. More of these seemingly ramshackle structures, made of wood the color of ash, dotted the hills, many of them having no discernable trail from which to approach.
Amazingly, there were even a few restaurants out here, with electricity and music systems. Tali had brought her own lunch, so she passed the places by as she came to them, which were filled with a healthy collection of red-faced hikers sitting on dark brown benches, who were trading stories and marveling at the views of the Matterhorn in between pints of the local beer.
She found a spot on the hill to park herself, away from the riffraff, the conifers now sparingly punching their way through the unhealthy soil, but she was still among a bare patch of ground that she was doused in sunlight.
Cracking open her bag of comestibles, Tali began munching joylessly on her food, watching as the strata of the faraway cliffs transformed from green, to brown, to finally a dull gray capped with blotches of white snow. Orange rescue shuttles made passes around the valley—apparently, this was an area where many hikers tended to overestimate their abilities and get themselves into a predicament of sorts. At least three airlifts occurred here on average, the crews in the shuttles no doubt amused by the litany of tourists they've had to rescue over the years.
Off in the distance, a low bell jangled. Mountain goats, judging by the bleating. The stock of some farmer.
The little town in the valley below just looked like dots on a chipboard, with the crooked streets and alleys circuitry that had been improperly soldiered. Tali finished her food and drew her knees to her chest so that she could wrap her arms around her legs.
Then, she could just sit here. And watch.
It was beautiful here. The extranet reviews were right. A bit cold, on the whole, but she could see herself wanting to visit again.
She sighed, her forehead aching, her mind a block of crystal fractalizing. It was not the altitude that was cropping all of this up. It was the here and now. The reality of her situation. The fact that she was absorbing these sights, these experiences, but had no one else to contrast them against.
The solemn fact reverberated in her head ad infinium: she was alone.
The invisible geodesics of the sky seemed to project their presence, slowly closing in around her. The banks of the distant clouds lowered, as if to amass for a fatal lightning charge. She almost wondered what it would feel like. Not the strike itself, but of the blackness afterward.
Was there such a thing as dark beyond darkness? Or was such comprehension limited to the perspective of those who could not return from it?
In less than two weeks' time, it will have been a year since the war ended, Tali noted. Since Shepard had perhaps touched that blackness and had never awoken, a program refusing to cycle. A whole year without him. After all their promises and vows. Maybe they never meant anything at all, their weight a figment of the imagination that sought to assign value to mere concepts.
The thoughts were returning. They had been waiting for their chance for a while now. It had been just insane bouts of lapses in judgment that had allowed her to even entertain such destructive notions, but nevertheless, she had been unable to fully eradicate them. It had been hard to tell if they were just offshoots of her main thought pattern, deviations in the root structure that spread all throughout her cortex, just one possibility among trillions.
Tali spread her legs out, leaned forward, and held her head in her hands. The forest rustled in agony around her. Maybe her path of self-destruction was rapidly approaching its climax. That the news she had been dreading for an entire year had been decided so far in advance that it was a foregone conclusion, that he was not going to wake up.
All of her rules in life, all of her precautions, and there was no point to any of them. What use was a universe where the one being amongst the quintillions that inhabited it could not experience life with her?
Maybe that was why she had come here, to the Alps. To see something truly spectacular, one last time. To experience a world, atmo, and all of the precious life it encapsulated within. Maybe she had not been running from the insurance, from the banks, all this time. Perhaps she had been running from herself, from the one choice she knew she was going to have to make, sooner or later.
She had already planned it out, months in advance. It had started out as a hypothetical and had gradually evolved into a genuine contingency. Medicine in the hospital was shockingly easy to steal. She had hidden a few capsules of morphine in her apartment that she had pilfered when the nurses were not looking. A triple dose would do it. Stop her heart in its tracks. Lie peacefully upon her bed, never to get up from it again. There was a sentimental angle to it all, a perverse congruency. The shocking part was that, as time went on, the idea seemed all the more natural, like there was little keeping her tethered to the meat that was her body.
Matter of time. Just a matter of time.
But… Tali raised her head from her hands. Her eyes shone with unspent tears. Her mind hummed with the frequency of a microwave and her mouth was filled with the taste of fire. A perverse response from the deepest core of her mind, insulted that her thoughts had been winning such a war to begin with.
"Not… today," she gasped as she slowly got to her feet, the wind whipping at her sehni and nearly sending her down the hill. "Not when he's still alive."
All bets are off then, she did not feel the need to voice aloud. She knew she would not hesitate, should the worst come to pass.
She followed the trail as it switchbacked downward through the thickening forest of pines. Her route led her across the old-fashioned cogwheel she had taken to the drop-off point, and down into the city of Zermatt.
The city was more of a town, a tight conglomerate of chalets all positioned to milk the money out of the tourists that visited. The mountain drew a steady stream of income for those who wished to either see it or partake in some kind of sport called skiing, but Tali was told that sport could only take place when there was more snow on the ground.
The avenues were too tight for cars—little electric trolleys bustled back and forth down the streets, shorter than she was, ferrying two to three passengers at a time. They honked at pedestrians that were not too aware of their surroundings, the drivers perhaps a little too eager to dispense their audible assaults upon the distracted passerby.
Tali was shrouded in the rifts of cool blue shade underneath the buildings with long planters that lined each level, from which brilliantly colored flowers spilled from the clay lips. As she made her way onto the main avenue, she got a glimpse of the commercialization here that ensnared the non-locals: restaurants with neon signs, watch shops where the gleaming pieces of jewelry were ensconced within pools of warm light. Too much like the Citadel, Tali found herself making the comparison.
Her hotel was close to the train station, just behind one of the many outdoor recreation storefronts that offered their wares at an extreme markup. It was practically a hut: six stories and faced with weathered wood. She entered and was in the process of walking by the desk when the receptionist hailed her.
"Miss Raentha?" Raentha was her alias for the week, taken from the name of the main character Shalei'Raentha from the movie Fleet and Flotilla. "Someone wanted—"
"Later," Tali said brusquely as she made for the elevator. She was not in the mood to hear anything right now.
"I mean," the receptionist tried again, "someone left a message. They came here to see you."
She stopped in place and turned her head ever so slightly to peer behind her. Was it the bank? "Who was it?" was her dry question.
"They're on the couch right now, ma'am."
Confused, she rotated on a dime. The couch that had been positioned next to the door contained a lone occupant, one who had been lying on their side, dozing, ostensibly waiting for her this whole while. She had simply been so absorbed in her thoughts that she had missed this person when she had entered. They wore a simple tunic—simple for their species—yet Tali could still spy a pistol that was strapped to their belt.
She walked over and nudged the sleeping person. A fierce blue eye, nestled amongst rivulets of scar tissue, suddenly blazed open.
"Pretty lousy overwatch," Tali drawled.
Garrus Vakarian sat up and rubbed at his neck. "It's nighttime back over on Palaven from where I left. Still getting used to the time change." His facepaint, the color of a still lake, had been immaculately applied. He had foregone his trademark tactical eyepiece, seeing as he was no longer in combat anymore. An old fossil, old soldier, who had run out of wars to fight.
Tali extended a hand and helped Garrus to his feet. "You've come a long way just to find me."
"Don't I know it. I didn't even know that ground transportation was the only way into this place. If you had seen me at the station, trying to decipher the timetables, you'd be having a fit of laughter."
The mental image of Garrus cursing at an automated ticket kiosk was amusing enough that it brought a smile to Tali's face. "Is Liara ever going to stop keeping tabs on me?"
The turian shrugged. "Have you asked her to stop?"
A fair point, but Tali had no response to that. She just laid a hand on the turian's arm, held it there for a few seconds. Out of everyone in the galaxy, Garrus was one of the few people who had served with Shepard longer than she had. Their paths had crossed with the human's at roughly around the same time, resulting in them getting whisked up in his adventures for what had turned out to be an experience unrepeatable under any other circumstance. Garrus and her had traded a few barbs at first, racial predispositions coloring their first impressions, only to make up over meals in the commissary of the SR-1, where Shepard would sometimes join them.
Garrus was a hell of a soldier, perhaps even a better shot than Shepard. The turian tended to brag about how he had bested the human in a shooting contest once, but if anything, Tali figured that Shepard had let him win. But Garrus loved the man, as much as brothers-in-arms could. Shedding blood together on the fields of combat tended to bond people more fiercely than just simple familial ties. And Garrus had shed enough blood that Shepard considered him to be his long-lost brother, a very removed one at that.
Her fingertips trailing away from Garrus' arm, Tali looked up at the taller alien. "Do I want to know why you're not still back on Palaven?"
"I think you know the answer to that already."
Maybe she did, maybe she didn't. Either way, it did not matter, as she was not interested in finding out the truth.
"Were you out on the mountain just now?" he asked her.
Tali nodded, distant. "Out and about. It's nice up there. You should see it from that altitude. The mountains in the distance look like floating islands."
"Perhaps some other time. Right now, I'm starving. You in the mood for dinner?"
She tried to tell him that it was still early afternoon and that dinner around here was not for several hours, but figured that being pedantic was not going to help anyone right about now. In any case, she was feeling particularly famished herself. Her curated trail snacks had only given her so many calories after she had burned a lot of them on her hike.
"Do you have a place in mind?" she asked.
As a matter of fact, he did. A restaurant a few blocks south, about a five-minute walk from the hotel, close to the tiny river that bisected the town. A sizeable building, with tables out on a veranda that provided diners an unobstructed view of the Matterhorn and of the cliffs capped with taiga and dried alpine grass in between rocky promontories.
It was early enough in the day that there were plenty of tables, no reservation required. They were seated immediately and they ordered drinks. Dextro beer was in limited supply here, but at least this establishment catered to the outerworldly visitor.
They watched the waves of the crowd as the hikers swept from around the town, going every which way. Bikers walked their two-wheeled mechanisms down the crowded lanes, trying to stay clear of the trolleys that impatiently shoved their way through the throngs, always in a hurry to get where they were going.
Garrus craned his head, noticing something about all of the humans that were at the nearby tables. "Why does everyone have a pot on their table? Is that—are they eating straight out of it?"
Tali looked and found that the turian was correct. Most, if not all of the levo beings that were having their meal had a large iron pot positioned over a wide-brimmed burner. They appeared to be dunking chunks of bread into the pot, the food coming out coated with a thick off-yellow substance that was nearly liquid.
When their waiter came by to take their order, Garrus pointed to one of the pots. "Just what exactly is that?"
"Ah, fondue," the waiter said matter-of-factly. "The regional cuisine."
"Okay. Fondue. What's in it?"
"Melted cheese, with some wine, and seasoning in a large pot called a caquelon. Some variants use kirsch—a cherry liqueur—for flavor. But it can be prepared in many different ways, though most tend to use gruyere cheese as the base. And there are dextro approximations that closely mimic the taste of the traditional levo ones, I might add, so you are certainly welcome to order one for yourselves."
"How does it work?" Tali asked.
The waiter made a face like he had been waiting to have been asked such a question, though he probably faced this inquiry twenty times a day. "You are provided pieces of bread and potato, along with an assortment of spices. With the dipping fork—that's the long stemmed one on your plate—you swirl your food in the fondue and, once it's coated enough, transport it to your plate. Don't eat your food from the dipping fork—it's merely used for transport. But once the coated bread or potato is on your plate, then you can add more spice to it before consumption. Oh, and try not to lose your bread in the caquelon."
"What happens then?" Garrus narrowed his eyes. "We get fined?"
"Of sorts. You have to buy a round of drinks for the table. Tradition, you see. Lose more than three pieces, though, and we have to throw you in the lake."
"I didn't see a lake upon coming in," Garrus mentioned flatly.
The waiter shrugged. "We have a river, but that sort of punishment is reserved for locals only. So, interested to see what it's like?"
They did. And in no time, the waiter came back with a pot of their own to partake from, along with baskets of bread and potatoes. Following the instructions, Tali speared one of the pieces of bread with the dipping fork and swirled it in the fondue in a figure-eight pattern, like how she saw the other diners were doing. The cheese was soft and goopy, and clung easily to the bread. Tali lifted up her fork and transferred the bread to the plate in front of her. She took one of the canisters of spices and tipped a dusting of copper-colored powder atop the serving. With her actual fork, she carefully maneuvered the piece of bread through the slot in her helmet, allowing her to actually chew the food.
"Fascinating," Garrus said on his third bite of fondue-coated potato. "The verdict, Tali?"
She was in the middle of stirring another piece of bread in the caquelon. "I probably shouldn't have this every day. Too much fat. But it is very nice. I can see this being quite the event with more people and several rounds of drinks."
She lifted her fork and found that it came up empty. "Oh, damn it."
Garrus laughed and knocked back his drink, slamming his empty glass down on the table. "The rivers around here are cold, from what I've been told."
"Bite me, Garrus." But she flagged the waiter down regardless.
They went for two more rounds of drinks and even though they had gone through about half the fondue in the caquelon, Tali found herself quite full very quickly. Even after a day of hiking, she had somehow managed to consume enough calories (and then some) just in that pot of cheese alone.
She folded her hands together, leaned over the table, and turned her head right, looking up the darkening spire of the Matterhorn in the distance. "Nothing I've ever seen before. Spend a lifetime in space, the land below tends to surprise."
Polishing off his third drink, Garrus joined Tali in observing the mountain. "Not the tallest one we've seen. But maybe the most dramatic."
"Yes," came Tali's hollow reply. "Dramatic." She paused as another waiter seated a couple next to them. So far, nobody seemed to notice the two war heroes that sat innocuously in the restaurant. She lowered her voice an octave. "You know, I would probably live here if he had asked."
"Here instead of Rannoch?" Garrus asked after he raised his empty glass so that a waiter could give him a refill on his beer.
Tali rocked her head back and forth in thought. "If he insisted. Maybe not in this city directly, but in a different valley. Somewhere more isolated. Separated from the tourists and the rabble. Would've been an easier decision if we never got our homeworld back."
The waiter returned with Garrus' beer and he took a careful sip, choosing his next words with trepidation, already seeing the branching paths this conversation could take. "But what will your choice be? You have that plot of land by the sea."
"I do. But I sometimes wonder what could have happened had things not gone the way I'd imagined. If I was still doomed to be a nomad forever, I mean. If Shepard had asked, I would have gladly made this world my home. It would not have been a difficult decision."
She took a pull from her own drink, eyes glazed in that neversphere of distant thought. "Can I tell you a story, Garrus? Something about John. And me. He would never have told you…"
The quarian paid little attention to the crowds of people that lurched by on the avenue beside them. Garrus sat up in his chair in interest, vaguely wondering where this was going.
"My mother died before I met you or John. A viral infection—caused by a tech incorrectly sealing a batch canister on sediment samples taken from a nearby colony. It was quick. She died within a week of getting sick. My father spent two days mourning her before he returned to his duties. Me, I was numb for several weeks. She had been there one day and then… she wasn't. When I came to visit her for the last time when she was in her bed, I thought she was just going to be unconscious from the meds. But my father was already at the door, standing in front of it, waiting for me. He didn't say anything. I just knew."
She toyed with her dipping fork, which had adhered to the plate when the cheese upon it had dried and solidified. She looked down, avoiding Garrus' eyes. "The tech fled, knowing that he had inadvertently caused the death of an admiral's wife. My father sent out marines to scour the galaxy. No luck. He gave up after a year. But I remembered his name. His face. I never stopped searching, even when hope was at its end."
Sliding her hands back to the edge of the table, the quarian finally raised her head. "I ended up catching a lead. This was back when we were trying to stop the Collectors. I tracked him to the Citadel, where he was operating under an alias, working as an illegal software modder. I found his contact info and asked him for a meet. Gave him the address—the alley where John and I first met. The place where Saren had sent his mercs after me."
Garrus remembered it well. Tali had once inadvertently come across a recording of Saren Arterius, the rogue Spectre, practically bragging of engineering a terrorist plot against humanity, which she had retrieved from a wayward geth unit. She had come to the Citadel, hoping to trade the recording to the Shadow Broker in exchange for her safety. However, Saren's agents had found out about the deal and had pushed out the Shadow Broker so that he could eliminate the quarian with his own forces.
Unfortunately for the traitorous turian, Shepard had found out about the deal and had arrived, guns blazing, firing upon all the mercs until they were nothing but smoking corpses lining the alleyway. Garrus had been part of the human's squad by then, but he remembered Tali's close-range pistol shot upon a salarian infiltrator, the green burst of gore that had fountained into the air starkly etched into his memory.
"I waited there, in the shadows," she continued. "Waited until he arrived. Then I stepped out, my gun drawn. Told him to raise his hands. He recognized me. Began to beg for his life. Said that it was just an accident, that he had not meant to hurt anybody…"
Tali folded her hands underneath her chin and propped her head up, like a plinth. She shook her head wistfully. "That was the first time someone pleaded for their life in front of me. I had shot people before, Garrus, and it had been so easy. They made it so easy. This time… even though this man had taken away more than any geth had at that point, I suddenly found it so hard to raise my hand. My finger refused to slip inside the trigger guard. I had thought about this moment for years. Years. I had imagined it going so many ways I thought I would be numb to it—silicon-ice numb. But when he started saying he was sorry, I felt like throwing up. It wasn't just some nameless grunt in front of me anymore. It was a person who had made a mistake and was being eaten alive by that mistake."
She shuddered and closed her eyes. "Then, I had felt a hand on my shoulder. I didn't even have to turn around to know who it was. Because I then realized that I was about to make a mistake of my own. I was about to repeat the past, to continue on this cycle of violence. John found me, somehow. He knew where to find me, as though he had this intrinsic link to me. I caught his eye as I looked back at him, the pistol at my side. I just found disappointment reflected back on me, and I became mortified that he saw me in that moment. That I had nearly let him down."
Waiting a beat, Tali reached for her drink and took another long pull. She set the glass back down. "Didn't matter for the other guy in the end. His guilt had finally caught up to him in that alley. Not me. He grabbed a derringer from a hidden holster and shoved it underneath his chin. John and I turned just as it was happening. He screamed for the tech to stop, but it was too late. I just remember the brains and blood on the wall. My ears were slightly ringing. John led me away, holding me close to him. He didn't talk to me the whole way back to the ship, as if he needed to keep up his projection of just how mad he was with me, or if he was trying not to show just how disturbed he was."
Tali paused and gazed off towards the mountain. "Sometimes I wonder what would've become of me if John hadn't showed up. Or if he had let me pull that trigger. What kind of person would I have been afterward? Or would something as simple as that have changed everything for me?"
Garrus tracked the departure of the diners at the table next to him in his peripheral vision. They were ruddy-faced, having drunk too much wine. He waited until their inane chatter had diminished to a tinny subharmonic in the lower recesses of his hearing. Then he folded his hands in front of the table, clearing his throat.
"Maybe," he said, "it doesn't matter."
Looking up, Tali's eyes were gleaming suns. "Doesn't… matter?"
The peak of the mountain was now starting to glow orange, like a fiery torch. Garrus leaned forward. "What happened already has happened. That was then. This is now. You are here, and this is what we all have to face." He reached out and tried to touch her hand, but Tali shied away. Garrus's mandibles flared once, hurt. "Spirits, Tali. All I want—all we want—is to find out how to help you. It's not even the least we can do. It's something we have an obligation to do."
Tali crossed her arms and slouched in her chair, the spike of rock shimmering in her visor as she turned her head. "You can't help me. I don't know if anyone can."
"That doesn't mean I should give up."
"Maybe you should," Tali snapped.
A rising heat had infiltrated Garrus' face, and it wasn't from the fondue. This raffish individual in front of him… what had become of her? It was like she had pulled that trigger regardless, become what she had envisioned in her nightmares.
"Tali…" he resisted the urge to rub at his eyes.
"Don't even start."
"I've mourned enough for one friend already. Please don't make me mourn another."
The quarian shuddered a breath. Intrusive thoughts bustled through her brain, the gates left wide open. She recalled the funeral of her mother, how her body was given to the furnaces of the liveship she had been born on. She remembered when she had first kissed Shepard and how his embrace had been. Then there was the moment when he finally told her he loved her. She had been so affected by the admission that she could not agree or cry at the time.
"It might not make a difference," she muttered.
Garrus jostled the table with his foot, perhaps a bit harder than he had intended, but it had the effect of jolting Tali back to the here and now. "Damn it, Tali. I can't tiptoe around this anymore, especially when you're saying all these things that… that… that are just unhealthy."
Tali just looked at the turian as if he had said something unholy and blasphemous. Then, she suddenly slammed her palms upon the table, this time rousing the attention of the entire restaurant, and stood from her chair, heading for the exit.
"What the—where are you going?" Garrus barked.
She ignored him, leaving him to pay the bill. The street was already crowded with passerby and she nearly blended in with them. However, the ex-cop could not be shaken for very long and soon he was chasing her down the avenue, yelling out, regardless of anyone who was in earshot.
"He's not just absent from your life!" he bellowed after her once he got within a few armspans away. "I lost him, too! We're not the only two, you know?! We all want him back!"
Tali whirled in the middle of the street, practically spitting fire.
"You never had what I had with him!"
"That doesn't lessen the fact that he was my friend! What am I supposed to do? Do you think I enjoy feeling so helpless? Don't you think, if I had the power to wake him, I would be doing everything I could to do just that?"
The quarian stumbled against a middle-aged man on accident, too blinded by grief to even apologize. She tried to shy away, to get away from the turian, but he was dogging her too determinedly.
She hooked a right and they were traveling down a little-utilized alleyway. "You haven't done shit. Just like me."
"Then tell me what to do. What to say. Anything to make it better."
"I told you, you can't. I don't even know why you're asking. You're the one who's lucky, out of the two of us. Soon enough, you won't even have a choice. And I won't, either."
He almost stopped chasing her, too befuddled to get the oblique reference.
"What did you just say?"
"It's obvious!" Tali nearly screamed as she looked over her shoulder. "Figure it out!"
They crossed in the space between two buildings and Tali was suddenly storming across an empty square. The thick color of blue boiled in the atmosphere above them, bands of steelgray and everwhite rimming the horizon in a ragged bowl around them.
Garrus jogged until he reached the quarian. He grabbed a hold of Tali's shoulder and gently spun her around to face him. He looked through the cool sapphire curtain of the quarian's visor, the dull sheen of her armor like platinum. Jewel splinters, through that ice, wavering terribly. Unable to focus upon her friend.
"Tell me what you just said," he said sternly.
There was no resistance as he held her. She had become boneless, inert. As though as she had always wanted him to do this. Or that she had wanted someone to finally force her to listen to reason.
She refused to meet his eyes. "I was being so stupid…"
"Tali…"
"I shouldn't have said anything."
"You didn't mean it," he said as he gently turned her head straight on towards him with a hand. He beheld a ghostly echo of his own face, distorted within her visor. "You didn't mean it."
"I did."
"You didn't."
"Garrus…" she began, and he only knew that she was not going to continue was when he felt her shoulders become wracked with a horrid tempo. She then grabbed for him, burying his visor in his chest. Her vocabulator became muted for a second, but he could still feel the raw scrape of her lungs from how tightly she was clutching him.
He brought his arms around her, patting her back. Looking out in the distance for some sign or a vague inspiration to see the both of them through this. Only to find himself wanting.
"We'll get through this," he whispered to her as they stood in that empty gray courtyard, the wind thin and cold around them. "All of us will. We're here for you, Tali."
"I just…" she finally choked out, her vocabulator un-muting itself, "…miss him… so much."
"I do too, Tali. Spirits, I do too."
Ibiza
The corner office seeped from the glow of the sun that was in the process of setting somewhere along the Mediterranean. Haas-Mase stood at the window, not looking at anything in particular, the scrubland stretching over the hills out towards the copper ocean in the distance, his bad leg temporarily ameliorated for the moment after his evening dosage. The room was varnished with clashing hues of gold sunlight and dark shadow. Nothing in between.
The call came on his omni-tool and the financier briefly glanced at it. One of his lawyers. He answered.
"You have news."
"You sitting down?"
"No."
"You'd better."
"Tell me first. Then I'll decide if I sit."
A curt pause. The person on the other end was obviously debating whether politeness could stand to be set aside over the course of this discussion.
"A Ryke/Saaven memo has just leaked. They're going to exercise an amendment to the merger deal tomorrow. They have the backing of the Alliance and the change is expected to be quickly ratified."
Haas-Mase shut his eyes and leaned his forehead against the window. The glass was warm from the light of the setting sun. "And?"
"They're offering more collateral from their end to offset SolBanc's share of the deal. They're going to exercise a veto-proof majority of the revised leadership, once the merger settles."
"But the merger is still on?" Haas-Mase asked.
"For the moment," the lawyer said nervously. "But they're taking great efforts to ensure that no SolBanc executives will be part of the future board."
There it was. Out in the open. "I take it my name is included in the exclusion list?"
A beat. "Yes."
The financier rubbed the bridge of his nose. So, after all these decades of service, his tenure finally had an expiration date on it. There would be no future for him in the new galaxy order. He would retire quietly, to slink off in the shadows. To be a footnote in some extranet encyclopedia. The idea was so undignified he found himself already getting furious.
"Did the memo say why Ryke/Saaven is pursuing this course of action?" he asked, though he felt he already knew what the answer was going to be.
"It made frequent citations to the recent reactions the public has made concerning Commander Shepard's treatment. Ryke/Saaven is reportedly very concerned with this latest news and wishes to ensure that the members responsible for the decision are not involved at the executive level going forward."
Of course. Haas-Mase felt like breaking his cane over his knee. Fresh bile rose in his mind, associated with his mental image of Tali'Zorah. The fucking bitch—why did she have to break protocol like that? If she had an issue with the bills of her commander, there was a process that she should have followed. A helpdesk chain to continuously rise and rise until she reached the rung she was looking for. There had been a solution for her this whole time, if only she followed the workflow chain! But instead of trying to traverse the process that had been so thoughtfully mapped for her, she had inexplicably decided to jump the line and set off a grenade on all social media channels.
The bitch.
"I see," his voice came out ghostly. "Thank you for letting me know."
He hung the call up and continued to watch the landscape shift as the shadows loped and lengthened while the sky turned the color of blood. He brooded in place for several more minutes, until he was dying for a drink.
Haas-Mase limped out of the room and headed for the other office where his liquor cabinet was located. As he walked down the hallway, which was low and vaulted and lined with several glass cases that displayed unique heirlooms like pieces of ancient armor or impacted meteorites, he quickly called his manor's head of security.
"Where is my son?"
"Still on the mainland, sir. South of France, from the looks of it. Want us to recall him?"
He thought about that for a moment. François was undoubtedly on another party bender again, once more ignoring his father's advice. At some point, Haas-Mase had decided that there was nothing left for him to do regarding his son's trajectory. He could not baby the man anymore—he was a grown adult and sometimes people had to fail in order to climb higher than their initial station. Besides, at the rate things were going, there was nothing that François was going to inherit when the time came. Just a name that would be forever linked with bad luck.
And if the man wished to waste his fertile years from the accumulation of alcohol poisoning, then Haas-Mase had decided there was nothing he could do about it.
"No," he said. "Let him have his fun. He's going to wind up at a police station or at a hospital at his current rate, anyway. Makes your job easier. When he's ready to be scraped off the pavement, then you can bring him back here."
Frankfurt
The steel and glass towers of the Deutsche + Schott campus outside the windows reflected the glare of the bronzed sun in prismatic fashion. The parks that ribboned through the city turned the color of an ember, golden avenues that not even the grid of streetlights could replicate.
Qual stood in front of the banker at his desk, privately stewing that his existence seemed to be moving from one office to another. Board meetings. Lawyers. And now bankers. Men who could theoretically ruin more lives from their keyboard than Qual could ever do with a gun. In some respects, he envied all of them for the power they wielded, but he could never shake his gut reaction of outright despising them for being so irresponsible with that power.
The banker, a man named Tobin, had a fairly neutral accent. Qual was sure he had not been born in this part of the world. Tobin was typing at his keyboard, eyes locked onto his console screen, before he grabbed for the virtual monitor and swung it around so that Qual could see.
"Transactions closed at thirteen-hundred hours yesterday. Receipts and all."
Qual looked at the screen. All he saw was a meaningless jigsaw puzzle of trendlines and quartiles. "Everything went off without a hitch, vahro?"
If Tobin understood the Khelish slang, he gave no sign. "Without a hitch. Sum total has been converted into Mantle Futures stock. Passed muster with the authorities and everything."
The quarian nodded. Well, at least that was one less thing he had to worry about. The transfer of funds from the late Vertrias brothers' firm had been a small thorn in the side of Haas-Mase for the past week. Maybe this was a sign that Qual could concentrate on other matters now, finally, like attending to this little Tali'Zorah problem.
"You know," Tobin said as Qual turned on a heel to leave, "not to sound impertinent or anything, but this could have been handled over a call."
"That would've been my preference, except the man whose money this belongs to prefers a more… personal correspondence."
"Of course. How very Old World, though. He's a quick study, though, that Haas-Mase. Purchases stakes in ventures, paper, men, even ships. Selling and reselling across markets, converting to tender and back again."
Qual did not pretend to know what Tobin was talking about. "All above my pay grade."
"So he's also aware of the discourse surrounding the COL, then?"
Qual stopped. He had been so close to the door, too.
Turning around, he eyed the banker. "Expand."
"The COL," Tobin was making slight gesticulations with his hands. "The Combined License. Mantle Futures is in the middle of making an expansion into one of their geothermal plants: Kamojang. Building a new reactor, that sort of thing. Which is probably the reason why Haas-Mase chose that company to invest in. Infrastructure's a growing market. After the Reapers destroyed practically everything, up's the only way we can go. And energy—power generation, specifically—is booming, I tell you."
"You said there's discourse around this particular topic?"
"You don't read the news much," Tobin gave a sad smile.
"Not particularly," Qual affirmed.
"The construction of every new reactor requires a separate COL to be issued. One per. Mantle Futures is planning to throw a lot of money into Kamojang. It's rumored to be their biggest investment over the next five years. A real money-maker. They get the power from deep within the Earth and broadcast it to other planets via satellite. Only problem, the applicable agency in the region is delaying the application process. Work can't begin on the new reactor until they get the COL."
Qual stepped back into the room, away from the door. "What ramifications are we talking about here?" he asked, after a pause.
"Long-term?"
"Worst case."
Tobin spread his hands upon his desk. "The reactor expansion is expected to usher in a new billion-credit revenue stream. The more profitable the corporation, the more valuable it is perceived. Now, by delaying the steps to get to this new revenue stream, that puts a moratorium on the whole works. I.e., it will take longer for the share price to rise and the investment that SolBanc has just put into Mantle Futures will not realize a profit until much later in the future than anticipated."
"Which can't be attained until Mantle Futures has the COL," Qual finished, fireworks furiously exploding in his head. "Fuck. There a reason why the license is being withheld for the time being? There's nothing out of the ordinary about this request, is there?"
"Who knows?" the banker shrugged. "Maybe Mantle Futures didn't make the right 'donation' to the right person over at the Hong Kong office. Maybe the supervisor responsible for handing out the COLs has a vendetta against the corporation, or is possibly financially motivated to stall Mantle at every step of the way by rivals in the energy industry. Or, someone in the office accidentally deleted the paperwork. Lot of speculation, little in the way of actual answers."
Qual very much wanted to be done with this whole sorry affair. He could not afford to have his attention diverted into two places at once. How was he supposed to help SolBanc financially solvent while Tali'Zorah was still galivanting around out there, free to spew her vitriol towards the firm across the extranet?
In the end, he was resenting all of this. Dealing with bureaucracy. An existence lined in fancy offices and high-rise views. Glimmering steel spires with neon holo-tisemenets swimming upon curvaceous faces of treated glass.
He walked up to Tobin's desk, pulling his pistol from his belt as he did so. He gently laid the weapon on its side in front of the banker, taking care to point the barrel away from the both of them, but he did not take his hand away from the gun.
Tobin just studied the pistol on his desk as though a mildly interesting article on the net had just popped up on his feed. A man of finance though he was, there were some variables in his life that he possessed an intrinsic understanding of. And looking into Qual's eyes, he could see a sour determination embedded there, a rigidness of a man who had finally run out of patience.
The quarian was bobbing his head so slightly that it might have been an involuntary motion. Continuing to stare at Tobin, his eyes slowly narrowed.
"You happen to know the name of the supervisor?"
A/N: You're going to like the next chapter. Trust me ;)
Playlist:
Hand-Hold
"Mi Amor"
Daniel Pemberton
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
The Mountain Afar (Zermatt Suite)
"Constellation 1"
Max Richter
Sleep
Fondue/Follow Her
"if you came this way"
Max Richter
Sleep